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Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from that of their social environment.
Albert Einstein
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and madmen.
Aldous Huxley
homovestite, n.:
One who obsessively, compulsively, and neurotically only wears the clothing of eir own sex.
Raphael Carter
First of all, a justification: all personal web pages are by virtue of their very existence narcissistic in the extreme. On this page, I blather on about something which is of interest to me, and, judging by various conversations I've had over the years, several others as well. If you don't care about my personal gender identity issues, go away; this will bore you. If you decide to keep reading, then don't blame me.
Also, I wrote most of this many years ago. I've since basically given up this project of wearing non-gender-normative clothing, to my regret, except in the few situations that it's socially acceptable (such as drag bars, Hallowe'en, and the occasional house party). Living like this was a constant struggle and eventually I grew tired of the stares and the constant fight for acceptance. If you were one of those rare people who neither disapproved, were shocked by, nor fetishised my clothing, thanks. Maybe some other time. For now, it's someone else's turn to subvert the dominant paradigm, and the best of luck to you.
I tend to get a lot of questions about my choice of clothing. I don't really understand this, and I'm usually at a loss to reply. People never seem to know why I would wear something that usually only women wear. This has been going on for as long as I can remember— my parents didn't want to give me a doll when I was about ten, and I couldn't understand why then, either. I didn't like playing team sports with boys my age, but adults kept trying to get me interested for some reason.
Finally, when I was twenty, I moved out of my parent's house, and for the first time I was in a position to decide how to live my own life. Among other changes, I sold my car and bought a bicycle, I stopped eating meat, I bought a few skirts which I began to wear around the city, and I began to collect makeup.
I can't explain why it feels right to crossdress. It just does; it always has. I don't think anything's wrong with me, my parents and the DSM IV notwithstanding. All I can say is that some people are born to act like boys, some to act like girls, and some are born to be somewhere in-between.
To answer another common question: no, I don't feel any urge to have sex-reassignment surgery. My physical sex isn't important enough to me to go through the hassle. People who do undergo surgery do so because they identify as a man in the body of a woman, or vice versa. I don't really identify as either, and therefore surgery doesn't really make sense for me.
I should also say that crossdressing doesn't necessarily mean that someone is gay. I know lots of straight guys who crossdress. I also know straight girls who "crossdress", to the extend that this is possible in our culture for women. Personally, I'm bisexual, although I'm not really attracted to people who are very feminine or masculine. I think a healthy and well-rounded person is able to act in both ways which our culture labels as "male" and as "female". Of course, that's probably just my bias.
Why are there no gender-free, third-person pronouns in English? If it were practical, I'd ask not to be referred to by either male or female pronouns, but this would be really akward in our current language. There's no good reason for this shortcoming in English. Besides referring to people of indeterminate sex, or situations where you don't feel like revealing the gender of a person you're describing, it doesn't make sense to have to know the gender of a person to refer to them in the third person. For example, if you were to tell me, "I just met the new teacher", it doesn't make sense for me to say, "what is he like?" If I happen to know you're referring to a kindergarten teacher, should I say, "what's she like?" Why? Neither "he" nor "she" is really appropriate in this case, although your high school english teacher would tell you to use "he".
We got into our current mess due to institutionalized sexism: since the early 1800's, grammar textbooks have been telling students to use the male pronoun in the case where the gender of the subject is not known. This implicitly defines women as "other", as de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex: "Man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of man to designate human begins in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity." The most workable solution to this is simply to use plural pronouns in cases where gender is not clear, although this is less than ideal. It does, however, get the job done. More to the point, that's what virtually every English speaker did until around 1900 (and if you don't believe me, go read your William Shakespeare and Jane Austen).
The nicest set of suggested neologisms I've seen suggested to address this problem are those used in The Joy of TEX (1990) by mathematician Michael Spivak. For your reference, they are presented in the table below. As for titles, people using these have commonly used M., Mir., and H. (for Honourable).
| Masculine | Feminine | Neutral | Plural | Spivak | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjective | he | she | it | they | e |
| Objective | him | her | it | them | em |
| Possessive adjective | his | her | its | their | eir |
| Possessive pronoun | his | hers | its | theirs | eirs |
| Reflexive | himself | herself | itself | themselves | emself |
There are also lots of good on-line references on gender-free pronouns, such as the following:
I also wrote two term papers on all this stuff for a Women's Studies course, which might be interesting to people who haven't read much of the literature on gender-free writing (and there's a lot of it out there).
This page began life in the summer of 1996 as a supplement to my friend Nikita's GIRLS page. GIRLS was the name a group of us geeky guys in the math faculty here gave ourselves when we began wearing skirts, and occasionally dresses, to class and elsewhere. The name was an acronym for "Guys In Really Lovely Skirts". (It was originally "Long", but we decided that was too restrictive.)
I had just begun to add skirts to my wardrobe, and some of my (male) friends also seemed to think this was a good idea, for various reasons. At least one of them probably just wanted to pick up, but most of the rest were bored with the usual clothes which males are expected to wear. It was also, of course, an interesting social experiment. (Hey, mathematicians are supposed to be eccentric.) The fad seems to have passed, although a few of us stuck with it for some time.