I’m giving a big talk next week on how clothes have no gender. I’m having flashbacks to prepping for my TEDX talk I gave 6 years ago. In that era of my style I was wearing a lot of bow ties, waistcoats, blazers + of course, lots of prints. To me these articles of clothing were so feminine! The intentionality, meticulousness, the bow around my neck...😍).
This was the period when I started to become an LGBTQ public figure + it was a very different media moment with very little gender literacy. I received so much scrutiny for my self presentation: “he isn’t trans, he dresses like a man!” “if he’s trans, does that mean he’s a trans man?” People conflated my vests + bow ties with my gender with my presumed manhood. I was new to this level of visibility, young and still coming into myself. It was traumatizing to have so many people misrecognize + misgender me — like they knew who I was and what I had been through.
Over the next year I started to get rid of these type of clothes + wear more dresses, makeup, skirts, + jewelry. Yes of course I liked them, but part of me also knows that I was motivated by wanting people not to misgender me as a man.
Years later in my speech I write: “I believe fashion should be a celebration of beauty. I believe that the gender binary is an obstacle to beauty. It limits our self expression and confines our aesthetic imagination.
Clothes should mean what we want them to mean, not the other way around.” I see now how the gender binary made me have to reject clothes associated with “masculinity” + don clothes associated with “femininity” in order to be legitimate, real, + worthy. I understand why I did — so many things were beyond my control. But I want so desperately for us to create a world where every article of clothing is for anyone who wants to wear it. One in which people can determine what their clothes mean to them.
Proud of my growth — that years later there’s still misrecognition + invalidation but I am wearing what I want for me, not the gender binary. I know who I am: my spirit transcends the visual, my body belongs to me not others’ projections.
