Weathering Female Masculinity

My book club for transmen and butch women recently read and discussed J. Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998). We started with the question: how would you define masculinity if not tied to men? Each of us, as the book explores, intuitively gravitates toward the concept. We are, after all, both female and masculine, and understand that if women can be masculine and men can be feminine, those characteristics are clearly not essentially connected with sex. But when tasked with trying to define masculinity without male embodiment, we floundered. We seem indefinitely described as “man-like”, whether we like it or not. Though unsatisfied with that definition, another one eludes us. As Frankie said:

I like that you point out that she never actually defined masculinity because as you asked me to do it, I was like, actually, I can't. You know, it’s hard to define without the relation to maleness because masculinity is the quality of maleness. So, when we're observing masculinity in females, it's how close is she to a male? … Even though I love her concept of masculinity without men, masculinity without males …it’s like I feel like it’s asking someone to describe… it’s a vibe, right? Masculinity is a vibe and that’s why it’s so hard to really pin down what it is because also it’s contingent on place and time, the culture, and the time period. (Lesbros 2025, 00:01:58–00:03:18)

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) Self-portrait. 1927 (Colourized by author)

In response, the best I could muster was that certain characteristics tend to cluster around male or female embodiment, so we come to call those things “masculine” or “feminine.” There are, however, men and women who fall outside the bell curve of sex-typical traits. To what degree such traits are culturally learned or biologically influenced has been a longstanding debate both inside and outside feminism. Some theorists have understood masculinity and femininity primarily as social products produced through norms and repetition (Butler 1990, 33–44; West and Zimmerman 1987, 126–29), while others have argued that sex differences in temperament and behaviour may reflect at least partial biological influences shaped through evolution and endocrinology (Hooven 2021, 48–49).

Whatever the reasons for the clustering of traits, some girls and women are undeniably, and for lack of a better word, masculine. For as long as there have been such women, there has been the conundrum of how to make sense of us. Historical responses have varied depending on the grammars available to a culture at the time. Such frames could be moral, religious, medical, intellectual, and aesthetic.

In the third century, St. Eugenia of Rome disguised herself as a man to enter a monastery as “Eugenius”. In the story, male passing becomes intelligible through Christian virtue, chastity, healing powers, and monastic discipline (Anson 1974, 12–15; Mills 2018, 540, 543–44).

Others were less fortunate. According to the medieval legend of Pope Joan, living as male granted access to religious authority until her sex became publicly known when she gave birth during a papal procession near San Clemente (Machielsen 2022, 222). “Joan, betrayed by her own body,” died shortly afterward (228). Her story was treated as scandalous and contentious.

Other historical examples demonstrate the many ways societies have attempted to classify female masculinity. Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob), the Surrealist artist and writer in interwar France, was rendered intelligible through the artistic and psychoanalytic preoccupations of the era. Oddity had a place within the surreal (Shaw 2013, 2, 5). Few masculine women like her make the historical record, which has long centred men and the upper classes. The hardships of the working-class butch were more vividly captured by Leslie Feinberg’s semi-autobiographical composite “Jess” in Stone Butch Blues: the childhood bullying, the bar raids, the workplace harassment, the sexual assaults (Feinberg 1993, 29–34, 73, 148).

Female masculinity is nothing new. Its seeming contradictions resist easy definition. As Halberstam writes:

Female masculinity is generally received by hetero- and homo-normative cultures as a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment, as a longing to be and to have a power that is always just out of reach (9).

This is evident in some branches of sexology. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, for example, regarded masculine women as “degenerates” positioned along a continuum of inversion and sexual abnormality (Halberstam 1998, 76–77).

Feminism has not always been kind to female masculinity either, at times treating masculinity itself as inseparable from patriarchal rule. Sheila Jeffreys, in The Lesbian Heresy, argued that masculinity and femininity are political constructions tied to male dominance and female submission (61–62). Within this view, female masculinity could appear not as resistance or legitimate female expression but as identification with the values of male power and, therefore, deserving of condemnation. Even as recently as 2024, the Women’s Declaration International USA movement described butch-femme lesbian culture as a harmful imitation of heterosexual hierarchy. The author goes so far as to call it a cult.

