Femme
Femininity held as a queer position rather than a default — chosen, worked at, expensive, and almost never read correctly from outside.
- One of twenty-eight Non-Binary identities
- No settled flag
- 14 min read
What it is
Femme is femininity that belongs to you rather than to the people looking at you. It came out of queer life, alongside butch, and it has never simply meant "feminine woman". It means feminine in a way that is queer at the root.
The history is real and documented. Butch and femme were the organising language of many lesbian bars in the 1940s to 60s — much of that culture working class, much of it Black and Latina. Lesbian feminists in the 1970s attacked it as copying straight roles. It was argued back into use through the 80s and 90s, notably by Joan Nestle and the writers around The Persistent Desire.
This page treats femme as a gender in its own right: the way some people answer "what are you" with femme, rather than with woman, or man, or non-binary. That use is real and it is growing. It is not the only use.
Keep reading
The community genuinely disagrees here, and you should know that before you go looking. Some hold that femme belongs to lesbians and sapphics and to nobody else. Some hold it is open to any queer person. Some think it is an adjective and not a gender at all. You will meet all three, and none of them is a fringe position.
So this is not an obscure term with three users online. There are decades of writing behind it, and enough argument inside that writing that anyone telling you the definition is settled is telling you about themselves.
Pronouns
Femme tells you nothing about pronouns. Most femmes use she/her. Plenty use they/them. Some use he/him and are femme without contradiction — a femme gay man is not confused about his pronouns. Some use two sets, or switch depending on the room and who is safe. Ask, do not deduce.
Does this sound like you?
Take the test
Twenty questions, about four minutes, nothing leaves your phone. It suggests. You decide.
An ordinary day
Twenty minutes at the mirror. Nobody at work will read it as anything but tidy. You do it anyway, and not for them.
It is not one look. Sometimes it is a scarf pinned exactly right. Sometimes it is rings, because your hands are the only thing you have energy for today. Sometimes it is the one ugly pin on the bag that other queers can read from across a platform.
On the way in, a man reads the effort as addressed to him. You run the calculation you have run a thousand times: correct him, or let it go and get to work. Most days you let it go.
At the queer night, the door person's eyes slide past you to whoever you arrived with. You are, once again, somebody's plus-one in the only room built for you.
Home. Face off, hoodie on, nothing performed. Still femme. That part takes years to believe, and some days you still do not.
What people get wrong
How it actually plays out
Love
The specific relief is a partner who knows the difference between "you look nice" and "you look like yourself". Who understands that the two hours were not vanity and were not for them, and who wants you anyway — or wants you more.
Butch and femme together is not two people acting out a straight marriage. It has its own grammar, its own manners, its own way of handling and being handled, and everyone who has been inside it knows it does not map onto anything on television.
Femme and femme has its own problem. Two people who both know how to be pursued, sitting across a table, each waiting for the other one to start. Somebody has to break first and it is agonising.
Dating apps are a bad instrument for this. You do not photograph as queer. Straight men flood in. Some lesbians assume you are a tourist. The people you want cannot see you and the people you do not want can see nothing else.
If nobody has read you correctly yet, that is a fact about who has happened to be in the room. It is not a report on how loveable you are.
Desire
A lot of femme desire is about being wanted specifically for the femininity, not in spite of it and not as a fetish object. There is a real difference between someone who wants you because you are feminine and someone who wants you because feminine means available.
The default assumption is that femme means receptive. Passive. The one being done to. Femme tops exist in large numbers, femme doms exist, and most of them are quietly tired of announcing it.
Stone femme is a term you will meet. People define it differently — some mean a femme partnered with a stone butch, some mean a femme with hard limits about being touched. Ask before you assume which one someone means.
Asexual femmes exist and lose nothing by it. Femme is a description of gender, not of appetite. If the whole desire question leaves you cold, that rules out nothing here.
Fetishisation is the ugly edge of this. Being decoded rather than desired. Straight men who like the look and would not survive the rest of you. You learn the difference fast, usually the hard way.
