I identify as a few things...

Queer Femme - this is my primary identifier within GLBTQ & Friends community. I like Queer.... for many of the same reasons others have stated. I love that it holds so much space for other identities, and feels more unified than other terms (to me). Femme is so important to me - and i never claim myself as Queer (or Lesbian) without adding "Femme" to it. That title is like a badge of honour for me.... it took me years to discover it, and once I did - I was NEVER letting it go. :) My tattoo has "Queer Femme" integrated into it.

Lesbian - I never used to use this label for myself but I am much more comfortable with it now and use it sometimes, particularly if I feel like it gets the idea across simpler with a particular person or group of people.

Little Girl - For those who get it - it's self explanatory. And for those who may not right away, I call this my "inner five year old". But really, this IS a huge part of my identity. I have a little side that I let out a LOT among people I trust - when I feel safe - and it's not so much about playing young, as it is literally letting myself squeal with joy and clap my hands when I want to. Letting my eyes go super wide and my mouth gape when I'm surprised in a good way.... bouncing up and down... tugging on Sparx's sleeve when I want her attention because I just HAVE TO SHOW HER SOMETHING RIGHT NOW. LOL It's just a huge part of me. She gets it. The man-children get it. My closest friends get it. It's just me.

I identify as a dyke...most of the time...why...because I like the word, it fits who I am, in personality and appearance.

There are times I view myself as genderqueer because I don't feel like either a man nor a woman at times.

There are also instances that I view myself as genderfluid, depending on my mood I can feel incredibly masculine or feminine, and I can move between these two very easily, sometimes I feel as if I am both at once....

I'm very complicated, all depending on my mood, the environment surrounding me, and the company I am in.

I am a work in progress. I am very, very queer. I am a butch. I am stone. I am male-identified and live my life as such. I will try to tell you I am just a simple guy, but I appreciate women who get that I am complex and like that I am.

I had to look through this to see if I'd answered before, only it doesn't appear that I have.

I am female
I am difficult
I am lesbian
I am femme(ish)
I am sometimes pseudo-heterosexual
I am always wife
I am a warm climate girl
I am hopefully a mother one day
I am someone who hangs out on online forums rather than real life
I am all the different types of me

1. Femme Lesbian
2. Interpreter
3. Twin
4. Handful

:-D

Gender queer femme with a wicked mind and a voracious appetite

Kinky
Queer
Femme
Feminist
Friend
Lover
Sister
Daughter
Sex worker
Dog mom

I'm a
Different type of Butch, nothing is typical about who I am or how I identify, I am my own person......I will never conform to anyone's definition of how I should be or act.

I am:
 

Woman/Female by birth and this has always felt completely gender-congruent for me

Lesbian femme, because I am sexually, emotionally and intellectually attracted to female-bodied butches

Feminist, because I believe that all of us, by virtue of being human, deserve equality as a moral and legal right

How do I self identify?

sometimes I am so tired of this 'I identify as ________'

Corkey says all the time..............I am a human being

I am is the most important thing. Be careful what you say after the 'I am' part......cuz your brain really believes it without any filter.

I am power-less blah blah blah blah................well I am powerless because I claim powerless.......why you claim that is not important

I am powerful blah blah blah blah........well I claim power because I am powerful.......

I am are the 2 most powerful words for the conscious and subconscious brain

I am because I am

Agreed!

I am so many things in terms of self-identification- no way can I put myself into one "identity"! Why would I even want to do this? I don't live my life as one, single characteristic of self-identification. That would mean I woud stagnate and have but one dimension.

Also, I always feel this question is gender directed and I don't view being a woman as uni-dimensional either.

For me, I've learned the best way to reply to this question is, I'm just me. Because when you say Satan it seems to really scare people.:seeingstars:

Don't call it a comeback....
 

I too am tired of this “I identify as________.” Yet, without it, I am unable to find the missing piece to the puzzle. I am a human being. Almost all of us in here are. However, I don’t want to spend my days and nights with just any human being. Otherwise, I could have stayed with the human beings I was previously with and just been happy they were human.

Some of us are tired of being a disappointment to people. To be loved and accepted is a very human need. It hurts when someone that you love looks at you and wishes you were someone or something else. The question of who I am is an important one to me. I prefer to partner with like minded others. Love is a verb. If I can’t love someone the way they need me to or they can’t love me the way that I need – how can it work? There must be a starting point. The older I get the less tolerance I have for experiments.


