Overview
What femme means.
Femme is femininity that belongs to you rather than to the people looking at you. It came out of queer life, alongside butch, and it has never simply meant "feminine woman". It means feminine in a way that is queer at the root.
The history is real and documented. Butch and femme were the organising language of many lesbian bars in the 1940s to 60s — much of that culture working class, much of it Black and Latina. Lesbian feminists in the 1970s attacked it as copying straight roles. It was argued back into use through the 80s and 90s, notably by Joan Nestle and the writers around The Persistent Desire.
This page treats femme as a gender in its own right: the way some people answer "what are you" with femme, rather than with woman, or man, or non-binary. That use is real and it is growing. It is not the only use.
The community genuinely disagrees here, and you should know that before you go looking. Some hold that femme belongs to lesbians and sapphics and to nobody else. Some hold it is open to any queer person. Some think it is an adjective and not a gender at all. You will meet all three, and none of them is a fringe position.
So this is not an obscure term with three users online. There are decades of writing behind it, and enough argument inside that writing that anyone telling you the definition is settled is telling you about themselves.
A gender identity and/or expression characterized by femininity. Often associated with queer culture.
Femme in one line
Origin
Where the word comes from
Femme comes from the French word for 'woman' and entered English lesbian subculture as half of the butch/femme pairing that organised much working-class lesbian bar culture in the United States and Britain from roughly the 1940s through the 1960s. It described a feminine gender style and role within lesbian relationships, distinct from and often stereotyped against straight femininity.
The word's meaning has broadened considerably since then. Contemporary queer and academic usage treats femme as an identity that engages with and reclaims femininity on its own terms rather than simply describing a role within a butch/femme pair, and it is now used across genders and orientations, including by nonbinary and trans people, in ways the mid-century bar culture usage did not anticipate.
Signs people describe
Common experiences
None of these is a test. Most people recognise a few and shrug at the rest.
You have been asked, inside a queer bar, whose friend you are.
Your femininity has a price you could itemise — hours, money, skill — and you pay it deliberately rather than by habit.
"You don't look gay" lands as an insult and you have still not found a good reply.
You have added one deliberately illegible thing to an outfit — a pin, an undercut, a ring on a particular finger — purely so other queers can read you.
Straight men approach you constantly and you run a fast risk calculation each time about whether to correct them.
You were feminine before you were out, and it did not feel like this.
Something changed that had nothing to do with the clothes.
Dressed completely down, you feel not more comfortable but less legible, and that unsettles you more than you expected it to.
You have been told your femininity is either brave or a betrayal, depending entirely on who is talking, and you are tired of both.
You notice the butch and femme pairings in a room automatically, and you know which side you are on without having to think about it.
You have been treated as the acceptable one — the one the family can cope with — and it made you angry rather than relieved.
You get assumed to be a bottom, or new to this, or somebody's plus-one, roughly every time.
If you are read as a man: you have been told to tone it down, by strangers and by people who love you, and told it was for your own safety.
Day to day
What it looks like on a normal Tuesday
Twenty minutes at the mirror. Nobody at work will read it as anything but tidy. You do it anyway, and not for them.
It is not one look. Sometimes it is a scarf pinned exactly right. Sometimes it is rings, because your hands are the only thing you have energy for today. Sometimes it is the one ugly pin on the bag that other queers can read from across a platform.
On the way in, a man reads the effort as addressed to him. You run the calculation you have run a thousand times: correct him, or let it go and get to work. Most days you let it go.
At the queer night, the door person's eyes slide past you to whoever you arrived with. You are, once again, somebody's plus-one in the only room built for you.
Home. Face off, hoodie on, nothing performed. Still femme. That part takes years to believe, and some days you still do not.
Across the parts of a life
Open the area you came here for.
Straight answers
What people get wrong
Femme is just a feminine woman with a fancier word for it.
Femininity is everywhere and available to everyone. Femme is a queer position inside it. Most feminine women are not femme, and a good number of femmes are not women.
You are conforming to what men want.
This was the argument thrown at femmes in the 1970s and it has not improved with age. Femme femininity is aimed at other queers. Male approval is the by-catch, and mostly an unwelcome one.
You are not really queer, or not queer enough.
Invisibility is not a lighter version of the experience. It is a different tax: constant re-outing, no default recognition, and being questioned at the door of your own community.
Femme means passive, submissive, the bottom, the one who gets looked after.
Femme tops. Femme doms. Femmes who drive, who fix the boiler, who do the earning and the deciding. The assumption is so common that correcting it becomes its own second job.
Femme is the easy one because you pass.
Passing is not safety, it is invisibility with a side of straight men following you home. And for femme men and femme trans people, visible femininity is precisely the thing that gets you hurt.
You need a butch partner to be femme.
Femme4femme exists. Single femmes exist. Femmes partnered with people of every gender exist. Femme is a description of you, not of a couple.
You have to be high femme, expensive, polished and permanently done up.
Cost is not the entry requirement. Charity-shop femme, broke femme, one-good-lipstick femme. The intention is the thing, not the budget.
Take care
On the hard days
The invisibility one is the worst. You are standing in the single room in the city built for people like you, and you still have to prove you belong in it.
Then there is the day another queer person tells you that you have it easy, hours after a man followed you three streets home. Passing is not safety. It is erasure with a side of straight men, and it has its own body count.
