Dad: Everyone Can Have Their Own Opinion And Be Attracted To Who They Wanna Be Attracted ToMe: Great!

Dad: everyone can have their own opinion and be attracted to who they wanna be attracted to Me: great! But why am I an exception

Elizabeth Anderson, a thirty-three-year-old gender-blender who works in accounting, shared how her gender display changed over time. She thinks lesbians develop a certain gender presentation once they spend time in the community. She says that when you first come out, “you’re just ‘being gay,’ you don’t realize how the community is.” In the newness of spending time in gay social circles, what she noticed first were the nonfeminine women: “You might think that everybody looks like a boy and you’re the only one who looks like a girl. But then you see that some people look like girls, some people look like boys, and some people are in the middle. So you will pick something that you are comfortable with.” Elizabeth said that when she first came out she wore feminine clothes to social events because that is how she used to dress for social occasions in the heterosexual world. However, with a feminine gender display mostly nonfeminine women were drawn to her. She wanted to attract feminine-looking women and learned to change her clothing and adopt a more masculine style, saying that “feminine girls are usually not attracted to other feminine girls, so you’ve got to be a little more aggressive-looking to get the feminine girls.” In constructing a gender-blending self, Elizabeth said she also found this style to more closely reflect the way she feels inside. She is divorced but says even when she was married to her ex-husband she never had a very feminine style, and the pictures from her married life support this recollection. So participating in the black lesbian social world gave her the freedom to “be herself,” as she put it, by dressing in a nonfeminine way, and it also rewarded her with the attention of feminine women, who found that gender display highly desirable.

This work finds that black lesbians in New York use gender display to structure social interactions, and the order of these social interactions maintains social control in the community. In order to attract a person with a certain gendered style, one must possess a complementary gender display. However, the structure imposed by these norms also grants women a certain agency or freedom to present themselves in a gendered way if they so desire, and that is different from the expectations in many lesbian-feminist social circles that encourage a look that is not overtly feminine or masculine. In black lesbian environments, lesbians like Elizabeth as well as Asa, quoted earlier, feel liberated by these categories of gender display, especially the gender-blender identity, because they allow for a way to express a nonfeminine gendered self and to have that identity valued by other gay women.

In today’s society, women have a significant range of styles that are considered acceptable, so the categories of femme, gender-blender, and transgressive have the most meaning when they are presented in a context where lesbians are present. It is in the larger group of black lesbians that the subtleties that often accompany a femme or gender-blending presentation of self are made clear. Athletic jerseys and baggy jeans on women as they walk down 125th Street in Harlem or Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn do not immediately mark them as lesbian but reveal their membership in a gender display category once they step into a convention center or nightclub filled with black lesbians.

Lipstick or Timberlands? Meanings of Gender Presentation in Black Lesbian Communities, Moore, Mignon R. (2006)

Note: I love how this gives depth to the stem(me) identity. Presenting masc and fem is part of it but this takes it further. Studs, stems and fems helped to reaffirm each other's masculinities and femininities and I think that's beautiful.

i love you im glad you exist im so happy you’re alive