There’s nothing I want to share with you more today than Butches & Babies, a delightful new Tumblr microblog site by Meaghan O’Malley. (Thanks to lesbian wonderland Autostraddle for the tip.) Meaghan brings together butch, “in all of its iterations,” and babies (“human”), saying that she’s “fascinated by the juxtaposition of a baby nestled in a butch’s arms.” Take a look at the photos she’s collected, and you will be, too.
Meaghan and Em, the butch to whom she is “almost-married,” don’t have any children of their own, but Meaghan says she loves to take photos of Em holding babies. She explains, “It’s not at all easy to march through the world shattering gender norms at every turn. So when a butch holds a small child, relatively unaffected by gender (in a cognitive/behavioral sense), it is a simultaneous exchange of healing and freedom.”
Meaghan is looking for submissions to the site; as she notes, please make sure you have permission of the parent(s) if the child is not your own.
Thank you for sharing the link, the back-story and encouraging people to submit! The funniest thing about all of this is that it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that Em even felt sure enough to hold a baby…our friend’s little one Bella. I’m just grateful that it’s caught on so quickly and that people love seeing representations of really incredible butches and queer families!