Unfortunately I Am A Pathetic Butch And I Have To Just Accept It. Somehow I Love Providing, Protecting,

“All the gays want is to groom my children! They are dangerous to kids! They hate children!”

- A lesbian saw your son struggling, and remembered what it was like to be young and autistic and overwhelmed by her emotions, so she sat down with him every day and helped him until his feelings wasn’t so scary anymore.

- A lesbian was the one who your daughter finally trusted enough to reveal the abuse she was going through by her father when she was at his house and she tried her best to get her help and always be a safe space for her.

- A lesbian overheard your daughter being told by her classmates that she couldn’t play dolls because the dolls weren’t of her race, so she went and bought a dozen barbies of all different races to show her that she belonged.

- A lesbian was the one who you knew you could count on to retrieve your babies when you let people pass them around at church. You knew that she’d keep an eye on them even if she didn’t know you personally. Everyone in that tiny church knew her for it.

- A lesbian defended your son from being harassed on the bus (by other mothers!) and was late to work making sure he was safely on his next bus heading to the food bank.

- A lesbian was your waiter today and she made your baby laugh while she was setting your table and she already knew how to keep all the dangerous items out of reach without you even having to ask.

All anecdotes I could pull off of the top of my head from my own life. I love children, while I don’t want any of my own (and can’t even have ‘em due to infertility anyway) and my connection with them is very odd as a butch lesbian woman. People tell me that my purpose in life as a woman is to have children, and people from the same demographic claim that I only exist to hurt their children. The reality is that, whether you like it or not, gay people exist in the real world and often take on beloved and pivotal roles in your life and your children’s lives that you don’t even realize. We’re here and we always have been, and we’re surprisingly just as normal and human as you are.

Update!!!

I did have my crashout and I cried in the bathroom at work!!

you say you're a writer! so am i. what are you writing?

I’ve actually got several projects going!

My current one, (and the one I plan to release to the world first however I end up doing it lol) is called, “Therese” and it’s a butchfemme lesbian second chance romance, and musings on how it was growing up in deeply conservative areas of America as a lesbian who didn’t realize she was a lesbian. It’s contemporary but also purposefully left without markers of exactly what time period it’s set in (because that blurs when you get to farm towns and they can end up recycling a lot of beliefs that people thought we left back in the 60s)

Basically it follows the path of Therese through the eyes of her childhood best friend Phoebe, as they grow up together and Therese (butch) begins rebelling against what she’s been taught in a more loud and aggressive manner, while Phoebe feels too petrified to really do anything. They end up realizing their feelings for each other but it doesn’t work out because Therese wants to leave and Phoebe still has a lot of guilt due to religion so she stays and they lose touch for several years. Eventually Therese returns and Phoebe pursues her again because she doesn’t want to lose the love of her life the second time around.

I also wanted to push back at the Butch=cold, mean, uncaring sort of stereotype I often see both in media and in characterization of lesbians within fandom, so Therese, though she is loud and opinionated, is also consistently characterized by her kindness and care. Phoebe is the one who struggles with more bitterness, which made more sense to me considering the lesbians I’ve met in my life who came out later often have a lot more pent up resentment (myself included) than those who came out earlier. Though Phoebe also learns over the course of her life that the pursuit pushed on women to be quiet and calm and never angry is ultimately misogynistic in nature, so she embraces her anger too.

I’ve also got a fantasy series I’ve been working on for like 4 years but the world building for that one goes DEEP so in nowhere near done with it 😭 so “Therese” is definitely going to be the one i release first

I grew up Catholic so I have a bit more context (which unfortunately doesn’t make it much better).

Mary Magdalene was commonly assumed to have been a prostitute (which isn’t biblically supported and actually wasn’t commonly believed until a while after Christianity was formed). Even after her conversion she’s shown as nude because it was common belief that she lived nude as penance and only used her long hair as clothing. She’s actually quite often shown in various forms of nudity and seductive positioning in her artistic depictions because she’s basically the scapegoat due to her position as “prostitute” or later “penitent”.

The mind naturally wants to think about sex after you go through puberty and your libido picks up, but in Catholicism you quite literally are not allowed to think about it at all because that counts as “adultery of the mind”. The only time this rule doesn’t count is if you’re condemning someone for sexual sins. This is why you see Catholics (and more conservative Christian groups who have this same rule) absolutely obsessed with constantly thinking and talking about and condemning other people for having sex they don’t like. Their mind craves some type of release for the curiosity they have so they become incredibly fixated on it in a negative fashion because it’s the way to get around that rule. This also leads them to have incredibly toxic sexual relationships after they enter marriage and are finally able to have sex because men have associated sexual arousal with a level of disgust or distaste for the woman.

