“They’re starting to wear the trans uniform”
Katie Glover writes in the Independent that men mustn’t be allowed to wear “women’s clothes” because that’s a “danger for trans women.”
She starts with the fact that 17-year-old Jaden Smith, son of American actor Will Smith, is going to be “the face of” Louis Vuitton clothes, specifically, women’s clothes.
Jaden seems to be up for this gender-neutral, equal clothing rights thing which allows men to wear women’s clothes without any fear of ridicule. But there is another, more important issue afoot.
There’s a reason why men wear men’s clothes and women wear women’s clothes, and why they are generally so different. OK, I know women have been wearing trousers for decades but they’re usually a femme version of the male equivalent – and I’m not talking about unisex clothes like jeans and t-shirts.
Not talking about them? Why not? Since they contradict that silly claim.
I’m talking about basic clothes norms that depict which gender is wearing them, even in the modern world. Stereotypically, men wear trousers and women wear dresses and skirts. That’s the ‘norm’ and it’s more than that – it’s a uniform.
Or, to put it another way, it’s an arbitrary custom, one that enforces a needless and oppressive gender binary, which is one reason to flout it.
But that’s not what Katie Glover is after. Quite the opposite.
When you get out of bed in the morning the most important thing you have to do all day is tell the world what your gender is, because from that, everything else flows. You may think that your job is to be an office supervisor or a stockbroker or police officer but these are all human constructs. Deep down your real job is to reproduce, and showing other humans your gender is the first step on that path.
Hoo-boy – evo psych in aid of enforcing the gender system yet again. No, my real job is whatever I decide it is, using my own brain and ideas and wants. Telling the world what my gender is is not even on my list of things to do, let alone at the top of it.
So, to help make it plain for anyone to see which gender you are, you put on a uniform. Men put on trousers and have men’s haircuts, and women put on dresses and skirts, feminine tops and tights and women’s shoes to show their femininity and declare to the world that they are female.
They have women’s hair-dos and they put use cosmetics to make themselves look nicer and more presentable and to reinforce the female uniform a bit more.
So, when some people come along and want equal clothing rights, that upsets the apple cart a bit.
Male-to-female transgender people rely on props like clothes, shoes, make-up and hairstyles to create the gender identity they want to portray to the world because most of the time their bodies alone are unable to do that. There are a few lucky ones who don’t have to do a thing to put across a female persona, but most trans women have to work hard at it.
Or not. They can just decide they don’t need to “put across a female persona” any more than they need to be visibly religious or political or of X nationality. We’re not walking advertising posters, we don’t need to be visibly anything in particular. That’s not a genuine need. It may be a desire, but it’s not a need.
The danger for trans women is that if wearing what are traditionally women’s clothes becomes the norm for men too, then trans women will no longer be able to rely on these props to help them display a female gender identity – and for many, that could be a serious problem.
Of course it will take time – a long, long time even – for things to change to the extent where men wearing skirts and girly stuff will be totally acceptable.
But trans people should be aware that well-known faces like Jaden Smith are starting to encroach on our territory. They’re starting to wear the trans uniform without actually stating that they are transgender, and they’re claiming it for themselves under the guise of gender-neutral fashion. All of which begs the question: where does that leave us?
So there you have it. We have to continue to enforce the arbitrary customs of the gender binary because men wearing “skirts and girly stuff” is what Glover so stunningly calls “our territory.”
It could hardly be more reactionary.
What the fucking hell?!
OK, slightly more coherently:
Um, that’s not true.
I suppose some people who identify as trans then telling the world what gender they are is, if not the most important issue, then certainly up there.
For me the most important issue on getting up is to ensure I get a cup of tea. For others it will be coffee.
Yup, “what the fucking hell” was all I could say too.
This whole trans thing attains a new level of barking by the day.
What is the point of being transgendered if men and women eventually adopt the same neutral unisex look?
If ‘the look’ becomes one of gender neutrality, then why transition?
Many women who become men are fond of growing some facial hair as it’s the definitive symbol of masculinity.
Similarly, men who become women, such as Caitlyn Jenner, tend to adopt props symbolizing traditional
femininity. The long tresses, the corsets and the off the shoulder evening gowns are almost essential. Jenner admits to having worn her mother’s clothing as a young boy.
