The Paradox of Transgender Fashion

The paradox of transgender fashion, and this applies mostly to MTF, FTM, and some C/D folk, but I suppose could apply to androgynes too. But I think it's mostly to the other three categories of the transgender community. At any rate, the paradox is thus: Because of the society driven need for gender based markers to mark out one's identity in the world(the gist of which is the incredibly boiled down age old "boys wear blue, girls wear pink"), a person who is transgendered in order to be properly recognized in the gender in which they are living, are required to gender their fashion in very concrete black and white ways. The paradox of this is that a lot of fashion, has moved toward androgenous concepts for the past several decades. So that while a trans person is wearing these very gendered clothes in order to mark their gender, they are pulled out of the normalcy of that gender, by that very act of having to dress in extremely gendered ways.

And the thing is, this is often an internal pressure that is pedaled in by the insecurities that society pushes into the transgendered person, that anything that is left indefinite or ambigious with their fashion, is taken by society to mean that they are not fully committed to their transition.

What this results in, more often than not, is a kind of hyper-gendered fashion sense that often times gets blocked into the extreme fringes. This of course creates the stereotype of the transgender woman(I think because women's fashion has the greatest play in it in terms of gendernessnessness, which I think is probably tied a lot into how greatly women's roles in society have changed over just the last 50-60 years) who is in someways outed by the outlandishness of her fashion choices, which she makes generally out of an intense desire to eliminate the confusion of her gender. This is not always the case, it's just the stereotype that you see in movies and popular culture--it's the general view that a lot of the populace has of transgender people. Which, it's not good or bad, depending on how the look is being owned.

I think the central question you want to ask yourself though, is are you wearing what you're wearing because you want to, and it's an expression of who you are, and your own style. Or are you wearing it because you don't feel safe, and are coming from a place of persecution and insecurity? Which I mean, I don't think that question is limited any particular life experience. I think everyone has those questions sometimes about fashion. But I'm more wondering about it from the lens of the transgender experience. But maybe that's the thing too. In a lot of ways these questions apply to everyone. But we act maybe, like they should just apply to one group of society when we're asking them.

It's a decent question, in terms of fashion. Are you dressing to express your own aesthetic and ideas, or are you dressing to conform to a gendered fashion out of insecurities about your male, female, or androgynessness?
Oh, and I realize that the way I explained this got lost in digressions, and now makes absolutely no sense any more. But oh well!