My Gender Fluid Husband

I don’t know all the words. Labels aren’t for me, so I never really bothered to search for the word when I already knew the definition.

My husband sometimes dresses and behaves in a more feminine way, then it’s the opposite and he’s definitely more masculine, then it’s a combination of both. Just watching him walk from the bed to the bathroom in the morning tells me which kind of day it is. I don’t label it a girl day or boy day and I don’t label the man as femme or butch.

It’s just Monday and Thorny.

Saturday afternoon, though, I found him on his laptop obviously reading and quietly crying. Heart in my throat, I went to him, terrified of what might have happened to hurt him again. But he looked up and smiled through his tears and said, “I’m gender fluid. I didn’t realize I’m what that meant.”

Apparently, he was looking for a label, maybe even unconsciously, to explain just what it is he feels and has been trying to express when he cross-dresses. I hadn’t realized he’d been searching because I thought he’d been fine just being himself around me, his family, and now his friends and coworkers. If it settles something in him, though, I’m all for it.

So now we have a label of gender fluid to go with the definition that fits him as being a man who can feel more like a woman or more like a man on any given day or even depending on the activity.

“Some days at home he wears dresses, paints his fingernails and plays with dolls; other days, he roughhouses, rams his toys together or pretends to be Spider-Man,” Ruth Padawer wrote in The New York Times about a 4-year-old named Alex. “Even his movements ricochet between parodies of gender: on days he puts on a dress, he is graceful, almost dancerlike, and his sentences rise in pitch at the end. On days he opts for only ‘boy’ wear, he heads off with a little swagger.”

I read that and, yes, that is my husband (minus the toys). If that’s what gender fluidity means, then that’s what he is.

I still don’t care, though, because I’ll continue to treat him the same as I have since the first time he let me see the different sides of him. Regardless of how he feels today, he’s still the one I love.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments.

Related articles

• What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress? (nytimes.com)
• . . . The Answer, of Course, Is Nothing (pinkisforboys.wordpress.com)