This is part 3 of a 3-part series. Part 1 can be found here, and part 2 found here.
Community, Liberation
Boston Dyke March was on a Friday, the week after Philly Trans Health. My friends had thrown together a pre-Dyke March Shabbat potluck, and I spent most of the afternoon and early evening – blissfully – a little distant. As someone who is so often at the center of organizing queer Jewish community in Boston, it’s a lovely relief when things happen outside of my professional realm, and I can just be there. This day in particular, against the backdrop of a beautiful Pride week and on the end of a soul-nurturing stint in Philly, I sat back on my mental heels and watched our community breathing. My friends and colleagues and community members and chosen family and partner came together with food and blessings of abundance. People laughed and sang and ate and celebrated and I loved getting to watch it, but at a bit of emotional distance.
That moment isn’t necessarily obviously connected to the ones that came next, the ones that have something to do with femme identity. However, what does matter to me is that this vibrant, fabulous, loving, thriving, queer community is the backdrop against and within which we’re sorting out things like identity and visibility. And that shapes it. Sometimes obviously, sometimes imperceptibly, but undoubtedly.
Mid-way through the march, as we wound our way through Back Bay, I caught up with a dear femme* friend. She has been in fairly intense wedding-planning mode for the last few months, and having just been at a wedding, I wanted to share with her what I hoped would be a reassuring image of a wedding with no drama, lots of love, celebration, and a great party for two people who really make sense together. Just to remind her that it’s possible.
Then she asked me about the conference. About what it did to me, what I took away from it, and it pulled me back into the moment. We dove headfirst into femme. We talked about what femme means.
For me, femme is a conversation, a dialogue, with femininity. It is particular and chosen femininity with understanding of the damage done by compulsory femininity, and a refusal to allow femininity to be defined and valued according to patriarchy.
And we talked about why it feels like a risk to take on femme. About the vulnerability of actively choosing something so fraught with potholes, and of fitting yourself within it – or of fitting it to you. And we talked about how hard it can be to name as femme even the parts of ourselves we struggle with. What does it mean to take on femme – femme as such a kick-ass, totally powerful, fighting the patriarchy, queering shit up super hero gender – even when we find ourselves caught within our own internalized oppression? Can you really be femme if somewhere deep down you know that sure, you’re wearing makeup because it’s fun and decorative, but also because you want the world to see you as beautiful and you know that according to their standards, that means smooth cheeks with no blemishes and perky lips? How do we reconcile the space between our femme ideal and the people we are, right now? People who are, inevitably, caught between the world as it could be and the world as it is. And is choosing femininity, in a world so scornful, dismissive, oppressive, and violent toward femininity, a radical act, even if our motives for that choice have been tainted by those same forces of violence and oppression?
I have a couple of thoughts on this. The first is that we need to wholly reject this idea that there is a point at which we’ve dealt with our internalized shit *enough* to have access to x, y, or z thing. You don’t have to wait to identify as queer until you’ve worked through all of your internalized homo/bi/transphobia. We are all, always, in a liminal space in terms of addressing internalized, individual, institutional, and ideological oppression – there is no “over there” or “then” at which we’re done. I don’t mean this to be discouraging, but rather to allow us to let go a bit of the intense pressure I see myself and my friends and community members holding ourselves to, the pressure to always get it right, that is, I think, often counterproductive because we end up frozen.
I mused aloud to my friend that, I think, part of what we can do for each other is give one another permission to “fail.” Permission to fall short of our own standards or someone else’s, permission to not quite get it right every time, and permission to celebrate that “not quite right –ness” in the same breathe as we celebrate polish and panache.
Because, as I articulated a few days later with that same friend from the crumbling Antioch steps, femme can, if we let it, expose to us the inherent façade of all of our genders. Ultimately, femme is always both the sparkle and the awkward misstep. In its simultaneous choosing and rejection of femininity and its trappings, femme belies an underlying commonality about all of our genders – they are formed through an iterative process of back and forth, give and take between something core within us that we haven’t quite named or made sense of but that makes us know and feel when something sits right – that moment of resonance – and the worlds we move through every day. This is why our genders are situated in space and time, are regional and temporal, and why there is no singular, authentic, “real” way to be man/woman/masculine/feminine.
I present myself and I am seen, both of these are active interactions, and sometimes what people see about me are the things I choose, and sometimes people see, read into, and believe they understand a core truth about me based on a piece of what I’ve put into the world that is so arbitrary and accidental as to be imperceptible to me. This is true for all of us, though perhaps some of us put a little more thought and analysis into those choices than others do.
The moments when I feel most at home and settled in femme are those moments of being authentically seen. And so, it is never just about me. This isn’t to say that I don’t get to name, shape, dictate, and define my identities, but rather it is a recognition that my identities don’t exist in a vacuum, and I am always stuck in this give and take with the world around me. We move through the world in constant relationship with our communities and environments. We can’t fully separate self or identity from the contexts from which they emerge – and so they are, as I see them, conversations.
And it is not to say that anyone’s genders aren’t real, or true for them, but rather to underscore that a division between “realness” or “innateness” and “chosen-ness” is a false dichotomy. And it’s certainly not to gloss over the reality that narratives about “real” genders or “innate” genders have been used to violently oppress, dismiss, and police gender expression. Because that shit is totally real, and totally fucked up. AND also, I think that we do ourselves a disservice when we respond to that kind of policing by reinforcing the paradigm within which it operates.
Undoubtedly, there are moments in which it is strategic to assert: “actually, my gender is 100% innate so therefore don’t oppress me,” but I think that in doing so, we are subtly affirming something really troubling, namely that there are some genders that are “innate” and “inborn” and some that aren’t – and that we only need to respect the ones that are, because a person can’t help it. This is actually the same logic that perpetuates transphobia and gender policing – cis people have the “real” and “authentic” genders and everyone else’s gender is “fabricated.” This is the logic of cisnormativity, of the belief that the standards and norms of cisgender people’s genders, bodies, and experiences are those against which everyone else is to be judged.
I do not judge a person’s choice to employ the strategies they need to survive in what is so often a violently oppressive world. But I also hold on to a vision of individual and collective responses to gender policing that don’t reinforce the systemic structures that sanction, condone, and uphold that gender policing. I hold on to this vision because I find it desperately necessary – any other response erases myself and the people I love, and reinforces the systemic physical, emotional, institutional, and epistemic violence and erasure that we experience.
We are all, always, caught up in the middle of it. All of us navigate, present, experience, and name our genders in that in-between, within the lines of the iteration, over and over; both reinforcing and undercutting the things we knew to be true of ourselves last time around.
And so, that acceptance of “failure,” the permission to get it not quite right, is actually about destabilizing the messages we’ve internalized that it’s even possible to “get it right.” We can continuously move into fuller, more vibrant versions of ourselves, and perhaps that is the extent of what getting it right looks like. One of the beauties of being human is that we grow, change, and evolve – and so we are always at our fullest for just a moment, before being given the incredible opportunity to step into something more.
*This friend has a complicated relationship with femme, and doesn’t necessarily identify with it all the time. I’m using it here because a) our relationships to it were central to our conversation and b) because I am committed to making sure that femme feels like it has space for her, in those moments when it is what feels right. To this friend – if you want me to change this, I will, today or any time it doesn’t sit right.
