May 13th, 2008 maggie
I’ve never been good at cutting my nails. Most of my life I’ve just clipped them as short as possible, then filled the rough edges and been done with it. Now, as discussed here, I’ve been growing them out and it feels like I’m entering new terrain in this world of femininity. I thought I had reached the frontier, but I just discovered that beyond these mountains I carry in my heart are plains that stretch forever and dark forests and hidden rivers. Read the rest of this entry »
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March 28th, 2008 Sassafras
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.
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March 24th, 2008 maggie
What is high femme? I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I don’t really know what it means. People keep referring to me as high femme. I hear people call others high femme, meaning “very femme,†but I don’t know many people who identify themselves that way. Sassafras does, and ze’s going to write about it this week. Maybe I should have made hir go first, since today you’re going to get some ramblings from me and not a lot of education on the matter.
Last week, a friend who I totally think of as femme, although I’m not sure if she identifies herself that way, hugged me goodbye and said in my ear “you make me feel butch.†I was totally taken aback. “Why?†“You just do your high femme thing so well.†My reflexive response was “I’m not high femme.†I may have also said something like “that’s ridiculous.†Maybe she feels that I’m more femme than her and it brings out a different aspect of her gender in a way she enjoys. Maybe she was flirting, in a friendly way. But it made me worried that she felt butch by default, that I made her feel less femme, not more butch in a good way.
Lately I feel like I’m going further and further into my femininity, doing things in terms of appearance/clothes/makeup as well as relating to butches in different ways that a few years ago I wouldn’t have wanted. Is that high femme? I don’t know. Read the rest of this entry »
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