I like the word ‘bisexual’. It is a word that feels right to me. It feels cosy and warm and authentic to me. However, I am a very fluid person and I’m happy just identifying as ‘queer’. For me, the label was really important when I first came out and I think that was because I hid my queerness for so long, I finally wanted to be very open about it. I liked feeling secure in a label after the insecurity that comes from hiding. I spent years trying to figure out exactly what my sexuality was, treating it like it had to be a fixed point and I needed to prove it to the world. I came up against a lot of gatekeeping, lots of people trying to define my queerness for me, demanding to know how many women I’d slept with, as though if I hadn’t slept with enough, then they would revoke my Queer™ membership card.
Coming to terms with my queerness made me realize why I had struggled so much with my body and presentation growing up, and my acceptance of that side of myself allowed me to heal. I had feelings for girls from around the age of 10. I remember some of my first crushes and I particularly remember that my body insecurity was often rooted in my worry that I would not be deemed good enough for girls to like me. I was much more preoccupied with how girls would perceive me than boys – that still stands, honestly – but I also began to experience a sense of shame that I felt the way I did towards them.
There is a common feeling among sapphic people where you feel slightly predatory for being interested in girls. I think that comes from a lot of deep-rooted homophobia which perpetuates the idea that queer attraction is depraved. This feeling created an idea in me that I had to shield myself from engaging with women’s bodies, that there was something wrong with me and my love and admiration of women’s bodies was absolutely not allowed.
I struggled with the very concept of touching other girls, which is why, growing up, I would barely hug my female friends. I think I wanted to hide from that part of myself that was curious about being attracted to girls. I also remember very vividly feeling a yearning to be more masculine and I was fascinated by the idea that there was a bigger world of options out there for me – beyond all the clothes I hated and the boys I didn’t really like but whose attention I was convinced was my only goal as a girl.
Competition is often pushed upon children who are assigned the same gender, and I felt this very strongly growing up. Competition between girls is framed in the context of beauty and our ability to attract men – personalities or skills be damned. I remember quite vividly feeling an odd mixture of emotions towards girls as I became a teenager. I was afraid of any positive emotional feelings I had towards them in case they developed into something more. I found myself fixating on the fact that my body was different to the other girls and convinced myself that I wanted to just be like them, emulate them, somehow turn into them. At that age, I found that prettiness was important to me in a way it absolutely isn’t now. I struggled with having female friends because, as much as I wanted them, I felt that I wasn’t good enough to be around them. Underneath that was an intense fear of having to admit that I was queer. I think I was just afraid of rejection for who I really was.
There was very little queer representation around me growing up. Diversity in representation matters because you are able to not only see yourself but see the infinite possibilities in queerness. I really wasn’t given the tools to be able to explore who I wanted to be and understand that, yes, my body was a queer body, and just because my body was fetishized by heterosexual men, that didn’t mean that I was what they wanted me to be. I really ended up believing that no woman could ever find me attractive, could ever fancy me, could ever love me or even like me. I thought that my bodily worth was solely in the eyes of cishet men, whom I didn’t really have much in common with usually. Somehow, I had been taught over time to think that:
• women were my competition and we were incapable of having any meaningful affection for one another
• what cishet men thought about me and wanted from my body defined my worth
• women could not possibly be attracted to me because I was chubby, had dark body hair and cellulite.
That last one still gets to me. My own experience as an adult with queer women has been one of acceptance when it comes to my body. However, whilst growing up I think I projected my own hatred towards my body onto other people and assumed they felt the same way. I was bullied quite relentlessly over my body type and I know that had a negative effect on my self-esteem. That took me to a place where I just assumed that everyone hated my body like I did, unless they were fetishizing me. However, that wasn’t and isn’t the case. A few bullies can get into your head and make you think every person you come across feels the way they do, and you start to feel insecure about the very way you move. Sometimes I wonder about all the other queer girls at school who were probably feeling exactly the same way I was and never said a word.
It took quite a long time to unpack my feelings towards my sexuality and my body. When I came out at 21, I didn’t have the queer community around me like I do now, and I think I was still completely sure that I had no place within it. Everything was a slow process: slowly seeing more people around me come out, slowly seeing more queer people on my social media, slowly having more queer people around me who showed me their multitudes so I felt comfortable exploring mine.
Learning more and more about queer history also helped me immensely. I began to see myself in people throughout history, I saw how I wanted to present, I saw how I wanted my relationships to be. Getting older and more informed meant that I slowly felt more and more like a whole person who didn’t necessarily have to spend their entire life performing.
I didn’t have to perform a bastardized version of myself forever.
A lot of my own personal body acceptance came from accepting my sexuality. The two are intrinsically linked for me. Picking yourself apart and trying to understand who you really are means that you also have to come to terms with who you really are. I used to dream of being someone else, someone in an easier body than mine. Someone thin, blonde and able-bodied.
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Queer Body Power: Finding Your Body Positivity by Essie Dennis is available from Amazon and Bookshop.