Recently, I attended a holiday party for the restaurant group I serve under with the goal of handing out enough of my business cards that, by the end of the night, I might be able to quit my restaurant job altogether. An ambitious goal, for sure, but I had a plan: find the gays.

While I can’t speak for my entire generation, I can certainly speak to my own experiences with queerness, visibility, and bodily autonomy in tattooing.

I started tattooing myself during the early days of COVID-19, right around the same time that I asked my friends to participate in a little experiment with me: using they/them pronouns. While my gender has fluctuated across the binary spectrum since I was at least seven years old, having an isolated group full of queer friends during the pandemic helped me to realize that I didn’t see myself as a woman, and that I felt so much more comfortable when people in my life didn’t see me that way either. Being surrounded by people who actively participated in my exploration of gender was incredibly rewarding, and I didn’t feel insecure in my body or gender.

Of course, as the things started to open back up, I ventured out of my queer safe space more often and, consequentially, got misgendered more often. It was so frustrating to get constant reminders that the world didn’t see me the way I saw myself. It’s an unfortunately common experience for genderqueer folks, as people will look at our bodies, find characteristics of our sex, and use those traits to associate us with a gender that makes them feel comfortable. Our society still struggles to dissociate sex from gender, so our anatomies are often wielded against us, as the parts of our bodies that are difficult (if not impossible) to control are oftentimes the same characteristics that lead people to misgender us.

I can’t control that my body has grown breasts and not facial hair, but those are still the things that people will look for if they’re “confused” by my clothing, language, mannerisms, chosen name, or anything else that I use to express my gender as I see it. Growing up, and especially going through puberty, I would feel so frustrated by friends, family, and anyone else passing through my life that used my body as a talking point. I’m lucky that much of it was kind-hearted compliments, but it was confusing to me how people would point out the elements of my body that I couldn’t control, like my chest, hips, and even my weight, as I was coming of age. It made me feel like adulthood required me to accept losing control over my body.

I still can’t control how strangers perceive my gender through my body, but tattoos have allowed me to regain that sense of self-control and bodily autonomy that I felt I lost when my body developed into adulthood.

Making my own choices about imagery, style, and placement in my adornments has helped me to mark my body as my own— to really personalize it. The pain of getting each tattoo is pain that I control and pain that I consent to experiencing. The outward expression of my self image on my skin gives people more information about who I am as a person than my anatomical traits ever could. People may still wrongly determine my gender through the traits associated with my sex, but they now have to look past so much of my time, labour, and choices, all visible on my skin, in order to find what they’re looking for.

I can’t force people to see me the way I see myself, but I believe that tattoos can help to guide people in the right direction when they interact with me. Tattooing helps me feel that my body is my own, and I prove that whenever I show the world the choices I’ve made on my skin. For me, not all of my tattoos are explicitly queer or even related to my gender identity, but to me they are all far more interesting as an introduction to who I am than just what’s in my pants.

The issues that I have with control over my perceived gender and control over my physical appearance are cut from the same cloth, but while I may never be able to control how people see my gender, tattoos help me control how I see myself, and that is definitely something to celebrate.