Discover Top Posts Tagged with #anne fleming

I find myself telling these anecdotes—and there are more of them—over and over, as a way of asserting something: The time I got called “sir” when I was wearing a skirt; the two bank tellers, one in the small farming community of Woodstock, Ontario, the other at a big-city dyke-central intersection, who said to me, “Anne. That’s a funny name for a boy.”

What am I trying to assert?

That there’s something about me that is read as masculine—a gait, a manner, a mien—even when I am not trying, even when there are contrary indicators like long hair, skirts, or earrings. That this “read” matches my own sense of self. Until I was in my mid-thirties, my mother and I had this recurring argument: “Why are you trying to look like a boy?” she would ask. “I’m not,” I would say. “I am trying to look like myself.” That there are girls and women who get this—who love this—whose eyes sparkle at this, and who know, long before I do, just what it’s about.

That I have what feels like a natural, in-born masculinity that even my mother’s long, relentless siege could not vanquish or disguise. That I like and honour this masculinity. That it exists universally in women throughout time and space.

from “A Dad Called Mum” by Anne Fleming, published in Persistence: All Ways Butch & Femme, ed. Ivan E. Coyote & Zena Sharman (2011)

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