Any other femme identified person remember when you realized that womanhood was something to fear rather than enjoy? Was it when you started to develop in middle or high school? Or maybe it was when you were trying to find your personal style without your Mom’s help. Whenever that moment was, you probably realized that your coming of age story was never going to an easy story to tell. There’s a darkness that’s shrouded over every femme’s story I’ve ever encountered. Regardless of hometown location, age, ethnicity, or family makeup, we have all dealt with less than pleasant circumstances based solely on gender expression.

What’s more dismaying is how many people want their hands in the control system over femmes. Everyone has an opinion that demands to be heard and actually taken into consideration, as if we’re supposed to care. Every decision that a femme makes is up for scrutiny no matter the size or significance. From the moment we’re placed on this planet expectations are dumped on us and we’re punished if we don’t measure up. While this is true for male identified people as well, many of the consequences aren’t as easily administered to them than they are to us.

It’s maddening to have conversations with men who don’t care about their actions literally putting people who look like me in danger. Nearly every week, since I’m deciding to be generous here, I’m bombarded with posts about femmes deserving the ill treatment we endure. Someone gets assaulted, we ask questions about their clothes and behavior. Someone gets shot, we assume they provoked the shooter. I want to ask where they do that at but the answer is everywhere. The accountability is very rarely placed on the perpetrator because it’s easier to justify the horrors femmes face.

How wild is it that people who never truly know (or care about) the consequences of their words to femmes will try to advise us on the “proper” ways to be ourselves? Don’t wear this. Don’t say that. Do serve. Do play your position. There is no winning the “model femme” prize because it’s an unachievable goal. Too many of the tips conflict if not completely cancel each other out. For example, consider the rules surrounding speaking up. If you talk with some people, they will highly encourage speaking your mind because what you have to say is valuable. But if you go to another group of people, they might tell you what topics to stay silent about to not upset anyone. Which piece of advice we follow and what the repercussions of our decision based on speaking is a conundrum that femmes must consider, regardless of any other aspects of our lives.

Continuing to see outrage over the femme body rather than understanding is disheartening. In the eyes of society our bodies aren’t ours and any action we take to embrace ourselves is met with at best intrigue and at worst, uncontrollable anger. There have been times when my body has made others so upset that I’ve been told to have some shame. Nothing was obscene about my outfit nor was I ever talking to the individual. Regardless, it was now my problem to fix. There’s nothing wrong with our bodies even when people project their ideas on us.

What happens when we’re notable? Femme entertainers have the grace to allow the world to see their beauty and talent and our response is to try to shame them. The obsession with femme celebrities following the rules we put in place for them isn’t their faults or responsibility to feed into. When they break out of one of the stupid boxes we put celebrities in, we vilify them. We streamed the music and watched the videos, did we not? It makes me wonder what gives us the right to put money in their pockets and try to make them feel bad about how they choose to show up in the entertainment world. It doesn’t make sense to indulge in what we like while putting a cloak of humiliation around it.

None of this makes sense. None of the rules make sense and I’m not sure that they’re supposed to. Maybe we put these restrictions up because we don’t want femmes to live freely. Maybe it threatens a sense of control that our society has relied on for centuries. But what kind of society is so weak that we won’t allow femmes to be full people who deserve respect? Or at least to be left the hell alone? I think more importantly the question should be why do we care what femmes are doing if it’s not really hurting anyone.

It’s no one’s business to know exactly what we see our womanhood as and how we present it. No matter how often we’ll hear from someone else of any gender the steps to put ourselves in boxes that make them comfortable, we don’t have to get in. We don’t have to give explanations for our choices if we don’t want to. Our womanhood isn’t about anyone other than ourselves first. Whatever we have left can be distributed at our leisure. So the next times someone tries to give a tip about our gender expression, I hope we have the strength to reply with a simple “Hush.”