I read this piece exploring what it means to me to be femme as a genderfluid, female-assigned nobinary at When She Speaks I Hear the Revolution's non-binary themed open mic last night. Enjoy!
Femme is the crackling current of a shared experience. It's the melody of beauty mixed with joy. It's the dark sure way our damp eyes hold each other close, resisting the seeping poison-pain of misogyny and femmephobia, from workplace lunches to rape recovery centers. Femme laughter rings out with scorn at the scripts that would reduce lives to weakness, and vapidity, and irrelevance. It's the knowledge that other stories have always teemed throughout the world, surrounding the ones of male archetypes that get written down, taught in class, projected on large screens. Femme is seeing every piece of bling as a locket, holding threads that knit our stories to the world and each other.
Femme is different for everyone, but for me it is also the aching gap between who I am and the distorted misinterpretation that is all the mainstream dares to see of me. I am femme because I am not a woman--I would not be femme if I were a woman.
As a not-woman, I could forget that I like long hair, erase the dysphoria of agreement between aspects of my presentation and how others seek to read my body. I could foreswear kinship with the isolated women in my male-dominated profession, never speak of the strength I found in nail polish, hide the steel of my emotional openness so it cant' be construed as weakness. But I won't butcher myself for normative masculinity, won't empty out the lockets tying me to femininity. That, too, is part of me.
I'm a femme because society will never recognize my masculinity, holds it hostage, offers soothing reassurance that all I have to do is pull the trigger on every memory of moist eyes holding sympathy. I'm a femme because that forced-choice is a knife held to my soul. Society lets me look trans masculine, or cis feminine, but cannot read my femininity as trans, cannot see how it's a response and counterpart to my own masculinity, a part of what I am as a man or an androgyne or agender. Just as society misses the anti-femininity of my core when I am a woman.
Often those who identify as femme do so because someone sought to take it from them. Because lesbians are supposed to be butch, men aren't supposed to wear ribbons, and a trans person who was first forcibly labeled "female" is trans-masculine. But these threads can't be plucked from our bodies, nor from the tapestries we weave together, and hold in our eyes.
