Femme Invisibility vs. Femme Privilege

I want to preface this by saying that I am femme-identified. I see the need to put more thought into the privilege that femmes have over people who read as “androgynous,” “butch,” or “masculine.” I also want to say that I am using the aforementioned words (in addition to other words I use below) as incredibly broad definitions, and that the queer community I am referring to is not the homosexual male scene. Another thing I want to clarify is that I’m aware that not all femmes are female or lesbians.

In the queer community, femmes are often invisible. Butches and otherwise “masculinated” people are valued as sexually attractive, sought-after and are often perceived as having opinions that are more valuable. It’s misogynistic in nature, but has a completely different structure than the straight world where feminine women are often perceived as “prizes.”

In the outside world (not necessarily the “straight” world, but the world outside of the queer bubble), butches and otherwise “masculinated” people are stared at, tormented, wrong-bathroomed, not hired for jobs, harassed, beat up, and killed. While femmes have entirely different realm of problems to deal with, including safety issues of our own, we don’t have the typical day-to-day struggle of the masculine queer based on our physical appearance.

I don’t like being invisible.

But at some point I started noticing that most conversations about femme invisibility in the queer scene revolved around the general “date-ability” of queers, and who gets hit on the most. A lot of femmes want to have long discussions about how unfair it is that butches get hit on more by other queers, that there are more femmes who are into andro/butch folks than the amount to go around, and other issues that are only significant if being insecure about dating is your primary issue.

When dialogue about femme invisibility became less about being heard and more about being dated, I started to feel grossed out and less involved with my own femme identity.

We’re all queers and we need to acknowledge that there are two worlds: the queer bubble and the world at large. While we continue to fight and fight and fight, these worlds haven’t exactly intersected (no, not even in Portland). What’s important to you in your dating/social scene is quite possibly not as significant as the butches/androgynous folks safety in the world at large.

Being perceived as an attractive, sexual creature in the queer community might be important for your self-esteem, but it’s also important to recognize the amount of privilege that we have as femmes. I rarely hear conversation about femme privilege, other than femmes claiming that it doesn’t exist.

1. A femme interviewing for a job will most likely get the position over a butch/non-femme-gender-variant person.
2. A femme going into a public restroom will typically not worry about safety or what the reaction of the other restroom users will be.
3. A femme typically has the option of passing as a straight person in the event of a violent situation. While not everyone would try to pass as straight in such situations, a femme can still make that choice if the other choice was physical violence/death.
4. A femme can walk through the world without being judged for having a gender identity that is perceived as “threatening” to the world at large.

Femmes have a different set of issues and worries that we carry on our backs in society. We generally deal with more sexual harassment on the street and in the workplace. We will be taken advantage of at auto mechanics if we aren’t comfortably knowledgeable with car repair. We are grossly sexualized by straight men and often put in unsafe situations as a result.

Femme invisibility is a real problem in the queer community, but it’s also really important that we keep in mind the privileges that femmes do have. We should also make sure to always check ourselves when our femme invisibility dialogue turns into belittlement, competition or mockery of masculine-gender-variant queers, or centers solely around our own insecurities of queers wanting to date us.