A year without performing a gender identity
Written by Alex
Photo of Alex by Hamza
There’s something about the pandemic keeping us at home, most of the time alone, that has led me to have some sort of epiphany, and I know I’m not alone with this thought: we stopped performing who we thought we needed to be and started looking within as to who we were, and how we needed to show up for ourselves. I identify as a nonbinary queer femme, or a queer nonbinary person. I came out in January, but before I jump into all of this, I want to rewind a bit into what I used to feel, and how it felt like a normal feeling.
As a kid, I made a point of hating the colour pink. Being assigned female at birth (AFAB) made me feel such pressure to perform certain expectations of my gender; I used to shave every day until I was about 19. Every. Single. Day. However, I absolutely wanted to reject parts of the expectations too. I didn’t have the language or the ability to pinpoint where this came from, but it was a mission deep in my heart. I played sports, loved having more muscles than some dudes at school, and I hated the colour pink with passion. I wanted everything in navy, green, or black. Hating the colour pink was important, it was my rejection of the societal expectations of what “girls” should be. It was my attempt at being something else than girly, really anything else but this.
Within the last year, I found myself buying pink things, I even got a pink blouse. I started digging back into where this hatred came from, what these feelings raised in me. It made me remember when I learned about the idea of “dysphoria” and how I thought, “I don’t feel gender dysphoria, but I feel clothing dysphoria.” Some days I’d wake up and be unable to wear certain clothes or feel so utterly uncomfortable in them, as if they were burning my skin. And I never took the time to realize it was because I was trying to perform for the societal (male) gaze. Buying clothes I barely wore because it fit what people wanted me to look like, having long hair only to tie it up everyday because people complimented it all the time. Still I thought this was womanhood, and not my own experience of gender dysphoria. I didn’t have access to tales of trans people and what it meant, I knew I wasn’t a boy, so I set this aside.
There’s a trend of tiktokers explaining why they’re changing their pronouns to “she/they” in relation to their desire to reject a lot of expectations of our contemporary understanding of womanhood. This relates pretty closely to the beginning of my own process. Some deeper introspection led me to post a version of this text on Instagram (heavily edited since then):
“I feel like I expanded my trust in my progress and want to grow even more into myself and all the nuances that come with it. I don’t know if this can be considered a coming out, I’m not transitioning towards anything in any way, it feels more like a coming into my self. Findind the home within my body. I’ve said for a long time that I was a queer woman, and the word “queer” really mattered there. I’m finding a vocabulary that feels closer to me, and nonbinary really belongs here. It feels like it includes all of the possibilities within myself. I am navigating gender identity and presentation, while rejecting what I want to reject and keep only what feels right.
Listening to Ev’Yan Whitney’s podcast was like the last straw, shaking things into place. All the gender issues I felt since early childhood, as long as I can remember really, were somehow being put into feelings and words. I’m not swearing off femininity, not now anyway. It’s just never felt right, the whole womanhood thing. I believe our society needs to deconstruct a million things, and the way gender is perceived, the expectations that are put on women (and men, but that’s not my point here), need to change. Femininity is a large spectrum, and I do intend to keep fighting the preconceived ideas of what women should look like or be. I’m still a feminist, as long as it’s intersectional as hell. And I still hope society allows us to diversify the way we understand genders (and the binary).”
Since then, I changed my pronouns to they/them, I put in my bio “queer enby femme”, and I started assuming more and more that it is indeed a form of coming out. I needed time to tread lightly because I was (and still am) experimenting with what feels right. As we’ve all pretty much been confined inside our homes with our own bodies, I feel like a lot of us stopped wearing certain clothes, stopped acting a certain way, and overall stopped pushing for something that came “naturally”, but really came as a defense mechanism, a kind of “if I act like this, I won’t get too noticed or bothered”. I discovered I passionately hate short skirts, I still love makeup, I despise having long hair, shaving feels too dangerous for what comes out of it, long nails are overrated, and wearing a strap-on feels hot as hell, almost euphoric (it used to scare me because of the masculinity I didn’t want to represent), and the colour pink is awesome!
My gender might never be clearly determined, for now I still say “nonbinary femme” because it feels right, and I do present more femme in my own ways. Our gender identities probably won’t be static forever within us. It’s not a linear process, it’s fluid and everchanging and a quest to nowhere but deeper in our connection with ourselves. And that’s what’s beautiful, that’s what I’ve been embracing through it all. It allows for an introspection of myself that requires me to check back in again and again, and see what feels right, and get rid of the rest.
Alex (they/them) is a person who invests a lot of time in their literary studies, and who enjoys their free time (as well as procrastination) to build their Instagram platform. Formerly petrified by taboos such as body hair, bisexuality, mental health (and many more), they now take great pleasure into debunking the myths that surround them and discussing them one by one on their platform.