Gender Heroes: Majestic Legay

Majestic Legay, a fat light-skinned person with a mohawk in fantastic makeup, wearing a black button-down shirt and a bow tie under a black leather vest.

Glittery Teen Werewolf Made With 100% Fatty Goodness

by Erica Stratton

This month’s episode of Gender Heroes shines the spotlight on Majestic Legay, co-creator of Glitter Politic. When not collecting Body Love Letters, Legay promotes an obese lifestyle, practices gay witchcraft, wears amazing jackets and cultivates zir mustache.

Legay lives in a shared house in Vancouver with fellow Glitter Politic founder Ashley Aron and Smith, who started Queer, Fat, Hungry. Legay calls this twist of life-imitates-Internet-awesomeness “gay fate!”

Genderfork: How would you describe your gender identity now? What’s your preferred pronoun (if any)?

Legay: If I had to choose an identity category I would say I am a non-binary trans (or genderqueer) femme. I usually use ‘they’ pronouns with people I am close with, but I am pretty serious lately about going by any pronoun. I am starting to gravitate towards that because I am feeling really complicated about all pronouns and they aren’t central to the way I understand my gender right now.

To be honest, the most accurate description of my gender for me at this moment would be that I am a sex crazed teenager who peacocks as a daddy. Everything about my gender seems performative and is constantly shifting and that feels like a funny and accurate way for me to describe this particular moment.  My lover once said to me “if prince and a tough but tender cowboy made love and gave birth to a baby wolf and the afterbirth was glitter, that would be you I think” which made a lot of sense to me. I’m not trying to be pretentious, I just have a non-binary experience of my gender and sometimes talking about it in terms of baby wolves and glitter and vintage glamour and leather daddies makes way more sense to me than things like pronouns.

Genderfork: One of the first critiques that were leveled at Genderfork was about the lack of body diversity (See “Why don’t I see more [insert group here] represented on your site?” in our FAQ). After looking for photos of androgynous fashionistas for three years, I think there is also a problem with the common perception of what body type is “androgynous”: skinny, hipless, and boobless. How can we smash this idea to smithereens?

Legay: I think we need to remember that the very notion of “visibility” is very, very loaded. We need to ask ourselves, “who is visible and why?” and “is visibility always a good thing? Is it always a choice?”. Visibility is often really about who has privilege in certain spaces and is often raced, classed, and gendered in complicated ways. For example, white, thin, “androgynous” queers dominate queer fashion blogs and websites while those who are more feminine, have different bodies, who aren’t white are often vastly undervalued and underrepresented. I am doing some writing on queer visibility in November and I hope to be able to better articulate this critique then. I think we can smash this idea to smithereens by recognizing that visibility is constructed in a way that makes certain people and bodies totally invisible. I don’t think people have to “look” androgynous to have complicated experiences of their genders. I’ve identified as trans for a really long time, but that’s not always how people saw me (I was often read as a cis femme). Visibility fails me and many of the people I love whose bodies and aesthetics don’t fit into the narrow confines of the dominant ways we see “queer”.

Genderfork: What message are you sending with your fashion?

Legay: I construct my visibility on my own terms but I acknowledge that I have no control over the ways that other people see or interpret that. I once said to my friend “I want people to see me and feel uncomfortable. Like they are simultaneously disturbed and really turned on“. This reminds me of an article that Dean Spade wrote on resistant aesthetics called Dress to Kill, Fight to Win. In it he says, “I want to be disturbed by what you’re wearing, I want to be shocked and undone and delighted by what you’re doing and how you’re living. And I don’t want anyone to be afraid to put on their look, their body, their clothes anymore. Resistance is what is sexy, its what looks good and is hard to look at and what sometimes requires explanation.”

I suppose that part of what I am trying to do is redefine people’s understanding of beauty with a forceful aesthetic that leaves people with no other choice than to notice that beauty, gender and desire are much more complex than mainstream media says they are.

On a less intense note, right now my style is teen werewolf because it’s fall and I am growing out my moustache. This means a lot of black clothes and glitter and trying to reclaim nailpolish.

