True Femme/Femme Romance

This concept has been called a "way to organize sexual relationships and gender and sexual identity". Both the expression of individual lesbians of butch and femme identities and the relationship of the lesbian community in general to the notion of butch and femme as an organizing principle for sexual relating varied over the course of the 20th century. The word femme is taken from the French word for woman. The word butch , meaning "masculine", may have been coined by abbreviating the word butcher , as first noted in George Cassidy's nickname, Butch Cassidy. There is debate about to whom the terms butch and femme can apply, and particularly whether transgender individuals can be identified in this way.