As a Black, non-binary femme who, while pregnant, intended to raise a “gender creative” child after birth, many of my concerns as a parent-to-be weren’t—not surprising, but disheartening nonetheless—addressed in the traditional parenting books I read about, was gifted or purchased.

I had countless romanticized ideas about the experience of pregnancy combined with feelings of paranoia regarding things that could go wrong, anxiety about how I’d cope with the upcoming changes while in recovery for an eating disorder, and general curiosity about what it meant to be pregnant. Due to health reasons, I’d been warned by doctors that my pregnancy would be high-risk and I had to take special precautions to ensure that myself and the baby would be healthy and safe.

Given the alarming statistics and data regarding Black maternal health in the U.S. (according to the CDC, Black woman are three to four times more likely than non-Hispanic white women to die as a result of giving birth as just one concern), I was riddled with worry at the potential for problems. Thankfully, I had a solid support system primarily in the form of an understanding and loving partner who supported me fully. Still, I hoped to find a sense of community or even a small village of people who could relate to my journey as a pregnant person and soon-to-be mom.

I started my pregnancy on Medicaid, enrolled in my final semester of undergraduate studies as a returning student, battling hyperemesis gravidarum—a severe form of vomiting and nausea vomiting—and hoping to have a doula-assisted home water birth. Fast forward eight months to an unexpected hospital birth, after over a day of excruciating but lovingly-supported labor at home, and an earlier-than-planned transition into motherhood.

Despite the last minute drastic changes to my birth plan, any sense of preparedness I had while birthing—and upon returning home with my newborn—was fostered and instilled in me not by any of the conventional pregnancy and parenting books I eagerly devoured early on in my pregnancy, but by a source not available to most prior generations of parents: social media-based forums and pages. I was gifted so many books and out of curiosity and fear of the unknown I read each one cover-to-cover.

I mostly read them with my future doula work in mind, gathering tools and information I could possibly need given the diversity of possible clients in my area. For me personally, though, the book just didn’t help for my unique journey as much as I hoped they would. They lacked the intersectional analyses of different issued related to pregnancy and birth I longed for.

During my pregnancy I experienced racism at my OB office at nearly every visit; I finally stopped going around 35 weeks. Each time I went I wished I had the confidence to advocate for myself and my child. Thankfully, my partner and I were honest and open with each other every step of the way so during moments of stress he would support me. Further, he would respectfully advocate for me if I was on the verge of a breakdown.

The levels of discomfort felt by my partner and I subsequently lead to crippling anxiety. Primarily for me. We would unpack the visits together because the racism we experienced was blatant but we decided to hang in there for as long as possible given the risks of my pregnancy. When we did stop going, though, if we needed help we sought the help of midwives, doulas, and nurse relatives for guidance. As a doula myself, I felt confident in my ability to seek the help of a new doctor if need be or to find other forms of professional, medical help.

Racism During Prenatal Visits isn’t a topic covered in any of the popular pregnancy books so I scoured the internet for people who could relate beyond peer-reviewed articles and academic texts about the intersections between institutional racism and the medical industrial complex. Sure I read those as well, but I wanted personal stories and honest narratives written by other pregnant people with relatable transparency.

There were other issues I yearned to talk with other pregnant people that the popular texts simply didn’t begin to broach: dealing with misgendering as a non-binary femme, choosing a parenting style that no one else in your family takes seriously or will most likely criticize, opting to raise gender creative children, planning for a home water birth with a doula in New York City, coping with body image issues as someone in recovery from bulimia, issues regarding receiving different physical exams during pregnancy as a survivor of sexual assault and rape, addressing intergenerational trauma as a soon-to-be Black mother. The list went on and on (and on) but luckily I eventually found exactly what I was looking for.

About halfway through my pregnancy I saw a shared post on Facebook that led me to a private group for pregnant people suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum. This was the first space I felt I could be open and honest about my experiences because the thousands of other people in the group could genuinely relate to me and I didn’t have to worry about suggestions for ginger or crackers. They, too, knew the struggle of wanting to take just a sip of water only to have your body reject it. Not eating for days, vomiting more than ten times a day, emergency room visits.

There were other issues I yearned to talk with other pregnant people that the popular texts simply didn’t begin to broach like theintergenerational trauma as a soon-to-be Black mother.
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Having found a sense of real community and understanding in that group I began to search for more solace, more solidarity. In time I was a member of about ten different groups that focused on the issues I was dealing with. I would discuss different topics everyday and eventually I made close bonds with people around the world by becoming friends on Facebook, texting, and following each other’s journeys on Instagram. Everything I couldn’t find and would never find in traditional parenting books I found online at all hours of the day.

