The Drag King Has No Clothes: The Rise and Fall of Female Masculinity
At 52, I’m old enough to remember several paradigm shifts in gay, lesbian, and bisexual history. If I live to 98, like my grandma, I’ll probably see several more. Political seasons change, and each time, depending on who’s in charge and the trajectory of thought, a new social engineering project repositions us within the social fabric. We’re on the verge of another major shift — it’s inevitable. It happens every 10 to 20 years, and this one needs to happen because the harms are stacking up. If we don’t participate in this redesign, it will be imposed upon us with a potentially unsympathetic heavy hand.
I’ve lived the past 20 years as a transman. I happened to be a gender-nonconforming lesbian born at a certain time and place. Not all of us can be “straight-looking, straight-acting.” I couldn’t. I took another route — from butch to transman. It solved a problem. It has both benefits and costs. But my story, like those of many others, cannot be understood without tracing some lines through the recent history of thought.
Not long ago, I had a heated argument with a gay man about queer theory. His view, which I once shared, is that capital-Q Queer is about the liberation of the gender-nonconforming dimension of homosexuality. He thought that the project was working well. I do not. The question I had for him was, “How many of the gay men you know transitioned because of queer theory?” A hell of a lot of lesbians have. As a nurse at a youth-focused gender clinic in 2019, I assessed young people seeking cross-sex hormones. 70% of those who came in seeking medical interventions were girls and young women, most of them same-sex attracted. Queer theory landed differently for lesbians. I don’t presume to know what it’s like to be a gay man. I do know what it’s like to be a lesbian, and the complex relationship we often have with our bodies.
As a young adult from 1991 to 1995, I was immersed in the lesbian feminist thought of the ‘70s and ‘80s, which shaped how I thought of myself. One idea that was particularly influential on me came from the French lesbian feminist philosopher Monique Wittig. In her 1980 essay “On the Social Contract”, she wrote:
“Frankly, [the definition of woman] is a problem that lesbians do not have because of a change of perspective. “Woman” has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual systems. Lesbians are not women.”
Wittig wasn’t confused about the biological realities of sex. She was describing a system of codes and symbols that culture assigns to our bodies. Women have female bodies, and “woman” is a set of roles, appearances, and behavioural expectations organized around the ideal of the heterosexual family unit. This is what French feminist Simone de Beauvoir meant when she wrote: “A woman is not born, but made.”
When “woman” is confined to a hierarchical system of presumed heterosexuality, a lesbian is not a woman by that definition, but something else. These feminists were right — but that “something else” still had little definition. It was left hanging on the vine — deeply felt, but out of reach and poorly articulated. What does it mean for a lesbian to be something else, outside of the very bounds of meaning? It was that lack of meaning that haunted me, and many other lesbians, throughout life. This angst appears to have reached a crisis point among young lesbians today who have been transitioning at such an alarming rate. I’d argue that this absence of coherent meaning also fuels the hatred we face. Wittig framed our otherness as a form of liberation: “a problem lesbians don’t have.”
In her 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, the English lesbian author and poet, Radclyffe Hall, wrote:
“You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet — you've not got your niche in creation. But some day that will come, and meanwhile don't shrink from yourself, but face yourself calmly and bravely. Have courage; do the best you can with your burden. But above all be honourable. Cling to your honour for the sake of those others who share the same burden. For their sakes show the world that people like you and they can be quite as selfless and fine as the rest of mankind. Let your life go to prove this.”
There is something about our nature that’s not yet explained. The gender-nonconforming dimension of lesbian sexuality has never been fully clarified, nor woven into our broader social construction of womanhood. Feminism gave us some collective language through which we could begin to understand our otherness, but one of the big internal disputes has been precisely over the gender-nonconformity question. Some branches of feminism have outright scorned butch lesbians and our femme counterparts, seeing us as nothing more than monkeys in poorly fitting heterosexual suits. Take, for example, this passage by Sheila Jeffreys, former professor of political science at the University of Melbourne:
“Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.”
While Jeffreys is correct that masculinity exists in relation to femininity, her assertion that female masculinity is nothing more than a performed position of dominance, inherently tied to heterosexual male/female power dynamics, is tone deaf to how many butch/femme relationships are arranged as egalitarian celebrations of female diversity. Her argument declares that the “correct” way to be a lesbian is via neutralized androgyny. But how can the structures of hierarchical oppression be dismantled if the prerequisite is sameness? The refusal to recognize female masculinity as an authentic expression of lesbian identity reinforces sex stereotypes, relegating masculinity to heterosexual men and denying that it can arise independently in women, with no reference point to maleness at all whatsoever. Butch lesbians rarely, if ever, gain social capital for our masculinity. On the contrary, we are often among the most disenfranchised. The illusion of the naturalness of male masculinity and female femininity is a patriarchal device — one that is directly challenged by the naturalness of female masculinity — and this is precisely why many lesbians face such vitriol.
