Lesbians who regard their strap-ons as the "real thing" instigate a representational crisis by producing an imaginary in which the fetishistic/hallucinatory "return" of the penis onto a woman's body goes beyond the "transferable or plastic property" of the phallus to other body parts by depicting a phallus that has no reference to the "real" of the penis. The lesbian-dick is the phallus as floating signifier that has no ground on which to rest. It neither returns to the male body, originates from it, nor refers to it. Lesbian-dicks are the ultimate simulacra. They occupy the ontological status of the model, appropriate the privilege, and refuse to acknowledge an origin outside their own self-reflexivity. They make claims to the real without submitting to "truth." If the phallus was banned from feminist orthodoxy because it was presumed to signify the persistence of a masculine or heterosexual identification, and butch lesbians or s/m tops who wore strap-ons were thus represented, as Butler points out, as "vain and/or pathetic effort[s] to mime the real thing," this "real thing" was at least two real things, which were only each other's opposites. There was not much difference between the straight "real thing," and the lesbian "real thing," since the latter was only the absence of the former. Both these prohibitions converged on the assumption of an identity between the phallus and the penis. Without that identification, the top who wears the strap-on is not the one who "has" the phallus; rather it is always already the bottom who "has it" by giving up what no one can have. In the lesbian imaginary, the phallus is not where it appears. That's why so many butches, as most lesbians know, are bottoms.
Ain't that the truth!