03/09/2025
I stir awake in the early morning in the crux between international women’s day and daylight savings thinking about identity.
I am a person who likes sleep and longer days. I am a femme. I am a person radicalized by the feminist movement lead by mothers, daughters, drag queens, and qu**rs for as long as it has existed.
I think about how five years ago, give or take, I was sitting in a meeting with some bankers telling the story for the vision of Our Time, and remembering the call ended with the bankers proclaiming “girl power!”, and feeling the collar of my shirt constrict. I remember thinking, what’s that feeling? I love lipstick, believe in glitter, and yet left wondering why my insides felt constricted when my strengths and vision were being seen only as “girl power”.
I started to feel conflicted about my gender identity and more began to unravel. Girl is infantile, was it just that? Women began to hit a different note, and while I looked around and saw so many of my mentors and role models and friends hold that title, I started feeling estranged. While still wearing lipstick? And I remember the first time I saw adrienne marree brown hold both, she/they. And then Kal from Rubblebucket. And then I started talking to people I love. And thinking these thoughts out loud- could I have been nurtured, raised and radicalized within femininity and still want more?
Gender fluidity started feeling more comfortable then the solo ‘she’. They, we, me today, who tomorrow…
I love being in a crux it seems. A grey area. A double meaning, and oh, I’ve changed my mind. I love what nonbinary has to offer our future, and I’m grateful for the ancestral femmes of the past.
This platform is contorting, but it’s also the outlet I saw queerness and gender fluidity being lived out in ways I could recognize. I’m grateful for women’s history, and I’m grateful we can find new ways to stretch and mold our own identities. -Xo a they/she for now