Despite all those fights among lesbians, or maybe because of them, we never fully realized a complete understanding or liberation of the lesbian self in its many forms. Queer theory picked up where feminists left off, aiming to build another layer of scaffolding toward our liberation. While feminism correctly described how lesbians exist outside of the bounds of societal meaning, early queer theory was an attempt to build a framework in which we could acquire meaning. Judith Butler and “Jack” Halberstam, love them or hate them, charged in to champion the masculine lesbian. They were, at that time, still grounded in the realities of sex and sexual orientation.
In 1996, at 23, I was an undergraduate art student when queer theory was introduced as a graduate seminar at a nearby university. The gay, lesbian, and bi students at my college were invited to participate. We eagerly accepted.
To understand what queer theorists meant by “transgender”, we must first understand the feminist definition of “gender” — the system of codes and expectations imposed upon us by straight, male-dominated society. “Transgender”, then, was a name given to the otherness Wittig described. The butch lesbian, in particular, was most in need of meaning and agency, crossing, as we do, so completely outside the bounds of stereotypical womanliness. As Halberstam wrote in the 1998 anthology, Female Masculinity:
“There is something all too obvious about the concept of female masculinity […]. I hope that this book opens discussion on masculinity for women in such a way that masculine girls and women do not have to wear their masculinity as a stigma but can infuse it with a sense of pride and indeed power.”
We started to disentangle masculinity from manhood. Is a man a suit? No. We could wear them well. Is a man a beard? No. Some women grow them. Is a man the natural suitor to a woman’s pleasure? Certainly not. We knew the female body intimately. Are men the intellectual authority? No. Some of us dykes were quick as whips and more logical than emotional. The penis? Despite the myth that lesbians envy them, what we envy is not a bit of floppy flesh, but what it signifies — agency, power, independence, sexual potency. We began to understand the symbolic meaning of our social bodies.
We brought these insights back to our own campus and studios. We noticed that whenever a prestigious guest did a public lecture, men in suits would arrive and take up the seats at the front. Students at the back. Newly endowed with “Queer” tools, we put on suits and sat at the front. The men noticed and shifted nervously in their chairs. The power dynamics shifted.
Sitting on a feminist art panel, I was once asked whether men could be feminists. I said, “On the days I am a man, I am still a feminist.” The room erupted in laughter, applause, and irritation. Of course, I wasn’t male. The remark was rhetorical — a challenge to the idea that “man” is a fixed category and that only men can claim masculine authority. The drag king would deconstruct the throne of male supremacy. Our masculinity was every bit as natural — and artificial — as theirs.
Aaron Kimberly, Autoportrait, (1996), Dressing Down, Oakville Galleries. Curated by Robin Metcalfe.
Meanwhile, my professor cautioned me: “Your focus on lesbianism makes you irrelevant and unsellable.” An economy built on heterosexual norms would never value me — a masculine lesbian. No man was going to buy my masculinity. This was a foreshadowing of what happened to queer theory itself: it succumbed to economic forces.
I graduated from my college program in 2000 and took my butch ass out onto the streets. I’d become confident while in school among peers, but I wasn’t on campus anymore. Real life was something else. After years of screamed slurs, discrimination, and friends being attacked in public, I started taking testosterone and had my breasts removed. It was a retreat.
The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, whose work formed the foundation of queer theory, warned us: power will always shift the goalposts and devour what is meant to liberate. It will not roll over willingly. It has no interest in sharing power with the masculine lesbian: “The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes.” Has his prediction not come true?
Queer theory didn’t heed this warning. Instead, it consumed itself. “Transmen are men” is not liberation; it’s a re-commodification. We’ve handed masculinity back to men, leaving the lesbian body medicalized and erased, relegated to an existence of scars and shortened life spans as permanent patients. We’ve split ourselves in two: same-sex attraction on one side, gender-nonconformity on the other, with the latter rebranded as a separate identity — “trans.” No longer rooted in feminist thought, “transgender” became marketing. And it sold. Far from our goal to create meaning for ourselves, we’ve spiralled into seemingly endless nonsensical identity categories and the most regressive of sex stereotypes.
Young lesbians, rather than being taught that their otherness is a shared legacy, are being told they are men. Feminism and early queer theory are not to blame for this. What has happened is the full realization of what feminism always resisted: the commodification of our bodies and a hierarchy that will never share power with masculine women. When men screamed “fucking dyke” at me, they were defending the illusion that masculinity naturally belongs to men. Making the masculine woman into a man did not redistribute power — it neutralized us.
To reclaim ourselves — and to care for the next generation of lesbians — we must, once again, disentangle masculinity from maleness.
Feminists were right to point out that a man is not a beard or a flat chest. They were even right to argue that, in a sense, a lesbian is not a woman. But a lesbian is also not a man. What gender-nonconforming lesbians have aren’t bodily problems, but social problems — and they demand social solutions. Trans men need feminism, and feminism must finally articulate — and liberate — the masculine woman.
Published Nov 06, 2025
