Femininity and masculinity are concepts people relate to differently. In queer culture, we often explore these relationships—how they show up in our external presentation, how we relate to others, how we move through intimacy, how we lead, how we feel during sex. These layers aren’t necessarily fixed; they can shift depending on context, time, or choice. For some, they’re fluid. For others, they are steady and unchanging. All of it is valid.
This exploration is something uniquely queer—expansive, specific, and often misunderstood by straight people. But it’s not for them. We’re not asking straight people to understand; we’re doing gender calculus for ourselves—because it’s real, because it’s authentic, and sometimes because it’s fun. Respecting what someone wants to be called is not the same as being asked to comprehend the depths of it. Understanding requires knowing individual people, not memorizing a pamphlet of “gay words.”
Still, even within queer culture, femme sometimes gets flattened or dismissed as “holding onto the male gaze.” But femininity—like masculinity, like androgyny—is layered, multifaceted, and more complicated than “stuff dudes like.” Femme is not about seeking men’s approval any more than masc is about rejecting it. Both ideas are still centering cis-het men, and that’s simply not it.
Take high femme, for example. It’s often the opposite of what I was taught men would find attractive. It’s fussy. High maintenance. “Too much.” Hyper-femininity ignores the script of what women are supposed to look like in hetero culture (which is, at its core, about fitting in). High femme exists for itself. It reclaims the traits we’re taught are lesser, frivolous, or embarrassing, and makes them powerful. It can look glamorous, frilly, vintage, or vampy. High femme might look like Little Bo Peep—or like she could kill you—or both.
Femininity isn’t innately sexual. Ruffles, for example, read as feminine to me. But ruffles aren’t sexual—they’re just fabric bunched and sewn. The idea that femininity is inherently sexual comes not from femininity itself but from rape culture, which insists anything “girl” is sexual and therefore prey. This logic means to cut girlhood short with abuse and ranks women by how much they’re “asking for it.” It’s how we justify violence against women. Conflating femininity with “for men” feeds the same logic that makes femininity “for the abuse of men.”
Enjoying the way you experience your gender is not a performance for men. And it isn’t inherently sexual.
Being feminine-presenting as a queer woman means I’m more often read as straight by straight people. That hetero misreading does protect me from homophobic targeting when I’m anonymous. It’s a privilege worth naming and a difference in my daily experience than many people in my life. At the same time, femininity puts me at the bottom of the gender hierarchy in hetero culture—marked as prey for predatory men. Both dynamics exist at once. All of that however is not about identity itself but about the different ways we experience abuse.
Our relationship to femininity itself can change. For some, it feels like a costume inherited from hetero norms—something to shed in favor of a much more authentic experience of oneself. Some come out, cut their hair short, throw on a backward cap and say: “I figured it out! I’m here! See me!” And later they realize what actually feels authentic is the femininity they first rejected. For others, it’s steady and true from the start. A lot of people, regardless of presentation, are more likely to feel like they have access to their femininity (if they experience themselves as having it) in relationships and spaces they feel safe. There’s no one “right” way to experience identity development or experience yourself.
That said, I notice this rhetoric most often directed at femmes—by people who don’t claim the identity, and by straight women learning about de-centering men without really understanding (or acknowledging) queer culture at all. “Dressing feminine is for men so I’m not doing that” might be part of their process, but as a blanket statement, it erases a whole lineage of queer history and femme culture. I’m happy to be the lavender menace to point out that we are also here. And a lot of straight feminist rhetoric misses the mark or completely ignores us, when the way we navigate the world actually might help the work they’re trying to do. It’s not new to divorce one's presentation from the control and preference of cis-het men. We know a lot about it, actually.
I love the conversations we have in our community about masculinity—what it means, how it subverts, how it reimagines. Those dialogues are beautiful and have helped me better understand myself. Femme identities have the same depth. Femme is not less nuanced. Femme is not for men. Femme is not less queer, less central, or less trustworthy. (The way femininity is constantly framed as manipulative or deceitful is its own dissertation.)
Our relationships to gender, gender presentation and identity are diverse, complex, and worth talking about. Femme is not an afterthought -it’s a powerful, essential part of queer culture.
One last thing:
If your understanding of femininity is weakness, or something that only exists in relation to cis-het men, you’ve never met a femme.
This is a sad, unimaginative little definition of power & possibility and it’s time has come to rot.