I was a damn cute boy….. or femme is just another way of fucking with gender

both photos by Kate Bornstein

This week was the NYC release of  Visible: A Femmethology. Having another opportunity to read at Bluestockings and getting to spend the evening with spectacular femmes and femme ally contributors was sooo good. Hearing everyone’s voices really blew me away and added so many more dimensions to the pieces that I have read a few times already since my contributor copies arrived several weeks ago.  Over the past several months I’ve been really involved with making the event happen and coordinating things between the publisher, the bookstore, and other contributors and I’m so pleased that on Wednesday night everything just seemed to come together. The bookstore was completely packed, and we sold out of books!

The reading was incredibly successful, but it was also really personally powerful. I was the last reader of the evening, and I selected my piece from volume two of the Femmethology. It’s titled “Searching for my history” and is very much about my love of queer culture, and the longing that I feel for intergenerational community and a connection to queer history and my own journey to femme. In the middle of the piece is a line where I contemplate my journey to femme and the genders that have come before

“Now I show old pictures of me to new friends of myself from so many lifetimes ago: my sideburns (the effect of pushing needle into flesh), my boots planted firmly on the ladders of old boxcars, posed on train tracks, hands in pockets.”

Normally this is just a couple of lines with little larger connection or meaning—however in this instance my friend and fellow gender traveler Kate Bornstein happened to be in the audience equipped with hir snazzy iphone. Over the course of the evening Kate had been busy snapping pictures of the different readers but at this moment did a quick search and was somehow able to pull up a photo of me from 5 years ago. The photo was from when we were working together on a storytelling production called “The Language of Paradox” in Oregon. Ze began showing the picture to others nearby. After the reading ze showed me the picture. I’d never seen it before and immediately begged for hir to email it to me. I don’t have many pictures of myself from what I playfully call “the boy years,” and the ones I do are mostly feature a scowl on my face (I thought scowling made me look more butch lol ) but in this picture I look genuinely happy. Ironically it’s from year two of the production and about 3 months before I was about to come out as femme. There were a lot of things I really loved about being a boy and this picture really captures that time in my life.

Having that picture being shown to people in the audience, even just a few of them who ze happened to be seated near made me feel seen and visible in ways that I rarely am in queer, but especially femme spaces. The evening reminded me about how important it is for me to be out about my past, but how seldom I actually choose to be.

It’s silly, but on some level I assume that people automatically know.  I have to remember that my journey to femme was so long ago and on a different coast so very few of my friends in NYC would have witnessed it.   Femme is the most at home I’ve ever felt in my body, but the longer I live my life presenting as femme the fewer people actually know about the gender journey I have been on.  For me, femme is just another expression of being trans. My gender is just as performed and transgressive as it was when I was binding every day, and pulling on workpants instead of dresses.

There are times where I struggle to feel at home in femme community, call it internalized femmephobia if you will but a lot of it is that it isn’t a space where I necessarily feel like my gender is understood. As a high femme people often assume that I’ve always been this way, and/or that it’s a “natural” presentation to me. The NYC Femmethology release was made special for me because in the midst of a femme event my gender history was known and understood. Beyond this particular event, being a contributor to the Femmethologies has  been a really unique experience in community.  With putting these incredible books together there was an emphasis placed on recognizing the diversity of femme. I’ve felt very at home there, and as though my history is something that is celebrated and not just pushed away.  I’m making it a personal challenge that I am going to be more out about my past, and not just assume that people know or can guess from the big multi-colored trans symbol tattoo on my arm.

Other posts by Sassafras

• September Femme Writing Prompt! - September 1st, 2010
• Rebel girl, Rebel girl, Rebel girl you are the inspiration to my femme gender - August 25th, 2010
• Trust Your Love... - August 18th, 2010
• August Femmes Guide Prompt - August 4th, 2010
• Femmepop ! - July 31st, 2010