Some transgender people in a desire to appropriate the trappings of the opposite sex can end up reinforcing gender sterotypes.
Last time I saw Danielle Muscato, she was wearing a standard man’s suit, man’s hair cut, and man’s shoes. Should she not be allowed to dress how she wants? She isn’t announcing her gender to the world; most people seeing her would say “male”.
Does she infringe on anyone’s territory by being who she wants to be in the way she wants to be it?
The purpose of transitioning is being recognized as a member of a gender different from the one assigned to one at birth. If all clothing options become equally available to everyone, there is still the option my kid and their friends use: wearing pronoun buttons. Buttons saying things like: ‘he/him’, ‘she/her’, ‘they/them’, ‘xie/xym’.
We can also work for an equal society where it is impossible to assume anyone’s gender from looking at them, everyone is treated as ‘person of unknown gender’ (using some universal pronoun, whether singular they or anything else we may come to agree upon), unless we are certain of the person’s gender *and* gender is relevant. (When most of the time people are referred to in a gender-inclusive manner, I think people will notice deviations from that, and it will be the place to discuss whether the deviation is warranted.)
This sounds like outright satire.
“The danger for trans women is that if wearing what are traditionally women’s clothes becomes the norm for men too, then trans women will no longer be able to rely on these props to help them display a female gender identity – and for many, that could be a serious problem.”
No, the “danger” is that it will quickly become apparent that people of any sex can wear what they like and act how they like without the need to jump into a different gender box than the one forced on them, and the acceptance of that will undermine the narrative that gender is some kind of essential element of one’s soul.
I don’t give a damn about luxury designer clothes, but if Louis Vuitton is going to do this I wish they would just take it to its logical end and call it a gender neutral clothing line, rather than having a man model for their women’s wear line.
How about an obligatory hijab for trans-women? Gender essentialism and avoiding the Male Gaze all in one empty gesture!
When you get out of bed in the morning the most important thing you have to do all day is tell the world what your gender is, because from that, everything else flows.
NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE
Deep down your real job is to reproduce, and showing other humans your gender is the first step on that path.
Wait, what? If gender is *really* about reproduction, what does it even mean to be trans?
For the vast majority of my activities, my 2 main goals for what I wear are to be physically comfortable and to not have my appearance distract from what I am trying to accomplish. Fortunately, my career in tech has allowed me to wear pants (UKian trousers) – usually jeans, masculine-style shirts, and plain shoes (usually I wear short hiking boots to support my weak ankles). I have actually been asked at a job interview, “Do you want to be treated as an electrical engineer, or do you want to be treated as a woman”. My response was something to the effect that I *expected* to be treated as an electrical engineer and that being a woman should not be relevant to how I performed my job.
My technical consulting work recently required me to participate in a week-long legal examination/discovery process for which I needed to dress up a bit. I wore nicer than usual pants, a turtle neck sweater or button shirt (one of my shirts even has French cuffs, so I had to wear cuff-links), and a blazer. But now it seems that my choice of such “masculine” attire was an insult and/or threat to trans people.
As far as I am concerned, Katie Glover can wear whatever the hell she wants. She should extend the same courtesy to Jaden Smith and to me and to all the Scottsmen (and non-Scotts and non-men) who want to wear kilts, and anyone who wants to wear a kaftan or a frock-coat, etc etc.
Quoth Anat:
YES, THIS ^^^
Oh, crap. I was fitted for a kilt a few months ago. Can someone clarify whether I’m allowed to wear it? Furthermore, I have long hair.
I’m plainly some kind of exclusionary MONSTER.
And a TRESPASSER.
And now a more serious point.
As I’m liable to write on student essays: Speculation! Many who? Only could be a serious problem? And what kind of problem anyway? In the final 9 words of that quotation, Glover has more or less told us that she’s making this stuff up. A vague wave in the direction of an unspecified number of people facing an unspecified problem of unspecified gravity really isn’t going to convince anyone.
Until there’s more detail, I’m gonna keep my kilt and my sarong, and pine for the days when I could get away with a bit of nail-varnish.
Don’t worry, Katie dear. There are other markers of femininity you can use. Rush off to do the dishes or the laundry whenever you can.
/sarcasm.
Who are these people? A new level of barking mad indeed.
” Stereotypically, men wear trousers and women wear dresses and skirts. That’s the ‘norm’ and it’s more than that – it’s a uniform.”
