Embracing the allure of fluidity
‘It's all about letting go of gender,’ says model and Instagram star
They are the new beautiful people and their pronouns are they, their and them. Fashion courts them. Publishers pursue them. Corporations see in them the future of consuming, as generations come of age for whom notions of gender as traditionally constituted seem clunkier than a rotary phone.
Why settle for being a man or a woman when you can locate yourself more exactly along the arc of gender identity? And, on another axis, why limit your sexual expression to a single definition when you can glissade along the Kinsey scale?
“It’s all about letting go of gender so you can be everything in between,” said Terra Juano, a model with 100,000 Instagram followers who track the booming career and amatory antics of this androgynous MexicanFilipino beauty with a shaved head, a mile-wide smile, an affection for cowboy hats and an uninhibited tendency to go top free.
In the evolving language of gender expression, Terra Juano, though assigned female at birth, identifies as nonbinary. And in business as in life, TJ, a native of Stockton, Calif., has lighted out for a new territory. It is one in which the conventions of both homo- and heteronormative expression are called into question daily.
“In the past, whether you were a straight woman or a gay woman, it was like either you were supposed to be hypermasculine or hyperfeminine,” said TJ, who, at 29, embodies a somewhat unlikely transit from outcast tomboy teenager subjected by family to aversion therapy to a beauty hotly in demand both for great looks, as may be expected, but equally for a smarttalking renegade attitude.
It is a stance evocative of Annie Oakley, the sharpshooting protofeminist 19th-century rodeo queen whose image is tattooed across the whole of TJ’s back. “Why not be both?” TJ said. Few exemplify that position more persuasively than Jacob Tobia, a fast-talking Instagram phenom with a penchant for rainbow lipstick and face-filter selfies.
By self-definition an AMAB (“assigned male at birth”) transfeminine nonbinary person, Tobia’s chatty and propulsive memoir of gender emergence, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story, is set to be published next spring.
In it, Tobia, 27, describes a metamorphic journey that is met with discomfort and scorn.
“When I was in college, the whole universe felt so binary,” Tobia, an Arab-American sixfooter, said one blistering day this summer as they sauntered on heels around the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“I finally said to myself, ‘Damn it, I’m going to Dollar General to buy some cheap gold glitter polish and the brightest red lipstick I can find,’ ” Tobia said. “And, when the lip was on and the polish was dry, I had this moment where I realized it’s not that I’m exploring anything new here. I’m calling back an old part of myself.”
What seems inarguable is that a move toward gender self-determination is underway, whatever its pace. On a chilly evening last winter, model Rain Dove Dubilewski, 28, and their roommate and friend Cory Wade Hindorff, 27, were addressing an audience at the Phluid Project on the struggle to promote fluidity in a world inured to one-size-fits-all.
“So many people are station- ary in identity,” Rain Dove said. “I think we need to leave some room to shift.”
Labels are the issue, Cory Wade told a rapt audience at Phluid Project that evening, and it was pigeonholing that had made being a contestant on America’s Next Top Model so trying for Wade, whose gender presentation is always in flux.
“I don’t care whether you call me he or she or refer to me as a man or a woman,” Cory Wade said. “I never felt it was necessary to settle in any one place on the spectrum. My identity is up to me. What I am is for me to decide.”