New Clothes!

So, my girlfriend and I celebrated our 1 year anniversary on Monday, and being the workaholics that we (she) are, we decided to grab takeout pad thai and do our homework on our ACTUAL anniversary. However, every time we went to the local Borders we smelled the delicious steakhouse behind it, and if there's anything yours truly can't refuse, it's eight ounces of filet mignon in bearnaise sauce. So we decided to investigate. However, at about 4:30 this morning I realized that while I had semi-nice pants that sorta kinda fit me, a nice, basic white Oxford from Ralph Lauren Rugby's men's section, and my dashing red skulls tie from the same, I had nothing to put on my feet except sneakers and too-large wingtips.

So I hightailed it out to my local Macy's and because I got lucky they were having a sale. By the time I had descended the staircase into the men's section, however, I was sweating bullets. I don't know why, but I just have this idea in my head of the men's section of any store being a bastion similar to the men's room, in which at any moment I was liable to be accosted and told that not only did I not belong here, I was going to be forcibly ejected any minute and was not expected to return-- only in much uglier terms.

Instead I found a graveyard of bored guys and their girlfriends/wives cruising the racks, taking for dull-eyed granted what I saw as a cornucopia of magnificence: styles, cuts, colors and fabrics that I would not be even allowed to look at were I to go shopping with my mother. Here were the clothes that I'd been coveting for so many years, all laid out on racks before me, free for me to...buy. Anyhoo. I scooted down to the shoes section and quickly got lost, starry-eyed, in the kind of shoes I'd only been dreaming of for years. I of course wanted to buy everything in every color imaginable, but I made myself focus. I was here to get brown Oxfords, preferably wingtips, to go with my brown belt, and I wanted to get them as cheaply but as fashionably as possible.

I soon found myself choosing between two lower end brands, one pair at $40 and the other at $60. The $40-dollar ones were acceptable, but at the same time I could tell why they were $40. Plus I knew that I would look like a twelve year old boy dressed by his mother and forced to go to church, a far cry from the suave, debonair butch that I wanted to be. So I gritted my teeth and grabbed the $60 pair, brown Alfani Oxfords, and started looking for a sales rep to get me sizes. This proved a little tricky but I was lucky enough to get a wonderfully flamboyantly gay man to help me out, and he even aided me in picking out dress socks (though I had to tone down his taste a little bit- I'm not quite ready for crazy colors). Then, pleased with myself, I headed to the checkout counter- and stopped.

They were having a sale on Dockers dress-casual pants, and as I stared at them with what I'm sure was a lustful, longing look that one often sees on nerds confronted with hot girls, I thought about the pants I had at home. They were...all right. A little tight around the waist, a little bit short as a result, and not particularly dressy. Dammit, I was taking a classy girl out tonight (trust me, if you knew my girlfriend you'd know she is undyingly classy) and I was NOT doing it in American Eagle relaxed fit casual chinos! Grabbing a pair of flat-front Dockers (I just don't really like pleats), I headed to the dressing room.

Annnnnd...dilemma number two. This was the men's section. The dressing room was, typically, reserved for men (though it didn't say that, it was pretty well assumed). After a moment of quandary, I headed upstairs. I had already done enough nervewracking gender trespassing today and I figured I'd done my part towards the dissolution of gender regulation; it was my turn to trend for safety. Of course, I'd have to get past the guard dogs of the women's room, but at least my voice and the gender cues (flippy wrists, hip swing) that I turn on specifically for places like dressing rooms and public bathrooms would protect me there.

Looking in the mirror, I had that experience again. You, if you are any kind of genderqueer or alternatively gendered creature, know the one- and even if you don't, you probably do too: looking in the mirror and finally, FINALLY liking what I saw. I've gotten that more and more since I've embraced my other-genderedness, but it's still a relatively new experience. Which makes me mad, and makes me wont to talk about the tyranny of regulated, regulation gender, but that's a whole nother post (or bunch of them).

Anyway, I got out of the dressing room with no comment, and paid for my stuff. Best part about all of this: Dockers pants, Alfani Oxfords, and (splurge!) Calvin Klein dress socks: $90. Score at Macy's! Unfortunately, the gf had a lot of homework last night and got about two hours of sleep, so when she begged off from our evening out I was inclined to be merciful. Tomorrow night, however, is a different story. I'm going to see what I can do about posting pictures, but I look pretty damn debonair, if I do say so myself. The only thing I'm worried about is the proverbial bathroom problem, scourge of genderqueers and transfolks all over the world. But that's a different story; milady must go to bed early tonight and it is up to me to enforce that. So for tonight, adieu...but for tomorrow, more posts!

