“It is such an unsettling feeling, you know” I told my husband this afternoon. The day was unseasonably bright and warm and we turned our faces to the sun. A cup of tea, a coffee and the leisure of French Saturday made this moment a perfect one for sharing confidences.
“When I am with men” I shared “when I relate with them without flirting, without a slightest sexual connotation, when I am simply their partner – I feel strange, both comfortable and … unwomanly.”
“What does make me a woman? The sexual aspect, the motherhood? Without it — what does it mean that I am a woman?
“But you know” I continued “I do not feel like I’m a woman, of course I do not feel I’m a man, I almost feel like something else, something that includes both male and female, something that goes beyond those distinctions. Frankly, I think of myself as “it”.
It does feel very real, much more so than defining myself as only one or the other.
But it is quite unsettling.