San Francisco is still one of the greatest cities in the world when it comes to being able to just be yourself, societal norms be damned. Aesthetics and identities that would raise eyebrows in other parts of the country are so prevalent and celebrated here, it's nice to take a moment and revel in it.
BUTCH is a portrait series by SF-born photographer Meg Allen, capturing the feminine masculinity of women in the Bay Area. She started the project a year ago, and it has grown into a stunning collection of more than 100 images. Meg explains, "After printing and displaying my first three portraits, I realized I wanted a whole wall of these images. The wall turned into a room and the room into an online gallery. I then wondered what would it have been like to grow up surrounded by these images in addition to the ubiquitous feminine I saw in most magazines."
From pink legos to people who need to know the sex of their friends' soon-to-be-born babies (because otherwise "every gift we buy has to be green or yellow!"), the gender binary is still alive and ingrained in our culture, for whatever reason. Projects like this help tear down those annoyingly stringent expectations for gender aesthetics, and this is such a handsome homage to the individuals who are doing their thing in the middle.
H/T: Buzzfeed