The Shape of Softness: A Femmeness Unseen

Living femme without permission, performance, or proof.

A year after coming out with only the word softness, I finally have the language. This piece explores femmeness as a neuroqueer stance—rooted, fluid, and resistant in the face of a world that demands hardening.

Introduction

It’s been a year since I came out to my wife, and even now, I return to that moment with a kind of reverent disbelief—not because it wasn’t true, but because I had no words for the truth I was trying to share. There was no script. No planned speech. No careful phrasing to hold the weight of it. What I had instead was the theatre of my mind: a vivid, sensory place where understanding blooms not through language, but through scene, tone, and emotional gravity. I knew what I felt. I just didn’t yet know how to say it.

As soon as I spoke the truth aloud—my truth—her questions came. Reasonable questions. Natural questions. But they were questions I couldn’t have anticipated, and thus couldn’t script for. That’s the thing about being a gestalt language processor in an unprecedented moment: without a model to draw from, I was suddenly exposed. Vulnerable. My autistic mind spun under the pressure of uncertainty and emotional intensity, with hyper-empathy and alexithymia crashing into each other like waves. I couldn’t hold onto her exact words—only the shape of them, the emotional trace they left behind. What are you looking for? What are you trying to accomplish? That’s what my mind held onto.

And I had only one word in return. Softness.

That was all I could say. Not because I didn’t feel more, but because I couldn’t reach the rest of the language in that moment. The yearning I carried was vast, but unnamed. The internal gravity I’d followed to that night pulled me not toward gender as category, but toward a state of being. I didn’t want to win anything. I didn’t want to fight. I wanted something I could live inside. Something that didn’t require hardness to exist.

It’s taken me a year to understand what I meant that night—what my body knew but my language couldn’t yet hold. I wasn’t looking for softness as the West defines it—weakness, passivity, submission. I was reaching for something else entirely. Something more like this:

Femmeness is not merely an aesthetic or an expression of gender—it is a political orientation toward softness. But not the softness the West imagines: not weakness, passivity, or submission. Rather, it is the softness of Tai Qi—yielding without breaking, moving with intention, absorbing force and redirecting it. Femmeness, in this sense, is a disciplined, relational power. It resists the hardness of domination not with compliance, but with rooted fluidity. It is strength that does not seek conquest.

This is what I meant. I just didn’t have the words—until now.

What I Meant by Softness

For most of my life, the word softness felt off-limits. Or at the very least, suspect. In the Western cultural lexicon, softness is often equated with weakness—something decorative, indulgent, easily broken. It is feminised in the most reductive way: softness as passivity, as something to be protected or dominated. I grew up with that framing, and I knew it wouldn’t hold the weight of what I meant. I wasn’t asking to be shielded or adored. I wasn’t seeking a dainty performance of femininity. The softness I was after felt older than any gender binary, and stronger than the systems that taught me to fear it.

In the year since that conversation with my wife, I’ve circled this word in my mind like a stone in the palm—feeling its edges, its weight, its cool resistance. I kept asking myself: what kind of softness do I mean? And again and again, my mind returned to movement. To flow. To my training in martial Tai Qi and Qi Gong, where softness is not collapse, but responsiveness. Not surrender, but presence. The ability to meet force not with brute strength, but with rooted redirection. Yielding, without giving way. Flowing, but never unmoored.

In those practices, softness is not a failure of form—it is the form. It is the practice. The discipline. You sink into the earth, not to vanish, but to root. You respond to pressure, not to submit, but to channel it somewhere else. There is tremendous strength in that kind of softness. Strength that doesn’t need to dominate to be real.

And so I began to understand: this is the softness I meant. This is what I was reaching toward that day when I had only one word. I wasn’t seeking softness as comfort. I was seeking softness as stance. As a way of being. Not just in my body, but in my politics. My relationships. My refusal to harden just to survive.

