Rejecting femininity is still misogyny

When I moved to New York state from the southeast two years ago, I stopped wearing skirts.  This was partly because I was freezing.  Skirts make so much more sense in the sticky humidity of the southeast, but not so much when by September it's already 40 degrees at night and the first snow is at the end of October.   This is clearly not skirt weather.  After that first winter, it took seven months before anything resembling skirt weather returned, and by that time, I had just lost the habit of wearing them.  They didn't seem to fit so well on me, or look familiar and expected.  I felt out of place with myself, so I put them away in a drawer and bought some bermuda shorts.

The other, more weighty reason that I stopped wearing skirts is that I simply stopped feeling powerful in them.  I had never felt vulnerable in skirts before, but now I did.  I found myself keeping my knees together.  Being aware of how windy it was and in which direction it was blowing.  Avoiding plopping down on the grass or sidewalk.  But it was more than that, even.  Skirts suddenly felt limiting in terms of my movement, but I also felt more...something else.  More feminine. 

And it was a painful realization to me felt uncomfortable being seen as feminine, or at least wearing-a-skirt-feminine.  This was so painful a realization that I quite promptly stopped thinking about it.  I moved the skirts from a drawer to a cardboard box hidden in a nook beside my fridge.

But the political nature of clothes, like Kingston's white ghosts, continued to haunt me.  It's not that I am uncomfortable with an ambiguous gender presentation.  If anything, I have had a long exposure to ambiguity.  When I was three, my mother took my twin sister and I to the hair salon and asked her hair sylist to cut off our hair (you know, that popular early 90s boy cut for little girls).  I still remember my first shocked glance in the mirror, thinking that I looked just like two little boys my sister and I occasionally played with.  I knew, at three, that to have my hair cut that way was a gendered statement.

For the next ten years, my sister and I were regularly chastised out of women's bathrooms.  When trans folks talk about how one of the most rigidly gendered spaces are bathrooms - gendered to the degree of violent and brutal enforcement - I know what it is they mean.  I do not know the every day anguish of attempting to enter a gendered bathroom in which you may not be able to 'pass' as a member as a transgender adult, but I do know what it is like to be chastised by looming grown-up women, to be told not so politely that you are in the 'wrong' place, or to be told to get out, that you do not belong.  To have to defend myself and define my gender, even as a small child.

When I was twelve, I grew out my hair.  That is the only period in my life that I know of when I have not been called "sir" or read as male.  For seven years I was only read as 'girl' or 'woman,' and I attribute that almost entirely to having longer hair, which sat in a chin-length bob.  But I grew disenchanted with longer hair.  Like my mother (who also has very short hair) warned me, it wasn't as great as I thought it would be.  I cut my hair short again when I was 19, and it has stayed short ever since.

I travel regularly, and at the airport I am invariably mistaken for a man.  Between my shortish hair and flat-chest, I can wear women's cut slacks and a women's t-shirt and a women's cut sweatshirt and still occasionally be "sir'd" by those who are reading superficial clues.  To be mistaken for male no longer bothers me the way it upset me as a child - if anything, I am happy that it happens, and do not correct them.  Judith Lorber writes that for children, gender means sameness, and as a child I wanted very much to be seen as a girl.   Now it doesn't matter so much.  It is perhaps more important to blur the lines, to challenge what we interpret as 'woman' or 'man.'

If anything, the ghosts that haunt me now are less about defending myself to gender policing adults, and all about what it means to be read as feminine.  Queer women face a particularly difficult line between the masculine and the feminine.  If we dress as feminine, we may be exerting passing privilege and risk critique from less gender-conforming lesbians.  And if we dress as masculine, how butch is butch enough?  And who is making up all these rules, anyway? 

I enjoy the greater flexibility women have in their clothing choices.  I am very thankful that, in the social construction of gender, women are permitted to pass off airy, tank-top blouses as professional wear.  I make the most use of that in the summer months.  But what I have found is that I feel most comfortable in different clothes around different groups of people.  And that what I put on one day feels marvelous, but can feel limiting and embarassing a week later. 

Much of this comes from others projecting their own insecurities on us, or us internalizing anxieties that are totally unncessary for changing a damn thing.  At the start of this summer, I was wearing (what I thought was) a pretty tank top.  A queer woman remarked on how I had gotten "frilly" with my clothing choices.  Although I laughed it off as joke, I am sad to admit that I have only worn plain t-shirts around her since.  Her comment made me, for a short time, hate that tank top.  More specifically, it made me hate that part of me that had loved the tank top.  But that hate is useless, and could only keep me from lifting my head and raising my voice.  I let my (and her!) insecurities, bred in me through years of socialization, win.

This hate is what I have been trying to talk about.  Patriarchy has convinced us that women should both a) dress a particular way and b) that this particular way is less powerful than how men dress.  We have been conditioned to project masculine power and feminine subordinance into the styles of the fabric we wear.  Clothing embodies this very hierarchy. 

Sometimes I jokingly describe my professional clothes as "power femme."  This might be dangerous, though, because it implies that to be femme is to not be powerful.  And that is what I am coming to grips with.  My gender politicization has only made it more difficult for me to dress myself.  I can't tell if I am supporting patriarchy when I wear feminine clothing, or supporting patriarchy when I express disgust of feminine clothing.  (Consider even my earlier blog where I chastened lipstick choices...that, too, is an unfortunate rejection of femininity, although, I still maintain, an appropriate example of rather trivial Western 'choices.')  Unfortunately, I think that both are, in their own ways, patriarchal.

Because to reject femininity, even a femininity that is cultured by and defined by patriarchy, is still misogyny.  And as long as we use these rules, we will never feel comfortable or stunning or whole.