I find it hard to accept feminity in myself.

I had it forced on me as a child: pink frilly dresses, cute hair, adorable little shoes, be ladylike…the works.  This made me so uncomfortable that I went the other way when I had a measure of control over my own clothing and style choices: jeans, baggy shirts, short hair, no makeup, and eventually, lots and lots of piercings.

Through exposure to femmes in my adult years I have come to appreciate the wide variety of femme expression and play around with it myself.  I still don’t really do makeup (except for the occasional mascara and lipstick).  But dresses no longer feel like drag (except when I’m in the middle of a bout of gender dysphoria, where I revert to tomboy all the time and don’t really feel comfortable in any clothing, but baggy stuff is the least offensive).  And I usually wear a skirt at least once a week.

But society puts down and degredates the feminine.  It reduces femmes to lesser than, to the least optimal expression, to the weaker people.  And that can be deeply ingrained.  Trying to pick it out and throw it out is quite a challenge.  I don’t think I can be ever truly comfortable in any gender expression until I do extricate myself from these trash ideas.  I want to be able to claim my gender expression and identity outside the binary, with full knowledge and acceptance of all options for expression available to me.

So, for now, I think I’m going with femme-ish, or leaning slightly femme of center for those days that I am feeling feminine and butch-ish, or leaning slightly masculine of center for the days I’m feeling masculine. In general, I am, as I have often chosen to describe myself – center of center.