Halberstam was perhaps one of the first, and certainly the most explicit, to regard female masculinity not as failed femininity, but as a legitimate and historically rich mode of gendered existence worthy of recognition in its own right (268).

To explore these tensions, I apply Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton’s ecofeminist concept of “weathering” (77–79). Weathering is more than just a useful metaphor. It describes a process through which bodies, environments, and meanings shape one another through cumulative exposure rather than singular events. I use it to read female masculinity as something not merely judged in isolated moments, but also formed through climates of approval, hostility, fascination, discipline, and desire.

My aim here is not to settle the definition of masculinity once and for all, but to argue that female masculinity becomes dangerous, livable, or protected through the cultural frameworks that make it intelligible. When seen as sacred, artistic, practical, or politically meaningful, it may become partially sheltered. When framed as pathological, deceptive, or failed femininity, it becomes exposed to scrutiny, correction, and violence.

I proceed in several parts, beginning with Beauvoir’s account of femininity as social production before turning to Wittig’s challenge to the category of “woman” itself. I then examine overt female masculinity through Halberstam and Feinberg, paying particular attention to the relationship between visibility and vulnerability. Firestone’s work raises the question of whether technology might offer escape from the conditions imposed upon female embodiment. Lorde’s reflections on hardening and survival help illuminate the figure of the “stone butch” as someone shaped by cumulative exposure to hostility and violence. I conclude by considering what it might mean to adapt to the climate without hardening completely or treating female masculinity itself as a problem requiring correction.

The Fair Weather of Femininity?

Femininity in women could be described as the sunny day. Flowers in bloom. A slight, warm breeze. A day for picnics and for sipping on a cappuccino in the park. All is well. So, it seems. As Neimanis and Hamilton tell us: “Weathering is a concept that helps us pay attention to the slow accumulation of weathers across place and time” (78). What happens when we pay attention to how concepts of womanhood form and circulate? Simone de Beauvoir’s famous line is instructive here: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (283).

Judith Butler treats Beauvoir’s line as one of the foundational openings for the idea that gender is socially produced rather than biologically fixed, though she is sometimes critiqued for where she goes with the concept (Butler 1990, 43; Moi 1999, 72–89). For many queer theorists, if “woman” is socially constructed, why fix it to female bodies at all (Butler 1990, 12)? Rather than follow that trajectory, I want to remain with Beauvoir’s own concern: the social production of femininity around the female body.

For Beauvoir, the word “woman” referred simultaneously to the material fact of being female and to the social expectations bound up with being female. Femininity names a compulsory set of expectations, though not ones fixed permanently across time and place. In one context femininity may mean veiling and modesty. In another, makeup, hairlessness, and sexual attractiveness. It is commonly tied to nurturance, passivity, softness, emotional receptivity, and heterosexual availability. Importantly, it exists in relation to masculinity and around male desire. Beauvoir’s concern was therefore not simply with identity, but with social position.

This was the distinction second-wave feminism often described through the language of sex and gender. Sex referred to the female body. Gender referred to the social meanings layered onto it. Butler later reformulated this dynamic through performativity: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame” (43). On this point there is substantial continuity between Beauvoir and Butler (though they diverge in other ways beyond the scope here). Neither treats femininity as a natural expression emerging spontaneously from female embodiment. It is cultivated, repeated, enforced, and rewarded.

When a woman’s appearance and behaviour conform to these expectations, the weather is unremarkable. Forecast: mild. Ordinary femininity disappears into the background precisely because it is culturally familiar. It becomes what Neimanis and Hamilton describe as weather that has been “backgrounded” such that its “political, social and cultural dimensions have been downplayed” (50). The feminine woman is therefore often treated not as a social production, but as common sense. The plot of a bland romance film. A family home with the curtains open. Nothing appears out of place.

