oh god gender and queer presentations
I am often the last person people sit next to on the bus, this is a genuine pattern, because I’m a fat girl who doesn’t always brush her hair or wear clothes that fit or have a bra or look like she’s all there mentally (talking to myself, staring into space, etc). I usually wear clothes like a baby wears clothes, with very little understanding of how they fit on my body or what they look like from external eyes. I don’t usually look in mirrors unless I’m naked or in my underwear. My socks don’t match. My shoes are peeling.
I also prefer feminine clothes, skirts and flower patterns and necklines and turquoise. I think they’re pretty. They make me feel good. I don’t know many other ways of expressing my femininity—never do anything with my hair, never wear makeup, don’t walk gracefully, and so on. I feel like a feminine person.
I am shy and graceless and there is very little art to my femininity but I still get read as straight by straights and queers because I guess that’s the default way people view women, and popular conceptions of queer femininity are usually really high maintenance (from my perspective). All that stuff I don’t know how to do. You know, dyed hair or colorful makeup, well-placed accessories (I don’t do accessories) and an obvious awareness of how the clothes fit on their bodies. How they look externally. Not the way babies wear clothes. Piercings maybe or tats. Deliberation and purpose.
I feel really invisible to the queer community, I don’t think I’ve ever seen my type of femininity celebrated…I guess I just have a really neuroatypical relationship to clothes and femininity. But I want to be respected as a femme and as a queer woman even though there’s a lot of expectations of femininity and queerness that I don’t meet.