The core of who I am is just that, my core. My ID is very much a part of that core. When I look back I can say that my ID hasn’t really changed, it was my vocabulary and ability to explain it that did. As human beings we tend to see others in our reflection. On the whole, we tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, allowing ourselves to remain in the blissful ignorance of thinking that everyone is basically like us. It keeps the murder rate down. The downside to that is that we can easily erase who other people are by seeing them as we are. The worst case scenario is that you end up in a relationship with someone, who one day turns to you, and says, “You would be perfect if…”

That communication of basics, that ability to say “I identify as ______” makes it more likely to fill the empty box marked “potential love match.” How anyone in the “friend” box IDs doesn’t matter to me. I want to look at someone who gives me butterflies and to say “I am ______and actually be able to fill in that the blank for them and then say to them “And who are you?” If they answer me like Popeye and say “I am what I am, take it or leave it” – well, today I’m smart enough to leave it. Sometimes that answer is the result of not knowing, other times it’s an unwillingness to be honest – either way, for me, it’s a set up that leads to disaster.

This thread (and others like it) are an important (I think) for so many reasons. There is hope here for the people who are looking for their missing piece and can answer the question of who they are and how they ID. Hope is important. I think meaningful love is important too. Without these answers, we are all just pictures in other people’s imaginations with put upon expectations of who they think we are or who they want us to be in relation to themselves. Until the questions are answered, who we actually are remains a mystery. While there is beauty and excitement to be found in mystery, there can be equal heartache and despair. It’s a unique pain that comes from falling in love with everything about a person before you know their ID or what it means to them. Talking fast about everything you have in common and thinking they are so wonderfulandjustsoperfectandhowdidIeverlivewithout youandomgmetoo!!

Only to find out, that, while it is entirely possible, because you are both human, to physically have a sexual relationship, they need things that you simply don’t want to do and worse, if you do them it changes how you feel. The relational dynamic falls flat. It’s not about acceptance or lack of acceptance. It’s more like a religion that you practice, one that’s important to you. Some relationships can work around it, but for most people they wouldn’t even bother to start with upfront knowledge. To continue with that relationship generally leads to a sense of longing, and to a worse loneliness than actually being alone. Ultimately, it leads to either being a disappointment or to being disappointed.

There are questions to be answered when getting to know someone. (Lots of them.) The ID, IMO, is a starting point and from that place we can begin to see where and if we fit together. Going backwards from everything else about a person to their ID is dangerous. (For me anyway.)

I wish more people would say “I identify as______” and this is what that means to me ______. Followed by, what I am looking for is someone who is_________________. (And actually be honest about it – don’t just say what you think someone wants to hear out of some twisted insecurity.) Most of us spend more time putting our grocery lists together for the week then we do on finding a real connection. It can be tough to navigate especially in forums because to say you don’t like something that someone else does (or if you use the wrong word when trying to explain it all) can require a PhD in verbal kickboxing that few of us have. The exhaustion of having to explain why we are who we are or why we feel like we do or why we like what we like is difficult enough one on one, much less in a virtual room full of people who only know their own paths to here.

I'm a
 

woman trapped in a woman's body....

Happy New Year Planet!

;)

Femme: a careful smile, a firm handshake, a raucous giggle, a penchant for lipstick, a tendency to twirl, an adoration of beauty, a deploration of invisibility.

Old-fashioned: gemeinschaft versus geselleschaft.

Kinky: as hell.

Butch Genderqueer

I feel mostly male on the inside, but I have absolutely no desire to surgically or hormonally modify my female body.

I am butch for a variety of reasons. "Butch" is an adjective meaning masculine; I enjoy playing the "butch" role in my relationships and would not have it any other way; I especially identify with the piece of queer history butches fought for and participated in; I also identify with the idea of using "butch" as a gender, which - for me - is a genderqueer identity; genderqueer meaning not solely male or female.

I also identify as queer, a dude, a guy, and a dyke... because I can.

how I identify
 

I am a stone butch domesticated daddy who is a lover of life, people and fur babies also the daddy to fur babbies :fastdraq: :cigar2 :cigar2: :cigar2:

I identify as queer because it's all inclusive - totally both and absolutely neither, and boi because it's male but soft around the edges. My personal leanings are MUCH more on the male side, but every once in a while I wake up on the femme side of the bed and rock that, too. Androgyn would be an appropriate term as well.

Can you explain what you mean by 'the femme side of the bed'?

single celibate and happy :)

femme ~ I was born this way.

Male. 100%. It's the brain, heart & soul I was born with. Just got put in the wrong container.

How I self-identify
 

I think I adopted the femme identity label because it more closely fits than any other label. I'm not opposed to labels; I think they can tell you basic ideas of expression in a short time period. Specifically online where you have absence of other cues and experiences with people, you can get a decent jest of someone with a label. That's not to say we all fit our labels perfectly, though.

I am femme in that I love frills, girl-talk, and butches as my partners. I am not femme in that my sexual preference is not #1 on the overall list of who I am. I identify first and foremost as a women, followed by a Christian, then as a femme lesbian. I think there is a distinction between 'woman' and 'femme lesbian' for me. Woman, for me, means I am half a whole. I am by nature the yin of that half and what it encompasses, as well as endless possibilities as a human being. To say this does not mean a butch woman is not also a 'woman' in identity. She may or may not identify as her/she, but rather by hym/hy. The femme lesbian label is more constricting. It places me in an exclusively-defined role and character, which I do not always agree with nor accept.