For Beauvoir, however, this apparent pleasantness concealed a disciplinary structure. The problem was never simply that femininity existed, but that women were expected to inhabit it as destiny. Traits associated with femininity were presented as natural features of the female body rather than historically produced expectations imposed upon it. This narrowed the possibilities available to women while disguising that constraint as normality. Beauvoir’s critique was therefore aimed not only at explicit misogyny, but at the quieter process through which constraint becomes atmosphere. As she writes, “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him” (26). Woman becomes “the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential” (26). Femininity, in this sense, is fair weather precisely because it feels comfortable, ordinary, and safe for those who remain within it.

 

A Cloudy Day for Lesbians

Lesbians tend to rain on the parade. Not because they are difficult, but because they are different. When femininity is constructed in relation to men, a woman without men becomes a downpour. People grab their umbrellas. Pack up their picnics. The inconvenience is both conceptual and social. Lesbian existence interrupts the assumed relation between femininity, heterosexuality, male desire, and family life.

What is the weather like for lesbians? Monique Wittig’s most famous line is: “Lesbians are not women” (32). The statement requires explanation. Wittig did not mean that lesbians are men. Her point is more subtle and more revealing. Like Beauvoir, Wittig uses the category “woman” not merely to describe female embodiment, but to describe a social position organized through heterosexuality and relation to men (20). The category therefore contains a normative expectation. To be a woman is not simply to be female, but to occupy a culturally intelligible feminine role in relation to masculinity.

As Neimanis and Hamilton argue, weather has “political, social and cultural dimensions [that] have been downplayed” (50). The same is true of femininity. Once social expectations become atmospheric, they begin to appear natural. Deviations from them are then interpreted not as ordinary variations in human life, but as abnormality or dysfunction.

Nineteenth-century sexology illustrates this clearly. As Halberstam explains, Krafft-Ebing identified four recognizable lesbian types: the feminine woman rejected by men, who turns to women, the cross-dressing woman, the congenital invert whose masculinity was innate, and the total “degenerate” whose same-sex desire was evidence of moral or biological regression (Halberstam 1998, 76–77). The categories are revealing less for their accuracy than for what they expose about femininity itself.

Lesbianism was rarely understood simply as attraction between women, but was instead interpreted through failed femininity. As such, lesbians did not merely step outside the weather of heterosexual femininity. They disrupted the atmosphere that made it appear natural in the first place.

The Atmospheric Turbulence of Female Masculinity

If lesbians, even feminine ones, are a disturbance, the overtly masculine woman is an outright storm. The response is often disproportionate. A woman may simply be standing at a barbecue, walking into a bathroom, or existing comfortably in a plaid flannel shirt, yet her presence can produce anxiety, scrutiny, or hostility. For butch lesbians, the difficulty can be both internal and external. Leslie Feinberg’s semi-autobiographical Stone Butch Blues is perhaps the most intimate and descriptive. She herself made the connection to weather: “Storm clouds were gathering on my horizon” (33).

Once femininity is seen as normal, and masculinity in women is framed as pathology, violence often follows. This takes repeated, recognizable forms. Take for example the parallel events described by Feinberg and by a participant in my previous narrative work:

‘Let’s see how you tinkle’, one of the boys said as he knocked me down and two of the others struggled to pull off my pants and my underpants (Feinberg 29).

Jessi in my study told me:

One afternoon when I came back—I was within walking distance of the school, so I went home for lunch - to the school grounds, just outside school grounds, I was physically attacked by three of my schoolmates; they were classmates to be exact. They dragged me off into the trees, yanked my dress up and ripped my underwear off. They were screaming and yelling and laughing that they wanted to see if I was a boy or a girl (Kimberly 2025, 33–34).

