And I know that sounds like a slogan you’d find airbrushed onto a Tumblr header circa 2012, probably in the same font as “I thought you said extra fries” or “my other ride is a butch,” but I truly do mean it in the most sincere way. Let me break it down for you so you know I’m not ragebaiting or being purposefully convoluted for the fun of it:

It’s not that I’m not a woman, because trust, I am plenty of woman. I pick my nose and pull the wires out of new bras like the rest of us! That’s part of what makes it so weird, because I’m not interested in rejecting womanhood. I’m trying to live inside it, even though the version of womanhood that exists in the world hasn’t been constructed with women like me in mind. It’s usually filtered through heteronormativity (awesome buzzword, take a shot) through men, their expectations, their presence. And I don’t move through life that way. I never have. It’s not second nature to me like it is to so many others. So I’ve had to find my own way into it. Not by reinventing it, but by figuring out how to live with it truthfully. And honestly, that’s been a slow process. Not because I’m ashamed of being a woman, but because it’s taken time to understand how to exist in this perpetual performance without constantly feeling like I’m doing it wrong.

And yeah. It’s political. It’s inconvenient. It makes people squint when I say things like “I don’t want a husband, I want to eat cherries in the forest with my beautiful lesbian trad wife and build a shelter out of compost ho ho ho.” It makes people think I’m being cute. I’m not being cute... I’m being serious. Bc in a world that puts the kind of love that is in service of men on a pedestal, a woman wanting a wife is seen as either ornamental or taboo.

It’s not even that I think all lesbians feel this way. I just know that I do. I’ve tried to explain myself through the lens of gender and ended up choking on it. But when I say “I’m a lesbian,” it feels like the first thing that makes sense. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s mine. Because it came from me, not from whatever mold was poured over me. Some people like me know themselves first through who they love. That love becomes the prism through which they see the rest of the world. And sometimes, lesbianism is that prism in the way you make sense of your physical person, your boundaries, your longing, your anger, your heart, your place in the world.

So let me be clear, “lesbian” isn’t reactive, it’s foundational. It’s not “before woman” in a hierarchical sense. It’s “before” like “beneath,” as in bedrock. A core, not a consequence. A way of being in the world that supersedes performance.



With love from the forest floor,

ipodpuppy (≚ᄌ≚)っ🍒🪵