Even as a child (when I suspected I would turn out gay but all this meant to me was ‘fancies other women’ rather than being associated with any wider culture – ‘gay’ for me was never constructed wrt gendering/stereotyping) I had no patience with words like ‘tomboy’, ‘camp’ or ‘butch’, and I still don't use them, but recognise that butch has its own established and valued culture. I’m seeing someone who describes herself as butch. I have long hair and like dresses. We’re more alike than we are different, tbh, I think. The concept butch has little resonance for me, so I wouldn't tie it to either sexuality, gender, sex or anything really, and given the variety of opinions here I'd say it's not very solidly defined for others either.
The reason it's not a word I would use (beyond to describe 'someone who actively participates in butch culture' - idk, getting a tattoo saying 'i am butch', going to butch only events??) is because I think it does necessarily entail using words I don’t like to use, such as masculine and feminine, to describe people, as I think we have always to take words in their historical contexts, and I do think these are inseparable from conceptions of the male and female sexes having complementary traits. IMO it’s naïve to think we can use them purely to describe a way of dressing etc, as if as concepts they are not aligned specifically to one sex each, and as if we don’t use them to mediate how we see and treat the sexes. So to talk about a woman being masculine – having some ‘man traits’ – I find this very problematic. If we’re bent on causally linking personality and preferences to M/F categories at all, then why doesn’t the fact of this person being a woman override any associations we might have with ‘man traits’, and make it a ‘woman trait’? Surely we do this because we place such emphasis on the body, and the fact that these traits have traditionally been seen to be housed in male bodies.
So the fact that we can see preference for short hair housed in a woman’s body should then, as I said, override any association with ‘man’. And following that logic would mean we’d have to abandon making any distinction at all, since having short hair can then very easily lie in the domain of ‘woman’ and ‘man’. Surely then it has nothing to do with being a man or a woman, since it makes no sense to identify a causal link in this way when sexual difference bears no relevance here. You can perhaps say ‘humans like to have short hair’ - but then not everyone does, and not everyone who has long hair has given much thought to it and vv. And so perhaps if we can’t identify any such causal link, then having short hair is not such a massive clue to the nature of, or proof of, a self construed as stable and constant we’d like to think exists? So anyway. I find ‘butch’ a difficult concept, especially as it seems to rely on the notion of our having a ‘unified self’ or essence, but clearly others get something from it.