The Summer I Became a Femme Queen

I’m standing with my hands clasped behind my head, sweat melting down the sides of my face like I just got caught in the rain. Except I’m in a 10’ x 10’ rehearsal room with six other performers, no working window, and one floor fan. The air inside is thick with perspiration and ambition. It’s 9:00pm on a Thursday night and we’re two days away from performing in front of ballroom legends and icons at the Lover’s Ball.

In a desperate effort to cool down, I run down the stairs and push open the glass doors to step outside. The air is chilled like an ice cold martini in a frosted glass, and that first breath brings me back to life, just like a well-made cocktail. I spread my arms and look up at the indigo night sky. It’s quiet except for the group of dancers outside chatting and passing a joint.

Four months prior, I signed up for an 11-week vogue performance intensive workshop. After a full year of returning to dance in 2025, I was hungry for something more. Ballet was and would always be my first love; it taught me about the beauty in totally devoting oneself to an art. Contemporary dance showed me how strength lives in the act of letting go. When I’m dancing, I can forget about the sociopolitical, fetishized battleground that is my transgender body.

But over the three months of learning how to vogue, not a moment went by where I wasn’t aware of my body.

“By the time we’re done here, your wrists will be broken,” said our instructor, Shea (aka Shireen aka Legendary Shea 007) as she demonstrated how to stretch our hands by stretching our fingers back towards our forearm. Not broken literally, but in the figurative sense of having a cunty wrist. The goal? Feline paws and a pussy attitude.

About halfway through, the first opportunity to showcase our training arose in the form of a mini-ball and waacking fundraiser for a widely-loved dancer in the community who had just experienced a life-threatening accident.

“If you’ve never walked a ball before, I highly recommend you walk this one. It’s super low-stakes and you can get a feel for how a ball works,” says Shea, who is a mother figure to the same dancer this fundraiser is for.

Low stakes. Perfect.

I arrived to the event with a friend an hour before the ball portion started so that I could get comfortable in the space—and have a drink. The room was already vibrating with energy from the waackers in the middle of the room moving their arms and legs in fast forward. The crowd around them ohh’d and ahh’d with every accent and exclamation point in the routine.

Even though this wasn’t an official ballroom event, I couldn’t help but wrestle with my anxiety.

What if I make a fool of myself? What if it’s messy? Do I know how to vogue?

As I got up from my seat and walked over to the line as they announced the virgin vogue category, I see Lily from my performance group.

“I’m nervous!” she says to me with wide eyes and I respond in the same way.

I get in line and watch a few people get their tens. I close my eyes and visualize what my routine could look like. Choreography comes easy to me; that’s all ballet is. There’s no improvisation in ballet and one simply has to follow a specific set of routines. So when it comes to making my own dance on the spot, I’m out of my element. My brain goes blank and I freeze, like suddenly I don’t know how to speak a language I’ve been talking all my life.

By the time I make my way to the front, my hips are swaying and my wrists are circling my hands right to left.

It’s go time.

Shoulder tap, shoulder tap, circle and down. Shoulder tap, shoulder tap, circle and down. Both shoulder tap, cross over, circle and down. Circle back up and titty push. Catwalk down the stage and turn it into a duck walk. Get down to the floor and end in a dip.

“She knows the language! 10’s from the judges, step aside,” the commentator exclaims into the microphone.

I skip back to the line, smiling and feeling cunt.

Mission accomplished.

When it comes time for my first battle, I’m already starting to black out. Brown out. Right before my turn, another teacher of mine, Christopher Milan, old way legend, runs over to me and whispers, “Do old way.”

But I don’t have an old way routine.

I freak out and before I can fully comprehend the assignment, the commentator brings us to battle. I end up relying on a similar choreography as when I got my 10’s and get chopped. I hug my opponent and run to the back of the room where I can get out of the crowd.

As I make my way through the crowd, a couple of my classmates congratulate me on my performance. I sit back down and the friend I came to the event with comes in for a hug and says “Yes girl! You did that!” with a huge smile on her face. I’m just glad I walked a ball for the first time.

I stay a little while longer and a few more people I’ve taken classes with come up to me and give me praise for my performance. Even if I got chopped, it still felt good to be seen.

A few weeks later, the final performance for our group came together just in time for the studio show. We were still practicing every Saturday, two hours at a time, some days three or four depending on if we had extra rehearsals. Throughout the week, we met up to polish the routine. Run it, run it, run it. On my own time, I watched ballroom clips of icons and legends—Leiomy, Sinia, Barbie, Brooklyn—copying their movements to steal the feeling of how they moved.

There wasn’t much pressure going to the final performance. It was a group number, we already had the choreography set, and small parts here and there were improvised, including one where I’d get into center and vogue into a dip.

Performance day landed at the end of May, and I was excited more than anything. A general audience. Fifteen other dance groups. And we were the only vogue performance on the bill. A fitting way to close out nearly three months of training.

Then came another milestone. We were told that we’d get to perform the piece again—this time at the five year anniversary of The Lover’s Ball. In front of ballroom legends.

This was the real deal. The ultimate stage to test out whether these hours and hours in the studio paid off in a fun and challenging way. I started showing up to the Tuesday open classes on top of everything else, getting in more time voguing and finally, not feeling like an absolute beginner. I slowly graduated to voguing in heels, which, as a femme queen, isn’t optional. It’s a necessity.

