on hair, as a testobutch
I wrote this piece on the 1st June, as a response to a discovery the week before. I felt compelled to write it as an exploration of the relationship between hair and both gender and sexuality, concerning my own personal experience in particular, but also those two things as general concepts. The background is made up of progress pictures that I have been taking to monitor the regrowth of my leg hair.
by Liv (they/them)
I am a non-binary lesbian working within London’s queer community, with my work focused mostly around the arts, nightlife, and in sex-positive spaces. I enjoy researching lesbian/dyke history in my free time, especially the ins and outs of lesbian subculture, and lesbianism as political identity. This is how I came to learn of butch (and often also non-binary) lesbians who take testosterone to affirm their butch identity through physical traits, which is particularly important context to this piece of writing. I stumbled across the term ‘testobutch’ on the internet a while ago, and adopted it as an identifier that I felt resonated with my experience.