Something that most traditional parenting books leave out are the effects that structural, institutional, and systemic forces have on lived experiences. Race, class, gender (or the lack thereof), nation of origin, disability, sexual orientation, region, and so much more impact our lives in ways that make experiences like pregnancy and childbirth truly unique.

Our bodies alone, and their differences and histories, make pregnancy and childbirth a unique experience, but so do things like the food we have access to, the way we are perceived by others, the type of insurance we have (if we have insurance at all) whether or not we work, whether or not we have a partner or partners, implicit biases medical professionals have toward us based on our race—there is so much silenced and overlooked.

But thanks to the internet, there are online spaces for people with shared experiences to connect, bond, and offer each other support. I’m thankful I found those spaces because they made my journey feel less helpless and made me feel less alone. I didn’t feel silent, I felt understood. My experience wasn’t erased. I, and thousands of others, could be seen and heard in those spaces.

Those spaces helped me see that for some pregnant people and parents, or people considering starting that journey, the most helpful guides to turn to for advice, useful information, and necessary guidance won’t be found on your local bookstore shelf (or online shopping cart). Instead, it’ll be found on social media, most likely Instagram or Facebook. And while we all navigate these journeys in our own way, if you’re like me and enjoy a sense of community with others who genuinely understand you, then I highly recommend you find an online space you consider safe.

Our bodies alone — their differences and histories, make pregnancy and childbirth a unique experience and there is so much silenced and overlooked.
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Sometimes you can’t always turn to family and sometimes the books won’t have answers to your questions. If you go into these spaces knowing you can learn, as a supplement to whatever level of professional and medical advice from doctors or other specialists you seek out, then your journey as a pregnant person or parent can be deeply enlightened and maybe, just maybe, less stressful.

It’s comforting to know that you’re not alone and it’s empowering to feel affirmed. Online communities offer that and I’m grateful I found them during such a major transitional and transformative time of my life.

I feel my most queer in a skirt. Dresses feel like drag, like a performance I learned a long time ago, and am now reprising. Not quite a reenactment, but rather, a gender reckoning.

I do not remember the first time I was taught to demean the feminine. Maybe it was when my play was restricted by well-meaning adults telling me to keep my legs together—though they were the ones who put me in dresses. Maybe it was when I was a pre-teen and was told that girls should be good at school, but not too good, for fear of scaring off men. I began to see, as many see, the feminine as less important, frivolous, false, an act performed for the benefit of men.

But the feminine was also my community (which at the time was all cis, straight women). It was daiquiri mix in the fridge and all girl nacho nights with my friends and their moms and my single mom. We bonded over mandatory pedicures and Reese Witherspoon and Julia Roberts. We asked each other for makeup tips and knew that men were no good, but should be pursued nevertheless. It was Jude Law and Hugh Grant and finding the sensitive, but not too sensitive, men. It was not judging each other for crying at the end of sad movies, and giggling at other women’s bad haircuts. It was letting ourselves be joyous when the makeup bag came in pink, and promising to never “let ourselves go.” And it was the power of being vulnerable with one another when we found out my mother wasn’t going to live out the year. It was the way she held me and let me cry.

When I was young, I would watch my mother get ready in the mornings. She was a project manager at Ford, which, she was reminded daily, was a good job for a woman with only a high school diploma. It was my job to pick out the shoes she was going to wear for the day. I knew when she had meetings with the mostly male higher ups, because she would wear red, her power color. She rarely wore pants to work, preferring skirts and dresses. These were her armor.

There’s a certain type of femininity for the white, middle class below the Mason-Dixon. It’s blonde and perfect foundation and blush. It’s pretending to be upper class. It’s fake pearls and hot pink dresses. It’s monogrammed towels and a perfect wreath on the door, appropriate to the season. It’s also a passive femininity. It’s gossip and prayer groups and PTA meetings, but it definitely did not include the assertiveness needed to manage a team or go after that promotion. It was not the power femininity of the self-help books on my mother’s shelf: How to Succeed in Business without a Penis, and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. When my mother called her makeup her “war paint,” I knew that on some level she was not joking or being metaphorical. She defied the femininity of her surroundings, and wore it into corporate battle, weaponized it. I remember her power. I remember her joy. I also remember her frustration.

