I’ve been naturally drawn to women since I was a child. I thought men were innately scary because they seemed to have a bitterness that made me nervous unlike any other.
My closest friends growing up were always girls. At every family function, I would find comfort in the arms of my mom and sister, or immediately run to my aunts across the room.
Every time I watched movies or TV shows, I immediately gravitated to female characters because they were more relatable. I originally thought it was just a symptom of being an effeminate gay person, but I eventually learned it was much more.
I didn’t just gravitate towards the normal female characters, but the ones with jagged edges. I had a propensity toward the ones with frayed personalities because they reminded me of a roughness I saw in myself.
I’ve always thought I related to the feminine experience more than the masculine one, because of how I move through the world and the way I process emotions.
I dabbled in the masculine too, playing baseball and taking up slight interests in cars and trucks, but nothing ever fit me. Each time I tried to be like a “normal boy,” it was ill-fitting and awkward, like when you can feel a tag rubbing your neck in a tight shirt.
I always thought that to identify as feminine, it had to happen in pink skirts, floral perfumes and bright patterns. I thought to be a proper gay man, I had to be the stereotypical caricature of a sassy sidekick, like Kurt Hummel from “Glee.” I tried on those costumes for a while, but it felt just as awkward as the masculine facade I tried years before.
It wasn’t until high school that I gave up the gendered balancing act I’d been doing my entire life. As a dance major at my performing arts school, I was always surrounded by girls with the same passions and interests as me. We were around each other constantly, and in many ways, it was my first exposure to the palpable power of the feminine bond.
Not only did we get to share our talents and passions, but we struggled together nearly every day. Dancing is a demanding sport, even though it isn’t always recognized as such. Your body is constantly contorted, working against its natural instinct, and pushing itself to the max.
We didn’t only endure the physical demands of training, but also the brain-breaking emotional pressure of encroaching adulthood and the mental degradation that comes from having to stare at your body in the mirror all day. Our sense of community didn’t stop the mental strain from getting to me, but there’s a special comfort in breaking down around people who share the same experience.
We cried and felt together. We grit our teeth, but we persevered nonetheless. I remember seeing girls run off stage after an intense performance and rip their costumes off for a quick change, only to run out on stage mere seconds later like nothing ever happened.
I saw in them what drew me to femininity before –– the stickiness and tenacity that lies under the surface which was absent from popular depictions of women. Within women is the ability to crumble and bounce back, and my shared experience with the girls I danced with reminded me of that.
Femininity isn’t just the pristine aesthetics the media constantly expects you to embrace. It’s also holed tights, beat-down canvas high tops and greasy hair. This hidden roughness is best seen in a dance show, but it’s only visible to those standing in the curtain.
Dancers taught me about the complexities of femininity I constantly avoided when I was trying to embark on the earliest versions of my journey to self-discovery. I’ve begun to embrace the attraction to femininity I’ve had since I was a child.
Skin tears, knees bruise and blood flows, sometimes all in the span of a two-minute number. But we all huffed through it and kept pushing forward, no matter how much we bled. There’s a toughness there that I didn’t understand before.
I feel a deep sense of who I am now, but I still don’t label my gender, because it’s quite frankly too complicated to try and stick a label to.
In the aftermath of the girlboss feminist ideal, it felt like to embrace the feminine you had to be either the traditional archetype of either the determined girlboss or docile blonde. But with dance, I saw both exist at the same time within my peers. That same combination exists within me now.
Be the first to comment