Photo: Urban Nomads #0763 by Lieven Soete (image, Flickr)

I’m just femme, no apology or propping-up needed. Not “femme, but I’m tough” or “femme, but not high maintenance” or “femme, but I’m not like those femmes”. Just femme. Folks can deal with their baggage on their own.

Been thinking about this a lot lately as I’m someone who has often found herself finding ways to compensate for the fact that I’m a (cis) woman and that I’m femme. I developed an excessively firm handshake because I realized that it caught people off guard, that they were expecting something very different from me. Strong hands meant “take me seriously”, “don’t treat me like I’m weak”, and maybe “I could fuck you up”. I used to take pride in being the only femme-presenting person, and almost always the only woman, using free weights at the gym. 

I used to say “I’m femme, but I’m no pillow princess”, and now I think, what was I really trying to say? Whose values was I was bending to? Did I have respect for people who own “pillow princess” and the partners who love that about them? Or was there fear there, a bending towards a butch, masculine-worshipping (and misogynistic) value system that delegitimized femininity and sexual receptivity? 

I write this because I know that I’m not alone in these feelings. I know I’m not the only femme who’s felt like it’s hard to be friends with other femmes, whether it’s competition in gender presentation, in attracting a partner based on that presentation, or that maybe in being around other femmes, we’d see some of what we most fear: signs of weakness, whether they be real or imagined, and we don’t want to be like that, right?

So my resolution to myself and to all other femmes is to stop throwing myself and others under the bus when really the issue isn’t our gender, it’s femmephobia.