Femme + Gender: Some Stuff
So, I’m not a woman! I live in a body the world sees and assumes that is the right word for me, but I don’t feel quite right when I tick the “female” box on forms. My gender feels most right when I call it femme. Female has never really meant anything to me. It’s a word I inherited by virtue of the shape of my body. I can’t quantify it, try it on, see if I like how it fits.
Consciously or not, no one ever doubts I’m feminine. Whether I’m in jeans or fancy dress, makeup or not, I’ve never been asked my gender identity. I doubt I’ll ever get asked what pronoun I’d like used. This is a privilege in a lot of ways. It’s also a trap.
Identifying as femme is a confluence of my queerness and my feminism. This is not to say that it is an artificial identity, or that they are its source, but rather that only as I have made those things a part of myself have I found the space and language to define my gender on my own terms.
Femme says just because I’m wearing heels and makeup, don’t assume I’m a girl. It says yes, putting this much effort into dressing like this is ridiculous, isn’t it, so why are you expecting it from half the population? It says this (and Dolly, Katie, Jodie, Jocelyn, Pete, Jackie and Joan) is the logical conclusion of what you’ve asked me to do, why you are calling me slut, freak, whore now?
I feel femme deep in my bones. It’s often talked about as an aesthetic choice, or defined in opposition to butch, but I don’t think either of those definitions encapsulate it. While femme is sometimes the choice to only wear skirts or a strong preference for heels, that’s only a part of it, and not a particularly vital one.
Femmes know how to fail and succeed at femininity at the same time. We use our flaws, our fat, our hairiness, our loud mouths, our oversized brains and our excessive accessorizing to celebrate ourselves and those we love…and to foment revolution.
Femme feels like slipping into my own skin. It is gender divorced from my physical bits. It is embracing glitter and makeup and frills as things for everyone, and femme feels true regardless of how high or low or butch or whatever I’m dressing that day. Femme is plucking the pieces from our constructions of femininity that work for me and setting the rest on fire.
