Are you fine with women wearing men's clothing? Are you fine with men wearing women's clothing?
For my entire life, I’ve been 1) mistaken for a boy and 2) told I look like a boy. Early on, I learned to go along with this. When doing icebreakers in school, my fun fact often was: “Despite the fact that I look like a twelve year old boy, I am, in fact, a woman!” I joked about looking like a boy for so long that I started to believe it: I had short hair, didn’t wear makeup, and shopped in the men’s department. I looked like a boy. Simple.Then, in university, I was assigned a section of the book Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam. In the chapter I read, Halberstam talks about how masculinity should be decentered from men. Men didn’t invent masculinity, nor do they own masculinity. There have been endless expressions of female masculinity throughout history.Beyond being simply amazed that I got to read a book for school that talked about lesbians (!!!), I was floored by this book because it expressed a feeling I had been searching for the words to for years. When you’re a masculine woman, people treat you like this weird pseudo-man: you’re like a man, but failing. You’re almost a man, but not quite. You’re a crappy knock-off for a man because your masculinity can’t be your own—it has to be a parody of someone else’s.But that isn’t the way I ever experienced masculinity. When I was a kid, I gravitated toward the boys’ section not because it was the boys’ section, but because I wanted to wear collared shirts with blue dragons on them. My taste is better now (I hope), but my masculinity is the same, and it’s mine.So when I buy a shirt, I don’t care if it’s intended for a man, woman, or a flying spaghetti monster. It’s a commodity, I bought it, and it’s my shirt. When I’m wearing a large baseball jersey, I’m wearing a woman’s shirt because I’m a woman and it’s my shirt. Pieces of fabric may have target audiences, but they don’t have genders.