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When I was younger, I was convinced that theater would be my future. As someone who was notoriously shy, socially anxious, afraid to talk to anyone new, I found comfort in the stage. For a few months out of the year, I could adopt a new persona, become a different person, and perform their life for others to see.
Looking back, I was a middling teen actor, already being typecast as “the eccentric” or “the mom” because I was fat and therefore could never play the lead, but at the time? I thought it was everything. I thought that was it for me.
I had no idea my best performance was off-stage, was within me, and there was more to come. During the same time in my life where I would proudly strut around in costumes, I was beginning to notice my voice was “too deep.” “I sound like a man!” I would tell myself, and looking back, I want to laugh, because no, of course you didn’t, but also – wistfully – ohhh but what if you did???
During the same time as I was laughing riotously in the dressing room with my friends, caking on makeup, I was consciously training my voice so that I would speak in a higher register. Suddenly, my voice became eternally chipper, occasionally mousy. I sang the men’s part in the jazz choir. My natural voice is low, nondescript, but all of a sudden I sounded like a Disney princess.
What drove me to do this? Was it my inclination to act, expanding outward – or rather, inward? In college, I became even more of an expert at this gendered performance. I took a feminism and film course that examined women during the Golden Age, with hearty discussions that included representations of homosexuality in film. My professor introduced me to Mae West, and that, now that was it for me. Her exaggerated curves, her bespoke femininity, her entire attitude. I became obsessed. Mae West was even born on the same day as I was; I stole her birthday.
The professor of that course said something I’ve never forgotten; he mentioned how Mae West performed in drag, and at the time I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand. Looking back, however, it’s obvious. She wore her womanhood like a costume, and whether I consciously realized it or not, that was her appeal to me. It made me think, “I could do that, too.” Not long after, I discovered the power of makeup, I began binge-watching Mad Men and I found new ways to perform. I am a woman, I am a woman, I am a woman, I would tell myself, begging for it to be true.
I’ve always been nonbinary, some flavor of trans, for as long as I have been alive. I have always been queer. There was never a moment where I made a conscious decision to be the way I am, I just began critically analyzing my own motivations and what gender and sexuality truly mean to me. When I first came out as nonbinary at the tail end of 2018 to two of my friends, I told them, “It’s the difference between wanting to kiss Harry Styles, and wanting to be Harry Styles.”
During the same conversation, I admitted how performative my gender has been, how I even changed my own voice to be who I thought I should be based on societal norms, which is a decision I made as an awkward teen that haunts me to this day. I’m still learning how to reject the commodified version of my voice, after over a decade of speaking this way. Every time I speak in my natural register, I get a little thrill — not only am I rejecting the impulse to perform hyperfemininity, but by doing so, I’m finally embracing myself, and who I am often feels like a rebellion.
Growing up closeted, life can be a theater; a series of performances. I was convinced when I was younger that I would continue acting forever; it was my passion. I never could have predicted that those desires would come true, that I would hide behind a borrowed persona, afraid to live my own truth. My therapist recently told me, “You don’t have to perform for other people’s comfort,” possibly not knowing how much this might strike me, how it spoke to everything I knew about myself and the version of myself I’ve been wearing like a mask for most of my life.
Gender is inherently a performance. So much of what we believe to be true about ourselves was internalized, sometimes even prior to birth. I won’t fault anyone for performing a version of their gender that speaks to them most loudly; after all, I still love Mae West. And besides, I would be a hypocrite, because aren’t I still performing, even now? All of those oversized floral button-ups, the masculine shoes, the lower register of voice, I am telling others, but mostly myself:
I am not a woman, I am not a woman, I am not a woman. I’m not here to make you comfortable.
— Kimberly Lopez (they/them) is a queer, nonbinary librarian living in the heart of Lawrence. They can often be found reading romance novels or ranting about the validity of boy bands. Their obsession with Harry Styles is “perfectly normal” and “healthy.” Follow them on Instagram. Read more of their work for the Times here.
