This is a picture of me looking dead sexy in a dress:
D351 in a Dr355
Something that irritates me: I’m not trans, gay, or in any other way a victim of sexual or gender-based oppression. This wasn’t a costume party (unless you consider “formal” a costume, which is actually a pretty good point). I wasn’t trying to make a joke of trans people and their struggle. I decided to wear a dress because I could. Then, I was encouraged by friends to take it a step further with make-up and heels. I don’t identify with gender, and I refuse to believe that wearing a skirt or dress says anything about who I am other than that I happen to be wearing said skirt or dress. I feel an aggressive approach to addressing this question is appropriate. I’ll wear whatever I want. I don’t mean to offend trans people, and I don’t care if I offend people who still think there’s validity to outdated gender standards. I just felt like wearing a dress. I hate “mens” dress clothes (and now I also hate heels).
I don’t mind if other people keep their personal definitions of gender, but I don’t see any validity to the idea for myself. Gender is a social construct. It’s still important to a lot of people’s experiences, but I don’t care for it for me. This is particularly awkward for me as a person who was raised with cis-male privilege who’s trying to respect and assist in struggles that my privilege makes me unqualified to completely understand. I’m really adamant that I mean no offense to the LGBTQIA (Is that the full list?) community. I’ve always been referred to by male pronouns and don’t feel strongly either way about pronouns. Rather than assert my personal nullification of gender in how others approach me, I really just don’t care. For this reason, though I support the decisions they make for themselves, I don’t really understand the trans community’s experience with pronouns. I support their right to make those decisions, but I don’t really understand them and guess that my position prevents me from having that experience.
But there’s more. As a cis-male (While I don’t really identify with the man/woman gender construct, for simplicity, I’ll use the cis- terminology, particularly as my internal thoughts don’t change the privilege I experience.), I feel like what little negative impact I experience is small potatoes, worth mentioning in my own space but ultimately unimportant. In a way, privilege can be silencing. But enough woe-is-me MRA-sounding bullshit. Then again, maybe this is just a natural extension of the abusive gender archetype that men aren’t supposed to complain. I feel a little gross about even bringing it up… and yet saying that makes me even more aware of it. This shit’s confusing.
On to something lighter: skirts and dresses are super-comfortable, even if the top half of dresses aren’t generally designed with me in mind. One of the (many) things I love about being in the Society for Creative Anachronism is the baggy clothing. My monk robe was one of my favorite articles of clothing in High School, before I even joined the SCA, and the difference between a robe and a dress is pretty arbitrary. As for upper garments, “womens” tops were not designed for my body, but “mens” fashion has long-since left baggy clothing for the upper body. Once again, SCA and ren fest clothes are much more comfortable than today’s “mens” clothing. I’ll probably eventually get sick of using quotes around “mens” and “womens”. The one big drawback I see in skirts and dresses is kind of important though: they’re designed for people who our culture expects to carry purses. In the SCA and ren fest, it’s pretty normal to not have pockets (you wear belt pouches instead), but in daily existence, I find it difficult to understand how women who don’t carry purses get by if they wear skirts or dresses. In my pockets right now are a wallet, a cell phone, three small notebooks, and an assortment of scraps of paper that I wrote something down on (for some reason I don’t always use the three notebooks). I often wear a jacket exclusively so as to have additional pocket space, and while I suppose that’s a solution, jackets often have very loose pockets that things fall out of. Maybe, I’m just being nit-picky at that point.
For the most part, I don’t usually wear skirts or dresses, though I do wear a kilt fairly often. Now, talk about arbitrary classifications. A kilt is TOTALLY a skirt. People who wear kilts often joke that it’s a skirt if you wear anything under it. Even I do. That said, my kilt has pockets, and that’s super-useful. Even so, dealing with the reaction to wearing a skirt or dress is often not worth the hassle for me, particularly in situations with groups of people I don’t know and have no reason to get to know (shopping, travel, etc.). In a way, I feel like this is selling out my urge to be aggressive about my rights. That said, it wouldn’t be the first time that toning down that urge saved me from a lot of potential public harassment that would quickly spread to the people close to me. I don’t know. I just hate to allow other people to arbitrarily limit my options.
dissident351 