Clothes make the genderqueer, or my masculinity, part one

First off, take the title with a grain of ironic salt. I know very well that clothes don't make the genderqueer, they just have always been an integral part of the experience for me.

I have always felt, for the most part, like a boy. When I was little, I was the most incorrigible tomboy. All my friends were boys, and I didn’t have a Barbie bone in my body. To show my distaste for such gifts, I tended to dismantle them and leave the pieces strewn all over the house. Having tripped over enough of these gruesome little displays, my relatives soon learned not to get me the latest Barbie that my cousins always wanted. Everything was knights and pirates and interstellar space wolves (don’t ask) with me. When, at a Ren Fair at about seven years old, the champion of the joust attempted to award cute, blonde little me the crown of flowers on the end of his lance, I thought he was challenging me and attacked the tip of his lance with my plastic sword. My greatest wish was a pair of zip-off cargo pants, but my mom said she’d only buy them for me if I could find them in the girls’ section. Oh, and I reviled pink, like any good tomboy. 

  Then puberty happened and, much to my horror, I didn’t stay slim-hipped and flat-chested. Other girls of my age were budding too, beginning to glory in tight clothes that hugged their curves, and lip gloss and makeup and doing their hair, and I stared at these hyperfeminine creatures and wondered how I could ever measure up to them. I seemed to have missed some “Femininity 101” class that they’d all passed with flying colors. For many years I tried to make myself care about such things, and would buy makeup kits and nail polish and let my friends give me makeovers, but a week later the makeup would be gathering dust in my closet and I would no longer be imagining myself on the cover of YM or 17. Femininity, like my clothing, just fit wrong, being too small or its sleeves and pant legs too short, and I felt like a pig in a skirt and blouse. My hair, blow-dried into an hour or two of wave, hung limp and stick-straight to my shoulders. I grew to hate girls my age for having femininity come so easily to them. Its performance seemed exhausting to me.

                 

Especially since I had nothing invested in it: I looked at the boys and envied them their slim, sure, athletic bodies, their pants that were more often too long than too short, their Oxford shirts that didn’t cling to what uncomfortable body fat they might have as if screaming, Look! She needs to lose ten pounds! Plus their shoes were cooler too (shoe whore that I am, of course I noticed that). But put me in a clothing store and I wouldn’t even glance over casually to the boys’ section, so afraid was I of being suspected to be anything but normal. Of course, my peers had already figured it out. It was in the way I walked, the way I didn’t wear makeup, the way I twitched at my mother’s “business-casual” clothing selections, the way I only felt happy and comfortable in my gym clothes, on a sports field.

                 

And then Cari happened when I was sixteen: what I thought of as my first girl crush. She was on my field hockey team (of course) and had the nastiest temper ever, and the crushes I’d had on boys were like candles compared to her bonfire. I’d had crushes on girls before—my field hockey captain when I was eleven , for example—but I called them off as “fascinations,” and thought them odd, and squashed them as fast as I could. But here, now—this was more than I could ignore. It was as if the combined weight of all the fascinations had broken a dam somewhere inside me, and came pouring out for Cari.

                 

Nothing happened. I struggled with it for a week then fell easily into the category of bisexual, and worked hard on repressing it, rationing how often I looked at her, how often I spoke to her (though that wasn’t hard; I was always bashful around people I liked, and she never gave me the time of day), trying not to talk about her. I was good at it. Nobody, especially Cari herself, had any clue, as I found out years later when I came out to my best friend at college. But that was high school, essentially: always wanting people, never getting them. I might as well have been a sexless individual for all the attention my peers gave me.

                 

At college, I was still trying to be feminine, but as I met more and more girls who didn’t care to conform to the rigid, preppy standards of my high school, I let myself, finally, begin to indulge. It helped that I had great role models of course: first the (relatively few) butches who walked around in cargo shorts and topsiders, and then the genderqueer hipsters in their skinny jeans and flannels, and the shapeshifters, wearing motorcycle boots and leather one day and gorgeous, flowing dresses the next. These creatures were strange, wild, wonderful, and everything I had ever hoped to be. Following their example, I began to look at the books of the “Lesbian Immortal” class out of the corner of my eye; I fell in utterly burning, hopeless, wildfire love with my field hockey captain (of. Freaking. Course.), and I started looking at the men’s section of American Eagle online, albeit clandestinely. I adored the cargo shorts, the men’s jeans—their cuts, their washes, the easy way they sat on the models’ hips, the way they broke at the models’ feet. I felt a burning need to wear them, to look like the models inside them. It wasn’t too long before I guessed my waist size and inseam and bought my first pair.