To be a woman with ambition meant sacrificing the social training of woman. It was learning to look down on previous iterations of yourself. This was a lesson my mother never truly learned, or perhaps refused to, always keeping a small sense of play in her wardrobe. But when I moved in with my dad and crossed a class boundary, the pearls were replaced with leather bands, the pink with neutrals. A different kind of femininity was enforced here, in the upper middle class. This was a femininity that played a man’s game: its colors darker, its lines neater. This femininity was less social and more capitalistic. The bonding rituals stayed the same: The Notebook, blonde highlights, men. But the consequences for violating that femininity shifted. Where once I only had to fear the loss of community, I now had to fear the loss of status. Qualifications are irrelevant if you violate the social order. To be an outsider also meant being a failure. Success equaled wealth; there were no other barometers.

I began to see, as many see, the feminine as less important, frivolous, false, an act performed for the benefit of men.
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After my mother’s death and cut off from my main feminine role model, I also became cut off from the community of women she had introduced me to. Sure, by the age of thirteen, I had gleaned a little of how to perform woman. I knew how to put on a little makeup, and I knew what cut of pants was most flattering to my emerging pear shape, the same shape as my mother. I could quote Miss Congeniality and Legally Blonde, and I knew which Titans players had the best asses. But I had very little language for this new brand of femininity, and it was becoming and harder to allow myself to remain vulnerable and open to it. Grief has a way of making a person insular, of making emotion inaccessible to others. PTSD deepens the divide between you and others, and, the protection of others gone, you learn that it is necessary to protect yourself.

Women’s clothing exposes. At best it is supposed to empower. At worst, it objectifies. I could not afford to be an object. My senses on high alert, I already felt outside my skin, outside of time, moving back and forth between the past and present jarringly. I began having flashbacks of my mother’s last moments and trouble sleeping. It became important to fortify myself. Often, that meant layers. That meant stoicism. It was James Dean, who knows how to be sad, but artfully. It was John Wayne, un-phased by massacre. It was denim, no makeup. Bravado.

And those men, the stoics. They always got the girl. And that was something, I was just figuring out, I might want too. And if my femininity was not solely to be performed for men, then what was its purpose? I discarded it, figuring it could no longer serve me.

The dictionary defines femme as “a lesbian whose appearance and behavior are seen as traditionally feminine.” However, that’s what makes it subversive. To be “femme” is to capture femininity on your own terms, reclaiming it from the heterosexual gaze and performing it instead for a queer community. Moving to New York at age eighteen, my ideas of femme possibility expanded: no makeup, unshaven armpits, shaved heads, not just lesbians but queer and bisexual women, too. These women exuded the same type of strength my mother had, but without the fake pearls. And, somehow, they still displayed traits of what we traditionally assign as feminine. They could allow themselves to be vulnerable, to take care of others while also allowing themselves to be taken care of. They prioritized intuition, not necessarily over logic, but alongside it. There’s a generosity in femininity, and an honoring of the role emotions play in our lives. In the feminine, they can be embraced; in the (toxic) masculine, they are something to be done away with. There’s a practicality to this femininity in the way that I imagine it. The feminine rolls up her sleeves and gets shit done.

But there is also a danger to femininity. How many gendered insults can be thrown against us without a few sticking? How many times can I be called a cunt or a pussy or a bitch and still maintain that there is strength in my womanhood. How many times can I be harassed? Raped? Walking down the streets of New York after I was assaulted my freshman year of college, it was hard to differentiate between annoying catcalls and threatening men. In some ways, I imagined the feminine as a victim.

The stats vary, but something close to one in six women will be raped in her lifetime. Hate crimes against trans women are on the rise. Femme gay men are often the targeted victims of hate crimes for threatening the masculine’s sense of world order. So I told myself a story. Masculine does not get told to smile on the street. Masculine does not get catcalled. Masculine is not raped. I understood that to be masculine meant being safer walking home at night. And it was that safety that I craved. This is of course, not true. The masculine is also policed and is sometimes the victim of violence. I knew that the more masculine my appearance, the more likely I was to be identified as gay by passersby, which presented new dangers. But I also knew that it was my femme and feminine sisters who had been taught to walk with our car keys tucked between our knuckles.

To surrender to the feminine began to feel like surrendering to pain. It seemed easier, safer, to hold myself at some remove. Withholding brought stability. The masculine myth of self-sufficiency made it less painful to acknowledge a lack of familial connection. But, for me, this remove was not sustainable. Stoicism meant isolation. Masculinity made me feel shored up against something. But though it was scarier, femininity meant healing, meant community. My femme identity exists in direct opposition to toxic, cisgender masculinity that would have me fear for my life no matter how I expressed my gender. Femme identity is my letting the guard down.