Both accounts describe life course patterns in which gender-nonconforming girls are first ridiculed, then monitored, and eventually subjected to physical or sexual violence. This violence sometimes takes explicitly corrective forms, where rape or threats of rape are framed as punishment for lesbianism or masculinity. As Jessi told me:

A lot of men, not, you know, hordes of them, but several men that I had interactions with were always challenging my being a lesbian and liking girls. And “you just haven't met the right guy before.” And “if you think you're so tough, I'll show you what a man really is.” I always took it as a threat, a sexual threat that if given a chance, this man would rape me to prove a point. And so, I carried that with me through coming out of the closet. I carried that through all my being out as a lesbian. (Kimberly 2025, 36–37).

Some men carry through with those threats. Jessi was sexually assaulted by a man her partner was having an affair with when she was fifty and living as a transman. He assaulted her on her own porch, called her an “abomination”, and left marks on her face and neck (Kimberly 2025, 37–44).

Halberstam likewise identifies these patterns in her discussion of bathroom regulation, public surveillance, and the violent enforcement of gender norms (Halberstam 1998, 20–26). She names the difficulty: “There is something so obvious about female masculinity and yet something so rigid about our refusal to recognize it, celebrate it, and accept it” (268).

None of this is accidental. The violence functions as enforcement. The message is clear: femininity is treated not merely as expectation, but as obligation. In Stone Butch Blues, Jess was always told, “I must wear a dress, sit with my knees crossed, be polite, and smile when I was spoken to” (Feinberg 34).

Neimanis and Hamilton argue that weather is not fully external to the body (49). The atmosphere shapes us and we shape the atmosphere. People move through environments that make some forms of existence easier and expose others to scrutiny, correction, or violence. Intelligibility is also atmospheric. How people are interpreted changes the conditions through which their bodies move.

Stone Survival: Weathering the Storm

Enduring persistent bad weather produces hardness. It is difficult to miss the use of the word “stone” across Neimanis and Hamilton, Lorde, Halberstam, and Feinberg. It means remarkably similar things across these texts. Audre Lorde was direct and elegant: “In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone” (160). Here, Lorde is writing about the anger and mistrust that form among Black women under racism and sexism. For her, “stone” names a form of adaptation that is protective, not liberating. It can also make tenderness, trust, and intimacy more difficult. Survival strategies are often ambivalent. They preserve the self while narrowing it, reducing exposure without eliminating threat.

In the context of butch lesbians, “stone” names a state so entrenched it has become an identity for many, referring to a kind of stoicism and untouchability. It can function as a way of stabilizing the self. As Halberstam wrote: “Untouchability… guards against disruptions in the butch woman’s performance of gender” (125). “Performance” here is not meant to imply superficiality. It refers to the creation of a self, female masculinity, that can withstand social pressure and survive within it. It is functional, not merely aesthetic: a weathered adaptation.

But even a rock eventually gives way to the elements, including the softer ones, like water. Neimanis and Hamilton name this: “Weathering involves a slow and ambivalent weathering of one’s identity and self-perception” (84). The untouchability of the stone butch is never achieved entirely. “Stones can also be bruised” (83). Even hardness erodes under prolonged exposure.

Stone is only one response to hostile weather.

Weathering Through Technology

Nature is something humans increasingly attempt to master technologically. This can take simple, everyday forms such as the invention of the umbrella, housing to shelter from heat, cold, and rain. In more extreme cases, technology pushes the limits further, with attempts to change environmental patterns, like localized rain production. When environments are experienced as hostile or uninhabitable, technological intervention can appear as a way to reduce exposure and gain greater human control over those conditions.

Likewise, some imagine that an escape from constraining social conditions requires technology to alter bodies or aspects of bodily functions. In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone provides one of the most vivid examples. She imagined that for women to escape oppression they must be freed from their reproductive role. She wrote: “The end goal of feminist revolution must be… not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself” (11).

