1:27am March 13, 2014

➸ I think maybe I was right.

youneedacat:

I probably shouldn’t write about my experiences of gender in public.

I also probably shouldn’t read people’s posts about gender.

If I do the first, I piss people off, almost always.

If I do the second, I nearly always run into discussions about how people with my (lack of) gender either don’t…

Oh and also…

I think the notion that ANY item of clothing has to be sequestered off in some “this ALWAYS broadcasts the SAME THING about gender” category is….untenable. I think anyone suggesting that isn’t taking human variety into account at all.

IMO, It has to be okay for two or more different people to be able to wear the exact same garment and be free to have it mean *for them* what they want and need it to mean. I don’t see how that could possibly be a threat to anyone.

I think maybe the way we discussed it can look like a threat, if you’re really stretching and have a lot of experience with seriously unpleasant people.

But I can’t see it as a threat either.

I honestly think the only viable solution that works for everyone, is to have a society that takes all of these things on an individual basis. Like… nobody assumes that particular garments are gendered in a certain way, but nobody assumes they aren’t either. Maybe there would even be specific ways of broadcasting whether your clothing was meant to be gendered or not.

But there can’t be any general rule like “all clothing is genderless” or “certain clothing is gendered” without creating problems for different sorts of people. The moment certain clothing becomes universally gendered, you create problems for genderless people (even if you create some little side-category of “genderless clothing”… in fact that just compounds the problem). The moment all clothing becomes nongendered, then you create problems for gendered people, especially some trans people who may need to use clothing to project their gender identity to the world (and may not be literally physically safe without the ability to broadcast certain cues and have them picked up, via clothing). So you have to find some way of dealing with the matter, that doesn’t involve any across-the-board solution of any kind.

But that really goes for most things. Across-the-board solutions always end up damaging someone.

Notes: