• 01 Jan, 2026 *

This is my very last-minute late post for the December 2025 Bearblog Carnival. Thank you Xaya for such a fun prompt!

This has been sitting in my drafts forever because, as always happens when I write about my identity, I feel like I’m talking around things more than actually saying them. Oh well. I hope y’all enjoy though!

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There has been so much media throughout my life that has influenced my understanding of my sexuality and gender that it’s difficult to pinpoint just one to write about. I grew up listening to the Indigo Girls, and their music still brings me a lot of comfort. When I was around 12 or 13, Haruhi from Ouran High School Host Club introduced me to the concept of not giving a shit about gender. A couple years later, in spite of its meme status, Homestuck exposed me to some pretty interesting ideas about non-normative relationship structures. I also want to give a huge shoutout to Boulet Brothers Dragula for introducing me to drag that didn’t aim to be glamorous, but that’s another story. There are many more things that influenced me in other ways, but what affected me the most, I think, was the life and work of Claude Cahun.1

I think one of my art history professors showed me Cahun’s (and possibly their life partner, Marcel Moore’s) work for the first time around 2019 or so. I was instantly enchanted, partially because I love surrealism, and partially because I was looking at a beautiful butch2 from nearly a hundred years ago. The more I read, the more I was drawn in. Honestly, the best way to describe how it felt was with some Indigo Girls’ lyrics:

"And here’s a young girl On a kind of a telephone line through time And the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend..."

• Indigo Girls, "Virginia Woolf"

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I had sort of come out before I had seen Cahun’s work. I had been out as bi for forever, and I was lucky enough for that to be a non-issue. At that point, I was thinking about trying out she/they (or they/she? tough choices.) pronouns, but I only told my close friends and still went by my birth name. I would not have dreamed of calling myself trans (this is a lie. I dreamed a little). I was still clinging to semantics at that point. A woman is an adult, right? Maybe I just don’t feel like a woman because I don’t feel like an adult. I was around 18 or 19, so adulthood was still very new to me.

It happened gradually, but the more I saw Cahun’s playfulness with gender in their self-portraits and their writing, the more I realized that gender was something that could be played with. The best modern artists do this. They make everything, even their life, into a medium.

The thing that ended up putting the biggest crack in my egg, I think, other than seeing someone say that they felt best as neuter in the 1920s, was a little part of Cahun’s biography in which she mentioned having a crush on a man, and imagining herself as a man when she was with him. This really resonated with me.

I have always been attracted to men, but the older (the further into puberty) I got, the grosser I felt in a heterosexual relationship. I could not imagine myself as anything other than a man if I was with a man, but I felt in my gut that they saw me as a woman. And yet, being a gay man didn’t feel right. If I imagined myself with a woman, I could only see myself as a woman. Or, at least, not a man. A lesbian is a woman with an asterisk to most of society, after all. It’s why I still feel comfortable calling myself a butch or a dyke even as I’ve been on testosterone for over a year now.

I think it helped that the time I discovered Claude Cahun was the same time that I was properly studying philosophy for the first time. I’ll probably elaborate on it in another post, but those first few classes made me develop an aversion to anyone relying too heavily on logic, which is probably exactly what those classes weren’t supposed to do.

Isn’t the world so much bigger and more complex than this word game we made up? Aren’t so many things both one thing and its opposite at the same time? Logic is great when you’re writing a paper and dissecting an argument, but are you really going to live your life with such a limited perspective? Relatedly, Cahun is perhaps best known for their autobiography that is also not an autobiography, Aveux non Avenus (translated in English as "Disavowals" or "Cancelled Confessions").

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I was lucky enough to have an aunt who was out as trans for as long as I could remember. She was very open about this, and I knew even when I was a kid that she was a woman who happened to be born a boy. Along with this knowledge came the explanation that some people are "born in the wrong body," but they know who they are inside. This explanation is true for some people, but it was never true for me.

On top of this was the discourse and gatekeeping around queer identities on Tumblr in the 2010’s. I spent so much energy in middle school and high school thinking about what labels I wanted to go by. I knew I didn’t feel comfortable in this cishet societal role I was growing into, but if that was really the case, I thought, why couldn’t I name the role I was comfortable growing into? Why do so many other people seem to know?

What Claude Cahun (and many other artists and theorists experimenting with life or selfhood as a medium) taught me was that it was perfectly okay to not know. You do not need a label to be queer. Back in the 1910’s and 20’s, homosexuality was just becoming something it was possible to identify with, as medical professionals started to study and classify human sexuality. I remember that in some important text at the time, homosexuality was compared to the image of Narcissus staring at himself in the lake, which surrealists like Cahun of course ate up. Surrealists had a fondness for mirrors and doubles. It’s why Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore chose those alliterative names, and it’s why I followed suit when I renamed myself.

I think the biggest thing for me was learning that, although queer people have always existed, the borders between identities have not. Over and over I have tried to explain myself to other people, or explain myself to myself, when truly I didn’t need to. I don’t owe anyone a neat and tidy story that makes sense. I don’t have to be knowable in that regard. Claude Cahun meant so much to me because their art was not meant to assure anyone of who or what they were looking at. I really, really wanted to be like that. That is, I wanted to be brave enough to leave people confused.

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Notes

This post will mainly be me speaking from memory about Cahun’s life and work, so do take what I say with a grain of salt. I did a lot of research on them during my undergrad, so I kind of know what I’m talking about, but it’s also been several years, so the specifics might be off, and I won’t be citing sources. I figure that since this post is mainly about how Claude Cahun affected my self-understanding, the strict facts aren’t as important.↩ 1.

Cahun was French and referred to herself with feminine pronouns, but has put on many genders and has stated that neuter is the one that suits them. I get the sense that he wouldn’t mind me using whatever pronouns and just confusing people. There has also been debate about how much Marcel Moore contributed to work that has been credited to Cahun. Moore was mainly an illustrator, I think? The two of them collaborated a lot, and possibly purposefully obscured authorship in some places; "they" could be plural, too!↩

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