Part 2 of a 3 part series, originally published in 2011 on a now-inactive personal blog. Part 1 is here.
Philly Trans Health
The day after the conversation with my grandfather, I landed in Philadelphia for the Philly Trans Health Conference – the largest trans-specific conference of the year. My friend and coworker Asher and I were presenting a couple of workshops, but we had a lot of time to attend sessions, connect with people, catch up with friends, go dancing, and just relish being surrounded by SO MANY trans & queer folks.
This was my first year attending, and it was also apparently the first year the conference featured a number of femme-themed workshops, thanks to JAC (the ever-fabulous Midwest Genderqueer). I’m not sure I knew how much I needed these femme spaces, but I’ve been feeling fuller and more alive since I got back, and I think the conversations we had about femme identity and experience are a huge part of that.
After the last workshop of the last day – a Femme Community Solidarity discussion – I was chatting with a friend from Antioch. We were friendly at school, but not incredibly close. But we have that Antioch thing – we are each other’s people in this particular way that goes beyond allegiance. Maybe it’s because you can’t really emerge from Antioch without having been transformed – and so we share this somewhat painful, powerful, challenging, liberatory, scalding experience that we love to hate, but will defend fiercely if challenged. Regardless, it was so nice to have her in that room, and to be able to remember some of the particularities of femme space (or lack thereof) in this one queer community we shared. We held similar frustrations, feeling like we often didn’t have space, affirmation, or reflection of radical queer femininity as an acceptably transgressive, political, radical identity. Queer masculinity was celebrated – and with good reason, because there were a lot of folks for whom their masculinity had been a source of scorn, violence, and dismissal – but it seemed to be at the expense of femininity. I couldn’t come to femme until I left Antioch, for reasons that were both particularly mine and also about that queer community. But through the course of our conversation, I saw my community now reflected against my community at Antioch, and walked away with such a deep appreciation for my community today.
I am blessed to be deeply immersed in a radical queer world of butches, femmes, queens, genderqueers, fairies, and faygelehs – little bird fairies who invite me to be playful and compassionate with myself and the world around me. I see everywhere people of diverse and lovely gender expressions who, without a glimmer of fear or contradiction embrace and celebrate femmes in the world.
I never feel like I have to fight with my queer family for space to be seen and heard. We operate in a world of abundance and expansiveness, when it comes to our identities and expressions. Your path to authentic, whole, celebratory selfness doesn’t pose a threat to mine, even in those moments when perhaps the ways we understand our selves vis-à-vis the world seem to bump up against each other. My fabulous little queer world feels, at least when it comes to gender celebration, like it has remarkable space for both/and, and as though we’ve really managed to step outside of either/or.
I left Philly with a deep gratitude for the friends and chosen family who have helped shape the contours of this world. I called a dear friend who, three and a half years ago on the crumbling front stairs of the student center at Antioch, asked me about what femme meant to me. He was the first person to reflect back to me the pieces of myself I hadn’t even yet named or embraced. Sitting on those stairs, I carved out distance. I explained that I didn’t necessarily identify as femme. I have my femme moments, but it doesn’t quite fit.
He didn’t challenge me or question that, but he also never stopped seeing and celebrating the femme pushing through the surface. The space he held for me - and continues to set aside and hold, every day - was, amongst others, one of the things that allowed me to imagine femme more broadly, and to start to see myself within it.
To find a femme that fit.