For some years now, I have realized that I would rather be perceived as a woman than a man by the people around me. Whereby 'would like' is often an understatement: I experience gender dysphoria - the uncomfortable to painful feeling that my body, my presentation or my social roles, do not match my own perception of who I 'am'.
The question of what femininity actually is has been with me in a very personal way for some time now. As a trans feminine person, I encounter it all the time. It stands in front of me when I look in the mirror and arises when I accidentally touch my stubble, which refuses to disappear completely even after 12 sessions of laser therapy. It sounds when I hear my own voice on a voice message. Whenever I am confronted with my own absurd ideas of femininity: Women have no body hair, especially no facial hair, women have high, soft voices, women are small and petite and women have vulvines¹ whose shape I cannot find on my body.
I want so badly to be 'beautiful' and 'cute' - a good girl, and I want to be 'sexy' and 'hot' and a fucking slut. I want to be a bad bitch and a cursed witch who fucks with demons. I want to be vindictive and vengeful and bitchy as fuck. I want to be dreamy and innocent and I want to master all the skills that are supposedly inherent to femininity: The caring, the loving, the self-sacrifice, the body-ness, the softness, the empathy, the mothering, the connectedness, the gentleness, the being-in-community. I am firmly convinced that it is precisely these 'feminine' skills that represent my role in my communities and are the basis for every political struggle. At the same time, I want to be able to conjure up bad weather with my anger, give the evil eye to those who misgender me and bring men to their knees with my irresistibility just for fun.
I want to possess this femininity. So much so that I sometimes feel greedy myself: I want to have all this and be able to do all this. This whole absurd cluster of femininity.
When I started performing (more) feminine in public, I suddenly had situations where I didn't feel safe, where I could feel male gazes trying to undress me. There were moments when I was overlooked or ignored or when I didn't feel my opinion was important and didn't express it and I reacted lovingly and understandingly, even though I was angry because my boundaries were being crossed.
I already had a bit of a feminist education by this time and even though I noticed these structures and was annoyed by them, it took me quite a while to get over myself to even try to change them. Because these experiences showed me that I was seen and treated as a woman, by myself and by others. And that was initially an overwhelmingly positive and profoundly affirming experience.
Am I a woman? The more often I ask myself this question, the less sense it makes to me. I am an above-average caregiver and user of beauty industry products. I have hot, very lesbian sex. I am a feminist organized FLINTA* who is generally in no mood for cis dudes. Am I also a weak, greedy being who can't help but sell their soul to the devil in exchange for magical powers? Am I a passive, obedient creature whose only two questions in life are: “What should I cook and what should I wear?”, as a Doktor Oetker commercial from 1954 claims?
There are so many images and characteristics that are supposedly feminine. Do I just choose the ones that suit me? Then pretty much anything could be feminine. And yet: if I perform more Butch², for example, I often feel reminded of the masculinity I learned as a child: Coolness, wide-leggedness and muscle shirts. Nevertheless, I just don't want to be gendered male by the people around me. Demanding it sometimes feels like an asshole move. Until I remember that the real asshole move is to assume that femininity means shyness, closed legs and dresses. In general, it's a pretty uncool move to assume that femininity means anything in particular, or at least that it can only mean some things.
And that's also my relationship to femininity: I want to shatter the idea that any of it is natural or only available to some people. I want to destroy the idea that any of these qualities go hand in hand and that sexual subordination is linked to a high voice, certain first names and pronouns, body shapes or clothing styles. I want to destroy femininity because I want to destroy gender.
So what is femininity for me? On the one hand, I crave femininity and want to embody and possess it, on the other hand, I am pissed and want to smash it along with the whole patriarchy. It is an immensely violent interpretation of my relationship to femininity to write that I want to either greedily possess or furiously destroy femininity. And by now I have understood that this violence does not come from me. It is the violence that is always inherent in gender: as a fantasy and vision that is projected onto us even before we are born. As a moral, governmental and medical regulation that forces us into certain physicalities and personalities and as an economic category of exploitation that is the foundation of our global economy. This is the violence I feel in my relationship to gender.
And yet I also feel loving and tender affection and belonging to certain forms of gender. And while these cannot be detached from gender as a binary and biologically constructed category of power relations, they are a big part of who I am and who I want to be.
ℹ️ Explanation of terms:
¹Vulvina is an amalgamation of the words vulva and vagina, which goes back to Souzan AlSabah. Mistakenly, people often refer to the vagina, which is anatomically only an internal organ, when what is actually meant is the entire genitalia. The vulva in turn comprises the mons veneris, vulva lips, clitoris and vaginal entrance. The merged term is intended to enable a positive and self-determined way of talking about an area that is often perceived as belonging together, especially in relation to sexuality. At this point, it should be noted that not all women have a vulvina and not only women have vulvinas. The decision on how to talk about a genital area should always fall to those to whom it is attached, regardless of anatomical and external characteristics.
²Butch, is a self-designation of mostly lesbian people who perform masculine or identify as male. The 'counterpart' is 'femme', French for “woman” and is used, also predominantly in lesbian contexts, by people who present as female and people who feel that female gender roles apply to them.