Butch Voices founder Joe LeBlanc says he saw the conference, held in Oakland, as a way to help butches "have the hard conversations that we never seem to have otherwise [...] because were so divided across race, divided across gender identities, pronoun choices." Described as "4 days of workshops , entertainment & bonding for Butches, Aggressives, Studs, & Allies," the conference included segments on such topics as "Taking it On: Dealing with Our Internalized Misogyny," "Butch Survival: Mentoring Gender Nonconforming Youth," and "Butches Having Babies." Logistics coordinator Krys Freeman also described the conference as a place for butches to meet people they share aspects of their identity with, outside the context of a bar.

NPR guest host Jennifer Ludden spoke with both LeBlanc and Freeman, and the whole interview is worth listening to. One of the highlights comes near the beginning, when LeBlanc says butches are "supposed to be these silent, cool types that don't talk or only are about how we look." He implies that butches are not only expected to conform to stereotypes about masculinity — being "strong and silent" — but are vulnerable to a stereotype more traditionally associated with femininity as well. That butches "only are about how we look" echoes assumptions about looks-obsessed women, but also the idea that LGBTQ identities are an act, something people put on, like drag. LeBlanc points out that some people both identify as butch and wear makeup, and part of the point of Butch Voices was to address the fact that gender identity is more than skin-deep.

LeBlanc, Freeman, and Ludden discuss class stereotypes too. Freeman says strangers don't expect her to be educated, "just based on my appearance," and LeBlanc says that "butch [...] is a very class-oriented identity, from the history of it, it's a very working class, a very white stereotype." On the Butch Voices website, conference co-chair Adrienne "Aj" Davis addresses these issues head-on. She writes,

I am black, I am butch, and I am an intellectual. I use that term in the classical sense of one who lives for the life of the mind and for ideas. I am happiest when I am either reading something that makes my brain hurt or engaging in a fast-paced discussion about politics or some arcane subject. It took me a long time, over a decade, to become truly comfortable with this fact about myself. In part this is because there were (and still are) precious few depictions of butch intellectuals in lesbian literature or film. We work with our hands, we shower after work, we have callouses and steel-toe boots. What we don't have are jobs where we sit and do mental work all day. For some odd reason that is supposed to be the province of femmes.

She also mentions that "the TV host, Rachel Maddow, is really the first acknowledged butch intellectual I've ever seen." Maddow notwithstanding, it's interesting to note that the idea of intellectual endeavor as somehow effeminate affects butch people as much as it affects male-born men. All these assumptions — that masculinity is about strength, silence, and steel-toed boots, or that being butch is all about "how you look" — stem from the idea that of gender as unitary, inflexible, rule-bound. But according to Freeman, Butch Voices showed that identity is actually much more expansive. She says,

What this conference brought out for me in particular is that people do form identities. [...] All these things are constructed, they're made by us and made by the influences the people in our lives have on us.

One lesson of Butch Voices is that gender identity isn't a set of rules imposed from outside — instead, it's something people build for themselves, consciously or unconsciously. If we are aware of this building process, we can understand that our particular gender expressions are just one possible construction — and respect other people's constructions as well. As the Butch Voices website explains,

The point is, we don't decide who is Butch, Stud or Aggressive. You get to decide for yourself.

A Conference For 'Butches' [NPR]
To Be Black, Intellectual And Butch [Butch Voices]
Butch Voices [Official Site]

Buck's taken shit from lesbians, from gay men, from Howard Stern and his crew, from pretty much everybody because he just won't conform. He won't get the add-on that would make him look "normal" as a man but that would leave him potentially without the ability to ever orgasm. And he deals with the question of the status of his genitals all the time, even as he announces to the world every day what they are, calling himself The Man With A Pussy. (If you're really, really curious, if you just have to know, 20 years of testosterone therapy has its side effects and an extremely Not Safe For Work Or Your Mother picture can be found here). He's living, breathing, fucking evidence of the fact that, even in the gay community and the sex-positive community, even when people are marching and fighting for the right to keep from being discriminated against for what they do with their genitals, everyone wants to know exactly what his look like. Being dumped by all his lesbian friends when he decided to be a man hurt, he says:

Fuck communities then, Buck thought, if all they do is uphold the tenets of a rigid, unchanging identity, and then spit you out when you deviate. The dykes won’t stick with a trans-man, and the trans-men get offended by a guy who has the balls to trumpet the virtues of his vagina. Why go through the effort of establishing nomenclature for every variation of queer identity if they’re going to be used as tools of division? If only your average straight-laced queer-baiter knew how closed-minded some sects of these hated deviants can be.

Everyone has prejudices, even people against whom too many people hold prejudices. But Buck forces us to confront not only issues of prejudice but of identity. Am I a woman because I have a vagina and breasts and a uterus and ovaries? Is Buck not a man because he is only minus one of those things? Biologically, he and I have the same chromosomes, but the state agrees to recognize him as a man and some people insist that he must still be a woman. My sex is female, but my gender is a more complex question, and a more complex answer because gender is an identity that doesn't reside in my nether regions. I'm a woman because everything in the mass of cells above my eyes knows that I'm a woman, and Buck's a man because the same mass of cells tells him he is. If he can get us all to think of gender as opposed to sex, to think about our chosen and established identities and those of others rather than which bits we all have and how we use them, and if he can do it by sticking a dildo in his big man pussy, then Buck Angel can be my feminist hero.

A Man Without a Cock or Country [BME]
Buck Angel, A Man With a Pussy: LGB Without the T [Village Voice]

Image via of Buck Angel Entertainment