Genderfork: Where do you get your clothes? It’s already difficult to find decent plus size fashion, and finding decent queer fashion just seems to add an additional level of frustration for a lot of people. (In other words: OMG, that purple rain jacket! *swoons* Where can I get one???)

Legay: I’ve been going to thrift stores since I was a tween. I get most of my accessories, t-shirts, button ups, jackets and sweaters from thrift stores. I pride myself in being able to work a thrift store like a boss and I love to shop for my clothes there as much as possible. That being said, PANTS ARE THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE. Finding pants as someone with big hips is really, really hard. I actually don’t really fit into boy pants, because I have a super wide waist. I usually always wear jeggings and women’s pants and usually get mine from Old Navy or Torrid. Finding decent fashion can be really time consuming and annoying. I would say, go to the thrift store, have patience and try everything on (because then you will find things like cropped satin purple jackets that make it all worth it!).

Genderfork: Any resources/style guides/fellow androgynous radfatties that you’d like to recommend?

A Dark Congregation (GQ Fat Latina Swag)
Callout Queen (Blogging for Brown Gurls)
Deli Sub the Femme Cub (Deliciously Subversive)
Dressupbox (Trans Queer of Color)
Fat Genderqueers
Fuck Yeah Chubby Butches!
Fancy and Dandy Fatties
Glitter Geek (Queer Geeky Glamdrogynous Korean Flowerboy Adoptee Fat Crip Artist)
Hickies ‘n’ Hotpants
Many Bothans (webmaster for Glitter Politic)
Pens and Paper ( Queer. Fat. Trans-masculine Bigender Boi.)
Queer Co.
Queer, Fat, Hungry (Queering Eating)
Trans (Fat)shion!

Genderfork: And… what are you thinking about gender right now?

Legay: I feel like there is a lot of misogyny in queer spaces (misogyny = the hatred of the feminine), and I have a lot of internalized misogyny I am dealing with right now. I feel like masculinity is often at odds with femininity and constructing my masculinity in a way that is not predicated on the hatred of the feminine but actually embraces and celebrates it is very important to me. Right now I am trying to explore masculinity while thinking about misogyny and transmisogyny a lot. My understanding of how misogyny feels personally is shifting with my gender presentation, and I don’t ever want to forget that as a femme I am committed to making misogyny visible in all of its forms so that I can resist it for myself and also be in solidarity with other femmes and feminine folks.

On a less serious note, my gender idols right now are Elvis and Prince because they both have a very meticulous masculinity and wore fancy makeup. Embracing blush and mascara like it’s going out of style is really important to me all of the time and you can often find me drinking coffee and contemplating the merits of different shades of blush.


Posted by on December 1st, 2011 at 04:00 pm

Category: Gender Heroes 7 comments »

7 Responses to “Gender Heroes: Majestic Legay”

  1. Zoée

    MAJESTIC! You are the best. <3

    [Reply]

  2. Jay

    ‘I’m not trying to be pretentious, I just have a non-binary experience of my gender and sometimes talking about it in terms of baby wolves and glitter and vintage glamour and leather daddies makes way more sense to me than things like pronouns.’

    This is just wonderful, and knocked me out of feeling pronoun angsty!
    Thank you.

    [Reply]

  3. Andy XX

    Thanks so much for the note about women’s pants- as a trans guy I also wear women’s pants and have been trying to speak proudly of that! Love it!

    [Reply]

  4. Anonymous

    you have a great sense of humor and damn…you fine in the mind and everywhere else, too

    [Reply]

  5. radical/rebel

    aw damn. this is so great. another amazing post on Genderfork of some radical, subversive queer, after that cis/straight profile dust-up.

    [Reply]

    Anonymous replied:

    wait, what?
    what are you referring to?

    [Reply]

  6. Anonymous

    i think they hit the nail on the head. there is so much misogyny in a lot of spaces- well, everywhere, but it’s definitely an issue to tackle on its own when it’s in queer spaces. a lot of the conception of non-binary/genderqueer stuff is founded on neutrality as masculinity, on male is the “default”. so. pretty bad stuff. i’m so glad you’re doing this for all kinds of rad people.

    [Reply]


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