Brandon Teena was an American transgender man who was sexually assaulted and then murdered by two cisgender men in 1993. Brandon had been openly transgender since his early teens and despite not having access to medical transition, had socially transitioned and passed as a man. While in jail for a petty crime, his girlfriend and future assailants learned that he was transgender as he was kept in the women's section of the jail, later assaulting and murdering Teena along with two of his housemates. While he died young, his case was notable as one of the first high-profile cases on transphobic violence, specifically against a trans man.

Kitty Tsui has been many things over her life. While she does not identify with butch as a label, she stands as an icon of Asian female masculinity as she has been deeply involved in the Asian-American and lesbian communities in the Bay Area for decades. Some of her other accomplishments include winning a gold medal in bodybuilding at the 1990 Gay Games (an Olympics-style sporting event for the LGBT community), as well as being the first known Asian-American lesbian to write a book. With her open presentation as a masculine woman as well as her participation in leather culture, Tsui came under attack from other parts of the lesbian feminist community as they sought to define an acceptable boundary for women's sexuality and self-presentation. You can listen to an interview with her here.

In her article 'Transgender Butch', scholar J. Halberstam describes a "border war" of sorts happening between butch women and trans men, who often view one another as ingenuine, seek to distance their identities from one another, or seek to undermine one identity to legitimize the other (Halberstam 1998).
As trans men seek to be perceived as male and butch women generally do not, this creates a tension, or even competition, over how to physically present oneself.
This is usually paired with an informal continuum of 'least masculine' to 'most masculine'. However, Halberstam notes that there has been a high degree of overlap between these identities, as well as complexity in either identity, and that this ambiguity means that any sort of continuum, or a dividing line, cannot be placed.
For example, butch women may have dysphoria, take hormones, or pass as men, but this doesn't make them repressed trans men in denial.
Likewise, trans men could have little dysphoria, not take hormones, and dress "less masculine", but this doesn't make them self-hating women. There are also many people who consider themselves both, in-between, or who don't want to label themselves.

Storme DeLarverie is widely known to be the person who first started the Stonewall Uprising. Known as a butch lesbian and frequent drag performer, DeLarverie spent her younger years touring in a racially-integrated drag troupe before settling in Greenwich Village, NYC. DeLarverie found refuge in the Village as someone ambiguous in both race and gender. During one of the routine police raids on the Stonewall Inn, a mafia-run gay bar in the Village, DeLarverie was apprehended by the police. To an onlooking crowd, she shouted to do something, which according to eyewitness accounts began the Stonewall Riots. DeLarverie passed away at age 93 after several decades spent in the NYC gay community. (Yardley 2014).

During the Harlem Renaissance, a blues singer by the name of Gladys Bentley became a popular musician. She was known for her bold and talented performances as well as openly crossdressing on stage and singing songs addressing her attraction to women. In her career spanning from the 1920s to the postwar era, she was well known in blues hotspots and well-regarded by other Renaissance icons like Langston Hughes. She lived very openly as a woman attracted to women, and in 1928 even married her girlfriend. This open defiance of dominant cultural norms in a conservative society made her quite notable, but unfortunately culminated in her entering the closet in 1952 and renouncing her past identity in an autobiographical essay, "I am Now a Woman". In it, she describes subjecting herself to hormone therapy in an attempt to feminize herself, as well as a wish to become an ordained minister. She passed away in 1960 having distanced herself from her past identity (Jones 2012).

Drag kings are an often unknown & underappreciated, yet important, part of drag culture. Like their counterpart drag queens, drag kings provide a satirical performance of gender, often emulating specific archetypes in masculinity or popular cisgender celebrities. Drag culture has historically been a refuge and a space of pleasure for gender non-conforming and transgender people, as one of the few spaces one could openly present as themself and connect with others like them. As drag queens have recently come into a wide public consciousness yet drag kings have not, this raises questions around how androgyny is viewed by a heteronormative society as well as how mass erasure of an identity is as much controlling it as its open demonization.