You know what it’s like to name an emotion — despair, clarity, hope, annoyance — and feel the weight of its resonance?

The feeling of YES! That is what I’m feeling:

I feel grateful that you do our laundry, and yet, I also feel annoyed that you dried that blouse. Both/and. See?

Even if the emotion is conflicting
— especially if the emotion
is conflicting — it feels good
to name it! 

The same has been true, in my experience, of coming across my mental and physical health diagnoses — it felt like FINALLY having some landmarks around what before just felt like a big mystery. 

My moods weren’t just off-kilter, I was living with unaddressed trauma. I wasn’t wheezing and swollen-faced from being “out of shape”, I had unmanaged allergies and asthma and needed different interventions.

I think of all this, and I think of what research tells us about happiness — how it’s really a game of incremental gains*, and to me, these acts of simply being able to name qualities inherent within me, felt like definite incremental gains. 

Naming a thing means I have more data to work with.
It means I have more clarity around a thing that once felt muddied, and ooohh! How our brains crave organization. It’s simply how we are wired.

Naming grants us the gift of organization. And once you can organize a thing, you’ve got a better shot at actually understanding and accepting it. 

So when I learned about non-binary gender expression, it felt like finally being able to provide a name to, a home for, a small and mighty part of myself that never felt Fully Woman. This part of me felt like femininity was much more of a character I sometimes liked to play rather than my fixed identity.

For me, my moment to moment expression of gender varies, and can range from feeling very definitely outside the typical male/female range to feeling like a mix of those energies.

While I abandoned forcing femininity years ago, identifying as genderqueer feels like a conscious act of radical permission-giving to be unabashedly myself on a moment to moment basis — no holds barred.

And I think this brings up a really interesting point because, like, what does it actually mean to feel like a woman? What does it mean to be a woman in a world where so much of our conceptions around gender are saturated in flattened stereotypes?

I can’t answer that. But I can tell you that when the term genderqueer came into my life, it felt so much more apt of a word to describe how I felt than “woman” ever did.

And yet, I have a uterus. And yet I often present as femme (or rather, look to the outside world as a woman), so I don’t fault folks for seeing me as a woman. To quote a fellow non-binary friend,

“It’s not that I’m not a lady — I’m just also so much more than a lady.”

In the same way that emotions get to be dynamic and at times conflicting, gender expression gets to be as well.

If you want to engage, I’d love to hear from you!

If you identify as a woman, what does that mean for you? What does it feel like?

If you’re genderqueer or have transitioned from your assigned sex at birth, when were you able to name it? 

Did naming it help you to accept more of who you are? How does gender expression show up for you?

references:

• Where Happiness Lies by Marcela Kogan