My friend Sarah, jane-of-all-trades including covering transgender issues for the Examiner, is now blogging at Where The Girls Go. Her latest post is on style, so check it out: A Blue Collar Femme’s Fashion Crisis. What do you think?
The other night I met Amos Mac, photographer and founder of Original Plumbing (OP), the trans male magazine. I finally got to purchase a copy of OP, and of course I chose the fashion issue. It’s great to see another take on gender-bending fashion and I really love the diversity of people profiled in the magazine. Rather than just focusing on the latest styles and cutting edge trends, it concentrates on individual stories, and how peoples’ backgrounds and unique experiences have influenced their perception of fashion and clothing.
Here’s the cover of the issue, and the table of contents (signed for me!):
There’s Jess Cuevas, who owns a clothing boutique and talks about doing away with the gendered sections in the store: “I couldn’t understand why that would matter or hinder what someone wanted to wear, so I got rid of gendered ‘sections.’ It’s a lot easier now and I see that people just buy what they like and what looks good without worrying about it.”
And Sanyu, who says, “The concept of putting art on my binders came when I realized that I had gone through so many surgeries already that I didn’t think that top surgery was going to be an option for me anymore … But, I told myself that I had to find something … beyond the mundaneness of my binder that could make it almost as personal as my flesh. I created a series of personalized binders that I’ve entitled ‘second skin’.”
And Griffen, from Australia, who said, “For me personally, I’ve really noticed a rise in my level of fashion flamboyance since I started taking T and passing more. I’m really into leopard print at the moment”.
Those were just a few of my favorites from the issue, but it’s worth checking out the whole thing for yourself. You can order it for $8 from Original Plumbing. Tell me, dear readers, how have your specific experiences influenced your take on fashion and what you wear or don’t wear?
Exciting! Hoorah! But wait… according to the bakery’s website: “We make manly cupcakes. For manly men.”
While I love the idea of hounds-tooth and plaid cupcakes, something feels a bit problematic to me about the way the bakery is branding itself– it seems so aggressively gendered, so intent on the fact that they’re MEN, and that their cupcakes are for MEN. I think it would be a lot more fun if they explained these differently-styled cupcakes as being for anyone.
Readers, what do you think? I’m on cold medicine today, which apparently does not lend itself well to a critical mind regarding the production of gendered cupcakes.
Update 2/24/2011: A reader pointed out I had the wrong link — all corrected now! Thanks — i.
We can’t talk about fashion without talking about the body, and we can’t talk about the body without talking about gender. Or can we?
Dean Spade wrote up a little thing (PDF) about how we might un-gender the language we use to talk about body parts. The examples given are of most use to health care practitioners, but the suggestions would be helpful for anyone who talks about bodies and wants to do so in a way that’s more inclusive and relies less on gender norms.
My wonderful partner had this t-shirt made for me for Christmas. The ninja is holding a bow tie:
Fambloyant 