Who's the queerest of them all?

The rabbit hole of gender.

I am, as has been well established throughout this newsletter’s many installments, a bisexual woman. I am also, for those of you who don’t know what I look like, on the more feminine side of the gender presentation spectrum. I’m not the girliest girl by any stretch of the imagination, but no one would ever dare to call me butch or even futch. I have very long hair, I like jewelry and make up, I had a whole period of my adult life where I refused to wear pants. So by the broadest possible definition, I see myself as queer femme. I’m queer, I’m feminine, I’m a queer femme.

And while I don’t do this so much anymore, there was a period of my life when I hung out in some online forums specifically designated as spaces for queer femmes. For me, this was a relatively straightforward decision: I like spending time with queer women, I like spending time with feminine women; being in a space that was a mix of feminine queer women and non-binary femmes sounded nice. (I don’t think there were feminine queer men in these groups generally, for whatever reason.)

A lot of the time, it was nice. There were make up tips and fashion tips and a general appreciation for girly shit just for its own sake. I liked that stuff. But there was also this dark undercurrent of defensiveness, this persistent need that many participants (okay cis lady participants, usually) felt to argue that queer femininity was an altogether different beast from straight femininity, that there was an inherent queerness to femme as a gender, that femininity became transformed when it was not in conversation with the male gaze, when it was not for male consumption at all.

My bisexuality was always going to make that point a complex one for me. But let’s come back to that in a second.

I want to take a beat to talk about what it means to have a queer gender identity. It is undeniable that there are certain gender presentations that are deemed less acceptable in mainstream society, that render a person more vulnerable to harassment, policing, and violence. If I invite a trans femme friend out to lunch or to a bar, I will find myself thinking about her safety in a way that I don’t have to think about mine. Will she be misgendered by the staff? Will she be treated with respect? Will she be outright harassed? There’s no question that a having gender expression that does not conform to some abstract idea of “correct” womanhood or manhood — which here includes not just trans and non-binary people but also butch women and feminine men — renders a person more at risk. Which is, perhaps, what we mean when we call a gender identity “queer.”

However, it is also worth noting that there are plenty of people who are not transgender nor same gender attracted who are nevertheless subjected to this harsh gender policing. I am endlessly grateful to

thotscholar

for her writing on the way that race affects one’s relationship to gender; while you should just go read her stuff, I will say here that many people’s conception of a default “straight cis man” or a default “straight cis woman” (who, for many people, are what we mean when we say “men” and “women”) are really actually a white straight cis man and a white straight cis woman. Through the white gaze, Black people are frequently cast as masculine — thus cis female African athletes barred from competing against other women due to their “excessive” natural levels of testosterone, thus Black men portrayed as aggressive and violent — while Asian people are feminized, with Asian men made the butt of jokes for their supposed weakness and Asian women fetishized. My own people — which here means Ashkenazi Jews — have historically been subjected to this treatment as well, though in our case Ashkenazi men are feminized (becoming those sniveling, nebbishy, mama’s boy stereotypes) while Ashkenazi women are masculinized (hence portrayals of us as pushy, hypersexual, and domineering). To exist outside of a certain frame of Western European whiteness is to inherently have your gender queered, whether by virtue of your own culture’s specific gender standards or your biology that dares to defy white European conventions of “normal,” and to be made vulnerable as a result. And again that is even as a cis straight person.

So it’s complicated, is what I’m saying here. If queer gender is our term for gender that steps outside a very limited and very white definition of “normal,” then many people have queer genders — and while people who explicitly identify as trans and/or queer may be the most visible examples here, it’s an oversimplification to suggest that these is the only way to have one’s gender presentation deemed unacceptable.

Which brings me back to this whole queer femme thing.

Is my gender queer? I don’t totally know how to answer that question. As a Jewish woman; I’m more readily seen as pushy, domineering, and hypersexual. As a bi woman, I’m also routinely hyper sexualized. This concept of “white womanhood” that people are always gesturing to — white women’s tears, white women’s presumed innocence — is one that has always felt fraught for me, not because it’s completely inaccessible for me (if I wanted it badly enough, I’m sure I could obtain it; and in certain situations and contexts it is immediately provided to me), but because it doesn’t unfold as readily for me as it does for whiter, straighter women.

And all of this is independent of the question of whether my femininity is being performed for men. Because, is it? I mean sometimes! And sometimes it’s being performed for other women and specifically other femmes, and while those experiences are different they are not so different that they feel like separate selves or anything. It’s not so much “my gender that I do for women” and “my gender that I do for men” as it is “my gender, different aspects of which are appreciated in varying degrees by different people of different genders.”

But.

The point I really wanted to make, the point that all this has been building to, is that the thing that weirds me out about the “is femme a queer gender” discussion — because for some reason it’s always about AFAB femininity, I’ve never heard anyone wringing their hands over whether masculine cis gay men have a queer gender presentation or not — is that the point of the discussion seems to be, not to locate and remedy an experience of oppression, but to police who is and is not, well, cool.

Like I absolutely agree that the experience of being a feminine woman who exclusively dates men is different from the experience of a feminine woman who exclusively dates women, or dates people of a variety of genders. But so much of the discussion seems to be this argument that queer femmes are not doing the same yucky femininity that straight women are, and honestly: who cares.

I don't think you are less queer if your gender presentation is identical to a straight woman’s. More to the point, I don’t think you are a better queer the less your gender presentation resembles a straight woman’s. You may experience more oppression, you may have a harder time moving through society, but that doesn’t say anything about your worth as a person. That simply says that society needs to be adjusted to accommodate you.

The thing, for me, about queer gender — in addition to everything I said above about “queerness” as a mode of describing an experience of vulnerability and oppression and othering — is this. Are you queer? Is your gender expression authentic to you? Then congrats, your gender is queer. Nothing more, nothing less.