My entire life, I have felt completely disconnected from my womanhood. I have been plagued by criticism that I was either too girly or too tomboy-ish and the like. I was either trying too much or not enough to be female. I felt like every time I put on make-up, I was playing dress-up with my mother’s things. On the other side, whenever I didn’t dress “girly” I felt like an outsider to my female peers. It became especially prominent when I was in middle school and every girl seemed to be getting more and more into boys and dating. It’s the cliche lesbian experience; being asked which boy I find cute, panicking and picking one at random, even dating him briefly to prove my heterosexuality (so, so sorry my dude).
But it all felt wrong. I knew I was wearing the wrong clothes, wearing my make-up wrong. I could even tell that I was dating my middle school boyfriend wrong (again, I am so sorry). But I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. It wasn’t until we had broken up, he was going to Arizona and I couldn’t pretend anymore, that I realised that dating men was not something I could put myself through again. Obviously, there was panic. While I went to a public high school, it still had a very religious atmosphere. The school’s biggest student event was a bible summer camp. Even though I was able to realise this, to finally connect with a part of myself, I was still conscious of being an outsider. But it was compounded by the fact that I knew I needed to keep my lesbianism hidden, and that meant that I had to be more feminine. But I just couldn’t do it right.
Even now, as a 22-year-old lesbian, I don’t feel like I’m able to connect fully with heterosexual feminism. The wave of Girlboss Feminism is so unbelievably heterosexual and set in the typically feminine that I get more annoyed the more I see it. Because it’s not for me. No, I am not welcome in those spaces. But, as a woman, shouldn’t I be entitled to it? And with the rise of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism (or TERF), putting womanhood within such a strict boundary that I know I don’t fit into, I feel less and less like I belong in feminist spaces. I’m yet another outsider within spaces that should be mine.
But it makes me wonder why. Why can I not perform femininity correctly? It feels like there’s something intrinsically wrong with the way I dress and even stand. And it’s not because I hate all things feminine; I did my senior capstone on fashion and its impact on how women express themselves, for pete’s sake. I spend at least ten minutes every morning debating what I’m going to wear and how it’ll look. It’s not that I don’t get it. Believe me, I do. But I can’t connect with it. It’s not mine, the way a pride flag is. I look at my straight friends, who seem to understand their own femininity deeper than I can. I look at my mom, my grandma, my aunts, and even my little sister, and I see their beautiful womanhood.
And then I look in the mirror and wonder why I don’t have that. Why I can’t. And it’s frustrating. Because to my friends who aren’t gay women, I am not femme. One of my friends, who is a gay man, teased me for looking for a new pair of boots; he called me butch. But when I shared the boots with another friend, who is a lesbian, laughed and called me femme. So for a lesbian, I am on the more feminine side. But for everyone else, I am butch. I am more masculine, even if I dress rather femininely (probably to the relief of my grandmother).
My entire life, womanhood and femininity have never been mine. Like lesbians before me, butch and femme alike, I have always approached them from a different angle than my peers. While my peers approach womanhood head-on, front and centre, I approach it from the side. And because of that, my experiences with femininity and womanhood are so vastly different that I don’t feel like I can discuss them outside of queer spaces.
Overall, I don’t think my experiences are worth any less than that of a straight woman. Nor do I think they’re worth more. At the root of it all, it’s just different. However, there are moments that do cause me to second-guess how much my womanhood is worth. And having frank, open discussions about the different ways womanhood looks and how it’s not just femininity is important. Because there are women who aren’t feminine. And that doesn’t make them any less deserving of their womanhood.