If you are read as a man, hard days can be violent days. Nails, a bag, a walk. That is not a metaphor and you do not need it explained to you.
The quiet one: the day the femininity feels like a costume you are too tired to put on, and underneath that the fear that you only exist while performing it. You do not. It is still there in the hoodie, in the hospital gown, in the week you did not leave the flat.
And if there is no scene where you live, nobody who reads you correctly, and the word only exists on your phone at two in the morning — it still counts. A gender does not require an audience to be running.
Pronouns
Pronouns
Femme tells you nothing about pronouns. Most femmes use she/her. Plenty use they/them. Some use he/him and are femme without contradiction — a femme gay man is not confused about his pronouns. Some use two sets, or switch depending on the room and who is safe. Ask, do not deduce.
Consider another path
This might not be your word if…
- 1You are a feminine woman and that is the whole of it. Feminine is not a lesser word waiting to be upgraded — it is just the accurate one.
- 2You are straight and cis and want a better-sounding label for your style. The word came out of lesbian bars where it cost people jobs, tenancies and arrests. Lifting it out of that flattens something.
- 3Your femininity is something you would drop tomorrow if nobody were watching. Femme is usually the thing you keep doing alone in a locked flat with the curtains shut.
- 4You only ever use the word about other people. That is a taste in partners, not a gender.
- 5What you are actually recognising is that you are a lesbian. That is not a smaller thing and it does not need a second label bolted onto it.
- 6Your gender moves — some weeks feminine, some weeks not, some weeks nothing. Look at genderfluid instead.
- 7The real question you are circling is about transition and how you want to be seen medically or socially. Look at transfem instead.
- 8You want femme because it sounds better than saying woman. If woman fits, woman is not a demotion.
Close by
Related identities
Butch
The other queer gender from the same tradition — masculinity held as a queer position. Femme and butch grew up in the same bars and define themselves partly against each other. Some people have been both at different points.
ReadFutch
Genuinely in between, or moving across the two without the gender itself changing. If you cannot pick a side and the question annoys you rather than worries you, look here.
ReadWoman
Most femmes are women. Femme describes the shape of the gender, not a replacement for it. It only becomes an alternative to woman for the people whose honest answer really is femme instead of woman.
Transfeminine / transfem
A similar-sounding word answering a completely different question. Transfem is about the direction of a transition. A trans woman may be femme, butch, or neither, and being transfem tells you nothing about which.
Non-binary
If femme is your gender rather than your presentation, you are describing femininity without womanhood, which sits under this umbrella. Note that most non-binary people are not femme and many are actively distant from it.
Demigirl
Partly a woman, partly something else. That is a question of how much womanhood you have, not what shape it takes. Different axis entirely.
Read
Genderfluid
Gender that moves. Femme is normally a settled position even when the outfits swing wildly. If the position itself changes, this is the closer word.
ReadHigh femme, soft femme, hard femme, stone femme
Flavours within femme, not separate identities. Stone femme in particular is defined differently by different people — some mean partnered with a stone butch, some mean specific limits about being touched. Ask which.
Camp / effeminate gay man
Overlapping ground for femme gay men, but camp is a performance tradition and a comic register rather than a gender. You can be camp without being femme, and femme without a camp bone in your body.
Feminine
The ordinary kind. No queerness required, open to anyone, carries no history with it. For a lot of people asking about this page, this is the word they actually wanted.
Questions people ask
Frequently asked questions
Is femme a gender, or just a way of dressing?+
Both meanings are in live use, and that is the honest answer. For a lot of people it is shorthand for how they look and present. For others it is the real answer to what their gender is — femininity that is not womanhood and is not a costume. Neither group is wrong; they are using one word for two different things. Worth noticing which one you mean when you say it about yourself.
Can men be femme? Can non-binary people?+
Many do, and there is a long tradition behind it — femme gay men, femme non-binary people, femme trans people of every description. You will also meet people who hold that femme belongs to lesbians and sapphics specifically, and who will say so directly. Both positions are common in the community. Neither is a fringe view, and no page can settle it for you.
Can a straight cis woman call herself femme?+
The usual answer is no, and the reason is history rather than gatekeeping for sport. The word carries mid-century lesbian bar culture with it — people who were arrested, sacked, and beaten for it. "Feminine" already exists and describes precisely what is usually meant. That is not a punishment, it is just the more accurate word.
Am I still femme in a hoodie with unwashed hair?+
Yes. Femme is not a maintenance schedule. Illness, poverty, exhaustion, a country where looking queer is dangerous, or simply not wanting to today — none of these are disqualifications. If it vanished the moment you stopped performing it, everybody would lose their gender in hospital.
The flag
Several competing designs on lgbtqia.wiki (noodle on or before 9 February 2018, strwbryfemme 2021, nbgender 2021, kenochoric 2020, and a Queer Femme flag on Commons by Andria Pettell); none has hex codes at a fetched URL.
Sources
- Butch and femme — Wikipedia Etymology and mid-20th-century lesbian subculture history; fetched 2026-09-06.
- Femme — Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press) Contemporary academic framing of femme as reclaimed identity; fetched 2026-09-06.
- Butch/Femme — Encyclopedia.com (glbtq) Mid-century US/UK working-class lesbian community context; fetched 2026-09-06.
Still figuring things out?
Twenty questions, four minutes, and a few words worth trying on.