Process

How did I put this list together? What were the factors that were considered when creating the order? Who was involved in the creation of this list?

Here’s some answers.

The first step was to gather as many possible candidates as I could, and I created a spreadsheet to keep track of them all, adding in websites, comments, and links to photographs. I asked for suggestions from the hive mind, aka Twitter, and I posted something on Sugarbutch declaring my intentions to make a Top Hot Butches list and asking for suggestions as to who would be on it. I received more than 50 comments with dozens of nominations. I also asked around – I brought up the project to various people to see who they thought of off the top of their head, and asked them to email me if they thought of something later. I kept up with word of mouth, internet searches, personal requests, and conversations, until I had a pretty darn solid list.

I emailed Femme Fluff and DJ Haha individually asking them to look over the list I had and add more, as I was still gathering names. They added many useful perspectives and I appreciate their feedback!

To be honest, I didn’t think I’d find 100. I hoped I could find 50, and thought maybe I’d get to 75, which would be good enough to cut it down to a really solid list of 50. But the nominations and suggestions kept pouring in, and the final list was more than 130.

Then, I assembled a panel of judges. I wanted some range of diversity in interest, geography, gender identity, ethnicity, and age, and ended up with the following folks:

Femme is my Gender: UK, identifies as femme, is partnered with a lovely butch (who I thought might contribute from the wings)
Geek Porn Girl: US, west coast; identifies as femme, except when she doesn’t
Kristen: US, east coast; identifies as femme, dates butches
Leo MacCool: US, east coast, butch smart-ass academic, partnered with a fabulous femme (who I hoped also might help with the process)
Rodger: the only cisguy of the bunch, has a particular attraction to butches and transguys

The panel went over The Giant Spreadsheet of Hot Butches with me, and each of us picked our Top 20 Hottest.

Once I had the top 20 list, the ordering process started. Diversity was a huge factor in assembling the list – I didn’t want separate lists for age, size, profession, ethnicity, or geography, so with diversity in mind, I worked with the votes from the website and the top 20 lists to finalize the order.

I had a lot of assistance from Alisha, too – big thank you to her for being part of the Sugarbutch Empire!

You may not agree with the final results – hotness is so relative. And I don’t expect this is ALL the hot butches (I’m sure I’ll run across someone who is super hot as soon as this is live), nor do I expect it to match what all people find hot. But hopefully you will find at least some of them appealing, and hopefully you find some new butch performers, artists, comics, musicians, political activists, atheletes, and writers to pay attention to and appreciate.