When I bring this label into the GLBTQ community, I think my femme lesbian identity can also be constricting even among those I consider my peers as far as what people see in that label and the inferences they take from it. I think it's humorous at times and also frustrating.

I like this thread a lot. Thank you for starting it!

:3femme:

When I first discovered my different nature compared to the rest of the world the only word I knew was queer but I kept that to myself. A year or so later I learned the word dyke and after that I learned lesbian.
What is my identity?
Third Gender Queer, Gynesexual/romantic, Demisexual, Polyamorous:| and happy to be me.
I go by Queer it saves a lot of explaining over the terms that best describe me.

I am very much femme for lots of reasons. I am very girly and when I am in a relationship it is with someone who identifies as butch or ftm.

Male, 100%. I've know since I was little that my body was the wrong one, my mind just knew that. Unfortunately it has been a decades long road for me to identify as FTM. I'm finally living who I am now. It feels good, it feels real, it feels right.

heart = girlie girl
gender = femme and my other gender is woman
sex = female (I get very irritated when people confuse sex and gender)
sexual orientation = dyke/queer. I often call myself lesbian though I'm not formost vagina driven. dyke cock is the first, then vagina. but both enjoyed.

I was not born femme. I was born female then I learned that my characteristics that i grew into were tomboy. I loved girl clothes but had no desire to hang out with other girls at all.
It wasn't till I realised I was a dyke that my big huge drag queen little girl came out.
I was happy to meet her.
I've slowly let go of the tomboy in the past 10 years, of having to prove I'm "capable" - I don't have to be good at fixing things. I still love camping and snakes etc but I no longer feel I have to prove anything by doing all the repairs. And frankly, I don't want to do any cleaning either. I'm happy to pay other people to do it.

so perhaps I've gotten rather urban as well.

Queer Femme. When I first came out, I used to word "lesbian" but it just never seemed to fit me right. Then I started discovering my attraction to male-identified butches and trans guys and I went..."Oh." One of my closest friends told me there was a name for that: Queer Transensual Femme. I loved it. But recently I just shorted it to Queer Femme. I still use lesbian so others outside the B/F community can relate. Sometimes I loathe lengthy explanations.

I am Butch but also consider myself two spirited. I also have a couple of other titles I am fine with too. Mom, Ba Ba ( grandson's name for me) I look like a male but I think like a woman. I think that women by nature are more intelligent then men are.(my opinion) I am attracted to strong,smart & independent femmes. But in the bedroom I like to be in total control.

I am very much femme and identify as femme or even high femme. I wear lots of labels like femme, sub, babygirl, etc. I embrace labels and it's probably because I'm a librarian--we classify everything. :D

To the rest of the world, gay or straight, I'm a lesbian and that's fine with me. I am a lesbian too. In the LGBT world, some recognize me as femme. I came out of the closet when I was 17, then figured out that I was a femme when I was about 22 or 23. That was like a second coming out--what a thrill!

Now that I'm in love with and in a committed relationship with a FTM, some may be inclined to question my self definition of "lesbian". I still consider myself part of the gay community, the LGBT community, but my identity is mine, not someone else's.

I think identity, for me anyway, is something that evolves and grows with time. Whether it's gender identity, sexual identity, cultural identity, or what have you. I'm fascinated by this and just love the multitudes and diversity of identities in our world.

Identify
 

A kinky bastard!

What she said.

I do use labels because it makes things easier for others, but mostly I self-identify as Loren, if you want to know about me, ask.

Labels I use most often: queer, lesbian, dyke, leather-dyke, butch, androgynous, gender-queer, Asian, Latino, Latina, and polyamorous. There's more, but you get the gist.

Why I use these labels is because I'm comfortable with them, and they're readily accessible.

I used lesbian and dyke when I first came out. Lesbian to be polite, dyke to be "in your face".

I'm of an age that I was part of the re-appropriation of "queer", so that has special meaning to me.

Leather or leather-dyke or polyamorous doesn't identify me, it defines how I do sex and relationships. But I threw those in cause, well, cause I wanted to.

I identify as a transguy or transgender male. I do not like the term "ftm" for myself because I feel that I am not or never was female specially after I hit puberty all my psychical femininity went out the door. Before I knew what "trans" was I was a dyke or lesbian who was very butch always , and for the majority attracted to women which always brought questioning myself up because a part of me was still attracted to other people specially as I became older. And soon later I realized I was also Pansexual. Now that I finally have "labels" I'm kinda more comfortable with telling people and being open. I'm not having to explain all these details and stipulations to how I identify.