The body
Femininity is a negotiation with a body, and femme is where that negotiation happens on purpose. Hair you keep or remove. A chest that is flat, or large, or new, or gone. A jaw, hands, a voice, a waist that the clothes were not cut for.
None of it settles. You can shave for fifteen years and still not be sure whether it is yours or the culture's. Femme does not require you to have resolved that. Most femmes have not.
If you are read as female and trans, there is a specific trap: femininity performed hard so that people believe you, or so that you are left alone. Femme chosen under that kind of pressure is a bad deal. Plenty of trans femmes are femme freely, and the difference between the two is something only you can feel from the inside.
If you are read as male, the body is where the danger sits. Painted nails on a hand that people read as a man's have a different weight in the street. You already know this. You do it anyway, or you do not, and both are decisions rather than failures.
Fat femmes, disabled femmes, femmes in constant pain: the look was designed for a narrow body and a working one. Getting it done in yours costs more time, more money, more improvising. That is a fact about the design, not about you.
Work
Femininity gets read as unserious. You are taken for the assistant, the receptionist, the one who will take the notes. Nobody says it out loud, which is what makes it hard to fight.
So there is the calculation before an interview. Butch it up, tone it down, get through the door, or go in as yourself and eat whatever comes. Both choices are strategy and neither is a betrayal of anything.
If you are read as a man and you are femme, the penalty is more direct. Male-coded workplaces punish visible softness immediately, and everyone including you knows the punishment is not officially about that.
Not everyone is in an office. Care work, trades, kitchens, gig work, night shifts, no work at all. On a building site femme is a pair of gloves you chose and nail varnish you take off Sunday night. It still counts.
Being read as straight at work by default, and letting it stand because you need the money, is an extremely common arrangement. It is not the same as being ashamed.
Family
The specific insult is being congratulated. "At least you still look normal." Said kindly, at a table, over food someone cooked for you.
Some families accept the femininity fine and cannot accept who you love. The clothes were never the problem. They will keep telling you they have no problem with how you dress, as if that were the argument.
Some families genuinely cannot see it. To them nothing changed between fourteen and now. You are still the one who liked getting dressed up, and the queerness is a phase attached to a person they do not know.
Then the sorting. You become the acceptable one, the one they can introduce, while your butch partner or your visibly queer friend gets the cold shoulder. Being handed that status feels less like relief than like being used as evidence.
If you are not out to family, or you have been cut off, or the distance is a border and a visa: none of this section is a standard you failed to meet.
Coming out
Femme means coming out over and over, indefinitely, because the default assumption never does the work for you. New job. New doctor. New neighbour. The colleague showing you photos of her son.
There is a second, worse version inside queer spaces. Coming out to your own people, at the door, in the group chat, to the woman who assumed you were somebody's straight cousin. That one costs more because you had not braced for it.
Coming out as femme-as-a-gender, rather than as queer, is a further conversation and most people never have it. Explaining that femme is your answer to "what are you" takes twenty minutes and a patient listener. You are allowed to hold it privately and just say you are queer.
Then there is safety. In a lot of places, being read as straight is protection you did not ask for and may not be able to give up. Staying unreadable at work, at home, in your country, is not cowardice and it is not a failure of nerve. It is a cost you are already paying quietly.
Nearby identities
The distinction is the useful part. Names without a link don’t have a page yet.
The other queer gender from the same tradition — masculinity held as a queer position. Femme and butch grew up in the same bars and define themselves partly against each other. Some people have been both at different points.
Compare Femme and Butch →Genuinely in between, or moving across the two without the gender itself changing. If you cannot pick a side and the question annoys you rather than worries you, look here.
Compare Femme and Futch →Most femmes are women. Femme describes the shape of the gender, not a replacement for it. It only becomes an alternative to woman for the people whose honest answer really is femme instead of woman.