(In addition, women accidentally get around this rule because we are taught to be constantly afraid of sexual assault sullying our virginity, so the mind often focuses upon that fear, eventually associating sexual arousal with the idea of being violated, which is why you see so many of them encouraging or flaunting violating relationships online.)

Going back to depictions of Mary Magdalene, since she was a prostitute she was the men of the time’s way of getting around that rule. It doesn’t count as them being lustful if they’re also condemning her actions even as it arouses them. It’s why she was one of the most common subjects of religious painting outside of the usual patriarchal figures and Mary the mother of Jesus. The really ironic thing is that there is absolutely no proof of her being a prostitute. She was actually quite rich and supported Jesus monetarily, but people liked to assume she got the money through dishonest means instead of through any type of skill or labor, or frankly even just coming from a wealthy family.

Anyway sorry for the rant lol Mary Magdalene was my birth patron saint, and I’m still very attached to her and upset by how much she’s been slandered by the church even though I haven’t been Catholic for years now. Hopefully it was interesting.

Mary Magdalene in the Cave by Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1876)

Wild how everyone who criticises gender critical feminism just misrepresents it entirely???

They’re like ‘oh TERFs think that gender is a social construct made to oppress women based on their sex and keep them subservient … so naturally they must believe that womanhood is all about giving birth and being feminine’ UGHHHH

Women do not need to be in fear of harm or harassment to want a space to themselves.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot with the whole women’s only gym nightmare argument the past couple weeks. So much of it is focused on a back and forth of whether or not women are actually in much danger, and I’m going to go even more woke and say I think the danger is actually irrelevant to this question.

We shouldn’t have to prove that we’re terrified of being assaulted, shouldn’t have to cry and break down into an anxiety attack on camera as we relive our trauma to prove we deserve a space for ourselves. If we put our time and effort into building spaces for ourselves in this stupid fucking patriarchal world, we’re allowed to keep it solely for the reasoning of wanting to keep it. That’s enough.

The sense of entitlement towards women’s work genuinely needs to be studied.

I love old media warning society of ✨ dangerous butches ✨ bc it’s always

“this woman WILL wear mens shoes and will STEAL YOUR WIFE”

“butch dykes are HANDSOME and GOOD IN BED”

“you WILL be seduced and they have a HIGH SUCCESS RATE”

“they prey on women DISAPPOINTED IN MEN and give them WAY MORE ORGASMS”

“DON’T let your loved ones receive LOVE from AFFECTIONATE LESBIANS”

Lol has someone been spying on my last relationship 😭😭

women say “i don’t want to do that because it feels degrading” based on an instinctive gut reaction to being degraded and people are like “noooo you just feel like it’s degrading because of society” i’ve had gut reactions to degradation since i was a kid. it is not society lol it is my body sending me a warning signal

Radical feminism, centering women, and worshipping female deities really turned my life around FAST because what do you mean my constant mental health problems are slowly alleviating, I’m making new female friends, I’ve finally left behind the toxic male friends, I’ve applied to and gotten my first management position, I’m gaining weight and muscle, and I’m talking to a lovely beautiful femme all within this year so far. Like I know radical feminism covers very serious issues too and politically life kind of sucks, but life really is beautiful as well when you center women and female-ness among the chaos. I love rad feminism and I love lesbianism.

I love vampirism as a metaphor for being homosexual and how our sexuality is seen as inherently predatory when it shouldn’t be, I love vampirism as a metaphor for obsessive and destructive love, I love vampirism as a metaphor for mental illness, BUT I also present vampirism as a metaphor for physical chronic illness.

The constant ache and hunger that will never, ever go away. You learn to live with it but sometimes it becomes overwhelming and causes you to lash out because you just can’t stand it anymore. The cycles of telling yourself you’re fine, of being able to make your peace with it, followed by the violent despair of knowing you will never know a life again without this pain and suffering. Slowly forgetting what it was like to feel normal. The ways you cope with and abate the pain are constantly demonized by those around you so you go as long as possible before giving in to what you need to survive, only for the waiting to worsen the effects so you need even more once you give in. Being seen as weak or worthy of ostracism and ridicule for something that was completely out of your control.

As someone who’s had chronic pain (and other symptoms) my whole life, the character archetype of someone being changed into a monster against their will (vampirism, werewolves, etc) has always spoken to me for that reason. Like I get it, sexy alpha werewolf claims you blablabla, but I think modern literature has leaned too much into the sexy aspect of monsters and could use a lot more of the psychological horror aspect. Really having to sit with what this character has become against their will and think about the ethics of their actions, and if they can even be condemned for what they do in response when it’s out of their control. Blame that had nowhere to go. Idk I was musing that over last night as I went over some of my old WIP and it just interests me much more than the sexy monster trope