‘Undefining’ the Femme / Nadia Cao

I recently decided to explore my identity through the use of “they” as a means to allow myself the agency to navigate my internal discomforts with the externally perceived “feminine” and consequently “masculine”.

I’m not speaking on behalf of other individuals who identify with this pronoun, but instead, would like to express this marker as an exploration of myself.

I stood half-naked in my friend’s bathroom as she looks at my underwear in horror, “It’s so small, is that even comfortable?”. Slightly taken aback, I also contemplate on this question. I’ve worn these for so long with obvious discomfort, is it even my style? Why am I wearing something that causes re-occurring physical discomfort?

I’m at home, I pick up my underwear. The thin fast fashion lace material, a baby pink “High-cut” pantie that would spend its day drilling itself into my asshole, constantly picked out every few moments as I realise the exasperated unconscious butt-clenching I’d experience as I walked through the discomfort. 

The disconnect I would experience watching my half-naked reflection dressed in this thin loincloth. I sit with that feeling, “Did I ever like these?” and did they truly ever make me feel within my body? 

Something that constantly touches my body. So intimately there and yet an ill-fitting glove. I cut the gusset out of the underwear, I feel a sense of something conquered, justice being served. “Oh yes, another ‘Burn-the-Bra’ writing piece”. 

The subject of femininity leaves me rather perplexed and exhausted, I suppose identity politics, generally sends me on a rabbit hole spiral into self-questioning, slight mania, dysmorphia, and thereafter a self-disassociation. I’m exhausted.

I feel as of late most aware of this gender-dysphoria. I reflect on my younger self’s journey through these binary identities- seemingly confused, trying to ride through the current, despite the obvious internalised discomforts, to align with these ideologies left me moving deeper and deeper into a body dysmorphia conundrum.

I’d find myself subscribing to the mainstream ideologies of the feminine, knitting myself within the archetypal “Femme Shell” prescribed through the culture, and reinforced through trending gender-targeted commodities- a vicious feedback loop. 

Through this spectrum, I find myself again at a foot of confusion-I watch myself- a character in a costume, my conscious holding the place of the disturbed onlooker of the self butchery.

I ask myself, who was I dressing as exactly? A commodified Idea of the feminine, through the lens of whom exactly? and for who? To miss-align was to leave me in what felt like uncanny Valley. These ideologies felt hollow, un-holistic, shallow, and very White. 

I take to the internet to help me further navigate this idea of the feminine with hopes to demystify the idea of femininity and find something a little more nuanced. I still however am faced with the same predicament- the “How to of feminine speak”, the importance of caring for your looks (in this particular way), this way to dress, that way to stand, realising the propaganda becoming more and more frustratingly imbedded and fed through the culture and regurgitated through these videos. Stomach reflux really. 

My coloured body does not fit within the deeply colonised ideologies of the feminine. To find a similar example of myself is to then fall crux to the archetyped stripping of its thoughtfulness and detail.

Lurking through the internet I see a rise in the use of gender-neutral pronouns and consequently the ridiculing undertone of mass media. Here the validity of non-conforming pronouns is discounting as ‘Liberal-PC-Jargon’. For that I wish to say, Oh you’re confused? I’m not sorry. Look at the world around you.

Could this rise perhaps correlate with the sheer human disconnect that gender binaries provide?  The cultural connotations and expectations that come with being born into this sex, to act in this nature, to appear in this way.

I feel the undefinable better articulates the idea that my gender identity is of a spectrum, not a binary. It is true there are connotations that come with the label ‘they’, as they are for the ‘She’ and ‘He’, but I feel a sense of agency in the lack of solidification in what is understood to be “they”. An honesty to myself, “they” is an adapting glove to the ever-evolving self-identity. 

Simply speaking, my identity does not feel a “he” but it does not totally subscribe to the culturally taught ideologies of a complete “she” either. To me “they” feels a gentle buffer in the cesspool of convoluted propaganda that swims within my own mind. “they” is the internal rebuttal on the days I feel I’m lacking, the days I feel the pressure to contort to an identity I don’t resonate with. 

I’m still getting to know my own definition of femininity and gently embracing the masculine within me. “they” allows me the space to figure this out in my own time, in my own space far from all the noise. I can take a breath.