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Pronouns are used to indicate gender identity.

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People seem to have a hard time distinguishing the fact that sex and gender are two separate things. Sex is rooted in a person's biology while gender focuses on the thoughts and feelings that a person has about their identity and themselves. My sex is female. My gender identity though? That ones a bit trickier to understand the older I get. I have for the longest time always been addressed as she/her, especially because I didn't know I could be anything else. I've thought about going as he/him briefly but that immediately didn't feel right. But recently, I caught myself almost introducing my pronouns as she/they subconsciously. In all honesty my gender just feels like a 'whatever' thing. I am me; I am Emma. Call me she? That's great, I haven't known anything else and I do enjoy embracing my femininity. Call me they? I don't mind that, it doesn't feel wrong and I like that. I thought I may be gender fluid but from she/he/they, he doesn't feel right. As I write this, I think I'm discovering my pronouns are she/they. At the end of the day I almost just don't want to be perceived.

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Me feeling comfortable in both fem and masc clothes.

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Gendered objects are things that are considered inherently pertaining to a certain gender by society. Clothes are a very topical object as people tend to use it as a signifier for what someone's gender identity is. In other words, clothes play a part in gender performance (QGH p.79). Gender performance changes over time. My favorite example of this is that men used to wear high heels until women started too, making men stop taking part in the fashion trend. The reality is that gendered objects and gender identity do not inform one another. Because I sometimes wear more male coded clothes does not mean that I identify as a man. With connotations, my own struggle of figuring out my gender identity, and coping with body dysmorphia, clothes cause me to have a love/hate relationship with myself and my body. Though I dress in masc and fem styles, I feel aligned to female gender identity, but that doesn't always feel right. I am me and clothes make me feel right... sometimes.

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Yup... that's 12 year old me on the right. Just one of the 'boys'.

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Jack Halberstam wrote in Selection of Female Masculinity that tomboyism "generally describes an extended period of female masculinity" p.5. Right from the get go, girls who exhibit tomboy qualities are considered to be going through a phase. Normal signifiers of tomboyism are girls who act like boys, dress like boys, and take interest in boy activities, a lot of the time centering on gendered objects, which all play into gender performance. Masculinity in girls/women is not accepted after a certain age because it is considered temporary and looked down upon after puberty. I myself was a tomboy as a child and was always kind of aware of the fact. I liked wearing converse, jeans, and hoodies, fighting with the other boys in my family, sports, and superhero characters like Batman and Spiderman. I tried to reject these tomboy esc traits as a teenager, to an extent, but have since realized that there is nothing wrong with me enjoying what society deems for boys or masculine. It is a dumb concept that tries to punish girls like me for holding onto my female masculinity past puberty.

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Like gender identity, sexuality is not binary; it is part of a spectrum. Though it is forced into a binary dichotomy through existing power systems (QGH, p.81). I don't feel 50/50 attraction for men and women, and that percentage is ever-changing. I may feel more emotional or physical attraction toward a gender more than another. I am still in the process of figuring such things out. Being in a heterosexual relationship makes me struggle sometimes to feel like I am actually Bi, especially when I have never had any relationship other than a heterosexual one. Even though I've settled on bisexuality, my identity is always changing. Even as I write this, I am questioning if I am actually pansexual instead of Bi because I do find myself attracted to anyone. But I don't know if I want to be called pan. It is all very emotionally and mentally confusing for me and I sometimes worry I will never figure it out.

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My partner: my favorite person in the world. <3

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Through all of my internal panic, my partner has been there for me. He keeps me afloat and loves and accepts me as who I am, even when I don't actually know who I am. I literally get butterflies looking at this picture because it feels like the embodiment of happiness. I do recognize that as a heterosexual couple, we benefit from a heteronormative system (Cohen, 452). But as an interracial couple, we fall into a category which Cathy Cohen calls "heterosexuals outside of heteronormativity" (p.452). This means that there are heterosexual people are not accepted in heteronormativity. We fall into this because interracial couples have historically been looked down on. Evidence of this is the fact that interracial marriage wasn't legalized in the U.S. until 1967. My grandma was already 17 by then. It is a part of our identity that I never dwelled on until it became a joke in high school. When the two of us were together then, THAT is what we were known for. It feels ostracizing being called out for something that is no one's business and doesn't affect how we feel about one another.

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Barker, Meg-John and Scheele, Jules. Queer: A Graphic History. 1st ed., Icon Books Ltd, 2016.

Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bull daggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?.” Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, 1 May 1997, pp. 437–485, doi:10.1215/10642684-3-4-437.

Halberstam, Jack. “Introduction to Female Masculinity”. Female Masculinity, Duke University Press, 2018, pp.1-41