“INTERVIEWER:

This is maybe like, could be too hard to tease out at a young age, but do you feel like you, outside of sexuality, felt aligned with other aspects of femininity?

BRI:

Mhmm….maybe it’s weird to say because sometimes I feel like it wasn’t that long ago but even still, I feel like early 2000s gender identity wasn’t as much on the table for people. Like at least in a, it wasn’t as pervasive. Like I didn’t have access to that dialogue. It just existed outside of my schema to even think that way. I think, you know. So, I don’t think gender identity for me was so much of a question that I ended up being, you know…cause yeah, I just think about people who have to pioneer that for themselves. Because they don’t have that in front of them. And that…no that wasn’t the case for me. But um…femininity…well I definitely over-compensated I would say. 

*laughing*

Like, I was like, ‘Well this is it. I’m gay. Figured it out. Going to like, make the transformation’ you know. So, I had always sort of awkwardly dressed in a pretty typical femme way for a kid going to high school in the early 2000s. And I had long hair, and I wore make-up. 

INTERVIEWER:

Oh, you wore make-up before that?

BRI:

Yeah.  I did. 

INTERVIEWER:

High femme. 

BRI:

Not high femme but…camouflaging femme. Too scared to not femme. Yeah, but it always felt like I was…yeah camouflaging I think is a really good word for that. Like not even disguising but camouflaging. Because the point was just to not stick out you know. Like I…to do enough that it wasn’t, to not draw questions as to why I was different. But I didn’t want to stand out either.”