Femmeness, for me, is this softness in motion. It isn’t about “passing.” It isn’t about appealing to the cishetero gaze. It isn’t aesthetic. It is embodied, disciplined, and relational. It is how I choose to meet the world: not with armour, but with flow. Not to win, but to endure—and to remain myself in the process.

Femmeness That Refuses to Perform

The deeper I moved into this understanding of softness, the clearer it became that I was also unlearning something else—something quieter but deeply ingrained. I had spent years absorbing the idea that femmeness needed to be recognisable to others to be real. That unless it was legible to the cishetero gaze—unless it could be categorised, consumed, or admired—it didn’t count. But that kind of femmeness was never mine to begin with. I wasn’t trying to become beautiful in the way magazines or department stores promised. I wasn’t looking to be claimed or validated. I was trying to survive—whole.

When I wrote The Struggle Is Real, I was sitting with the dissonance between the internal sense of femmeness I carry and the ways the world refuses to see it. Salespeople steered me toward “men’s” clothes. Fitting rooms felt like foreign territory. There was no welcome. No recognition. Just the lingering question in their eyes—are you lost? And the quieter question in mine—do I even belong here?

But I’ve come to realise: I don’t need to belong to that. What I seek is not visibility, but truth. My femmeness isn’t performative. It isn’t a curated aesthetic for public consumption. It’s not about creating the illusion of “womanhood” for the comfort of others. It’s a quiet refusal. A rejection of the scripts I was handed. A commitment to softness—not as decoration, but as stance.

I’ve stopped trying to meet other people’s expectations of what a femme body should look like, or sound like, or move like. The softness I embody is not always visible—but it is mine. It’s there in how I choose to walk through a world that tried to harden me. It’s in how I teach, how I write, how I dress—not to please, but to feel true. It is an internal orientation, not an external ornament.

Femmeness, for me, is not about becoming what others see as “womanly.” It is about refusing domination. Refusing compliance. Refusing the demand to harden in order to survive. It is not shaped by performance, but by presence. I don’t need anyone to buy that I’m femme. I don’t need to pass a test I never agreed to take. What I need is to live in alignment with my own truth, my own body, my own scripts—or sometimes, my own silence. And in doing so, I honour a form of strength the world still doesn’t understand.

Martial Arts, Flow, and the Intelligence of Softness

Looking back now, I can see that softness was never absent from my life—it simply had to wear different clothes. Even in my second act, when I lived by brute strength, anger, and violence, there was something else moving beneath the surface. A different current, quieter but persistent. A longing for flow, for pattern, for coherence. I didn’t have the words then. I didn’t even have the concept. But I had my body, and my body remembered.

I grew up in chaos. Abuse, emotional neglect, the kind of loss that doesn’t announce itself but lives in the marrow. There was no safety, no instruction manual for survival. The world felt jagged, merciless, deafening. As a child adrift in a sea of tragic circumstances, I learned to cling to fragments of meaning wherever I could find them. It began with undisciplined street fighting—raw, instinctive, a way of hitting back at a world that hit first. Later came wrestling, still brutal but offering the first glimmer of structure, of strategy, of patterns that could be learned. And much later, when the rage began to burn less brightly, I found my way to the flowing traditions of Tai Qi and Qi Gong, where movement was no longer about domination, but about relationship—about breath, balance, and the unseen currents moving through all living things.

At the time, I thought I was learning control. Mastery. Power. But in hindsight—in the beautiful retrocausality that a later script allows—I see that what I was truly learning was something softer, and infinitely more vital: the intelligence of flow. The art of meeting force without becoming force. The practice of yielding without collapsing. Of adapting without abandoning yourself.

As an autistic GLP, I now understand why martial arts felt more natural to me than conversation ever did. Movements were scripts I could hold. Forms were sequences I could feel in my body without needing to assemble them word by word. Pattern, flow, sensitivity, and discipline—these were not just techniques; they were survival strategies. They were, in their own way, a form of autistic communication with the world.

