I bought four new items of clothing last year:

1) a loose, blood-red, Medieval-style blouse

2) a pearly pink maxi skirt

3) a white, lacy Mary Shelley-esque maxi dress

4) a wine-purple shirt with a floral print.

With these four new items, my wardrobe had shifted a little towards the sensual femininity I always wanted to embody, and to some extent, always had.

In the early 2000s when I was growing up, mainstream lesbian representation was often intertwined with masculinity.

Ellen DeGeneres, arguably the most famous lesbian of the time, had short hair. My primary school friend’s queer mothers had short hair and a rotation of blue jeans. Janis Ian from Mean Girls (2004) is smeared by Regina George as being a ‘lesbian’ due to her alternative appearance starkly contrasting the femininity of the Plastics, even though Janis is ultimately revealed to be attracted to boys.

It’s worth noting, of course, that early representation of butch and masc lesbians was not without its problems – queer visibility often came from being the butt of the joke.

I never had short hair. I was anything but butch. It took me many years to come into my sexuality. But since I bought my new clothes, each time I’ve worn them, I’ve stubbed my toe on a realisation: I am as gay as every rainbow in the world, and I am still as femme as the goddess Venus.

Ever since humans began to wear clothes, fashion has been a carrier of identity.

A person’s fashion choices often aim to signal to others where they belong in society. Funnily enough, in an earlier draft of this piece, I made a Freudian slip and misspelled “where” as “wear” – “wear they belong in society.” The diversity of clothing reflects the diversity of the human population.

There were times growing up when I thought that everyone looked like everyone else. I am not sure that’s the case anymore.

The feminine parts of me often feel like a surprise, and for a while I wasn’t sure why. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became to me that all the people in my life who embraced and relished in their femininity also happened to be straight.

The most talked-about lesbian at high school was the tall, muscle tee-wearing, tree-climbing Maths teacher. I was nothing like her.

While lesbians have historically been stereotyped as distinctly unfeminine, the all-prevailing stereotype of gay men is that they wear nail polish, speak with high-pitched voices, and listen to Kylie Minogue on repeat.

But both of these stereotypes are mostly inaccurate. And even in cases of gay men who are more traditionally feminine, new research unfortunately suggests that many masc-leaning gay men frown upon their femme-leaning counterparts due to their perceived proximity to womanhood.

On the flip side, as Katherine Giunta wrote for Archer back in 2016, femme-leaning lesbians are often seen as less ‘legitimate’ than butch women – again, it’s because of their perceived proximity to womanhood, but more specifically, to heterosexual womanhood.

Travelling this idea beyond the realm of sexual orientation, trans women are often shoved between a rock and a hard place in terms of their gender expression.

Generally, if they are not performing femininity to within an inch of its life, they don’t ‘pass’, and are therefore at much greater risk of being the victims of transphobic hate crimes.

But if they are performing femininity to within an inch of its life, they may be accused of “reinforcing the gender binary” – even by fellow members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

This past year, I’ve had the pleasure (I guess?) of learning about tradwives.

A portmanteau of “traditional” and “wife”, this subculture glorifies conservative forms of femininity, primarily partaking in heterosexual marriages, being a stay-at-home mother, wearing pretty dresses, and living on farms.

The last word of that sentence – “farms” – brought to my mind a particularly famous member of the subculture by the name of Hannah Neeleman, or as she’s known on social media, “Ballerina Farm”. A dancer-turned-mother of eight, she is (in)famous for her propagation of Mormon values and Little House on the Prairie-esque aesthetic.

In some ways, Neeleman and other tradwives seem like the perfect role models for women who genuinely love being feminine.

Personally, tradwife fashion appeals a great deal to me. I love those smock dresses, flannel shirts and hand-knitted cardigans, and it’s taken me the highest possible amount of self-control to not empty my bank account on them.

But here’s the thing – the principles underpinning tradwifery are so conservative, it’s terrifying.

Many journalists and content creators have discussed the divine-femininity-to-alt-right pipeline, and while this doesn’t account for every single tradwife on the planet, it is a growing pattern.

A substantial proportion of tradwives identify as Christian. This would be fine, except for the fact that their preferred religious practices tend to centre campaigning for “biblical femininity” and against “sexual depravity”.

Sexual depravity. Familiar with that term, anyone? Those of us who have experienced even a modicum of homophobia probably are.

So, maybe tradwifery isn’t for me. But what is?

Raise your hand if you have ever been personally victimised by traditional gender roles.

I propose that femininity does not have to be traditional, conservative, or stuck in the 1950s to be legitimate.

Who gets to decide what is masculine and what is feminine? I have namechecked dresses, makeup, motherhood and many other things that denote this type of gender expression.

But what if I said that frogs were feminine? That umbrellas were feminine? That the colour grey was feminine?

You might look at me like I was something that you’d stood in. But you might also feel like you had the permission to choose what elements of culture got to be a part of your gender expression, and to choose to call it ‘feminine’.

The way I dress would likely meet the tradwives’ check of approval. The way I love would not.

Sometimes, I indulge in a fantasy of staging a traditionally feminine TikTok set-up, filming a tutorial on how to make bread, but with a rainbow flag hanging in the background, for no other reason than to troll people who think femininity and rainbow flags are antithetical to each other.

I just want to be free. I just want to be able to dress as I please, without judgment from anybody inside or outside of my community. I want the same for every other queer and trans person, too.

I think that we can reclaim femininity in whichever ways we like. We just need to get a little creative.