What is Stone?

To be stone means that one does not allow sexual partners to actively pleasure one’s body. This notion is most often used regarding “stone butches,” who up until recently had been pathologized as hating their own female bodies, and thus also all females, or simply written out of female dialogue as pre-transsexual. Halberstam explains that the stone butch exists within a disconnect between her femaleness and her masculiniy; only within a working definition of female masculinity does the stone butch become a cohesive identity.