Lately, as a queer, femme body, I find myself being herded into newer and newer categories of being digested as a person by the public that doesn't completely agree with my system. Every single day, it seems I can't escape being asked by familiars and strangers on the streets even: What are your preferred pronouns? I can't bear this virtue signalling any longer. It's upsetting me more than making me feel understood in this world. It is like at the very moment in my life when I'm beginning to own my ease, all and sundry are hell bent on making me feel uncomfortable again. And this sick feeling in my stomach at each of these times has got me thinking about my own personal takes on these ideas of presentation, publicness and pronouns.

While I'm well aware that I'm living in the contemporary moment where these very ideas are being argued, adjusted and acquired into our languages. [I'd like to imagine that labels like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender persons and queer — and their many translations and trip-ups — didn't always fit every body or enough either.] I'd like to write out this personal witness to my own struggles with these terminologies. This might be twisted by adamant assholes among us who want to enforce rigidity and rigour but rather it is to propose that the promised fluidity of our present discourse doesn't also account for every single body. And that's okay too, right? I hope it still is.

In my own life, attachments to these labels of individual identity fall apart when it comes in contact with love, lust or both, or even in contact with the outside of myself. One of the first times I grappled with this self-realisation was before I was even 10. One morning, like something had shifted in my stomach, I found steel and snuck out of my grandparents' house before sunrise. It was to arrive appropriately at a strategically, well-camouflaged perch to spy on the construction men washing themselves. Even then, I knew it wasn't right but it was okay. It was like I had no choice in this matter; every night I went to sleep knowing I'd be drawn to that spot the next morning. Like a ninja, for the next couple of years, I learned to negotiate mango leaves, twigs and tiles without having them crackle, crumple or cringe to get the briefest eyeful. I knew boys weren't supposed to want this —

At 11, my mother's friend asked me to be the ring-bearer at her wedding. Until then, I'd gotten new clothes on only birthdays, Christmases and New Years, which all fell too close for delicious anticipation. I insisted on the chunkiest gold buttons for my shiny black sherwani and gold buckles for black shoes — Schiaparelli would have been so proud. A couple of weeks after the wedding, my grandmother took me to a studio and photographed me in that suit. But she also put me in the prettiest little white dress, a pair of clip-on mother-of-pearl earrings, a long pearl necklace, white frilly lace socks with black Mary Janes. My pose in each of these photos is ever so gently different — square in one, sinuous in the other. It is like the wearing of these garments gave shape to the something bubbling on the surface. It was subtle but sure these stances. I knew boys weren't supposed to be able to shift like this —

For most of my teens, my grandparents' conception that rebellion resides in denim meant that all of my outfits were tailored trousers and starched shirts. I looked like a corporate cog but I wasn't and some people could read past this suiting material. Eventually with earning, I have tried on every version of myself in between before arriving at my present look. These changes have also meant threading myself through various tribes. And while this destination has got the public to read me in very particular ways, I'm not sure getting here had anything to do with thinking at all. In fact, now that my playing with gender has begun to be caged as a non-binary experience, I find myself thinking about the ways I could fine tune this look to read as something else. What will I put on my body now that will make it carry itself differently from this overriding narrative? How will my not changing it at all underscore my own position in this narrative more?

Silly me, talking about drapes and doodads again. Okay, let me tell you about the ways that people have worn me or I have held onto them like a shawl to walk down a street at night. In the weird, wonderful ways that I have lusted and loved so far, I have found that these bodies have granted me safe passage into spaces usually restricted to me. And I have done the same for them. I think in not centering my choices and acknowledging the many ways they change to accommodate or act against those around me, I side-step this main character syndrome. I'm glad that my community has found the strength to pry open the jaws of public speech and get them to account for them in ways that they want. But I think that we shouldn't erase other gestures towards blurring gender and generalities. And sometimes, nothing and everything fits, and most times, it is a practice not phrase,

There's this sinister, succinct Magaret Atwood poem that I will place as an end knot here —

like a hook into an eye

— in truth, these pronouns, practice and pleasure don't always fit easily, either ways.

Joshua Muyiwa is a Bengaluru-based writer and poet.

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