Gender feels like a cage

As a young girl, I felt that there was so much attached to being a woman, and those were the things I couldn’t do, say, or be. I often walked around in shorts, a cap, and a hoodie but once in a while I felt the urge to wear a short skirt and some heels.

I existed in duality, feeling the same enthusiasm playing FIFA as I did playing the Covet Fashion game. However, there was always pressure to choose. By the time I was in primary school, proudly calling myself a tomboy, I felt ashamed of all the parts of me that were girly. These parts didn’t quite fit into the persona that I was becoming accustomed to.

This was despite the fact that gender fluidity was a big part of African culture historically. Spiritual leaders in different African societies usually carried multi-gendered spirits and were therefore typically gender fluid. Historically, Sangomas in Ndebele culture could refer to themselves as females when they were commanded by a dominant female spirit without hesitation.

In Ghana, Burkina Faso, and the Ivory Coast, gender identity was determined differently before European laws. Shaman Malidoma Somé of the Dagaaba says that a person's gender is independent of their sexual anatomy. “It is purely energetic. In that context, one who is physically male can vibrate female energy and vice versa. That is where the real gender is.”

Shown in “Fuck Your Gender Norms: How Western Colonisation Brought Unwanted Binaries to Igbo Culture”, Igbo pronouns are gender neutral. Pre-colonisation the Igbo existed in a society that had flexible gender structures. They considered it normal for one to be both a female son and a male daughter. Allowing women to take on wives or husbands to take on the surname of their wife in order to continue her family’s lineage.

According to the Dogon tribe in Mali, the perfect human being is androgynous and they centred their religion around the loss of this duality. The tribe worships Nommo, ancestral spirits described as androgynous, intersex, and mystical creatures, and also called "the Teachers."

In Britain, it wasn’t until 2021 that we had our first Black non-binary romance on TV and western media dominated our reflections on culture from when I was a child. I ‌felt out-of-place wearing skirts when I was with my guy friends and I could never speak of all the varying interests I had without being told, “you’re such a girl”. This shame also existed when I was around my female friends but in a very different way. It was okay to dress masculine, considered cool even. The more hoodies and sneakers I owned, the more the cool girl label was put on me and the media worsened this by pushing the ‘Not Like Other Girls’stereotype on TV.

If I wanted to be cool, then I couldn’t be too girly, but if I didn’t learn how to be a ‘real woman’ then I would never get married – and that, as a young girl, was peddled as the be-all and end-all.

Like Jacob, another non-binary person said, “all that gender meant for me as a child, was just things that were forbidden.”

Image Courtesy of Takunda Aaron Chimutashu.

The sexuality label

Bisexual, was the first label that ever really fit me. I was attracted to girls and boys. It wasn't easy coming to that conclusion, but it was the first time I felt seen. While I had felt like an outsider amongst both men and women, for the first time I felt the same way within the LGBTQIA+ community. Everyone wants to put you in a box.

Even amongst the sexually liberal, there was a tendency to push you towards the binary of straight or lesbian, but you couldn’t be both. As a plus-sized Black person, I often experienced a toxic combination of sexualisation, fixation and tokenisation of my body. There was still lots of pressure to be something that people could easily understand, but I wanted the freedom to be multiple things at the same time.

It didn’t help that the only representation of bisexuality was often white celebrities who were performing it for a crowd. Imagine that; someone merely acting out something that's a part of your identity. In the years that I was growing into who I am, I found myself surrounded by more and more performative bisexuality.

A lot of girls at parties, sleepovers, and clubs usually performed sexual acts in front of guys, simply for the male gaze and pleasure. And when I said that I liked girls, it couldn't be real nor be accepted if a guy wasn't a part of it.

A study conducted by Breanne Fahs examined women's narratives about performative bisexuality through forty qualitative interviews with women of diverse backgrounds. They found that, “Although younger women reported more performative bisexual experiences in public, older women reported more pressure to perform as bisexual in private. Experiences with performative bisexuality did not consistently predict political attitudes that supported full civil rights for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer (LGBTQ) community, showing a disconnect between behaviour and attitudes.”

