I want to talk about shape-shifting, and clothing, and being a butch who wears things, because so much of butchness is tied up in the things we put on our body.

There is something strange about the street harassment I receive as a butch in that it is often terrifying and extremely triggering, but something about it makes me feel justified. I am glad these men see me as a threat.

“It’s easy for us to say that we don’t participate in the patriarchy because we are women, or because we have been women, that we have known what it’s like to be objectified, oppressed, fetishized. The thing is that we queers can perpetuate rape culture just as much as the next frat boy…”

Everything is slower in the South. I’m (slowly) realizing that this includes progress.

She looked me up and down, shook her head like she was clearing her ears, and then turned to check the sign on the door. Ah, I thought.

If you’ve read this column, you’ve probably come to understand that I have a bit of an obsession with the written word. I find that self-expression through language is very powerful stuff, and in the right hands, it can be positively erotic.

It’s that tie-straightening and sunglass removal feeling.

“So what do you do in bed, then?” they always ask, but what they mean is “I think I already know what you do in bed because you’re a butch who likes femmes, so I’ve made assumptions on your behalf.”

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.

“There are so many terms for what I am – genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, pangender, neutrois – but none of them feel quite right. So Kade takes the place of that descriptor, and Kade feels right.”

Maybe there are possibilities beyond the mortgage and the SUV and the Big Oil Company. Maybe you’ll walk along past where the sidewalk ends and discover those possibilities for yourself.

I started feeling cold around the time I started feeling self-conscious.

“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.

“I continued to make intense eye contact with my interviewer, concentrating to the point of not blinking. To her credit, she did sometimes look down, but it was usually to take in my tie, skipping my face altogether.”

“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.”