Cross-dress for success

I finished Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man this past week, and I was impressed by her audacity. Despite being a somewhat butch lesbian, spending 18 months disguised as a man ended up inducing a level of cognitive dissonance that caused her to have an emotional breakdown, seemingly speaking to the innate and fixed properties of our individual sense of our own gender.

I was most fascinated by other people's assumptions about her gender and how female masculinity was perceived as effeminacy once ensconced in a "male" persona. I was further intrigued by her comments that once she established herself as a man amongst the men she socialized with, she later removed her glasses and stopped applying her fake stubble, and yet still no one guessed that she was a woman. This proves that people don't so much see what is in front of them, but rather only the rough outlines of gender. Once our brains create a categorization, we cease to question and move on to the next level of human interaction. And when we come across someone of indeterminate gender, it's a puzzle and stops us in our tracks.

I've never dressed in drag, although I find the idea somewhat titillating. However, I don't think I'd make a terribly convincing man. The only thing I have going for me is my height and that my hands are kind of square. That said, I have been addressed as "sir" about 5 or 6 times in my adult life, perhaps most embarrassingly by a proctologist who was looking down at his notes as I walked into his office. I suspect that my height, my short hair at the time and my black leather jacket may have contributed to his reading of "male" out of the corner of his eye. (And I suppose I should be thankful that I wasn't pants down, prone on the table when he made this error.) Still, I doubt most women would be mistaken for a "sir," so there must be something about me that reads as unfeminine when viewed in a certain context. I'm guessing it's my comportment.

Since I was a teenager, I've had an acute sense that my posture and the way that I walk isn't typical of most women, but I didn't recognize it as "gay" until after coming out and spending more time with other lesbians, where I saw aspects of my physical self in them. There is such a thing as lesbian body language, and it reads as more "masculine," but not all lesbians have it, so it can't be conclusively stated that lesbian = more mannish in mannerisms. This tells me that gender correlates to sexuality in some fashion, but the exact nature of the relationship still seems to elusive. I suppose that's the beauty of the complexity of human beings.

I strongly feel aspects of masculinity and femininity within myself, almost equally, which translates, to me, into a kind of androgyny inside myself. When I was a kid, I wore my dad's ties, baseball caps and refused to put ribbons in my hair much to the consternation of my 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Cohen. As a teen, I was super-femme with long curly hair, skirts, and a lot of makeup. For a large portion of my adult life, I had extremely short hair and nondescript fashion. That changed once I came out and decided to remake myself physically. I dyed my hair electric blue and black and created rules for my wardrobe (solids, stripes and argyle = OK, patterns = absolutely not). I became more aware of how my appearance reflected my inner life, and now, I consciously choose certain outfits to reflect aspects of my gender.

I enjoy the interplay of masculine and feminine as I allow it to manifest on my outward body. I feel most whole when I appropriate masculine symbols of power into my dress (like my stylized sheriff's badge belt buckle, or my military jacked by Laundry). The twist is that I never wear a literal translation of male symbols--my belt buckle is not an actual sheriff's badge. And, I wear these items at the same time I emphasize my femininity via tight denim that shows off my female ass and hips. Along with my sheriff belt buckle, I wear a cowboy shirt cut for women that happens to have line drawings of cowgirls with lassos. It's a costume, and I see it as such, but at the same time, it represents a deep part of my psyche. I can feel my masculinity and femininity at the same time, and it lends me confidence. It is sexually charged, at least for me, which is how I know there is a connection between sexuality and gender.

Which leads me to explore the notion of cross-dressing, spectatorship and empowerment. I haven't been to a drag king show in quite some time, although I've seen about four performances in my life thus far. As a spectator, it's not something that I ever really understood. There's nothing particularly sexy to me about watching women dress up as strange male archetypes such as a trucker-hatted guy wearing a Led Zeppelin t-shirt swilling beer while lip-synching to some Hootie and the Blowfish song.

I'm sure this may be a turn-on for some onlookers, but I'm guessing it's the minority. It's like a gay man in drag among the Chelsea boys. He has a place there, but it seems unlikely that he, as a woman, is an object of desire for most of those men.

As I think more about my own style as well as drag, it's becoming clearer to me that cross-dressing is more about harnessing the personal power inherent in gender than it is about transforming oneself into an object of desire (although paradoxically, invoking that power may make us more attractive to those who appreciate the confidence it creates). A man in drag invokes the sexuality and sensuality of female power over masculine energy. And a woman expressing herself through aspects of masculinity is doing much the same, in reverse. Masculinity can't exist without its opposite, and vice-versa. Dressing in drag is a touchstone to our innermost expressions of ourselves.

Markers of gender have definitive meanings and power in our culture, and as Norah Vincent has proven, clothes do indeed make the (wo)man.