In sitting down to write this entry (which was harder than i thought it would be) I asked Kestryl (my partner) why i’m a high femme and hir joking response was that it was because i got bored with being a boy. Now that isn’t exactly the case but for folks who know me it has been a pretty crazy change in trajectory from injecting T every week.

It’s hard for me to put into words what high femme means to me, even though it is an identity which I have a lot of connection to. On a linguistic level there is a part of me which takes issue with the term, after all doesn’t using “high” to qualify femme inherently create yet another false binary in which high femmes could be understood to be more femme, or better femmes? I’m not sure if that ends up happening within the community, although it is something that i worry about even if i do identify with the label. I don’t want my identity or how i conceptualize of my gender and sexuality to provoke competition amongst femmes, nor do I want to participate in the creation of a femme hierarchy.

For me high femme is at its root a gender identity. I view it as connected to the idea that femininity is socially constructed, and I see high femme as really an embracing of excessive and flamboyant femmininity. For me, this sort of femininity is outside of the constructs of “woman,” and defies the norms of conventional gender roles for bodies read as female that it blasts through these cultural norms shooting through the atmosphere into outerspace, into queerness, into the unknown. For me, high femme is outwardly expressed in over the top ways like wearing dresses every day, wearing petticoats to the office, glitter and fishnets as part of normal attire. But of course high femme way more than accessories, as I would never want to make the case that queered femininity is all about the clothes, they like makeup are just tools which I use to express myself to the world around me, to try to help them read the ways in which I am performing my gender.

I don’t know exactly when I started identifying as high femme, but I know it was something I was very uncomfortable with for an extended period of time. When i first came out as femme there were little things that I had decided were too femme for me, like wearing dresses as apposed to skirts, or shaving my legs, wearing makeup etc. But along the way, as I became more and more comfortable with my own identity and my own feminity those little rules that I’d constructed fell away, and it was then that my femniity began shifting towards the excessively flamboyant. But my embodiment of femme with tits and tattoos isn’t the only way that high femme can be expressed, I think the power of the identity is that it defies definition, and that it resists being pinned down into a neat and tidy definition, rather it explodes stereotypes blanketing everything in a layer of hot pink glitter.

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