Gender is a shape. Sometimes it’s a line, a spectrum, binaried and contained. Sometimes it’s a circle, and it spins and spins and spins at the behest of two opposite magnetic poles. Sometimes it’s a football field. Long, expansive, traversable; two clear goals, situated on opposite ends. There are clear expectations as to how you can score, and win, at gender. Usually we don’t get a choice, we just have to play the game.
My gender? I’m a fucking star baby. But somehow that doesn’t translate to gender at all.
I’m a man who wears dresses sometimes. Well, I’m a he/they, but there’s still a sense of cis-ness I cling to, with my broad shoulders and hairy body and stringent homosexuality. Part of the joy of my presentation is transgression: it’s relishing in the confusion of a tight dress and hairy legs, broad shoulders and bright colours. Fitting in a box is boring and unfulfilling, and considering we as humans have unequivocally broadened the horizon of human endeavour with every turn of the modern century, why should we stop with the way we express ourselves?
Androgyny and gender play have always existed in fashion, at a couture and common level. Across cultures, across time, dresses and tunics, skirts and pants, formal regalia and cloth have signified many things to many different people. But let’s situate ourselves now.
Clothing is gendered. That is a fact of our times. We look at clothes and instinctually assign them as a male or female item. We have bathroom signs with men in pants and women in dresses. Clothing stores are stratified, whether it be the entire store, or by sections.
As we turn towards a more free expression of gender in modern fashion, a troubling trend I’ve noticed is the masculinising of women’s clothes. It’s skirts for guys being called “kilts”. It’s a specific bubble-gum pink proliferating in men’s sections which say “I experiment with colour but only in baggy jumpers.” It’s a single string of pearls outlining an incredibly chiseled collarbone on Instagram — not too gaudy, but tasteful. Tastefully, femininely masculine.
I see men wearing crop tops that show their abs and yeah it’s hot and sexy, but it’s also something that only gets encouraged on masculine or muscular or androgynous bodies. Femininity becomes an affordance only some can pay for because they sit within the masculine range.
The entire discourse of embracing men in our current wave of feminism is flawed. Men bring other men into the fold of tears and emotions by making it a ‘manly’ thing to do. We put a rugby player in a video discussing mental health and it widens the discourse because mental health becomes destigmatised. But why is it destigmatised? Because discussing mental health becomes something you do with the boys. It’s another one of our little tasks we expect men to perform to prove that they are men.
The problem is not that dresses and skirts aren’t manly enough as they are, that was never the problem. The problem is that men are not afforded the comfort/ease/safety/joy/torture/heartache/pleasure of expressing femininity. We aren’t breaking the game of gender when we make skirts ‘for men’, we’re simply moving the goalposts of when you can score. If we make emotions masculine, if we make clothing masculine, that still creates room for penalties for people who defy those lines.
What happens to me when I play the game? With my soft tummy and thick thighs and that feeling buried deep inside of watching the kids at my all-boys school partake in gender-bend day because it was a funny rite of passage knowing deep down that the idea of wearing a skirt wasn’t funny to me, it was freedom.
I am a guy who expresses himself femininely. What that looks like internally versus externally is very different for different people, but for me, that means my innate sense of gender isn’t compromised by the shape of the clothing I wear on my body. What that means — what I am suggesting — is that we need to stop making it okay for feminine things to be masculine so that men can engage with them. We need to make it okay for masculine people to be feminine. To embrace femininity.
Now, changing the perception of femininity and feminine clothing doesn’t actually create revolution either. There still lie questions of sizing and design and accessibility, like how so many skirts have ropey waistbands which don’t sit on my non-child-bearing hips, or how gender-neutral clothing lines are aesthetically pretty boring, or how dresses compact in the middle of the body and don’t account for my erroneously large torso. But this is not a unique problem because of my male body — this is a problem many people of many genders and sizes and bodies face.
What utopia lies beyond gendered clothing? How do we categorise things? Size? Colour? Shape? There is a whole future beyond men’s and women’s clothing. I do not have the vision to comprehend what that looks like, but I have the heart to tell you it exists somewhere. It’s in my wardrobe, nestled between my black work jeans and the dresses I used to only wear in my room when I was home alone.
I’m not a sporty person. I don’t know why I chose a sports metaphor for this article. But if gender is a game played on a football field, I tapped out a while ago. I’m still watching it. I pretend to know where I’d be playing if I was on the field. But scoring doesn’t matter when the points are rigged. Why can’t we change that?
Men, have you ever stood in the middle of a room in a dress and spun? Have you? Guys? You should. You’ll see a whole other world in front of you. You can reach it with me.
