Femininity.

Femininity.

When you look at it it looks like just a word, and yet it’s so much more. It is, to me anyway, power in and of itself.

I ran from it, repressed it, feared it, denied it, pretty successfully for something over 40 years.

And yet its power pulled me in.

I am a child of 1970, when being trans was deeply pathologised, and most likely physically dangerous to your health.

I am a child of conservative christians upbringing where being trans was some kind of abomination, personification of evil.

I’m also a child of humanity. And being that child of humanity, eventually the humanity of who I was caught up. The deep repression of my true self was peeled away, and the woman I am began to be exposed.

In some senses it was like a peeling of an onion to find my womanhood and femininity and others it was something like dropping an egg on a hard floor where suddenly I was exposed.

I think it is intensely important for each of us to find our own balance of femininity and masculinity. Because what is right for me is of course not right for others. It might be in the ball park and then it might be nothing like it.

Whether or not a woman displays more or less femininity is not the power of it at all though. No it’s far more primal than that. The power of femininity is in it being owned by it’s wearer.

When I came out trans, the idea of my femininity was in so many ways a new and dangerous concept. I think at some level I had it in my head I would be less feminine, and perhaps in a sense closere to an agender or NB person, but it surprised me. Powerfully it surprised me.

Femininity snuck up on me, I put on makeup, ostensibly to hide my shadow, and of course there is elements of that in play, but it was more powerful than that, it was joyous. Putting this product on myself and seeing femininity shine through it was powerful.

It snuck up in clothes, in choosing them, in wearing them.

Dresses, Skirts, stockings, they all powerfully impacted me and make me feel more feminine than I ever thought possible. And because of that they make me feel free and powerful and more womanly than I thought possible.

I suppose in a sense I shouldn’t have been surprised, as, in a sense, maybe, it’s in direct contrast to the powerlessness I felt in the repressions, the denial, the shame and the bullying of childhood and adolescence as the taunts and comments were made.

Femininity, I think, just maybe, feeling it, knowing it, experiencing it, letting it be what it will be is where I find my strength, in a way it is my superpower.