The metaphors of my practice stay with me still. Water wears down stone not by force, but by persistence. Bamboo bends in the wind but does not break. The wind itself reshapes landscapes without ever being caught. Each one soft. Each one unyielding in its own way. This is the kind of strength I recognise now as my own. A femmeness that isn’t about presentation but about presence. A strength that moves, bends, absorbs—and in doing so, transforms what it touches.

In Tai Qi, as in life, everything moves within the interplay of Yin and Yang. Softness and strength. Yielding and action. Neither is lesser; neither can exist without the other. Yin—the receptive, the fluid, the enfolding—is often cast as feminine. Yang—the active, the forceful, the expansive—is often framed as masculine. But these are not hierarchies. They are partners in an eternal dance, each carrying the seed of the other within. In every yielding, there is a hidden strength. In every act of force, there must be a space for return. I see now that the femmeness I carry—this commitment to softness—is not the absence of strength. It is strength shaped differently. Relational, rooted, patient. A strength that honours connection rather than conquest.

Martial arts didn’t erase the chaos I carried inside. But they taught me how to live alongside it. How to flow around it. How to root myself even when the ground felt unstable. In that sense, I have been practicing the politics of softness for far longer than I ever realised. I just needed time—and the right language—to see it.

Femmeness as a Neuroqueer Strategy of Being

The more I have learned to recognise the movements of Yin within myself, the more I have come to see my femmeness not as an imitation, but as an inheritance. Not a performance of gender, but a strategy of being. Femmeness, for me, is a neuroqueer way of relating to the world. It is rooted not in how I am seen, but in how I sense—how I flow, how I adapt, how I refuse the brittle postures demanded by a world obsessed with force.

In this sense, my femmeness is not separate from my autism; it is an extension of it. The same sensitivity that tunes me to light, sound, and movement tunes me also to the subtle shifts in energy between people. The same mind that scripts dialogue, that patterns and echoes and weaves fragments of language into gestalt wholes, also recognises the patterns of relationship: when to yield, when to root, when to move with the current rather than against it. Flow states that others might call distraction or delay are, for me, acts of profound listening—allowing my body to process what words cannot contain.

Echolalia, scripting, repetition—these are often pathologised in autistic people, seen as rigid or maladaptive. But in the context of femmeness as flow, I see them differently now. They are movements of relationality, not withdrawal. They are ways of holding meaning in the body when language fractures under pressure. They are gestures of softness, of seeking resonance rather than confrontation. They are, in their own way, dances of Yin—adaptive, fluid, relational, enduring.

This kind of femmeness does not seek conquest. It does not seek centre stage. It does not demand that others remake themselves in its image. It is a way of being present to the currents of life without losing oneself to them. A way of refusing to harden, even in a world that rewards hardness. A way of living through movement, not through domination.

When I move through the world now, I move with the quiet understanding that my femmeness is not for sale, not for spectacle, and not for translation into a language that flattens it. It exists where I exist—in my sensory presence, in the flow of my mind, in the rooted softness of my body. It is autistically rooted, neuroqueer by nature, and femme in its stance toward life itself. And it has been with me, waiting patiently, all along.

The Softness That Resists

Femmeness, for me, is not merely an aesthetic or an expression of gender—it is a political orientation toward softness. But not the softness the West imagines: not weakness, passivity, or submission. It is the disciplined, relational softness of Tai Qi, of Yin moving through the world with rooted intention. It is strength shaped by flow rather than domination, by yielding rather than breaking. It is a refusal to become hard just because the world demands it.

This softness lives in the way I teach—offering scaffolds rather than commands, creating spaces where students can unfold at their own pace rather than performing on demand. It lives in the way I write—layered, sensory, circling truths rather than forcing them into rigid arguments. It lives in how I move through the world, quietly attuned to the shifts in light, sound, and feeling that others miss, trusting that presence matters more than performance. This is the flow I live by now, the current I have learned to trust.

