I have every faith in you, baby butch. I know you will be careful with this word and its legacy. It looks like a badge but it feels like a battleaxe, and I need you to know that it’s five times as difficult to earn and ten million times more dangerous.

Why is it that time and time again, people act like they can’t make me uncomfortable? That as a butch — as well as a queer person, a top, someone who likes to flirt and be sexual just like most human beings — it’s impossible to sexually harass me?

Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is only an effective strategy if you have boots to begin with.

Anxiety on a butch is no different than anxiety on anyone else, but somehow I feel an immense shame as a result of the two’s interactions.

“I took a long bus ride to the “good” school where I could learn how to speak French and be Catholic, where the girls, instead of pretending to be dragons from Harry Potter, gossiped about which Backstreet Boy they’d eventually marry.”

“Me too,” I could so easily say to the teenagers on that Edmonton LRT train: “Me too.” I had also wanted to leave, and I did; but then I came home.

“That’s what you wish you could tell her when you’re staring at your shoes or finishing that drink or pretending there’s nothing else to say.”

“If I wear my heart on my sleeve – and I do these days, much to the shock and dismay of a butch gone prematurely tender – then the sleeve itself is my masculinity.”