Gender Fluidity, Chosen Family, and the Invitation to Realness

By Amanzi Arnett Dowdy

“This is a new meaning of family… It wasn’t a question of a man and a woman and children, which we grew up knowing as a family. It’s a question of a group of human beings in a mutual bond.” – Dorian Corey

For much of my life, gender was something imposed on me. It functioned as an inheritance, a set of obligations passed to me that dictated what boyhood would be. Masculinity wasn’t presented as a form of expression. It appeared as the absence of expression and a performance of certainty and control. It was something concrete and easily discernible. Legibility seemed to offer protection. To be understood was a prerequisite for safety and dignity. Fluidity and the rejection of neat categorization became unintelligible. Complexity was seen as suspect, and ambiguity was a threat. 

As a child, regardless of my surroundings and long before I had language for fluidity, I understood gender as something expansive rather than fixed. Mostly through the refusal of rigid boyhood and choosing instead to move with more openness, I began to imagine myself differently.

The discovery of self does not occur in isolation. Identity emerges through both introspection and collective experience. It is relational, forged through community, and influenced by encounters with people who expand the boundaries of what one believes is possible. 

As I came of age as a queer person in the South, I encountered various phases of the gay community through music performance spaces, college life, and parties. Gay friend circles allowed a space for my sexuality to bloom, but much of the gender expression perceived to be deviant was met with shame or silence. 

These identities flourished in the nightlife but were often concealed in everyday life. Church life provided examples of veiled presentations of queerness, ostentatious and flamboyant, but accompanied by sexuality shrouded in secrecy. These groups allowed me to imagine a world beyond heterosexuality, but within the Bible belt’s stronghold of heteronormativity, parts of me remained unfed and underdeveloped. Upon moving to New York, I encountered a network of queer friendships that transformed my relationship to identity. These relationships affirmed who I already was, and also created the conditions for a deeper becoming. 

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These new friendships did not require a uniformity of gender performance to gain a sense of belonging. Evolution was both accepted and expected. Uncertainty was welcomed. Questions were not failures, and contradictions were not evidence of confusion.  Within these relationships, identity was understood as an ongoing process rather than a destination. It was my first time in close proximity to people who openly identified as trans and non-binary. Gender became less of a rigid classification and more of a space of continuous unfolding. 

My experience reflects a reality that Black queer communities have long understood.  Across generations, Black queer communities have developed kinship that challenges normative assumptions about the construction and functions of family. Ballroom houses, artistic collectives, activist organizations, and friend circles have created social structures where queer people can create meaning, care, and connection. Though these images existed in pop culture references, I had never experienced the people intimately. 

I often think about how much my understanding of myself came through a sense of awe while observing my queer friends. The obvious evidence of a departure from traditional masculinity came in the form of crop tops, nail polish, skirts, eyeliner, and other aesthetics emphasizing the soft and effeminate. They experimented with gender and boldly embraced sexuality. Witnessing these bold choices from my peers ignited in me the courage to deviate from norms similarly. Beyond surface-level clothing choices or outward gender performance, I watched them unapologetically claim complexity. In doing so, they expanded my own sense of what was available to me. I was able to explore my sexuality with more freedom. I finally had the language and the evidence to support the foundation of my own non-binary identity. 

Through queer friendship, I also found new understandings of intimacy that were not governed by traditional and transactional gender roles. Care circulated differently. Vulnerability carried new meanings. I discovered tenderness and physical intimacy untethered to sex. Emotional openness was framed as strength instead of a weakness. The restrictive gender distinctions I’d always known between masculine and feminine, as protector and protected, and leader and follower, became increasingly unstable and undesirable. 

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My chosen queer family became a vast ecosystem of varying presentations and ideas, without the pressures of flattening out differences for the sake of functions based on gender. These new family dynamics presented a space in which a male friend could “mother,” domestic labor could be shared and democratized, a younger peer could be a source of inspiration, and roles were not fixed or permanent. 

Chosen family occupies a central place within queer life. It often emerges in response to rejection, exclusion, or displacement. However, Black queer kinship traditions have never existed solely as substitutes for biological family. Black queer families provide refuge. They also produce new worlds. Within such spaces, I have found possibilities unavailable within dominant social frameworks. This world-making became central to my development. 

Without the pressure to perform manhood as a fixed social role, I began to blur genders lines in both subtle and visible ways. I began to experiment with clothing to slowly open up my expression of self. I embraced a leadership style that fused tenderness with authority instead of treating them as opposing qualities. My relationship with caretaking, household labor, and emotional responsibility expanded beyond gendered obligations. Even my spiritual life deepened. Through deepened access to feminine dimensions of myself, I uncovered new ways of understanding my connection to ancestry, rituals, and intuition. 

While family is often experienced as a space in which individuality is sacrificed in order to fulfill predetermined roles, my queer chosen family saw individual liberation not as a threat but as necessary to the health of the family unit. Community was a space where freedom became imaginable. 

“Without community, there is no liberation…but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” 

― Audre Lorde

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The first family that wanted me, the real me, was not the one I was born into. This does not invalidate my blood family, but it is evidence that I required a more expansive space. The presence of queerness and gender fluidity in my chosen family demanded divestment from systems that felt restrictive. This freedom was collective. Dominant narratives portray liberation as a solitary achievement, emphasizing personal courage. But none of us creates ourselves alone. We inherit language, possibility, and imagination through our relationships. Traditional family structures I had encountered did not provide the imagination I needed to fashion my true self.

Looking back, I understand that my closest queer friendships offered something far more transformative than acceptance. Their love was not passive affirmation. This family was an active invitation to abandon performances that no longer served me, instead of abandoning aspects of myself to serve the family. It disrupted expectations of gender and created a space in which fluidity could flourish without constant justification. They did not tell me who to become. They demonstrated what was possible. 

Queerness was not solely a site of marginalization. It became a doorway to a more sustainable self, generating new languages of care, alternative models for kinship, and the liberation of the self. Our communities have consistently transformed conditions of exclusion into opportunities for experimentation. This feels especially urgent in the present political climate. As queer and trans lives are increasingly subjected to violence, scrutiny, and public debate, queerness is often framed through either victimization or a threat. While these discussions accurately describe certain political realities, they fail to completely capture the generative dimensions of queer life. 

As with smaller queer families, we can imagine queerness as a site of invention rather than seeking the protection of respectability and assimilation. Queerness is not merely an identity category but a method of imagining freedom. Pride remains important because it publicly demonstrates these possibilities, and queer chosen families serve as a space to build these worlds freely, exist outside of the definitions of oppressors, and thrive beyond the limits of tolerance and acceptance. 

Amanzi Arnett Dowdy is a multidisciplinary artist based in Memphis, TN. Their work focuses on place-based Black cultural memory and the preservation of Black and queer community spaces in the South. Amanzi was awarded the Indie Memphis Screenwriting Fellowship, during which they completed a feature-length film screenplay I’ll Fly Away. A trained composer, they presented Songs of Cabin and Field, a concert of their compositions at the historic LeMoyne-Owen College featuring the Memphis area PRIZM Ensemble. Amanzi also wrote and scored their first short film “Shine On: The Story of Tom Lee,” which premiered on PBS in May 2025. Amanzi is approaching their second year in the Southern Studies MA program at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture.