Skirts: You love them. I love them. When you forgo masculinity and decide to present femme, your wardrobe options increase roughly threefold. In that triple, there are some garments you find yourself gravitating to more than others. Skirts, denied to you for so long, will be one of those choices. They’re flirting, flattering and versatile. To wear one is to make a statement. To wear one is to be touched by Tinkerbell. Oh so feminine … apparently. However, skirts can also be tricky. Let’s look at some of the hard facts about skirts for transwomen.
Here’s my first blunt point: there is nothing inherently feminine about a skirt. Hear that again: skirts are not feminine. I mean, men wear skirts everywhere outside the Westernised world. But let’s focus on the West. Here, it is not feminine to wear a skirt. Rather, it is masculine to reject a skirt.
WHAT DOES WEARING A SKIRT MEAN?
The magic of a skirt comes not from what it is (just a tube of fabric), but from the gendered meaning attached to it. That meaning is supplied by men coding skirts as feminine. Thus to restate my first blunt point in a new light: ciswomen do not see skirts as feminine. Ciswomen regard skirts as simply another mundane ingredient that can be used in cooking up an outfit. To a woman, a skirt is not a gender statement.
Men are, however, excessively proud not to wear skirts. It is part of the general pomposity they display in scorning feminine things. And yet cismen do wear skirts. In special times, a man may wear a kilt – a skirt that’s desperate to not call itself that. In lazy times, a man may knot a towel around his waist – the literal definition of a wrap skirt. See what I mean when I say that skirts are just pieces of fabric. No static object has a “gender”.
Thus, the only people to whom skirts are symbolic of femininity are men. If you want to wear a skirt to feel more like a woman, you’re thinking like a man. It’s okay to think like that, but it is not okay to deny that this is what you’re doing.
THE BIG FOUR ANTI-MASCULINE GARMENTS
In terms of clothing, the skirt is in the Big Four of visible markers of “not masculine” that “gender culture” perceives. The other members of the Big Four are dresses, bras and high heels. Not a one of these has a male or unisex equivalent. Even if the case is improbable, things like tanktops, hair-ties and leotards have male equivalents.
Even lingerie has a dude version: witness the various styles of harness and satin thong at your local gay club. Pantyhose are the sleekest kind of long johns. Stockings are but socks of melodramatic length and fineness.
Yet for skirts, bras, dresses and high heels, it is the total lack of masculine equivalent that makes them magnetic and powerful for people seeking to embrace their femininity … or to renounce their masculinity.
BUT I STILL LIKE WEARING A SKIRT
So, why do I – a transwoman – choose to live much of my life in a skirt? Because of all of the above. As I transition, I found that skirts made me feel more comfortable in my own skin. They allow me to make an unmistakable statement about intentional femininity and do it in a way that feels valid. They ARE a rejection of masculinity, or rather a rejection of masculinity’s rejection of femininity. And I want to embrace my femininity…
This also plays into a joke I heard once and have repeated often: How do you pick the transwoman out in a group of crossdressers? She’ll be wearing pants. Indeed, the more comfortable I am about how my gender “fits” the more comfortable I am to be a woman wearing pants too. Much the same way I am increasingly comfortable to be a woman who wears less makeup.
LOSING THE MAGIC: REALITY IS BETTER THAN FANTASY
I have travelled on holidays without packing jeans or trousers. There is something powerful in waking up, showering and going to your suitcase and having no option but to happily accept the bargain of wearing a skirt in public every single day. As you do this sort of thing more and more, you will inevitably be spending more time living as the woman you are. As you do this, you become better adjusted to being feminine. And soon, just like for ciswomen, skirts lose their magic. This is a good thing.
Your skirts will become just another item in your wardrobe. Not to say a black vinyl miniskirt doesn’t stay sexy and a calf-length denim skirt doesn’t stay mumsy. But if you’re going to have a healthy relationship with your gender identity, taking the “magic” away from the outward markers of gender is a necessary and healthy thing. Prevailing over preoccupations and illusions always is.