Project K.I.S.S

babyperez:

I was talking to an ex-lover a few weeks ago and he told me that I was masculine. 

“I am…?”

I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to something like that because I consider myself to be both masculine and feminine, but I think he meant something else. He was purposefully omitting my femininity in order to compliment my character. I think he was speaking of effeminacy as a pejorative and I really hate that. In truth, most of what he perceived in me as “masculine” behavior was actually in emulation of the black women that have raised me, not men. They identified as women, but chose not to live under the oppressive, violent yoke of the men in our lives (my grandfathers and my father, too). Some of them never married nor had children. I don’t understand how someone could relate that to masculinity or not. That sounds more like freedom of choice.