[Kätzchen]

I think, for me, I cannot condense or distill my life experience into simple sets of events… concerning ways that I embrace my Femme identity or how others perceive me as Femme or maybe not even recognize my Femme being. It feels very complicated to me, when I think of my own life and how often fragile I feel about myself but yet simultaneously, I feel incredibly strong, confident, unrepentantly Femme – all in the same breath.

I am 53 years old now. It seems as though it was just the other day when I was in my 20s and 30s. Time does fly, and fast. I have talked about my own journey on occasion in our community and wanted to add toward what I have already shared.

I was aware of my own identity before I ever had a way to name it or own it. Who I am is who I am and I couldn’t renounce one ounce of who I am as I have grown over the years because at heart, I do believe I was born into my own skin of thought, my own skin of identity and my own skin of anything – like a huge genetic marker that cannot be altered by the best of scientific discovery or process, as if it could be dissected that way.

I think what my life looks like to me is one very slow progression of how I bloomed into being me. I seem to remember hearing a well known catch-phrase that goes something along the lines of: A person is the product of their environment. Cliché or not, I sometimes want to believe this strand of thought but find myself rejecting it on a consistent basis because in some ways I might be a product of my former environments and in some ways I might even be the product of my present environment. I want to say that for me, I am the product of the skin of thought I choose to try on or discard or toss into the wash with some dye or see if it survives a fiery furnace and still seems to fit who I feel I am or how I am just as I am (if that makes sense at all).

I grew up second eldest of four siblings, but later on in years mom and dad gave us two other siblings – increasing our familial arrangement to a household of 8 (minus a sister who died shortly after birth). My formative years were spent growing up with two brothers and one other sister. We lived in a rural area on a dairy farm. Our lives were dominated by farm life, church, school and if there was time (which there was little of), we each had our own hobbies and sets of friends. I had the least amount of time to myself but I loved music, piano studies, my very small set of girl friends from school or church and cousins I wrote to who lived very far away. It didn’t matter what kind of clothes I wore. I had and always have had a very large wardrobe. Dresses, skirts, coats, shawls, stockings, socks, all types of shoes, pants, sweaters, boots, trinkets, jewelry, but never really wore makeup until I was almost a young lady of 17 years of age – I love makeup and have to have the best I can afford but I don’t wear it daily. I save it for when I go special places or want to get all dolled up for work or sometimes just because – for no reason. I wasn’t allowed to have makeup or pants when I was young, due to sets of religious practices my family abided by or social customs of the day that my family valued more over other social customs people practiced who were not anywhere remotely like my own family or people we went to church with or went to school with.

I’d say I was a slow bloomer. It’s taken the better part of my own adult life to grow into who I consistently am – minus a few adjustments along the way: Like raising my two sons or earning two formal education degrees or a lifetime career that spanned 20 years of my adult life.

Speaking of which: Embracing my Femme identity.

I was rather quiet growing up and rather quiet in my early work life and even rather quiet as a mother raising her two sons. People knew there was something entirely different about me but they just couldn’t pinpoint what was different. As engaging as I can be socially and publicly on our forum boards, I am rather quiet and private as a woman, but not quite as private these days about the Femme in me. Over the years as I grew up, it was not entirely a safe thing to be out loud and proud. People were locked up for what society thought people like us were: social outcasts because we did not fit the parameter of what current day society back then sought to enforce (heterosexuality). Even as I grew into my adulthood, depending on where a person lived (in the continental US), you could lose your ability to earn a living, be socially discredited to the point that no one would hire you in your community, much less let you live a peaceful life. But my life was a set of complications from the start of motherhood: due in part to my sons being Black and being of a multicultural background which was peppered and salted lightly with characteristics that set me apart socially from groups available to me. My life has never been a cake walk but I do make a nice cake!

So, where was I going with all this??? Oh. To give a current day example of how invisible I am as a Femme, still to this day, I will tell you about an experience I had this summer working on my former job. The job market is a tight one out here and all I could find for a job over the past six months was working at a gas station. How I even got the job, I still wonder about today but I feel probably my unmistakable femininity is probably what helped me to get that job. Anyway, loyal customers of both corporate gas stations I worked at would at times comment to corporate offices and field supervisors about who the “lovely woman was who worked at the station.” People who frequented both places were from a cross section of everyday people to upper-level executives to travelers in our region and other parts of the US and even a small sampling of international guests. I can’t tell you how many times I heard customers say: “What are you doing here? We never see women doing this job, much less look as beautiful as you or smell as pretty as you. You are not the run of the mill worker.” And of course to me, their comments were classic: classic for those who enjoy seats of entitlement, power, privilege and a whole host of other things colliding daily on my tiny little job that was probably more of an education for people who worked with me or came to know me at the gas station and certainly for my superiors. People came to know the Femme in me in a diverse set of situations and I know they will never forget me (they miss me, clients and coworkers do: I miss them too).

I am strong. I am highly qualified to be me. I am Femme.