Come to my working class neighborhood. It’s not.
I wish there were more — any — discussions on how class influences gender. Dresses didn’t signal “girly” to me as much as they signaled wealth. (Or, at least, enough wealth to wear something other than your cousin’s hand- me-down jeans.) Oddly enough, I thought shorts were “girly” and refused to wear them, even in sweltering July heat.
@Theo Bromine
One of many, many questions Katie Glover would have asked herself were she not such a spectacularly muddled thinker.
If “someone” is hoping that everyone else is going to live any portion of their lives deciding what to do so that “someone” can be sure to be perceived the way they want to be, they are screwed. I’m not sure when it became fashionable to forget that the world doesn’t bend to your will because I don’t know anyone who would not prefer that it did.
@Ophelia #12 –
Given that I’m only homeopathically Scottish, we can add cultural appropriation to the mix. YAY!
But…but…that must make you STRONGER Scottish than the Scots who are actually born and raised there. The more you are diluted, the more Scottish you are, right?
*paints face with woad*
*sharpens Claymore*
Crivens!
Now I wonder: when cis-women started wearing pants-suits was it such a huge threat to trans men?
Wow.
That’s basically homophobic, because they need artificial means to reproduce and therefore “aren’t doing their job” in many cases. It’s anti-childfree-by-choice because we’re not doing our jobs. It’s anti people with a low chance of reproductive success. It’s anti gender nonconforming. It’s extreme conservatism, basically. Go forth and multiply, nothing else amounts to success as a human being.
And then it’s followed by a pro-trans statement that makes little sense unless you assume that trans women are seeking women who want a woman with a penis and trans men are looking for a man who wants a man with a vagina. Because they won’t achieve reproductive success any other way through their signalling.
Or maybe how people present has little to do with a desire to reproduce. That could be coherent.
Huh. A gender-policing trans activist.
Pretty much on schedule, I guess.
So basically you can switch gender no problems, so long as you conform to every patronising clothing cliche in the book.
I would argue for pretty much the polar opposite of this. Instead of having gender as some nebulous, impossible to pin down label for the sake of choosing a label (HJ Hjornbeck’s “a woman is someone that identifies as a woman” silliness), do away with (or greatly diminish) the concept altogether.
It is a plain fact that humanity is split almost perfectly into two physiologically disctinct groups, and most can be correctly identified as one or the other at a glance. (Some people can be male or female while looking androgynous, and others may have hermaphroditism or body dysmorphia or ______, which may put them completely be at odds with their apearence.) So, instead of viewing a person as having potentially any gender until they tell you, and instead of clunky pronoun buttons, just call a person male or female as their appearence seems to indicate, and be willing to accept a correction with good grace should that arise.
Also, keep in mind that behaviour, hobbies, aptitudes and the like are not proscribed by gender, so none of this ‘maths is a guy thing’ or ‘chemisty? Oh, you mean cosmetics?’ tripe. A man can like fluffy wabbits, a woman can like automotive care. Oh and none of this ‘turn in your man card’ fucking idiocy, and a billion other idiocies while we’re at it.
So, physical appearence is a useful identifier as long as it is not taken to be infallible, male and female are useful descriptors of people so long as it is divested of a shitton of baggage, and exceptions exist and should be supported. What we have left is …not much that can be called gender.
Samantha Vimes, also so much ‘is ought’ confusion. Even if our society’s ideas of gender presentation originated because they promoted reproduction (do people really need to know whom they can reproduce with from a distance? we aren’t among those species that live solitary lives on huge territories, we get to meet others of our species up close), ever since we got to the point that a large proportion of infants born lived to adulthood the need to reproduce (which takes for granted that perpetuating humanity or a specific segment of it is something that needs to be done) the amount of reproduction that needs to be going on has significantly diminished.
The vast majority of people are not going to be reproducing in the near future (and that is a good thing!), or are going to be reproducing with someone who is already their partner, someone who knows them well enough that they don’t need to read gender cues to recognize that the partner is someone they can reproduce with. So even if there is some reproductive reason for cultural gender cues, it does not apply to any but a minority of humans – those adults who are seeking new partners with the purpose of reproducing with them sometime in the future. So most people can wear whatever the hell they want with no effect on anyone’s future reproductive success.