For her, the sex distinction was reproductive. Eliminating the sex distinction, then, by her formulation, required that gestation be dislocated from women’s bodies through technological reproduction and artificial wombs (198–99). Pregnancy itself, she argued, was a “barbaric” condition imposed by biology (188–89). Such a measure becomes more than weathering. It is mastery and liberation through technological control.

A parallel can be drawn to how some masculine women have sought to weather through the use of medical technologies to alter the body and pass as men. The participants in my narrative work made that connection explicit.

Jessi said:

Those threats were an alarm… it was one of the motivations for me, after I discovered female to male transitioning… The attention, the harassment, the threats… were all big motivators for me to pursue transitioning (Kimberly 2025, 38).

However, this form of protection was not without failure. She was assaulted again as a transman before reclaiming a butch lesbian identity.

Josh is happy with his decision to become a transman but is clear about why:

It was almost like a tough shell that protected me. So, I think I had my cringiest, you know, hyper masculine… projection of masculinity during that time, because I was desperately trying to protect myself from quite literally everything at the same time… A male appearance is really lovely or, even an androgynous appearance, is more lovely because it does have a stronger message of leave me alone or, I’m not sexually available (8, 11).

Sammy, for a brief time, tried to shelter herself with femininity: “I saw femininity as a tool… to survive. I had to put on makeup and high heels to survive, even though it was painful, and I hated it” (4). She later reclaimed masculinity.

From controlling climate change, sheltering from the elements, and escaping harsh social conditions, technology can seem like the answer. Yet weathering theory complicates any fantasy of total escape. As Neimanis and Hamilton write:

In other words, even as we erode the nature/culture binary, we still need ways to talk about materiality, or the raw state of things, as different from their representations, or from how they have been shaped by humans, even if ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ aren’t quite the right words for doing so. Weathering offers careful, intentional, and non-hierarchical ways to hold these differences. It helps us argue against a nature/culture binary… At the same time, it can also still hold on to material difference that may be incidental, evolutionary, or not necessarily anthropogenic. The base dictionary definition of weathering tells us that granite does not weather the same way as clay. The three little pigs taught us that straw houses don’t withstand the weather (human or wolf-created) the same way brick ones do. Nature—as material affordance—matters (87).

Hormones, passing, and androgyny can alter one’s exposure to hostile social climates, redistribute vulnerability, and provide forms of shelter. But they do not eliminate weather itself.

Conclusion

Weather is often treated as background—atmospheric and impersonal. The same is true of gender. Femininity can appear natural when it is familiar and socially rewarded. The weather seems pleasant enough. But this paper has argued that the atmosphere changes when women move outside the expected conditions of femininity and heterosexuality. Lesbians disturb the arrangement. Overt female masculinity intensifies the disturbance further. The result is often scrutiny, regulation, harassment, or violence. That climate, in turn, shapes the subject, producing survival strategies that feed back into the environment.

Beauvoir, Wittig, Halberstam, Feinberg, Lorde, and Neimanis and Hamilton all circle around a similar theme: endurance. Gender nonconformity is both interpreted and weathered differently. Masculine women, butch lesbians, and transmen repeatedly describe managing visibility, threat, sexual scrutiny, and vulnerability. Responses to such conditions vary. Some seek shelter through femininity. Others cultivate hardness. Others alter their bodies technologically to reduce exposure or become less legible as targets.

None of these responses fully escape the conditions that produced them. Hardness can bruise. Shelter can fail. Male passing can redistribute vulnerability without eliminating it. As Neimanis and Hamilton write, “Nature—as material affordance—matters” (87). Social life may function similarly. Different bodies do not weather the same conditions in the same way.

Female masculinity has often attracted scrutiny that goes beyond ordinary social difference. Women who appear too masculine are frequently treated as troubling, deceptive, or out of place. Those responses are socially patterned, not random. What needs to change is the weather: the conditions that make female masculinity difficult to inhabit without concealment, punishment, or fear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpPvXVazPLs

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