I do think there's some truth to this passage:

Prejudice against homosexuals is about cross-gender behaviors. [...] On the occasions when guys have screamed “FAGGOT!” out of their car windows at me, it wasn’t because I was hand in hand or making out with my boyfriend (or theirs!) It was because I was walking. I was just walking, and there was something about my walk, my clothes, my hair, who knows, which they processed as inappropriately unmasculine.

Earlier this week I watched an interview with Helen Joyce where she said the same thing: https://youtu.be/OygT20clGfM?t=3380

What people used to know — and have almost deliberately forgotten — is that gay people are highly gender non-conforming. Every homophobe in the world knows this. Like every dad who wants his son not to grow up gay, knows very, very well that if he looks at the three-year-old who's borrowing his big sister's tutu and saying, "I want to do ballet," he thinks, "Shit, I've got a gay son." And like, we're somehow meant to pretend that's not the case.

The correlation isn't 100%, but it is strong enough to be statically noteworthy. For a while people have been kinda trying to pretend it's not the case, and I don't think that's yielded anything useful. I do feel like subculture that we in this group are are part of doesn't quite now what to do with gender nonconformity? Like, we say it's fine, everyone should be themselves, etc. And that's great. But what we don't do is contextualize it, or say it means anything, or give it a social framework. And this conceptualization of gender non-conformity as basically a superfluous random detail... I mean, I think it works for some people, but I think there are other people who find that lacking.

A year or two ago, I was reading ''Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold'', a historical book about the lesbian community in Buffalo New York from the 40s to the 60s. For them, the butch/femme culture was absolutely foundational. In the 70s, it fell away, and a more an androgynous version of lesbian social life, this one influenced by feminism which at the time often critiqued butch/femme subculture. I was thinking about how in butch/femme days, I doubt gender ideology would've made made any headway. There was already something else there to give lesbians a way to conceptualize gender expression. Like, the niche was already filled. But once that was gone, this new androgynous version of lesbian social life didn't last. A few decades later, young lesbians were once again reaching for a way to talk about gender expression and contextualize it socially, and now we've got this.

Even now, long after most of the butch/femme subculture has been left behind, the word "butch" has remained part of the vernacular. It's useful. It helps people make sense of things, and contextualize them within society. And every time Kai makes a post about how it's such a struggle to be a really gender non-conforming gay man, I think that the fact that gay men don't have any butch counterpart may be to their detriment.

I don't know. I think attaching meaning to gendered behavior is messy and iffy, but I also feel like basically we've already tried not doing it, we've run that experiment, and the results are in, and they're not very promising.