Today's Keyboard Smash
Nov. 13th, 2020 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksI wore a skirt for the first time in...oh, maybe five years or so today. We're doing pre-Thanksgiving shopping, trying to stay ahead of what I anticipate will be a monumental shit show in the grocery stores as the holiday gets closer. I was riding high on the endorphin surge of having planted a bunch of bulbs and being in the sun and the cold. That's my excuse, anyway, for having the audacity to pick out the outfit I did.
I have several casual skirts of various sorts still hanging on my clothing rack, even though I've been studiously ignoring their existence for years. This one is a sort of dusty red jumper--overall bib and middling long skirt--which I guess is technically a dress, but jesus fishsticks, don't make me call it that. I already feel way too much like this scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
Paired with leggings, a men's t-shirt plus a flannel over everything, bee socks, and sneakers, it was probably A Lot to cope with visually. It was also very comfy and fun and the sort of mildly eccentric mishmash that I've always wished I could pull off wearing. I have no idea if I did, in fact, pull it off, but by gods, I wore it.
Even just admitting that I wanted to wear such a thing feels like flaying my skin off and standing naked in front of a crowd. Navigating clothing has been a fraught process for me since my teenage years. Being both fat and varying flavors of genderqueer since I hit puberty has given me a lot of issues in this department.
I like to wear a blend of masculine and feminine fashions, but I lack confidence. Because of the body type I have (read: a chest that could suffocate small lifeforms), anything even vaguely femme just reads as cis girl on me. Menswear often turns out looking dumpy and awkward on my curves, despite my love of it. Jeans and a flannel are, of course, a universally flattering--or at least obscuring--look, read as acceptably queer under most circumstances, and meet my core criteria of "comfortable and moderately shapeless." Because even when I dress to stand out, I fundamentally want to give the impression of only possibly possessing a physical form.
Shaving my head the way I have helps a lot, at least in my mind, to make me read as queer regardless of what I'm wearing. Or at least a few steps to the side of mainstream, which is a decent alternative option. As long as no one looks at me and thinks, oh, yes, here is an average person, I'm on the right track.
Wearing a skirt, though, still feels strange. I have a lot of opinions about our cultural standards about how gender is read and how fatness influences that and how quick people are to shove deliberately deviant bodies back into one box or another given half an opportunity. At the same time, the idea that I might ever wear something that makes people look at me and easily classify me as cis-het-girl makes my skin crawl. Makes me feel like I'm misgendering myself as soon as I pull a piece of clothing off the hanger.
But today, I dressed like the weird little queer kid I am, in a dozen layers and four patterns and at least seven pockets, and it felt good. Weird. Good. Gonna try it again tomorrow.
I have several casual skirts of various sorts still hanging on my clothing rack, even though I've been studiously ignoring their existence for years. This one is a sort of dusty red jumper--overall bib and middling long skirt--which I guess is technically a dress, but jesus fishsticks, don't make me call it that. I already feel way too much like this scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
Paired with leggings, a men's t-shirt plus a flannel over everything, bee socks, and sneakers, it was probably A Lot to cope with visually. It was also very comfy and fun and the sort of mildly eccentric mishmash that I've always wished I could pull off wearing. I have no idea if I did, in fact, pull it off, but by gods, I wore it.
Even just admitting that I wanted to wear such a thing feels like flaying my skin off and standing naked in front of a crowd. Navigating clothing has been a fraught process for me since my teenage years. Being both fat and varying flavors of genderqueer since I hit puberty has given me a lot of issues in this department.
I like to wear a blend of masculine and feminine fashions, but I lack confidence. Because of the body type I have (read: a chest that could suffocate small lifeforms), anything even vaguely femme just reads as cis girl on me. Menswear often turns out looking dumpy and awkward on my curves, despite my love of it. Jeans and a flannel are, of course, a universally flattering--or at least obscuring--look, read as acceptably queer under most circumstances, and meet my core criteria of "comfortable and moderately shapeless." Because even when I dress to stand out, I fundamentally want to give the impression of only possibly possessing a physical form.
Shaving my head the way I have helps a lot, at least in my mind, to make me read as queer regardless of what I'm wearing. Or at least a few steps to the side of mainstream, which is a decent alternative option. As long as no one looks at me and thinks, oh, yes, here is an average person, I'm on the right track.
Wearing a skirt, though, still feels strange. I have a lot of opinions about our cultural standards about how gender is read and how fatness influences that and how quick people are to shove deliberately deviant bodies back into one box or another given half an opportunity. At the same time, the idea that I might ever wear something that makes people look at me and easily classify me as cis-het-girl makes my skin crawl. Makes me feel like I'm misgendering myself as soon as I pull a piece of clothing off the hanger.
But today, I dressed like the weird little queer kid I am, in a dozen layers and four patterns and at least seven pockets, and it felt good. Weird. Good. Gonna try it again tomorrow.