                 

They were a disaster. I’d botched my measurements (they made me feel fat) and they were the wrong cut for someone with my hips and waist. They looked like mom jeans, and they hit my dorm’s free box as soon as I’d gotten them off me. I was disgusted with myself…but not so disgusted that I didn’t immediately rehash my measurements and go in for shorts, jeans, and T-shirts, all but wiping out my miniscule savings account, because while my parents usually bought me clothes, I knew very well that they would not pay for these.

                 

But it was worth it, worth every inch of fabric, of cotton and jeanscloth and Oxford cloth. Because when I looked in the mirror wearing what I have on today—dark wash, low rise bootcut jeans and a blue and white checkered Oxford—I saw a beautiful young man, a handsome young woman, and one damn fine alternatively gendered thing. I saw Jackson on the outside for the first time, and for the first time I liked what I saw.

                 

That’s not to say it was always easy. Tune in later for “my masculinity, part two: gender wars!”

The obligatory "all about me" post.

So, where to start? Let's see...

To begin with, Jackson is not my real name. It is nowhere close. I like my privacy and I like the privacy of those who appear in my blog, so their names and some details will be changed. One thing that's important is that I'm currently in the process of changing my name, from Jacqueline to Jackson, because I never liked the name Jacqueline (which I actually do, but it's not my real name anyway, so) and feel that Jackson better expresses my gender. Which is butch and genderqueer.

I work at my school's computer desk, helping people out with their computer problems, from mildly to moderately complex (anything beyond that goes to the full time tech staff). I really enjoy it, oddly enough, and if I have a good story I'll share it with y'all. I also play World of Warcraft--Horde only--and my current project is a level 76 orc marksmanship hunter named Boreal, so I may expound upon him in the future. I'm also a DJ, and I'm having fun playing with the DJ software on my MacBook Pro. I'm a total and complete Mac snob.

I hate spiders. My girlfriend kills them for me. Yes, I'm a butch. I have short hair and I wear men's clothing (and isn't that so stupid, that a whole style and type of clothing can get completely reserved for one gender only!), much to my mother's chagrin and girlfriend's delight. I sometimes feel like I'm more than half a boy, but I flap my arms a lot when I get excited and I'm one of the world's biggest shoe whores. And you know what? I spend way too much time justifying both/either my masculinity or femininity to people, so I'll stop there. For now. Because I'm having a shameless, dirty, delicious love affair with queer theory right now, I can't really keep from talking about gay stuff for long. All of that will be posted under "Teh gay."

I'm an athlete. I've played field hockey and lacrosse since I was 11. I recently quit lacrosse for rugby for reasons we won’t get into yet, and let me tell you, it is a very difficult experience to be playing a sport I don’t know inside out and backwards. I may not be a great player, but I make it my job to learn the minutiae of the field. Thankfully, my school isn’t very good at sports (with the exception of badminton and rugby), so they let me play on their teams. Of course, most of the people at my college were picked last for gym class all their lives, and they are all too pleased to never have anything to do with athletics ever again, so as alumns they never donate. So sports at my college are kind of a labor of love.

I’m a libertarian. Wait a minute, gays can’t be in the least sense right wing! And yet, here I am. As you may have figured out already, I’m a walking contradiction. See also: athlete, computer geek, violist.

And I’m a writer. And English major. I hope to be a publisher someday, and put queer (fantasy) fiction in the mainstream. Like Philip Pullman, I’d like to be a realist writer, but no matter how hard I try a demon or a dragon or a vampire-werewolf hybrid (not as lame as it sounds, I promise) always pops up. I love Philip Pullman, Robin McKinley, George R. R. Martin, J.R.R. Tolkein, Pamela Dean, Lev Grossman, and anything about walking through a door, a wall, or a wardrobe into another world. I do have a crippling case of writer’s block that has felt like my arm’s been off for over a year. Which brings me to…

Early in the second semester of my freshman year, I was diagnosed with acute clinical depression. It nearly claimed my life several times. It’s in remission right now—I think of depression as like cancer, in that it doesn’t always completely go away but goes into remission. I’ve had a few flare-ups, but thanks to my loving, caring, beautiful, wonderful girlfriend, as well as my therapist, I’ve never gone back so far into the darkness. But that doesn’t mean I don’t remember, and I will talk about that here too. Mental illness is unfairly stigmatized and it’s important to bring its suffering out into the open and show people that it’s real, it’s serious, and it’s not just “all in your head.” It claims lives. It ruins them. Its sufferers need support and care and love, not injunctions to “get over it.”

Other than that, I will try to post at least once a week, on Fridays. I will talk about gender and sexuality, World of Warcraft, mental illness, procrastination, fantasy (and realist) literature, DJ software and sick tracks, college athletics and college politics, and the trials and tribulations of being an English major.

Ready?