Femme Love

I’m only a month late for the February Femme Writing Prompt – but then, February was kind of one big blur.

I hate February. Did you remember that?

I tend to go way underground in that month. Because of  the nature of my work, the first three months of the year are generally chaos, especially in the S-corp section of Corporate America when you’re on a calendar fiscal year. January is eaten by year-end reporting and analysis, and then February begins the tax preparation insanity. (Companies that have Inc. in their names file taxes in March, did you know?) Somewhere around mid-March, I become a human being again.

For example, yesterday. I dug out my cute little brown leather flip-flops with the braided straps that look like the “hers” version of Rhett’s boy shoes.

It was awesome to slide my toes back into those babies, let me tell you. Of course, by dinnertime my feet were thoroughly frozen, but that’s not the point.

The point is supposed to be what I love about being femme.

I guess the shoes and the topic do have something in common… I’ll see if I can get us there.

Femme for me is like those flip-flops. It fits exactly right. It’s all broken in and comfortable. It gives me room to breathe and feels like the most true thing about me. When everything else about me seems to be stuck in that long dark stretch of winter that may never end, femme is the springtime right around the corner that you can smell in the air.

I love that this identity gives me room to be as traditionally female as I want to be on any given day and still feel part of something bigger – that queer community that has always been home to us statistical outliers. (There aren’t words for how much I loved and geeked over Harrison’s ButchLab post – I can’t wait to get the roundup so that I can link it here!) Every way that “lesbian” felt limiting, confining, and standardized, femme lets me feel the opposite.

It gives me a place to paint my toenails and let my fingernails get long and pretty and perfectly manicured. It allows me to slide my feet into strappy sandals and saunter around in high heels. It lets me indulge my socialized femininity on purpose, without feeling like it’s all part of some greater Stepford scheme to turn me into something I’m not.

Because when I was a kid, I wasn’t comfortable with being a girl. I liked it, but I didn’t really get it. There were lots of things that just didn’t make sense to me. My friends all wanted to be teachers and nurses and the really ambitious ones wanted to be veterinarians. I wanted to be more. I just didn’t know what the more was.

Now, as an adult, the more is who I am. Femme to me means the freedom to pursue my career, my continuing education, from a place of self-knowledge and confidence that I never found in the “straight” adventures of my early adulthood. The fluidity of the genderqueer spectrum allows me to think like a man and look like a woman. I’m not a freak, I’m femme. I’m not just one of those ball-busting power dykes. As a femme, I’m allowed to be strong, ambitious, competent, intelligent, and female.

It’s feminism but it’s not. It’s grrlpower at it’s finest – I can take the best of all the attributes I can think of and aspire to be all of them, and even more.

Femme is what every little girl should be able to want to be when they grow up. It’s freedom, and that’s what I love about it.

Looking for more? Check out the joint blog, filled with gushy marital ad nauseum, at This Side of the High Speed Rodeo. You can also find me sounding off as a Guest Lesbian, at Card Carrying Lesbian, on my adventures as a transwife in an oh-so-straight world.