To be “femme” is to capture femininity on your own terms, reclaiming it from the heterosexual gaze and performing it instead for a queer community.
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Over the last several years, as I have begun my slow, femme re-education, I have found a new type of community. It is a sisterhood of queer femme-ininity. It includes cis, femme, queer women, trans women, femme trans boys, gay men in nail polish, and lipstick with beards. What I have learned is that there is no one way to be femme. Some wear their fierceness on their sleeves like a weapon, and others hide it beneath pastels. I have found power in many different avenues of the feminine, reclaimed.

Sometimes, it can be easy to let myself regress into the trappings of Southern femininity, especially since I’ve moved back to Tennessee. And it can be especially easy when I am rewarded with the mixed privilege of passing as straight. My queerness is routinely erased in the workplace, and it can be difficult to decide to out yourself when Tennessee currently does not have laws on the books protecting queer people from discrimination. So passing can start to feel, not only like a social mandate, but also an economic one. In what class does my femininity sit? In which class do I wish to sit?

But that’s when I decide that it is time to play, just like my mother taught me. I sit in a chair with my legs spread, just like I was told not to. To be femme is not just to be feminine, but to allow myself to practice femininity in ways that empower me. Most days, I choose not to wear makeup, but I also choose to center the personal in my writing, and to ask for care when I need it. I let myself take care of others because I know my community needs to be strong for each other. I allow myself to be vulnerable because it grants me power to take what I want. I now find myself reenacting the rituals, but I choose to go in sans war paint.

“Sharks are feared. Sharks are bloodthirsty. Sharks just cruise around the ocean with their mouths open, full of sharp, dangerous teeth sucking in krill and little fish. Sharks are feared as the killers of the ocean, but actually, they’re an endangered species.” –The Femme Shark Manifesto

Let me start by acknowledging my position as a fierce, femme-identified, queer, biracial dyke. I am a working-class writer who is writing from the privileged position-ality of having come into femme identity in a relatively femme-centric queer community in Oakland, California. I recognize that my experiences do not constitute the absolute femme experience, and that “femme” is a deeply layered political identity with a wide variety of histories, representations, manifestations, and interpretations.

That said, over the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time with fierce-ass femmes and femme-allies alike. And I’ve come to realize something: there is intense femmephobia within queer communities.

This realization came about in part because of a move from Oakland to Salt Lake City, where I encountered few femme-centric groups that had the primary objective of community building or betterment. Moreover, those femme or feminine-presenting queer folks (henceforth known as FPP, or Feminine Presenting Persons) I did meet were regularly iced out, disregarded, invalidated, or unwelcome in circles of largely masculine-of-center queers and trans folks. (Important aside: while femmes and feminine-presenting folks are often treated as the same thing, they are not always the same.)

To address this issue, I began a community video project, which started as a zine, by asking folks point-blank: “What does the word femme mean to you?” I generally got one of two highly disconcerting responses:

1. A femme is a queer woman who looks straight!
2. Femmes wear heels!

These answers do a significant disservice to the general bad-assery that is femme identity — and they certainly aren’t specific to Salt Lake City. In most radical queer communities, I’ve witnessed sexualization, fetishization, or sexual harassment projected onto femme or FPP bodies. I’ve seen people expect femmes and FPP to date, play with, be sweet on, or be partnered with other queers who identify as trans* masculine, butch, or any other identity or body that is more visibly masculine-of-center. I’ve witnessed violent and aggressive transphobia surrounding femme or feminine queer identities. And I’ve attended house parties themed in drag representations of femme or feminine identities in largely masculine-of-center queer circles, in which feminine identities or bodies were trivialized.

Fierce femme identity, to me, is a purposefully blurry entity unto itself, and I think there is something gorgeously radical in that ambiguity. I can tell you what femme does not mean with a bit more ease: femme identity is not especially rooted in physical appearance — to qualify as a glorious femme, you do not need to wear heels, glittery eye shadow, garters, or stockings, nor do you need to date butches or masculine-of-center folks, or any other such limiting nonsense. Though glitter, dresses, makeup, bowties, and thigh-high cheetah print boots are my current fierce femme M.O., one of the wonderful aspects of femme identity is that it is inclusive and embracing of femmes with all kinds of styles, abilities, desires, tastes, backgrounds, and preferences.

What’s up, pajama femmes! What’s up, masculine-of-center femmes! What’s up, high femmes, femmberjacks, low femmes, gender queer femmes, femme-on-femme femmes, femme sharks, dolphins, platypuses, etc.!

