Femme

Femme is a feminine gender presentation and self-description used chiefly by lesbian, bisexual and queer women. Like its counterpart butch, it describes how a person carries gender rather than which gender they are: most femmes identify as women, and femme is the register in which that identity is performed.

The word is frequently misunderstood in two opposite directions at once. Inside queer communities it has been read as insufficiently distinct from conventional femininity; outside them it is barely legible at all. Both readings treat femme as an absence — of masculinity, or of difference — when the literature that exists treats it as a positive gender with its own content.

Definition & scope

Femme describes a feminine register of dress, bearing and social role adopted by a woman who is not heterosexual. It makes no claim about anatomy, medical history or legal sex, and it is not a statement about who holds which role in a relationship. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies treats butch and femme as a paired system of lesbian gender rather than as copies of man and woman, and femme is the half of the pair for which that point most needs making.

The internal vocabulary is fine-grained: high femme for a deliberately heightened presentation, soft femme for a quieter one, stone femme, butchy femme and futch for positions that borrow across the line, lipstick lesbian as a looser popular synonym. As with butch, these are not interchangeable. Femme sits with tomboy and the wider family of gender-nonconforming terms as a description of presentation rather than of identity: most femmes are women, and femme is how they are women.

Femme is also independent of orientation in the strict sense. It says that the person is not heterosexual, which is why the word exists at all, but the specific pattern of attraction is a separate question catalogued in the orientations vertical.

History & origins

• French origin: femme is simply the French for woman, from Latin femina; English took it as a loanword and gave it a sense French does not have.
• 1940s–1950s: femme enters American lesbian usage as the partner term to butch. Kennedy and Davis's oral history of the Buffalo lesbian community documents the pairing as the organising grammar of working-class lesbian bar life, with femmes doing much of the community's practical and economic work precisely because they could pass in public.
• 1970s: lesbian feminism attacks the roles as an imitation of heterosexuality. Femmes take a particular kind of criticism — accused simultaneously of playing a passive part and of hiding — and femme identity becomes hard to claim openly.
• 1992: Joan Nestle's The Persistent Desire: A Femme–Butch Reader collects femme writing in volume for the first time and makes the case that femme is a chosen gender, not a residue.
• 2003: the first empirical model of femme identity appears in Sex Roles, three decades after the debate about it began.

In practice

The defining practical fact about femme is invisibility. A femme is read as heterosexual by strangers by default, which removes the street-level exposure butches carry and replaces it with a different cost: constant erasure, the need to come out repeatedly, and — historically — suspicion from within lesbian communities that a woman who can pass will. That asymmetry, not the aesthetics, is what the femme literature is mostly about.

Psychology

There is no diagnosis here. The ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019, and gender expression in adults has never been a diagnostic category of its own.

The empirical work is qualitative. Levitt, Gerrish and Hiestand's study in Sex Roles interviewed femme-identified lesbians about identity development, life in the lesbian community, life in heterosexual society and romantic relationships, and analysed the interviews with grounded theory. Their model's core category is maintaining integrity: upholding beliefs about sexual desire and gender representation — the work of holding a coherent self across contexts while confronting stereotypes about women and about lesbians at the same time. The paper opens by observing that femme identity is rarely represented in empirical literature at all, which is itself the finding.

Prevalence & culture

How common is femme identity?

No probability survey isolates the term; the usable numbers come from a community sample.

The National LGBTQ+ Women's Community Survey analysed 5,002 respondents fielded between 2021 and 2022 and found 52% describing their gender as on the femme or feminine spectrum, against 15% on the butch or masculine spectrum, 14% non-binary or androgynous and 8% fluid or genderqueer. Among the 2,048 respondents who elaborated with their own labels, femme was the second most common current descriptor after woman, used by 23% — up from 15% who had used it in the past. The report itself notes that the survey's invitation may have appealed more to femme respondents than to others, so the 52% is not a population share.

Converting that into a population figure requires an outside base. Gallup's 2025 survey puts LGBTQ+ identification at 9% of US adults, 16% of them lesbian — about 1.4% of adults. The entry's figure applies the survey's femme label share to a base of that order, widened for bisexual and queer women, and carries low confidence.

The gap between how common femme is inside queer women's communities and how rarely it is recognised outside them is the whole subject in one line.