But even within this softness, there is the seed of something harder. In every Yin, there is a kernel of Yang—a moment where flow must become stance, where yielding must end, where a line must be drawn. I feel it in the classroom when I must enforce boundaries, when I must call the energy back into order, when safety—for myself and others—requires firmness. I feel it when I must assert my right to be recognised, respected, not erased. These moments are uncomfortable for me. They are heavy. I do not move into them lightly. But they are part of the dance. They are not betrayals of softness; they are its guardians.

True softness, after all, is not the absence of strength. It is strength held differently. A river carves canyons over millennia not by brute force, but by persistence. Bamboo survives storms by bending when trees snap. Wind shapes the earth not by shouting its presence, but by steady insistence. The boundary that holds the river’s course is not its opposite—it is its necessary partner. So too with the moments when I must stand firm, even inside my commitment to flow.

This way of being will not always be understood. It may be misgendered, misread, dismissed. But it remains legitimate, whole, sovereign. It is not lesser because it does not conform to the hardened, spectacular models of strength the world prefers. My femmeness, my autistic relationality, my way of moving through space—all of it stands as its own kind of truth. A softness that resists, a flow that endures, a presence that refuses to be conquered.

Softness That Resists
for those of us who do not harden

femmeness is not frill,
not lipstick in the mirror
or lace pressed flat against the skin.

it is the slow breath held in a stance,
the way a reed knows when to bend,
how bamboo does not snap but sways
in storms that level kings.

it is not softness
as the West sells it—
not submission dressed as sugar,
not pleasantry, not pretty.

no.

this softness is coiled intention,
a muscle that remembers the blow
and chooses not to return it.

this is Tai Qi at dawn,
bare feet in cold earth,
the spine listening before the hand moves.
this is yielding without collapse,
responding without retreat.

it is power,
not the kind that conquers—
but the kind that endures.

I move like this now.
not to please,
not to pass,
but to survive as myself.

to stand firm like water.
to protect like wind.
to carry the sacred
without becoming stone.

call me unreadable.
call me strange.
call me woman only in parentheses.
but know—

this is not mimicry.
this is not costume.
this is not for you.

this is the femme that grew in silence,
learned to redirect the strike,
and chose softness
not because it was easy—
but because it was the only way
to stay whole.

Final thoughts …

When I came out to my wife, I had only one word. Softness. It left my lips with more weight than I understood at the time—more urgency, too. I didn’t know how to explain what I meant. I didn’t have a script. But my body knew. My body had always known. It had spent a lifetime reaching for this very thing, even when I couldn’t name it. Even when I fought against it. Even when the world punished me for moving differently, feeling too much, refusing to harden.

Now, more than a year later, I can finally say what I meant. Not just in words, but in rhythm. In story. In poetry. This is the breath of relief that comes not from being seen, necessarily—but from seeing myself clearly, fully, without shame. From being able to say: this is my femme. This is what I was trying to offer that night, when the question came and I froze. When all I could manage was a stuttering word in answer. This is what it meant.

This, too, is how we show up in the world—as autistic gestalt processors. One word in a moment of overwhelm. Then, a year later, a thousand words and a poem that moves like breath. We don’t always have access to language in real time—but that doesn’t mean we don’t know. Our knowing is real. It’s just stored differently. It unfolds slowly. It arrives whole, but only after time and tending and trust.

I was always flowing toward this. Even when I didn’t know the name. Even when I couldn’t draw the map. The truth was never absent. It was simply moving through me in a different form. I was already living this softness before I could define it. Already shaping my life around a way of being that the world often misunderstands, but that I now recognise as sacred.

This femmeness—this fluid, disciplined, neuroqueer way of being—is not a performance. It doesn’t need to be seen to be real. It doesn’t need to be approved to be true. It flows. It bends. It yields. And it endures. Like water. Like wind. Like me.