Gender Fluidity

[Nat]

Lovely thread

I've spent a lot of time publicly dissecting my gender experience. For whatever reason I was riddled with shame through most of it. Constantly worrying, wondering if i was okay, valid.

Though I wouldn't necessarily come up with the term fluidity - Met's description comes closer than most to my experience.

I feel like I'm both male and female and both feminine and masculine. I really don't know how others experience me, but I tend to live in the femme. It is what it is, I am what I am.

The person I'm seeing is not butch and not trans. I experience her as fluid, though I'm not sure she'd describe herself that way. Sometimes to me she is this gorgeous and feminine woman and sometimes she's this beautiful tomboy, and these energies seem to flicker in her pretty much all the time. She's complex and transfixing and magnetic.

I wondered for a while if being with her would affect my femme identity over time - if I would draw closer to some imaginary center-line - but so far that hasn't happened. If I were a heart, femme would be the systolic contraction and guy would be the diastolic. Such is life. At least, such is my life.

Identity seems to be a hole I can fall into. It's helpful at times, but at the moment I find it's something that doesn't affirm me much. Being around other people who get femmes and sharing the company of other femmes just makes my heart sing. But in my daily life, I am just so conflicted about identity that I'd just rather not focus on it at all. Though I consider myself a femme, I can only do it on the days where it feels elastic enough to fit me. Being around other femmes makes me feel free again, re-affirms me somehow.