Introduce yourself.
My name is Gray and my pronouns are she/they.
How long have you been a student at Sky Sirens? What do you do here?
I’ve been a student at Sky Sirens since mid last year. I do Lyra and Conditioning classes to help me build up my strength and flexibility.
It was important to me when choosing a dance studio to pick one that emphasised the importance of sex workers in modern erotic dance.
What do you identify as within the LGBTQIA+ community?
The easiest way to described my identity is queer because it encompasses both my sexuality and gender identity. My more specific identity (at the moment) would be bisexual, grey-asexual, non-binary demigirl.
I knew I was bi since when I was 14 and cut out pictures from Dolly mag of girls I thought were *too* pretty and stuck them in my diary. I then suppressed these feelings for a few years until I was able to move out away from my homophobic family.
Once I was in my community, I was then interacting with all these different people.
Over the course of about a year I was asking trans and non-binary people in my life about their experiences with gender and realized it resonated a lot with my own rejection of womanly ideals from an early age, and that I was non-binary.
Having a word to describe how I felt about myself then allowed me to have a lot greater exploration into my fashion and self representation while still holding onto the parts of my womanhood that I aligned with.
If we recognize gender as a social construct; as an autistic person I haven’t actively or passively learnt a lot of what it is to perform my assigned gender and don’t relate to many aspects of it.
I’m still quite uncomfortable with a lot of my femininity and going to Sky Sirens was a way for me to be able to learn and get in touch with a way of moving I always admired and found beautiful but felt didn’t come naturally to me.