I believe that it is systematically problematic to create borders and limitations to the definition of identity — in the book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler discusses how the naming of a thing, its taxonomy, can be a beautiful and radical act, but dualistically can lead to the identity becoming a target for policing and violence.

Femme identity is absolutely a political act — there is no way for it to be anything but extremely radical (and hot! Did I mention hot?).

In the Femme Shark Manifesto, written by Leah Lakshmi, there is a magnificent communiqué about how femme sharks understand that going out into the world as fierce femmes is an everyday act of revolution against systems of oppression that actively work, through violent acts of misogyny, to restrict individuals embodying any kind of radicalized gender identity.

And you’re abso-fucking-lutely right that femme identity is a gender identity! And I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I think that fierce, radical femme identity (such as the representation of femme identity presented by the Femme Shark Manifesto) is a queer identity, too. This is not to say that a body must identify as a queer to claim femme identity, but that femme identity is a queer, radicalized, politicized gender representation.

Queer femininity and femme identity actively work against oppression and misogyny by representing a gender identity that refuses to be anything but fierce.

A person who is a feminist and is feminine-presenting may not necessarily identify as a femme, and a person who is a femme may not be feminine-presenting nor identify as a feminist. And so on.

Femme identity is a beautiful smorgasboard of radical identity politics and the historical embodiment of learning from a legacy of really fierce femmes who have come before: femmes who helped bail their butches out of jail, clean them up, and sustain them after pre-Stonewall raids; femmes who have held rent parties for community members, who have helped to nurse sick lovers and chosen family; femmes who have stood in picket lines, been tear-gassed, been victims of sexual/domestic/urban/rural violence and all of the subsequent trauma; femmes who have written manifestos, created safe spaces, held conferences and community debriefings — all to help ensure the safe pathways of their fellow and future femmily, and to help build stronger queer communities and foundations.
Many times, femme identity is a reaction to and transcendence from unspeakable trauma, including racism, misogyny, genderism, and classism. It can be a method of survival, as well as a big fat fuck you to the patriarchal systems of oppression that govern everything, including many circles of queer communities.

Yes, I said it, sweet queer family — let’s watch ourselves! We are obviously and absolutely not exempt from gender bullshit, included, but not limited to, misogyny and femmephobia, despite being a part of a political identity that has, itself, been historically and systematically oppressed.

As my brilliant friend and fellow writer-activist TT Jax says, “Any of us who claim community are responsible for what we allow to happen in it. When we protect our abusers — including when we tacitly ignore them, but allow them to continue to perform and access queer spaces — we punish our survivors and maintain the cycle of violence.”

There are many ways to be an ally and to help break the systems of oppression within queer communities. Some dos and don’ts of how to be an ally to femmes and FPP include:

Do Not:

1. Assume all femmes/FPP are cisgender or cis-sexed.
2. Assume all femmes/FPP do or do not identify as lesbian, queer, female, bottom, or submissive.
3. Assume all femmes/FPP are passive and/or weak.
4. Tell a self-identified femme that they are not a femme.
5. Pressure those you see as femme to identify as femme.
6. Become threatened or violent when a femme/FPP steps outside your view of what it means to be femme or feminine-presenting.*
7. Expect femmes/FPP to educate you on identity politics, misogyny, or misogynist-driven community violence.

*It is not about you.

*It doesn’t make them more or less queer.

*It doesn’t make them more or less of a femme/FPP.

Do:

1. Hold femmes/FPP up for the individuals they are, without expecting them to conform to society’s views of normative femininity.
2. If a femme/FPP has specific sexual preferences or boundaries, please know and accept:
3. Ask for help or engage in conversations with your community about how to deconstruct or learn about your own privilege in relation to the further marginalized people in your communities, including but not limited to femmes/FPP.
4. Stand up for femmes/FPP when people speak disparagingly of us. Challenge misogynist thinking.
5. Take accountability for your own actions. Think about your positionality within your community, and how you may or may not be contributing to oppressive structures of hierarchy.
6. Empower yourself to expand your education about different identities within your own community. Read widely and voraciously from the multitudes of zines, articles, discussion forums, and anthologies available to you (like this and this). Like the talented and articulate Mia McKenzie, among many, many others! If you have any questions or concerns, ask your community for help.
7. Allow yourself to be called out, and to call others out, responsibly and constructively.

To invalidate femmes and feminine-presenting folks, or to refuse them the respect they are due, is to inflict hurt on an entire queer community. Take a page from the Femme Sharks, who say: “Believe in communities that heal hurt, apologize, listen to each other, and make things right.”