Why we write:

“I left the lesbian community [around me] in the Eighties because it was too depressing.” —Jack Halberstam, 2018, Penn LGBT Center, public talk

“I speak today from a conviction: in order to survive what we come up against, in order to build worlds from the shattered pieces, we need a revival of lesbian feminism. This lecture is an explanation of my conviction. Right now might seem an odd time to ask for such a revival. It might seem we are offered more by the happiness of the queer umbrella. I think the erasure of lesbians as well as lesbian feminism (often via the assumption that lesbian feminism is a naïve form of ‘identity politics’) would deprive us of some of the resources we need because of what is not over, what is not behind us.” —Sara Ahmed, Lesbian Lives conference, February 20, 2015, University of Brighton

“I do want to play a Cassandra role for a moment…and warn that in many locations and many ways the discourses of lesbianism – and specifically, Lesbian Feminism – have been all but silenced [in academic spaces]…[This has resulted in] the appropriation of our work and ideas (including Feminism itself) without any recognition or citation of sources, the vilification of our values and continued existence, and the misrepresentation and ahistorical construction of the past thirty years.” —Bonnie Zimmerman, 2007, p. 49-50 (see Working Bibliography below)

“I wrote a book about the history of transing gender in the UK & US in the 18th & 19th centuries. I use ‘they/them/theirs’ throughout the ENTIRE book for everyone who transed gender, as a way to make space for their varied identities, which the historic records don’t capture.” —Dr. Jen Manion, in a tweet, 09/12/21

“It’s as if the category of lesbian is just emptying out.” —Jack Halberstam, quoted in The New York Times, 08/20/06

“The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this ‘not-said’ is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said.” —Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1969)

“History is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked.” —Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1969)

“The history of ideas, then, is the discipline of beginnings and ends, the description of obscure continuities and returns, the reconstitution of developments in the linear form of history.” —Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1969)

We believe women need to write. especially when we disagree with each other.

To all my fellow self-identified feminists, of diverse minds and bodies: I believe writing will help us see each other’s humanity, discipline assholery without canceling people, end the TERF wars, and get on each other’s teams. My goal in the essays below is to provide witness to how the patriarchy divides and conquers feminists and to lay out a program for coming together. We have to join together to fight the Right. I believe that means writing, loving, and listening. Love, Rachel

Note: The longform essays linked below are the original writing of Rachel Stonecipher; thus, they’re her responsibility and no one else’s. If you have a question, comment, or concern in response to them, please send a wonderfully civil email to stonebutchdisco@gmail.com, with subject line “For Rachel.”

Keep in mind: “Hate mail,” if any, may be published in its entirety, but with all identifying information redacted. I will reinsert the spirit of dialogue if it’s not offered.

  • “Are Trans Studies and Lesbian Studies Compatible? Of Course, But Not If We Behave Like This,” January 2023

  • Introduction to the SBD Project, September 2022

    • The one where I recount how lesbian expression stopped me at the edge of an abyss.

  • “How Queer Theory Consumed Lesbian Theory in the 1990s, The-Blob-Style,” November 2022

  • “What Judith Butler Actually Said about Sexual Difference, Or, The Great De-Lesbianization of Lesbian Scholarship,” December 2022

    • The one where I explain why university-based teaching and scholarship mis-teaches Judith Butler and misgenders Leslie Feinberg.

  • “What Feminist Theories Are We Replacing with Whoozit Now? Huh? Or: The Contemporary Humanities’ War on the Person,” December 2022

    • The one where I look at some super-popular high-theory BS attempting to “transcend” feminist theory.

  • “Feel Bad. What I Took Away from Netflix’s Feel Good,” December 2022

    • The one where I insist — really, I must insist — that sperm is overrated.

    • Video of the conversation that inspired this essay: Media & Podcast

  • “When ‘Fixing’ Gender Fixes Gender in Place: How Hollywood’s False Enlightenment Fortifies Male Supremacy,” April 2022

    • The one to remind media makers that masculine female characters aren’t waiting “in plain sight” for you to change them.

  • “Acknowledging We’re Confused: Dictionaries and Their Ever-Elusive External Referents,” January 2023

    • The one where dictionaries are a starting point for thinking about sex and gender instead of the Language Gods incarnate.

  • “Reforming Relationships in the Late Italian Renaissance: The Protofeminism of Lucrezia Marinella and Isabella Andreini,” December 2022 edit (orig. 2013)

  • Working SBD Bibliography

  • Academia.edu page (with pre-2022 work)

Potentially useful sundries:

Seen around the web:

Katherine Park, “The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 1570-1620,” in The Body in Parts (Hillman and Mazzio, 1997)

A tomboy character is just a trans character “in plain sight” —Isaac Butler writing for Slate

Excerpt from Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War, re: how patriarchy structures our stories

Aaron Kimberly: “What nobody told me about transition, but should have”

  • “Instead of being honest about the connection between sexuality and gender dysphoria, we’ve come up with a language of liberation that confuses the reality: 78 genders, each with its own neo-pronoun…Everyone has a ‘gender identity,’ or mysterious ‘gendered soul.’ That’s not the truth. Rather, it’s a series of politically motivated academic ideas about gender as a performance, and the ‘queering’ of categories, that has obscured the truth and the important research about gender dysphoria.”

George Packer for The Atlantic, on words: “Prison does not become a less brutal place by calling someone locked up in one a person experiencing the criminal-justice system.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “It Is Obscene: A True Reflection in Three Parts”

  • “…And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

    I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.”

Mainstream lesbian website Autostraddle’s film critic Drew Gregory, a Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes, on loyalties, lesbian sexuality, and the vitriol lesbians deserve:

  • “And if I do eventually trust you enough to let you interact with my penis it certainly won’t be the same as whatever experiences you’ve had with cis men … But this would never be my rebuttal, because my loyalties do not lie with some cis woman and my desire to get laid. I will always care more about trans women who will never have access to surgery. I will always care more about trans women who don’t even want surgery. I will always care more about trans women who do want their dicks sucked. Because discomfort with one part of your body does not make you trans and does not make you a woman.”

  • “I’m not asking for perfection. But I am asking for effort. Not for my sex life — I wouldn’t date most of you anyway — but for my humanity, for the humanity of so many. Don’t repeat platitudes. Really unlearn your binary connections between genitalia and gender. Really unlearn the associations you bring to bodies you’ve yet known. Really unlearn these things and start seeing trans people as individuals, as people. Unlearn these things because if you don’t trans lives will continue to be debated in the Senate and I will not fuck you.”

  • Excerpt from comment chain, including comments from Autostraddle’s CEO Riese Bernard

  • Note: Autostraddle’s “About” page (accessed March 19, 2023) describes it as “the internet’s most popular, and oldest independently-owned, website for lesbian culture”

Rachel’s feature on Milk Makeup discussing the sex/gender culture wars and her very public firing for LGBT advocacy (see the “Butch on a Mission” page for that story)

The r/detrans 2023 screened demographic survey and:

TO CITE:

If you ever want/need to formally cite any of my (Rachel’s) writing — THANK YOU and BLESS YOU for writing about lesbians, and this could help for copy-pasting:

Stonecipher, R. [(Month Year)] Web blog post. [“Title of Essay.”] Stone Butch Disco. Opinions Her Own, accessed online at https://www.stonebutchdisco.com/opinionsherown.

And if you want to support my full-time writing about butch lesbians, or fund your own project (see the “Shooting Blanks” page), THANK YOU ALSO BUT THIS TIME EVEN MORE. You can donate below if you’re an actual angel and/or my angelic future project director.