“are you masc or femme?”
i’m cute. that’s it and that's all.
as a “baby gay” labels were life rafts. kept me buoyed in this new world where i was always 3 steps behind. never able to measure up to the “gold stars” and not quite able to blend in with the femmes, i was determined to find my people. locate my place of belonging in this ocean of a city. i pondered every question with the care of a person disarming a bomb. baggy clothes? bodycon? she? him? they? stemme? femme? themme? fluid? i bounced between life rafts, testing to see which one accommodated me the best.
somewhere along the way, the life rafts turned to stone. became anchors, weighing me down in the journey of self-knowing.
when people ask, i say i’m nonbinary, but truthfully, i’m gender-defeatist. defeatist bc i’m too tired to write a thesis on how boring i find binaries to be. too underwhelmed to explain how unimpressed i am by our definitions of masculinity and femininity. besides, i’m not sure i believe anyone on this earth could fully understand my gender…even if i did find the words to share.
even before i knew i was queer, life in this body often felt like cosplay. i learned to soften my tone and shrink myself for other’s comfort. how to smile through pain, choose an outfit based on what i hoped would minimize the harassment. crafted so many masks and characters to protect myself at all costs. makes it hard to decipher where the performance begins and ends. is this the agender experience, genderfluidity, an existential spiral? all of the above and then some?
sometimes i envy how nice it must be to find a home squarely within a label. to feel held by the words of a language. i imagine it’s similar to the experience of encountering your name in books, songs, and souvenir shops. to be concretely reminded that you were meant to be here. that there’s space in this world carved out just for you.
thank you so much for taking the time to read. it means a lot that it resonated with you.
it’s difficult to express my disinterest in making sense of the gender binary when many of my/our community members are finding their power by queering colonial ideas of gender. while i struggle to find anything radical about equating my choice of clothes to my gender, i do my best to hold space for other ppl’s experiences. it can feel like a tightrope walk sometimes but i remain rooted in my own truth and the ability to live in active resistance against the traits we assign to masculinity and femininity.
hoping you continue to find your personal freedom outside the binary
This was so real. I've had gender issues...since I became aware of definitions of gender(like this is what it means to be a woman etc). I tried to explore and just got tired coz ideally, I'm just a person. Like, when we speak Kiswahili/ Kikuyu and you're referring to someone, you don't know whether they're male or female, that's my gender. Thank you for writing this. It made me feel really seen ✨