Gender fluidity in later life
How exploring gender can be freeing
An excellent first-person account by Lisa Daniels at Nextavenue, demonstrating how the exploration of gender identity can be confirming and freeing for many older people, as well as keeping us in touch with the rapidly-growing LGBT and queer scene.
She writes, “Many of our new words have to do with identity and many of those have to do with gender.There is cis-gender, gender neutral, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, gender fluid and one that is new to me: non-binary. During my 23-year hairdressing career, I was lucky to have several gender non-conforming clients who taught me about authenticity and self-acceptance. When I first met each of them in the early 1990s, they didn’t have accurate words to describe their gender identity. I also learned that gender identity and sexual orientation are two completely different things. The biological male who wanted to become a woman preferred women and so did the mustached, biological female who identified as a man. Gender is much more than appearance, but if how we look accurately reflects our inward identity to others, it becomes an affirming loop of expression-reaction that makes us feel at home in our own skin. Whenever I cut my hair extremely short, I feel more energized, as if long hair is a girly lampshade that dims my light.”