This study found that a lot of women felt pressure to be attracted to the same sex for a sense of validation, even those that were not in support of the LGBTQ community. Yet, bisexuality is still not considered real by a lot of people and our experiences as bisexual people have always been challenged. This is even more evident amongst Black plus-size women. There's constantly a lot of debate around what it means to be bisexual, with some people seeing it as a phase.

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As Rebecca Plante argued for the American Psychological Association, “Interpretations of what ‘counts’ as bisexual vary widely across groups. Others argue that bisexuality serves as a vehicle through which women decide whether to be gay or heterosexual, whereas still others claim that bisexuality is a legitimate and permanent identity category.”

Now as if all this wasn't confusing enough, my best friend pointed out that I was actually Pansexual.

According to Healthline, “The prefix ‘pan’ means ‘all’. Similarly, pansexuality means that you’re attracted to people of all genders. This includes people who don’t identify with any gender (agender).”

Note that being pansexual doesn’t mean you’re attracted to all people. For example, heterosexual men aren’t attracted to all women, and vice versa. It simply means that we find ourselves attracted to people of all sorts of gender categories.

So what's the difference? I identify with both. Basically, when you're bisexual you're attracted to multiple genders but it doesn't mean all genders. So you can be bisexual and be attracted to only women and non-binary people or be bisexual and be attracted to only men and women. Bi means attracted to multiple sexes and pan means all. For me personally, gender isn't the biggest thing I'm looking for but personality is everything.

Why wasn’t all of this enough?

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"While I had felt like an outsider amongst both men and women, for the first time I felt the same way within the LGBTQIA+ community"

Image Courtesy of Takunda Aaron Chimutashu.

The Question Of Gender

Although women's and men's relationships in precolonial Africa varied, changed and were culturally specific, there were some common threads. A majority of African societies attempted to achieve heterarchy; a system of organisation where the elements of the organisation are unranked (non-hierarchical) or where they possess the potential to be several different ways. This meant establishing multiple centres of authority and fostering equitable gender relations between women and men. The amount of labour a group or individual could control throughout history determined status for most Africans, which meant that motherhood and giving birth to children was a very important aspect of life in a historically underpopulated continent. Gender roles as we understand them today however, were not.

Bisexual or Pansexual, I was still expected to look, speak, and act a certain way. My fashion choices meant that on varying days of the week I was expected to behave in a particular way. Show up to a place in a dress and there would be many attempts to have me end up in the kitchen and suddenly be bad at the video games I had grown up playing. I Showed up at a place wearing full-on guy clothes and there were many more comments about how cool it was that I didn’t care about the way I was dressed. I did.

This is inherently the power of fashion. A quest to establish what we are trying to say with our clothes. Although gender is based on sex, gender itself is a construct. Gender is what sex means socially, culturally, politically, economically, and historically. Gender informs all the stereotypes we are forced to live under. This extends to our clothes; everything we wear makes a statement. The more feminine the clothes you wear the less society awards you respect. The more masculine the clothes you wear are, the more cool, professional and smart you are seen to be.

According to VeryWell, “Nonbinary gender identity is a term used to describe individuals who may experience a gender identity that is neither exclusively woman nor man or is between or beyond both genders. Nonbinary individuals may identify as genderfluid, agender (without gender), genderqueer, or something else entirely.”

They tell you to dress the part but they forget to tell you they rigged the fashion game against those who dare blur the lines of what they consider acceptable.

Fashion was one avenue I often tried to find myself in but couldn’t. The fashion industry has changed, sure, but where are the pictures of people who look like me? There isn’t, nor should there be, any one representation of what a non-binary person looks like. To be non-binary is to be free of any gender constraints that threaten to cage you into any one box and our ancestors understood that.

I am non-binary when I’m wearing a dress with heels, when wearing jeans pretending to know how to fix a car, when wearing shorts and even on the day when I am somewhere in between wearing a dress, sneakers, and a shirt. I am a Black, non-binary, plus-size person who has the right to see herself in the pages of a magazine. It took me 25 years to finally embrace my freedom and express myself fully through the clothes I have. More than anything though, it took me 25 years to realise that I no longer had to choose. Like my ancestors, I could just be.