mascpriv:

a butch i’m friends with has told me what it was like for her in her youth and its so fucked! she went to college in the mid 70s, keep in mind too that it was a PUBLIC state college not even a religious one, and it was literally against the rules for women to not wear dresses. workplaces were universally the same (unless of course you passed). last time i was with her and another old butch they talked about how it was normal in lesbian culture to have half your friends immediately go to the bathroom and change when they went out to bars after work or school, like unquestioned thats just what all the butches and dykes did. you’d see em for a sec in day-drag and they’d come back out as themselves, unquestioned. anyways, in the 1990s my friend was working as a lawyer in the southwest and she literally could not enter the courtroom in pants or else the judge would tell her to leave and it would hurt her case too. like, i was alive then? it was not a long time ago? its fucking nuts that people think that women being able to dress practically is just like women getting away with shit when they fought tooth and nail and organized to be able to do it. and yknow what, today in 2018, women can wear jeans without question, but they sure as fuck can’t look like too ~manly~ and be left alone, i can attest to that, so uh, yeah, women keep breaking the rules for years and getting beat up and excluded and marginalized and humiliated and shamed until its normalized and then the second it is everyone with the memory of a goldfish is like “wow women can wear pants, privilege!”