A similar-sounding word answering a completely different question. Transfem is about the direction of a transition. A trans woman may be femme, butch, or neither, and being transfem tells you nothing about which.
Transfeminine →If femme is your gender rather than your presentation, you are describing femininity without womanhood, which sits under this umbrella. Note that most non-binary people are not femme and many are actively distant from it.
Compare Femme and Non-Binary →Partly a woman, partly something else. That is a question of how much womanhood you have, not what shape it takes. Different axis entirely.
Compare Femme and Demigirl →Gender that moves. Femme is normally a settled position even when the outfits swing wildly. If the position itself changes, this is the closer word.
Compare Femme and Genderfluid →Flavours within femme, not separate identities. Stone femme in particular is defined differently by different people — some mean partnered with a stone butch, some mean specific limits about being touched. Ask which.
Overlapping ground for femme gay men, but camp is a performance tradition and a comic register rather than a gender. You can be camp without being femme, and femme without a camp bone in your body.
The ordinary kind. No queerness required, open to anyone, carries no history with it. For a lot of people asking about this page, this is the word they actually wanted.
It might not be you if…
- You are a feminine woman and that is the whole of it. Feminine is not a lesser word waiting to be upgraded — it is just the accurate one.
- You are straight and cis and want a better-sounding label for your style. The word came out of lesbian bars where it cost people jobs, tenancies and arrests. Lifting it out of that flattens something.
- Your femininity is something you would drop tomorrow if nobody were watching. Femme is usually the thing you keep doing alone in a locked flat with the curtains shut.
- You only ever use the word about other people. That is a taste in partners, not a gender.
- What you are actually recognising is that you are a lesbian. That is not a smaller thing and it does not need a second label bolted onto it.
- Your gender moves — some weeks feminine, some weeks not, some weeks nothing. Look at genderfluid instead.
- The real question you are circling is about transition and how you want to be seen medically or socially. Look at transfem instead.
- You want femme because it sounds better than saying woman. If woman fits, woman is not a demotion.
On the hard days
The invisibility one is the worst. You are standing in the single room in the city built for people like you, and you still have to prove you belong in it.
Then there is the day another queer person tells you that you have it easy, hours after a man followed you three streets home. Passing is not safety. It is erasure with a side of straight men, and it has its own body count.
If you are read as a man, hard days can be violent days. Nails, a bag, a walk. That is not a metaphor and you do not need it explained to you.
The quiet one: the day the femininity feels like a costume you are too tired to put on, and underneath that the fear that you only exist while performing it. You do not. It is still there in the hoodie, in the hospital gown, in the week you did not leave the flat.
And if there is no scene where you live, nobody who reads you correctly, and the word only exists on your phone at two in the morning — it still counts. A gender does not require an audience to be running.
Questions people ask
Is femme a gender, or just a way of dressing?
Both meanings are in live use, and that is the honest answer. For a lot of people it is shorthand for how they look and present. For others it is the real answer to what their gender is — femininity that is not womanhood and is not a costume. Neither group is wrong; they are using one word for two different things. Worth noticing which one you mean when you say it about yourself.
Can men be femme? Can non-binary people?
Many do, and there is a long tradition behind it — femme gay men, femme non-binary people, femme trans people of every description. You will also meet people who hold that femme belongs to lesbians and sapphics specifically, and who will say so directly. Both positions are common in the community. Neither is a fringe view, and no page can settle it for you.
Can a straight cis woman call herself femme?
The usual answer is no, and the reason is history rather than gatekeeping for sport. The word carries mid-century lesbian bar culture with it — people who were arrested, sacked, and beaten for it. "Feminine" already exists and describes precisely what is usually meant. That is not a punishment, it is just the more accurate word.
Am I still femme in a hoodie with unwashed hair?
Yes. Femme is not a maintenance schedule. Illness, poverty, exhaustion, a country where looking queer is dangerous, or simply not wanting to today — none of these are disqualifications. If it vanished the moment you stopped performing it, everybody would lose their gender in hospital.
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