Slowly I learned to channel the big and bold side of my femininity. Vogue is loud and larger than life. But me, I’m reserved. I speak when spoken to. And my femininity is soft and delicate. Learning to embody my sexiness, to sell my femininity the way vogue demands, meant going completely 180 of who I am at my core.

But that’s exactly why I wanted, no, needed to vogue.

The day before Lover’s Ball, Shea and her organization, Oakland to All in collaboration with the Oakland LGBTQ Center, hosted an open masterclass with three ballroom powerhouses—Packrat Basquiat, Fe Garcon, and Roman Ebony—who taught vogue performance, runway, and vogue performance, respectively. A triple stacked class, one hour each. I was already exhausted from rehearsals that week but I knew I had to go. The opportunity asked me if I was hungry enough for this? It ended up being the right decision to go, especially for some runway practice.

I got to the venue around 5pm on the day of Lover’s Ball. As a group, we got ready, ran through the performance a few times, and got warmed up on the stage. Since the stage was a lot bigger than the one we did our final performance on, there was more space to cover. And this time, the audience was on all four sides of the stage.

The choreography was grounding, the movements felt like coming home, and that helped simmer the nerves. Besides, this was the same five, six, seven, eight as last time.

But walking the ball, that made me nervous. It’s completely improvised and in the moment. With a dozen more hours of practice, and a mini-ball under my heel, I felt confident in performing my best. Who knows, maybe I would surprise myself.

Since I was already preparing effects for the two virgin categories I planned to walk (a denim look for virgin vogue and neon model for runway), I brought along a dress for the realness category. Some other dolls I knew were walking the category and I thought if they could, why not me?

When the categories finally arrived, I was ready. I remember feeling the euphoria build with every “stay” I got from my first time walking runway. My mind was blown and I had to stay focused so I wouldn’t black out. Thankfully, runway isn’t as physically demanding for my thirty-something girlie body. In that last battle, I wanted to win so bad, but the other person won and rightfully so. Their walk was nasty. But the fact that I got that far was a gag.

I was riding that high going into virgin vogue. I got my tens, then lost my first battle (same fall, different ball). After months of practice, I had learned how to speak the language, but it was still hard for me to construct shady, cunty sentences on the fly, especially when battling someone head-to-head. Still, the thrill was undeniable.

The white and black checkered floor hums under my feet with the vibration of the crowd when they call the category for female figure realness. I’m surprisingly at ease for a first-timer walking a non-virgin category with the experienced girls. After performing one choreography number and walking two virgin categories at the beginning of the night, the butterflies in my stomach have fluttered away.

All I have to do is be me. Just be a girl. I think to myself as I make my way through the crowd and over to the edge of the floor where girls are already starting to walk and get their 10s.

I shimmy up my sequined tropical floral strapless minidress and stand tall in my black leather stilettos. With my hot pink Prada shoulder bag and a lollipop in my mouth for extra feminine effect, I’m confident I’ll get my 10s, at least.

With barely any time for overthinking to take over, I walk into the fiercest category of them all: Does she pass?

The judges don’t take long.

Chopped. Swiftly.

In the five seconds between hearing the verdict and skittering off the floor, my mind goes blank. I smile it off and slip back into the crowd.

Did I just get called a brick?

Although it wasn’t the result I was hoping for, I watched my sisters from the audience. And these girls were really fishy. Shaved from face to toe. Moisturized. Highlighted. 400 cc gummy bear, half over, half under the muscle titties. Petite hands without a trace of a vein.

The categories kept going and I moved to watching the categories from the upstairs artists lounge with sofas and chairs. At around 1:45am when every category was finally called, I packed up my clothes and heels in my suitcase, put on my black oversize hoodie and sweats, slid on my crocs and called a car home.

A few days after, I was still thinking about that chop. It stung more than I thought, and the wound started to get inflamed. I started to doubt myself and question my passability. Maybe I wasn’t as real as I thought.

Before I went down that spiral, I caught myself. It’s a slippery slope to start doubting your own transness, womanhood, passability, based on what someone else says. I’m all too familiar with that and I pulled myself back from the cliff of self sabotage.

Maybe I wasn’t passing at that moment. To be fair, I was coming off a full choreographed performance and walking two categories. I was looking a little rough compared to some of these girls who came freshly showered and stress-free. They also may have been looking for a specific type of femininity and it wasn’t mine that night.

And the thing is, I will always be judged. Whether it’s in ballroom, on the street, or in the workplace, humans make flash judgments all the time without even realizing it.

Being the best version of my own realness, womanhood, transness, whatever, is the real grand prize.

What started as a decision to learn a new craft, turned into a pilgrimage to a new woman in me. Putting in the hours at the studio, bruising my body, regularly confronting my own comfort zone. The late night practices in rooms so hot that I thought I would pass out from heat exhaustion; though at the same time, it was giving Pop Star Academy in a cunty way. Even, the moments where I could barely put together a hand performance because I was too in my own head. Through it all, I learned to embody my own version of a sacred transgender body. One that’s unshakeable by critiques or chops. A femme queen is born.