Holms, doing away with gender cues altogether increases people’s freedoms. Let people wear whatever they want, engage in the hobbies and jobs they want, stop making them feel they have to fit into boxes. There is nothing clunky about all-inclusive pronouns, one gets used to them fast enough. As long as we insist on gendered pronouns as the norm people will feel they just have to know someone’s gender in order to talk about them. If we get used to not knowing people’s genders I expect we will treat people in more equal ways.
Anat @21,
Indeed it was (and I think still is for certain communities such as fundamentalist Christians and ultra-Orthodox Jews) – ever heard the trite comments about “who wears the pants” in a heterosexual relationship?
And note that the pantsuits were, at least initially, pretty much styled as a dress over a pair of pants.
Theo, Anat was asking about trans men being threatened by women wearing pants, not cis men. Cis men have had issues about women wearing pants, yes, but trans men?
What counts as men’s clothing and women’s clothing is very culturally specific. Up until the first quarter of the 19th century both Japanese men women wore kimonos. Men started wearing suits as a self-conscious attempt to Westernise the society. In Scotland the kilt was traditionally worn only by men and it is not long ago when some traditionalists were opposed to women wearing them. In the 60’s there were restaurants in Edinburgh that would not serve a women wearing one there were also restaurants in London that would not serve a woman wearing trousers.
It’s strange that anyone wants to go back half a century and start enforcing “uniforms.”
::wakes up::
::opens window::
“Hey, world! I’m not sure about this whole “gender” thing and where I fit into it. Could you just treat me like a HUMAN BEING for one whole day, in spite of me having breasts? And do that for EVERYONE? Thanks!”
\inlieuofgenderperformance
Actually, based on the cited article, that apparently isn’t enough. You have to force everyone else in the gender you have chosen to conform to those patronizing clothing cliches, as well.
When I was in school (I rode dinosaurs to get there), we weren’t allowed to wear “pants” of any kind. All boys wore pants, but all girls wore skirts. When I was in junior high, they finally relaxed a bit and allowed girls to wear “pantsuits” – they had to be matching pantsuits, with tops and bottoms clearly intended to go together, and made out of the “right” sort of material – in other words, no denim. And we weren’t allowed to wear denim skirts. When I was a junior in high school, women were finally allowed to wear jeans and other types of pants that were not “pantsuits”. This was in the 1970s.
@Samantha #28 (& @Anat #21)
Moving on from my reading comprehension fail: I’m thinking that, based on the way the world was at the time cis women started wearing pantsuits, trans men faced threats that were far greater than the offense caused by cis women who were not “properly performing their gender”. Seriously, I would have thought that having a more relaxed gender dress code would make it easier for trans people to dress in a way that makes them feel comfortable well before they are ready to publicly come out as trans. Most people have heard the whiny lament: “The way that person looks, I can’t tell if it’s a male or female.” To which I would answer, “Please explain why how another person looks is a problem for *you*.”
@iknklast #31
I too went to school at the time of the dinosaurs (but I didn’t get to ride one to school – I had to walk uphill both ways in a driving snowstorm). I recall as a child I would come home from school and immediately change out of my school clothes (skirt/dress/jumper) into the comfort of pants so I could go out and ride my bike, climb trees, play in the snow, etc. And it was not until I was in highschool (also in the 1970s) that girls were finally allowed to wear pants instead of skirts/dresses. In my school, they started by allowing individual teachers to decide what was permitted in their classes. Of the 8 classes I had, 2 teachers insisted that girls wear skirts/dresses. So I would wear a pantsuit (which was a minidress with matching pants), and then *remove the pants* immediately before those 2 classes so that I would have attire acceptable to those teachers.
Where on Earth does this woman live? The Bible Belt of the USA? Only I recall my sister saying that they drove off the highway into a mid-USA town, looking for refreshments; wound up their windows and locked their doors and drove straight back to the highway. They are a multi-racial family, and the uniformity of the people in that town terrified them. All the men and boys in suits, all the women and girls in Laura Ashley-type dresses; and every face as white as snow.
But look at any street in Ireland, and fewer than 2% of people will be wearing anything skirt-like. Perhaps the occasional new African immigrant, not yet used to the ubiquitous variations on jeans and T-shirt with a jacket or sweatshirt over the top, will be wearing flowing robes – and is equally likely to be a man as a woman.