One might say that my toddler photos tell a political story rivaling my current anarchist organizing projects. The collage is single-minded: A little girl proudly hoisting a makeshift protest sign, traipsing through the living room, and shouting chants to herself. A little girl reading picture books on women’s suffrage, the way other kids might have read See Spot Run. A toddler, yes, but a budding feminist.

That little girl eventually turned out to be trans. As a child, I knew I felt masculine-of-center. Still, I justified it the only way I knew how: By claiming a connection to feminist history. In my family, where there were almost no out LGBTQ+ people but many proudly feminist women, this was a passable justification for gender nonconformity, easily believable by anyone I explained it to. See, the historical figures I idolized were all, in my five-year-old mind, attempting masculinity. So I saw my desire to be a boy in (almost) every way, and the fact that I didn’t feel at all like a young woman, as analogous to how feminists of yore argued against being pressured into living as housewives—not a gender identity or sign of transness, but a reaction to a societal role.

This continued until I was 13 and joined my first anarchist group (as one does). I’d been bullied by my schoolmates for being a lesbian, faced with a middle school culture in which every boy was a budding tech bro and almost every girl was okay with that, and I desperately wanted community outside of that. And rather than meeting women who resembled the first-wave feminists in a desire for masculine assimilation, I met anarchafeminist organizers, both cis and trans, who embraced deeply feminine gender expressions. I’ll never forget the first conversation I had with someone who’s become a longtime friend—a core collective member of a local anarchist space, who infodumped to me about Emma Goldman for a solid hour, resplendent in her long hair and press-on nails and considerable knowledge of anarchonihilist theory. A few months later, I spent a whole day making zines with a new friend, a trans girl with a special interest in early gay liberation, a proclivity for the least practical fonts on Canva, and a passion for resisting social hierarchies with glitter and queercore.

Like the girls at my school, the anarchist women around me had feminine gender expressions. But unlike my middle-school tormentors, they were among the most loudly and proudly feminist people I’d ever met. This forced me to interrogate the story I’d been telling myself for years. At my school, being a feminist meant exclusion from femininity; my own feminist views had led to intense mockery, mainly from straight, cisgender girls. But if it were possible and common to be feminine and feminist at the same time, then my masculinity couldn’t simply be an outgrowth of my feminism. I admitted, during one very late night at a reading group after discussing and critiquing The Feminine Mystique with friends, that I was probably not a girl.

I’ve never felt more feminist than the first time I told someone I was a transmasculine lesbian who used it/its pronouns. Than the time I cut off my long hair, started dressing in an androgynous queercore style, and pursued friendships with trans and GNC masc people. I didn’t have to be like the boys at my school, who worshipped the Andrew Tates and Elon Musks of the world, prone to harassment and lacking in social tact. I could just be my butch feminist self.

Lee Cicuta’s essay Butch Anarchy was a guiding light for me: The sacred weapon in the arsenal of patriarchy, the one they did and continue to do everything to keep us from taking, is not something we even bother to steal under the cover of nightfall. Instead, we swagger right through the front door, wryly appraise the shelf on which it sits, and take what of it suits us best.

Maybe my anarchist organizing projects, and their implications for my gender, tell a story to rival even the girlishness of my toddler photos. I’m not single-minded anymore, not wedded to a gender that didn’t feel like mine. As an anarchist in my mutual aid projects, street theater groups, the all-consuming BashBack tendency, and the home I’ve made among misfit queers trying to make the world a little more beautiful, I can be everything. Sometimes a butch, sometimes a femboy, sometimes a lesbian, sometimes transmasculine, sometimes an incomprehensible creature made of discarded genders. But always a proud feminist. Not in spite of my transness, but because of it.

I am not a feminist because I am a woman, or because I used to be, but because I believe in masculinity that is culturally lesbian, in lesbian identities that are utterly unrelated to womanhood, in a feminism that gleefully expropriates masculinity from patriarchy. Because I believe that, in the words of Lee Cicuta, “a woman can be any gender he wants to be.”