Gender Identity: The Freedom to Be, The Power of Gender Expression, and Self-Discovery

Are you comfortable fitting into gender stereotypes? Or do you fit into one or like to be labeled? As a society, it is important to separate gender expression and gender identity from each other so that people don’t feel trapped. People should not lose themselves in the process of gender expression, instead, it should help them to find themselves.

Gender expression should not feel restrictive and should not determine gender identity. It should be looked at as a tool for self-discovery; one that unfolds independently from external pressures, identity labels, and sexual orientation.

Brandon Hu remembers how his interpretation of gender impression began. He had to do a project for his ninth-grade history class on some historical event, person, or society in ancient or classical periods. His teacher did not want the students to research a boxed set of topics. The teacher believed in intuition and meaning and suggested Brandon write about Sappho instead of choosing a topic that dealt with sexuality in Islam.

Sappho was the main character in his transformative thesis. Brandon’s thesis was about Sappho’s poetry, the fluctuations and fluidity of gender, relationships, and sexuality in ancient Greece. The evidence was based on her poetry, contextual norms in Spartan and Judaic society, and various scholarly journals he referenced. It was then he started to feel maybe this thesis for his term paper was different. It was more of a thesis on his identity, who he was.

Before we get into more details about Sappho, let us have an overview of Brandon’s life, and how he remembers his life and experiences of gender expressions vs. gender identity. His first introduction to the idea of gender was when he was around seven. He speaks about how his parents signed him up for the hockey team with many other boys. There was something that scared him. He couldn’t go after the puck, he couldn’t imagine pushing someone aside to steal or bang the hockey sticks. Everything felt bad.

To understand Brandon’s insight, one must first look at Sappho. Born in 630 BCE in Eresus on Lesbos, off the coast of Ionia, Sappho came from an affluent family. Her father, Scamandronymus, was a wine trader and married Cleis, Sappho’s mother.[1]

She also married a man from Andros known as Cerclyas and had a daughter she adored named Cleis after her mother.[2] Sappho’s poetry survived, but in physical fragments and through the reuse of her poetry throughout history by authors and literary critics.[3]

Her legacy remains today with authors J.D. Salinger and Peter Green.[4] Lastly, Sappho passed away around 570 BCE. According to tradition, she threw herself off the Leucadian cliffs as a dramatic suicide because of an unrequited love with a ferryman, Phaon.[5]

How her poetry reveals what sexuality and relationships were like in Greece is through the fact that she is of a conflicted identity. While bearing a child and married to a man, she writes about having sensual feelings for women and men, proving that sexuality and relationships were blurred at the time.

That summer, Brandon’s parents signed him up for a sports camp. He recollects crying on the soccer field because he was overwhelmed with all the expectations, positions, and rules of the game. He was made fun of by the other boys, saying he was not a boy. The coach reprimanded him for crying, saying it was for girls and not boys. Brandon was convinced he was not normal. He knew he wasn’t a girl, and he remembered struggling with understanding who he was when he was in the fifth and sixth grades.

Brandon was confused, and he tried to fit into being transgender for two years, from eleven to thirteen. The media he was consuming, whether it was TikTok or YouTube, made him think he was a girl. He was made to understand he was transgender by the way he acted or thought, super binary. However, he never felt right when his friends addressed him as she or her.

He went on with them in our label-based society, and it made him feel worse. He wasn’t comfortable with the pressures of being a boy coming with that label: athletic, cars, more physical and aggressive with each other. It wasn’t him.

When Brandon graduated from elementary school, he was still confused about his identity. He was walking into a new school, and it was a new start. This new class made him feel even more confused as well. There was a clear distinction between “girl” and “boy” groups, and he realized that if you were in the middle, that was considered taboo.

By the time he completed his seventh grade, he had an identity crisis. He started questioning who he was and what he was. Then, in his eighth grade, he decided to embrace my biological gender. From they/them, Brandon went back to the/him. He tried to play lacrosse and talk more masculine, and it worked for him. He became immersed in teen boy culture. By the end of the eighth grade year, he was confused, not knowing who he was.

Things changed when Brandon was in his high school freshman summer and went to this music camp in upstate New York. He met some of the most talented and kind people, and he felt like he cherished himself. There was no pressure to be anything. Brandon was like his authentic self of who he was: a boy who doesn’t fit in the gender stereotypes and is a bit more feminine, but also a boy who hung out, felt feelings for, and cherished his guy friends.

To this day, Brandon feels he was a hermit crab scavenging for a shell. He stopped looking for a label, instead, he expanded it by breaking stereotypes and expectations that have changed him. He remembers praying to God and Lord Buddha to bless him with a stable identity, and he found himself in the twilight zone.

Brandon analyzed the events of and concluded that gender expression and fluid labels are a mechanism of finding oneself. He remembers dressing up in my sister's clothes when he was 4 as a way for him to explore what he liked to wear. He didn’t see himself as a girl while wearing his mom’s high heels. He hung around girls because he felt safer and better seen with them rather than guys. It didn’t mean he was gay. And embracing masculinity did not mean he was straight.

Based on Brandon Hu’s perception taken from his writing and his expressions, if you connect back to Sappho, in ancient Greek times, the roles of gender and sexuality were blurred rather than set in stone like today. Brandon prefers to be seen as the Greeks and Sappho saw themselves, as fluid, ever-changing. He speaks through his words about how, throughout his experience of finding himself, it wasn’t clear-cut gender or sexuality labels that helped him discover himself. It was a gender expression.

[1] Freeman, Philip, and Sappho. Searching for Sappho : the Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet : including New Translations of All of Sappho's Surviving Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. 101-104

[2] Shelley A. Thrasher. "Sappho." Edited by Christina A. Salowey. Great Lives from History: The Ancient World, Prehistory-476 c.e.. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2004. Accessed March 06, 2025. online.salempress.com.

[3] Thrasher, Salem Press

[4] Richard Jenkyns. Three Classical Poets--Sappho, Catullus, and Juvenal. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.

[5] Joshua. J Mark. "Sappho of Lesbos." World History Encyclopedia. Last modified June 10, 2021.