Title: Clothing Has No Gender – Cerebral Sexuality
Headings: Clothing Has No Gender
Clothing Has No Gender
Content: He may be presenting in a feminine manner, by wearing clothes that embody a stereotypical view of womanhood, but his gender identity doesn’t change. Masculinity and femininity aren’t genders, they’re behaviors and presentations. They are rooted in stereotypical gendered experiences, but we have joyfully reached a point in existence where we know that we can separate the presentation from the experience. So I can separate my feminine presentation from my woman’s experiences. (This is also really culture specific – I imagine that most of the people reading this are from the US or other Western countries, and our views of gender presentation are pretty rigidly formed by Western colonial culture. In a culture where men wear things that we could call dresses, they’re not presenting in a feminine manner. We might think that they are, but that’s our external view imposing our values and expectations on them, even if it’s kept in our own heads.) Now that we’re all on the same page that gender identity isn’t the same thing as gender presentation, let’s talk nuance. Everything I’ve just laid out is a fairly binary explanation of masculinity/femininity and man/woman. So how does this work when we think about people with non-binary gender identities?