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To Be With Her or To Be Her?

To Be With Her or To Be Her?

This age-old question has been echoing in the minds of femme lesbians, trans women, femme bi women, and even straight men who like to dress in drag since time immemorial. Being attracted sexually to women, while also wanting to do your hair the same way they do or find out where they got that cute dress, is an issue that lots of women face. This can be confusing — sometimes even painfully so — for those who are not out, who are struggling to understand their feelings, or who deal with self-esteem issues.

However, this doesn’t have to be a negative thing.

Celebrating femininity can happen on many levels, from striving to be someone, be with someone, or just generally celebrate the female form.

Being attracted to women and being female offers up an interesting paradigm for gay and bi women. From personal experience, it’s not uncommon to see a woman who is both a standard of beauty to ascribe to and an icon of attraction. Laura Prepon’s Alex Vause is a perfect example of this. When her character debuted on Orange is the New Black, tons of women drooled over her gorgeous height, hair, and sexy-girl-with-glasses appeal. However, did those same women not also envy how she can make a prison jumpsuit look sexy, how her makeup and hair are flawless despite her incarcerated condition, and how she even looks great when she cries?

It’s almost impossible not to have these feelings — attractive women cause attraction — but as femme women, we also want to look that good. However, everything discussed up until now has fit into the category of the heteronormative to some degree. It’s one thing to want better hair or cuter clothes, and also kind of want to get the number of the girl with the great hair. But it’s quite another to be constructing your entire female identity based on your perceptions, as well as pursuing women romantically. So naturally, I wanted the input of a transwoman on this fascinating topic.

My friend Drew came out and began her transition later in life, so she had a whole lifetime of experience being attracted to women and secretly wanting to look like them, as well as some recent experience actually putting those ideas into practice and working on her feminine identity. I asked her about this confusing quandary, whether it has ever posed a problem for her, and how it affects her daily life.

“It affects everything,” she admits. “I’m constantly realizing things about myself. As a transgender person, I have a different perspective on a lot of issues than most people do, and I think this has led to me doing a lot more conscious thinking about gender roles as they exist in our society.”

“Since I came out, I have realized my previous feelings of attraction to particular people who more an attraction to their style, or a feeling of wanting to be them more than anything,” she elaborates. “I have a cis lesbian friend who once described feeling like she wanted to ‘both be and f*ck’ certain women and I related to it really hard.”

However, Drew also points out the other, not so shiny, side of the coin: Sometimes women strive to be the women they want to be with because of societal standards of beauty, which are not attainable, nor should they be, for everyone woman.

“Of course, this is also an intersectional issue, because anyone who does not fit the societal definition of ‘conventional attractiveness’ will run afoul of these same problems, whether they are cis or trans,” she adds. “Maybe it’s because of their race, their size, or their height; maybe it has to do with physical health or sexuality or any of a dozen other potential issues. Regardless, almost every woman has to deal with this struggle and it just helps remind me that problems that plague trans women also plague black women, disabled women, cis queer women, and a lot of other women. Most of us look nothing like Megan Fox or Kate Moss. So really, every woman I know who is able to be her own true self and rock a style that she can be proud of — or even feel comfortable enough to leave the house in — is a style inspiration to me. It feels like just existing in the world as an actual human woman is an act of courage, and when we can find the confidence to do it proudly and defiantly in the face of everything that rains down on us all the time, we’re all beautiful. I really do mean this.”

Bottom line, femme women are beautiful, all of us, so it’s completely natural that we breed imitation as well as attraction. As long as we all practice consent and cordiality when it comes to style inspiration and telling a woman she’s got it going on, we can all truly celebrate the beauty of being feminine on all levels.

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