June is Pride Month and I figured since 2020 is so shitty, I might as well tell the world what I’ve been working on for a few years.
I’m genderfluid! Genderfluid is having a gender identity outside of the binary; female, male, agender (no gender), and/or all genders is where I live at any given day or hour. Some days I feel very much like a woman and express myself in a traditionally feminine wardrobe. Other days I feel like dude, a man, a Zaddy if you will. Those days I typically play up my masculinity. Then there are the days (months) that I feel like a fucking alien, no gender (re: my bleached brow phases). And I think one of my favorite expressions is when I feel like *all* the genders; it’s when you see a lot of femininity mixed with masculine in my fashion choices. It’s the best of all worlds and lets me just play and exist however I want.
For a long time, I fought internally over how I could be ~*straight*~ and genderfluid. It’s easy, your sexuality and your gender identity and your gender expression are all different things. I’m straight because my sexual preferences are dudes (pray for me) and I’m not a dude. My gender is fluid, not my sexuality. I’ve questioned my sexuality because of my gender and that was fucking weird. It didn’t feel right at all. But that voice in my head was like “yOu CaNt Be GeNdErFlUiD aNd StRaIgHt” but you can. Just like you can be genderfluid and a lesbian, or genderfluid and pan, or genderfluid and bi, or genderfluid and asexual...the list goes on.
Yes, I have been thinking about this for a long time.
Yes, the pressure of presenting hyper-femme as a fat person really fucked with shit.
Yes, I had to do the work for myself around gender and fatness to get to a place where I could even start to think about figuring out how I actually feel.
Yes, growing up in a binary world in rural America was a lot of pressure to be feminine, especially being in a fat body. I didn’t really start to question my gender until my late-20s, but that was also when I started unpacking my childhood traumas and undiagnosed anxiety disorder. When I started to do the work instead of run from it, things changed for me.
Yes, I still use she/her pronouns. I also use they/them, and I haven’t ever used he/him, but that day might come? I’m not sure. Honestly, letting myself just exist is really fucking freeing. I spent a lot of years trying to be in a box of what I should be - even when I was saying “fuck the system” there was a lot of performative things going on in order to be noticed because I felt like I had to conform to certain standards of femininity and womanhood in order to be taken seriously in public and in my fat and fashion communities. That was a lot. Go back and read that last sentence again.
Being a single, straight, genderfluid adult approaching 32 is fucking weird, yo. I don’t have the answers but I can tell you that if you do the work you need to surrounding who you truly are and who you want to be, you will be happier with yourself than ever thought possible. If you have any questions, or want to reach out, or want to chat about my gender identity and how it has changed over the years, send me an email or a DM on IG. Let’s chat. Seriously.