How To Be Femme and Cast Magic With Lip Balm

Image credit: Sal Harris

Up until about three years ago I had zero clue that I was experiencing dysphoria. I was riding that train to denial city so fast the trolley guy had velcro on the soles of his shoes just to stay upright. Then, one day, one of my dearest friends came out as non-binary. I was transfixed (hahahahaha… trans), but this fascination wasn’t just from ignorance. This was from a deeper place. A place I would later find was full of glittery rage, feminine strength and a craving for voluptuous scarves, the likes of which would make Audrey Hepburn’s clothes look like potato sacks and the overused tea towel no one wants to put in the wash. It was my planet femme, and it had been spinning silently inside me my whole life.

Seeing my friend transition was like reading a friend’s essay over their shoulder at school, admiring their work, shuddering with the desire to copy them, but eventually, regretfully, plodding back to your own essay, with three lines written, and praying through coffee for an original idea to strike. But then I looked at myself and realised that, damn, I had no bloody clue what I was. All I knew was that I really didn’t feel like a man. There were bigger things at stake than copying (there usually are) and I had a serious backlog of stuff to deal with. I stuck my head out the top of that train and whooped. I whooped quietly at first, but as my confidence grew and I began to understand myself better, the whooping became wild and witchy. I threw sequins on the tracks and derailed that shit, grappling with the complexities of leg shaving as I tumbled across uncharted lands.

I had no idea at the time, but in the following year this new-found comfort would come with a big side order of ‘what the actual fuck’. Suit-shopping for graduation nearly had me in tears and though I now understood why I was shaking, it just opened up more questions for the future. In my young mind, it was the drama of the century. I’m still waiting for the film.

I took the term transgender for myself in 2016 when I saw that it would help me more than hurt me. I flung my little genderqueer heart into everything I did, with pride, and the results often came back colourful. But there was more. There was something femme coming from the corner…

It took me way too long to work out what languages and continents were on that planet femme. This was when I encountered what I like to call the Cheeky Binary. The Cheeky Binary is super cheeky. It tells femmes they should like flowers and when the femmes say ‘not today Cheeky Binary’ it blushes and runs off giggling. You nearly got us Cheeky Binary. So cheeky. The thing about the CB is that it’s not to be blamed. It doesn’t mean harm, but when people listen to it and think it’s a messenger of the law or some god, then it gets dangerous. The CB is more of a pet that we trained ages ago but can’t remember why. It paid me so many visits early in my transition, without calling beforehand (rude). It told me that I couldn’t be femme because I didn’t want to wear lots of makeup, or because I liked dark colours. The kind of ‘ooh-err’ stuff that I didn’t have the time or patience for. So I told the Cheeky Binary ‘thanks but no thanks’ and watched Buffy The Vampire Slayer with a pizza instead.

My magic lip balm has changed forms a couple of times, but it’s always in my pocket. It’s my honey-smelling life saver. Most people don’t know it’s magic, they think it’s just for my dry skin (it’s multipurpose). They have no idea how many interviews it has got me through, how many new classes I have been able to teach because of it, or how many ‘5 o’clock shadow’ panics it’s saved me from. It’s not even just a symbol of my femininity anymore, it’s a symbol of my femme strength. It’s not about coping, it’s about reminding myself that I’m strong.

The title of this article is a lie because there is no one way to be femme. To me, it’s my magic, my wild train, my thick scarf, my lip balm, my colours, my transness. It’s my journey, and it’s the lens through which I see it. I hold it high and proud because it’s the proof that I can find myself, when it feels like the world is begging me not to.

Sal Harris is a self-confessed gendernaut and queer witch from North Lancashire, currently living in Rennes. She’s a writer, a creative, a femme, a poet and an English teacher, among other things.

Diversity and queerness are key themes in her language teaching and she also runs workshops on gender exploration through art and mess, looking at new ways to represent the gender spectrum. What happens when we talk about the taste of gender? What words will suffice for self-identification when we step away from all googleable words?

She’s made of paint and scarves and her inspirations include Frida Kahlo, Kate Bornstein and sometimes a little touch of Bellatrix LeStrange.