David Davis

on the dyke nod

I’m going to make this quick, because while it’s been on my mind for a minute, I don’t really want to make it a thing. I know this newsletter’s description says I write about “popular queer discourse,” but still, this topic is a little cringe, so, sorry in advance, and also—you asked for it.

Here on DAVID, I’ve written at length about the problems presented by the validity discourses that have cropped up around queer identity. If you don’t feel like reading all that (which, valid), I recommend Cyrée’s bite-size but incisive breakdown of this rhetorical phenomenon as an “ask to foreclose upon any ethical questions raised by…identification, to be rendered pure and unproblematic in an identity.” As I wrote in my final installment of the series, “Feeling valid might be of use to people with no skin in the game, but for others, the squishy benefits of validity simply don’t go far enough.”

Now, I introduce this piece on the dyke nod with validity for a reason. For years now, I’ve occasionally heard or read about lesbian, dyke, or queer (usually cis) people who feel that the dyke nod—framed as an almost mythic signal of gay recognition and connection—only happens to and among masculine lesbian, dyke, or queer, and/or transmasculine people, and that this is because “we,” as a group, don’t recognize femmes, feminine, and otherwise “straight-passing” queers as fellow travelers. If validity is an individualist, liberal, and ultimately reactionary “solution” to the complexities of talking about ourselves and each other as homos in our hyper-taxonomized capitalist hellscape, then the dyke nod is a snowflake on the tip of that iceberg.

Put just a little more simply, I think that people who seek to go no further toward liberation than feeling valid (and validated) in their identity are missing the same point as the people who feel oppressed because random butches they see in public won’t make eye contact with them. Both, I think, would benefit from a more thorough look at what ails them, preferably from some new angles, even more preferably from angles that aren’t grounded in the cisgender experience. But hey, an anecdote might help here:

I used to live with this cis femme dyke who came home from work one day feeling frustrated because someone she clocked as a trans man at her workplace didn’t “know” she was queer, because, she suspected, of her feminine appearance. She felt he was standoffish with her, and assumed that he thought she was a straight woman, which she resented. Typical masc!

While I understood where she was coming from, I wondered if her frustration was well-founded. Like, sure, it was entirely possible that her coworker thought that she was straight—many (not just straight) people not only assume feminine gay and queer women are straight, but insist upon it, over and over again, and my friend was not unfamiliar with this kind of homophobia. But having been in that gentleman’s position before, unlike my roommate, I had another read on the situation: What if he was being standoffish with her as a cis woman, not a straight one? Cis queer people are often transphobic. You all love that shit!

And of course, there were other possible explanations that my roommate didn’t appear to consider. What if he was simply shy? What if he was a faggot and didn’t care about making friends with lesbians (lol)? What if he was just a dick? What if he was stealth and nervous about paling around with other out queer people at work (I have encountered queers like this, myself)? But my roommate took as a femmephobic affront the behavior of another queer basically because of his gender presentation, and as a trans person, I learned to become very sensitive to this kind of unexamined transphobia.

To be clear, I refuse to dismiss the misogyny and femmephobia that femmes of all gender experiences encounter, both in the world at large and among queer people, too. And I know it exists because I have seen it happen—because it happened to me—and because I listen to my femme friends and lovers talk about their experiences with it, many of these mediated by other identities that I don’t share. But I also think, as I said above, that some soul-searching is in order; I’m a big believer in opting for an examination of one’s own biases and assumptions before leaping to the transphobic explanation.

So if you share the feeling that “the dyke nod” is being denied you because you are cis femme, I have a few questions from the perspective of a gnc dyke going back a decade.

• Do you ever give the dyke nod? To whom do you give it? Why do you feel that it’s another person’s responsibility to start the nod, and to start it with you?

• Do you expect the dyke nod from all masculine queers, or just the ones you want to fuck?

• Do you assume that all queer masculine people acknowledge each other in a way that is not available to you (and would you like it to be available to you, perhaps because you would like to switch up your gender presentation)? If so, why?

• Why would you assume that recognition between gender-nonconforming people would be about homosexuality and not about being gender-nonconforming?

• Have you considered that in a changing world of queer (and straight) social mores, pressures, and visibilities that coded communication among queers has evolved?

• Has it ever occurred to you that other femmes may not recognize that you are queer, or that butches absolutely can?

• Have you ever considered that masc, butch, and trans queers may worry about their behavior being read as sexually predatory to feminine women, particularly cis ones?

• For you personally, is the dyke nod a general acknowledgment, or is it specific to cruising? Whichever it is, have you considered that it may mean something else to other queer people?

• Have you ever wondered if maybe you feel entitled to the time and attention of gnc and trans people in a way you don’t of cis people?

Anyway, I reserve the right to expand on this one, but I probably won’t. Consider this your once-in-a-blue-moon thoughts on obsolete dyke “culture” (such that it can be consolidated into a single culture) from someone who is too old to give a shit.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read the earthquake room. Keep reading DAVID to find out when their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), is available for preorder.

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