How my coming-out and job-out led me to Hyper-Gender

Part 1 - Exploring identity and society beyond stereotypes

Six years ago, I fell in love with my soulmate, who happened to be a
woman. Like myself, she had grown up in Morocco and came to
study and work in France. We spent 3 beautiful years together in
Paris, until the reality of life caught up with us. She had to go back to
Morocco unexpectedly, meaning we had to reshuffle our relationship
from our romantic paradise in France to a long distance secret
relationship where I was working in a country that just passed gay
marriage rights, and she went back to her family in a country where
our love is considered a crime.
The situation forced us to get out of our bubble, face the reality of
society and make a choice: pursue our love or honor our cultural
roots? We could either fight and struggle to build a family, but face
ostracism from society and our loved ones, or we could end our
relationship because theres no hope for a real future together where
we could find acceptance. It took us over 2 years to make up our
mind and be able to choose the latter. Because our love was so
strong, we tried everything to save it: soft break-up, openrelationship, polyamory. But anything we did brought suffering.
Why am I telling you this story?

Because when your love life becomes political, it makes you reflect
about all the different perspectives of your life.
In the meantime, while I was trying to figure out my life without her,
I switched my career, starting with my job-out 3 years ago from a
senior consultant in a large consulting firm in Paris, to a changemaker of the new economy. I discovered and explored NeoTribes practices: new organizations (intentional communities,
hacker & art collectives, co-working spaces, ephemeral experiences,
eco-villages, entrepreneurial hubs, and other grassroots movements)
where everything was possible. Becoming part of these innovative
ecosystems and living a nomadic life put me at the forefront of
society to observe the systemic changes and alternative value
operating models the world is shifting to.
It also made me realize that while many are analyzing and debating
a paradigm shift in businesses and new power structures, no one has
been yet talking about one of the biggest shifts happening: that
of gender in the New Economy. In a beautiful combination of respect
and genuine curiosity about ones authentic self, we have slowly

been able to create certain safe spaces that allow people to explore
and accept the complexity and multiplicity of their true identities.
One reason why I feel so happy and fulfilled in these communities, is
that I am accepted for who I am. Nobody expects me to behave this
or that way because I am a woman, or dating a woman or a man or a
couple. This authentic and holistic approach to what I have been
calling hyper-gender is perhaps all the more noticeable for me after
my complex long distance relationship, and my experience of
working as a consultant in a mainly male heteronormative
environment where despite French liberal values a conservative
mentality remained.
For me hyper-gender is about letting go of labels, dissolving the
male-female binary, and exploring our capacity for new forms of
relationship.
My endeavour towards more freedom cut across many aspects of my
life. I went from being a mainstream business consultant to a
freelancer, from living 12 years in Paris to becoming a digital nomad,
to going from labeling myself as heterosexual to a lesbian,
then bisexual, and finally now, hyper-gender.
For me hyper-gender is about letting go of labels, dissolving the
male-female binary, and exploring our capacity for new forms of
relationship. And although it may seem paradoxical to create this
new label when my main mission is actually to overcome labels, it is
something I deem necessary in navigating the social transition
towards a new understanding of identities and gender.
Painful as this journey may have been, it brought me to the life I am
happily living. Allowing me to break free from all the expectations of
what it means to be successful, the process of the past years helped
me become the explorer and evangelist for freedom and authenticity
I am today.
This article is the first of a series of 3 articles that explore the
concept of hyper-gender in its various manifestations. The next will
explore the meaning of hyper-gender in our identities, relationships
and sexualityso stay tuned!
To find out more about Hyper-Gender, join our conversation here!
NB: A special thanks to my friends who have been crucial to the start
of this conversation: Marie ChartRon who initiated the reflexion with
her interrogations about why gender was so little discussed in

our OuiShare book

"the
end
of
"hierarchies"
(in
french http://magazine.ouishare.net//05/livre-societecollaborat/), and Aurlie Salvaire, Aline Mayard, Michel Bachmann,
Alexa Clay, Francesca Pick, Soukeina Hachem, Adam Yukelson,John
Toutain who have been discussing neo-feminism and sharing
content in private streams with me for a while, before we called it