on passing, or Why I Wear A Necktie

NOTE: Originally posted in 2007.


I've been thinking lately about passing, and first impressions, and my relationship thereto, and so on. Like you do.

I wore a dress today. It's a fun sort of dress: very long, brightly colored, broomstick-skirt style and thus nice and swooshy. I wear it once every few months, and if I shut off the part of my brain that is all genderqueer-masculine-expression-all-the-time it's actually really pleasing to wear. The aforementioned part of my brain doesn't stay shut off for long, though, so my thinky thoughts meandered around to something of a conclusion:

Wearing male clothing feels extremely natural to me at this point. I've been doing it (almost exclusively) for quite a few years now; I always shop on the Men's side of the store on the rare occasions I buy new clothes, and the few items of female clothing I own are old, secondhand, and rarely see the outside of my closet. I don't think much about wearing my men's cargo pants and button-down shirts (though I do still get a little thrill of excitement at putting on a necktie, but that's a whole tangent on phallic symbolism that I don't want to get into just now). For the most part my dressing habits are not foremost in my thoughts, and I no longer feel like I'm anywhere in the vicinity of crossdressing when I pick out my (male) clothes for the day.

When I wear a dress, I get a backwards sort of transvestite thrill. Like what I normally do is present my basic Genderqueerness, which is an important part of Who I Am. This is not quite the same as presenting Maleness; at present I'm too girly in my features to expect to be read as Guy, though I do smile whenever I get a gender-double-take. But when I wear a dress or especially girly clothing, it's almost like I'm suppressing my Queer and 'passing' as normal, 'dressing up' as something I'm not, doing the exciting costume thing.

Sidebar -

I don't remember where I was reading this, but to paraphrase an idea: trans- and gay- persons both use the term 'passing' to describe how they move in the world, but they mean essentially opposite things by it: To the transman or -woman, 'passing' is asking the world "please see me as the Other I wish to embody even though it's not how you expect or want to see me"; to the gay 'passing' is asking the world "please see me as a normal man/woman and ignore that which makes me different because it's not your business to know". (Perhaps it's this disconnect that's at the heart of the political clashes between trans- and gay-cultures: for gays, passing is hiding and lying and bad; for transpersons, passing is fundamental to the brand of queerness, or at least it might be. Again, a tangent for another time.) I'd love to hear thoughts on this, actually, because I'm not sure how I feel about the distinction.

But to go with that idea, when I wear a dress I'm 'passing' in the gay sense of "nope, nothing different or queer about this girl", which isn't something I can maintain for long because it feels like lying. When I wear a button-down and a tie, I'm maybe halfway to 'passing' in the trans-sense of "oh look, it's a boy." And that feels honest, because it displays my genderqueerness to those that are willing to see it. I do recognize (and ponder, and poke at) that as a female-born-genderqueer nudging the boundaries of masculinity I have a MUCH easier time of it in my daily life than does a male-born-genderqueer nudging the boundaries of femininity; that's unfortunately how the gender divide works these days.

(For more on that tangent-for-another-time please (please!) read Julia Serano's Whipping girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. ::fanbois her::)

The part of me that Envisions A Different World doesn't want to have to worry about wearing male clothing all the time, because pretty dresses make me feel pretty, and I'd like to have a mixture of presentations. But as long as I know that when most people meet me they will think "heteronormative female person" rather than "gender ambiguous omnisexual human" unless I do something about it by wearing a necktie, I'll go on wearing a necktie.

Because I'm not a liar.

I learned that much from my dad.