Random Thoughts from Gate A48

Hi! I was stuck in the airport last week and you can only wander aimlessly around the concourse for so long. So I wrote this:

As I type…  whatever this will end up being (and really, aren’t almost all of my posted missives bear little resemblance to how they usually begin?), I am sitting in the airport while I watch my flight back home repeatedly get delayed from 5:05pm to 7:20pm to what is currently a departure time of 11ish PM which will mean arriving in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul airport at around 2:45am am the next morning.

So, that sucks.

All in all this has been an unpleasant work trip.  The book I brought with me is boring and the book I bought to read instead of it is terrible.  And!  The hotel bed is about as soft as an emery board.  So, this has been a fitting end to this adventure.  As Bilbo Baggins would put it, the Tookish side of me is fading.

With so little to do and with so much time on my hands, my brain has been keeping me busy.  Not surprisingly I am thinking about gender and clothes.  Specifically I am thinking about the relation between gender identity and presentation.  I often feel indecisive or hypocritical when it comes to these concepts.  On one hand, a pink pair of panties is a way for me to stay connected with my feminine side.  But on the other hand, clothes are just clothes and they do not have to be genderized.  A skirt is just a skirt.  It’s not fair to burden any article of clothing with human conceived concepts of gender.

But why should I resolve these seemingly contradictory ways of thinking?  I saw a post online (well, where else would a post be?) that helped me accept that clothes can symbolize gender and can also… well, not.  I am not quite sure yet if they can mean EVERYTHING and NOTHING at the same time, but maybe a skirt can be a symbol of my femininity and/or just something to wear.  Whether the skirt is connected to my gender identity is up to me.  And it’s okay if that connection exists one day but is gone the next.

Similarily, a t-shirt is just a shirt, but if it was a Taylor Swift t-shirt, I am also expressing that I am a Taylor Swift fan. In that case, the shirt IS an article of clothing, AND it is communication an aspect of myself.

The post I am referring to started with the statements “clothes don’t have gender” and “clothes can and do invoke gender dysphoria and euphoria for many people” can and should coexist.

Someone replied with clothes have the gender that I decide, not the gender someone else decides for me.

I think this summarizes my thinking about whether or not clothes have anything to do with gender, or if they HAVE to, in a pretty succinct way.  The reply is also pretty brilliant as well.  I don’t want anyone to impose gender norms or gender roles on me, so why would I concern myself if others associate my gender identity with my clothes?

Why listen to someone if they think something/anything is “for girls”?

I recently embraced identifying as non-binary.  But, of course, it’s not as simple as that.  I am, like everyone on the planet, many things.  I do like classifying things.  I like organizing things.  I like order.  I like to compartmentalize…  things.  My bookshelf, my lingerie drawers…  I do something similar when it comes to my gender identity.  At my very core, I am bi-gender.  I am a coin with two sides.  Two distinct sides.  

One side of me is Hannah.  Hannah is femme, Hannah is transgender.  

The other side of me is, for simplicity’s sake, him.   What or who is he?  He is non-binary.  He wears leggings, he wears nightgowns, he wears panties… He is not presenting as femme.  He is wearing femme clothes or rather, clothes that are typically more common for feminine people to wear.  He wears these items because he doesn’t feel that clothes should be genderizied.  

Since embracing this side of me, I’ve more or less leaned into it.  Nothing too drastic, though.  Hannah wears skirts, but he does not.  Rather he is wearing femme jeans and femme shirts more often.  Well, perhaps jeans and shirts that are found in the women’s department is a more accurate way to describe this look.  Some femme jeans have rhinestones in the shape of a heart on the back pocket but the jeans and shirts he is wearing look… well, they are more subtle.  Honestly?  I love these new additions to his (shrinking) side of the closet.  

When I develop a new interest, I tend to dive head first into it.  If I like a book I read every word, but I also read everything I can find ABOUT the book and the author.  Embracing a non-binary wardrobe hasn’t been much different.  I want to find more femme clothes to wear in my masculine presenting life.  I’ve looked for non-binary options and there are certainly a lot of designers out there (well, at least compared to a decade ago) that make clothes for anyone, regardless of the gender one was assigned at birth.

The problem is that they are all, well, kinda boring.  Still just pants and shirts.  It’s kind of strange how clothes for non-binary people just means “women can wear pants”.  Yay.  On occasion I see on some websites a masculine person wearing a skirt, but the whole ensemble is just a little silly looking.  Like…  it’s almost aggressively non-binary.  A bearded dude wearing a flowery, above the knee skirt but with hairy legs.  The model is meant to contrast gender binary in an extreme way. MEN HAVE BEARDS and WOMEN WEAR SKIRTS but they are a PERSON WITH A BEARD WEARING A SKIRT and they kind of look ridiculous. Like, the skirt is femme but you get the impression that the person is meant to communicate “yeah, I’m a DUDE and I’m wearing a SKIRT.  What are you going to do about it???”.  

Like, calm down.

Now, to be clear, I don’t feel masculine presenting/masculine identifying people who wear skirts look silly. My point is that I feel that an outfit/look needs to be in harmony, for lack of a better phrase. What I mean is that a pressed dress shirt and a necktie would look very out of place paired with sweatpants.

Masculine presenting people wearing skirts draw enough negative attention as it is, but adding an element of in-your-face-aggression just adds to others associating “men wearing skirts” with “asshole”.  

Like, I dunno, just wear a skirt and be nice. Be normal.

Many of us have a few ideas about what we could change in the world if we could. Some ideas are giant and cruel, some are small and kind. If you work backwards you can see how some things evolved to what they are today. These things can be a law or a work policy or a way of thinking. Hindsight is always 20/20 and it’s easy to look back and feel that how something was done maybe could have been done better.

Change in society or in one personal’s life is usually brought about in two different ways.

I think of Stonewall and how those protests in New York fifty years ago brought the queer community out in a way that had never done before. Although we have a long way to go, I feel that almost everything about us (yes, we are part of the queer community and queer doesn’t necessarily mean gay) can be traced back to Stonewall as the flashpoint, the spark that slowly, gradually, ignited change.

Of course, change is never easy and it’s never a linear path or without resistance.

But we know this, don’t we? If you have a significant other who is aware of this side of you, you would have needed to come out to them. Like our own journey, our gender identity coexisiting in a committed relationship wasn’t without challenges. Two steps forward, one step back. It may have been difficult in the beginning but maybe things have gotten easier. The reverse can also be true.

But Stonewall put the attention on us in a way it hadn’t done before. Even (some) people who weren’t exactly supportive of the queer community felt that people had the right to live their lives and to love who they loved and present as they pleased, even if they couldn’t relate to someone having a gender identity that was different from the one they were assigned at birth.

I don’t care if someone doesn’t understand me, but I hope that they accept me.

Well, maybe ‘accept’ is too much to ask. Tolerate me? Ignore me? There are many people in the world that make decisions or have opinions that I don’t agree with but I don’t feel the need to communicate my perspective to them. After all, someone’s opinion of me isn’t going to change me, and I know how I feel about them isn’t going to modify their actions.

Love, Hannah