At the same time, however, Powell says gendered societal norms also influence how they decide to dress to best present their gender identity. Like Hernando, Powell dresses differently depending on how they feel at a certain day or moment. Perhaps a traditional work environment may move a gender-fluid person to present more feminine or masculine to fit in with colleagues, she suggests. “Sexual fluidity was a way to try to describe and explain that phenomenon of change and development and oscillation and growth and sensitivity to environmental contexts … We quickly found out that the very same issue applies to gender.”Įveryone whom BBC Worklife spoke with for this article described gender fluidity in slightly different ways, but they all landed on roughly the same idea: it indicates that gender “is not a fixed point”, as Powell puts it, but rather flexible and able to shift depending on various factors, both within a person’s internal self as well as their external surroundings.įor instance, certain environments may dictate how a gender-fluid person expresses themselves, says Erin Davis, a sociology professor at Cornell College in Iowa, US. “Others said, ‘That doesn’t fit me because I don’t tend to stay in one category completely consistently over time,’” Diamond says.
“We used to think people came in two flavours, heterosexuals and homosexuals… then we realised there are some folks who do not feel like they fit in either category.” That gave birth to the term bisexual, but, as Diamond explains, that didn’t work for everybody, either. “In many ways, our definitions of gender fluidity that we use now are borrowed from the language that helped us understand sexual fluidity,” says Lisa Diamond, psychology and gender-studies professor at The University of Utah, US, who began studying the field in the 1990s. The origin of gender fluidity has roots in the notion of sexual fluidity: the idea that sexual orientations exist beyond straight, bisexual or gay, and might shift over the course of a person’s lifetime. But at its foundation, she explains, gender fluidity enables people to take their identity and expression one day at time, instead of feeling tied to a single, overarching gender label.įor many people who are gender fluid, the discovery of the descriptor has been liberating, helping them understand themselves and the way they live. “There are as many ways to navigate gender fluidity as there are gender-fluid people,” says Philadelphia-based Liz Powell, a gender-fluid psychologist, who works with many gender-fluid clients. The term is hard to pin down precisely, since it describes such a vast array of people and experiences, say experts. Gender fluidity has grown even more visible as celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, Ruby Rose and Cara Delevingne embrace it in the public eye. The term acknowledges that gender doesn’t have to be fixed, and de-emphasises the need to align oneself with a specific gender – a concept more and more people are moving away from, as conversations about alternate ways to express and experience gender proliferate. The term ‘gender fluidity’ has come to best describe the way some people feel they fit outside the gender binary. The lived experience of gender fluidity – wearing a binder one day and more feminine outfit the next – is what ultimately helped Hernando discover that the term applied to them. And then there’s times in which I’m like, I need my binder, because I’m not feeling it,” they say.
“One day I wake up and feel more feminine, and maybe I want to wear a crop top and put earrings on. Hernando felt it was an even more apt descriptor for their gender identity. That experience was the gateway to another discovery: the term ‘gender fluid’. I just had felt completely different my entire life.” But the more education they got about the range of possibilities outside the gender binary of ‘woman’ or ‘man’, the more they felt they related. “ is way behind in terms of gender,” believes the Barcelona-based Hernando, who uses both they/them and she/her pronouns. The journey continued during Pride Month that June, when Hernando found both an article and a documentary on non-binary gender identities, by Time Out Barcelona, further opening their mind to possibilities beyond the gender binary of ‘woman’ or ‘man’. Then, when Covid-19 took hold in March 2020, they got a lot of alone time to reflect on their identity. Carla Hernando, 26, never quite felt like they fit into a particular gender.
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