Category: gender

So Andrea got me thinking about what I feel like when I feel attractive.
And the answer is Sting. Or Adam Ant. Some days, Buster Keaton. On groovier days, Terence Trent D’Arby (anyone remember him?).
I’m not copying a look. God knows I can’t walk around looking like Adam Ant; I haven’t got the cash or the innate sense of style he’s got. It’s more this sense of walking and having this sense that I feel like what he feels like when he’s out walking. Or what I imagine him to feel like feeling like.
Except the funny thing about it is that until hanging out with trannies, I never thought of any of it as gendered. I always admired a kind of cocksure attitude, and I’ve always liked suits, and white cuffs, and cufflinks. When Betty and I watch Raiders of the Lost Ark – which we do sometimes – and that scene comes on toward the end when Indy and Marion on are the steps of the Federal Building, and he’s natty in that 40s suit (and fedora) and she’s wearing that great women’s suit, we both know what the other is thinking. I wanna look like Indy, and Betty wants to look like Marion.
But I don’t want to be a man, don’t feel like a man, know that I won’t look like Indy. It’s more a sense of admiration I have for the person, in a role model kind of way, a sense of self that I’ve internalized, and that yes – is symbolically indicated by a suit. And a suit worn with attitude. Ditto for leather pants.
When I was a kid, my brother had these really cool red Levi’s. And I wanted a pair just like them. Eventually I got a pair, but by then I had hit puberty, and I had hips. And when I put them on, I felt really disappointed that I didn’t look like him in them.
I know, I know: everyone’s thinking she’s trans again. It’s hard to explain why I’m not, when I have all this evidence of both gender non-conformity (in general) and what you could call “cross dressing” piling up. But not looking like my brother didn’t make me think I should wrap my hips in ace bandages. It was more that I wanted the jeans to look the same way they did on him – not for me to look like him. If it makes any sense, it was more that my hips were ruining the lines of the jeans; my hips weren’t ruining my sense of self.
I don’t know or care what people actually SEE. It’s this internal rhythm, or internal rightness. I don’t feel disappointed when I look in a mirror & notice I’m *not* wearing spats or that I’m way hippier in suits than any man would ever be. In a sense, it has nothing to do with the way I look, but entirely to do with how I feel.
It doesn’t bother me that people don’t necessarily see what I’m feeling. Some days I think they must see something – a gleam in my eye, perhaps.
Basically, I know I’m not trans because it never occurred to me to want to be a man, and I certainly never thought I was one. I just thought I liked a certain kind of clothes that most girls didn’t like. But you know, most guys don’t like the kind of clothes I like, either. And I never felt like a man walking around in them, and still don’t. When I feel like Adam Ant, or Sting, or Buster Keaton, it’s because I feel a certain way, a certain kind of confidence, or cockiness, or jauntiness, or something like that. Something bookish, and antique, and wearing a good suit.
I just don’t think of myself as a gendered thing. There is nothing odd to me about liking men’s suits. Granted, I’ve got kind of foppy taste in men anyway. (If I were to add anyone else to my list, it’d be Oscar Wilde, but that comes with so much of a sense that I need be clever as well as well-dressed that it’s not a mood I strike very often.)
I was thinking that I don’t experience myself as a gender. Certainly not as male or female. If I were pressed, I might say “Masculine Woman.” (Recently I’ve been using “Phallic Female” because I think the “phallic” bit connotes far more of what I’m after.) But “masculine woman” conjures up: big, blue collar, maybe mean, undereducated, Bertha-type Diesel dyke. German athletes and jokes about women with mustaches, too. No matter what Katherine Hepburn did, or even Marlene Dietrich, we don’t hear “masculine woman” and think “natty dresser.”
Some days I think “feminine man” has better connotations, since it does point at some remarkable femme-y gay men, like the aforementioned Mr. Wilde, or Quentin Crisp.
And then, in an interview in Curve magazine (the same one I’m in) with the new actress of “The L Word, ” Daniela Sea, I find this exchange:

DS: I definitely identify as a tomboy … that’s the first thing that anybody teased me for when I was like 6.
DAM: Some people will interpret that as a lesbian experience and some interpret that as a typical trans experience.

And I think: I must not be alone. I can’t be the only woman who isn’t a lesbian and who isn’t trans who just happens to like men’s suits and feel like Sting when I’m walking down the street on a brisk Fall day.