Is it crossdressing if it was male fashion once?

 As a kid I tried to justify my wearing girls' clothes by claiming that men in the past used to wear the sorts of things I liked to wear: silk shirts with lace, stockings and suspenders, high heels, etc.; or else that certain men wear certain things that are more usually associated with women such as Scottish kilts or dancers' tights. This was a kind of legalistic interpretation of the notion that boys mustn't dress like girls - kids are all barrack-room lawyers, aren't they? - and that therefore I wasn't really dressing like a girl (even though I was), just in case I got caught and interrogated. This was also before I knew that being transgender doesn't equate to being a boy who wants to be a girl. 

Things seem to have become more fluid, clothing wise, and a lot of clothes are essentially unisex or not obviously gendered now. This partly explains my last post about soon replacing any remaining menswear in my wardrobe with womenswear. A lot of the time, as with jeans, say, who can tell any difference? Apart from looking at the label. 

But there is also a trend towards people selecting clothing that is more obviously associated with the other gender. I have seen many men in skirts in recent years for presumably no reason other than that they prefer to wear them. And who doesn't? 

My motives for wearing skirts are different - I want to look and feel feminine and be treated as a woman, not a guy in a skirt. But going back to my younger years, how could I justify why I wore skirts in an age and culture that still thought trans people were weird? (OK, it's not that we're not deemed weird now, but nothing like to the same degree.)

Hence my legalistic interpretation of whether or not each and every item of clothing was or was not for women. The whole ensemble was never examined in this way and, yes, I was dressed as a girl all right, no doubt about it, and that's what I wanted to look like. 

A trans friend used to be in a rock tribute band and therefore was justified in wearing a long wig, fitted top and leggings as it was part of the act, and even at home the odd clothes were deemed acceptable by the wife. Rock and roll yeah! Until my friend forgot some panties drying on the radiator and the wife realised that the rock band excuse was not the real justification for the feminine clothes. Sadly, they have split up and I suspect, as is often the case in these scenarios, that the bogus justification upset her more than the fact her husband was trans.

Finally, I don't pretend to understand anything about manga/animé and the whole graphic and games culture associated with these art styles but time and again I come across mention of the character Astolfo, who is a guy who dresses girly because he likes it. Originally a warrior in Renaissance epic poems, notably Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (a piece of literature that, for my part, I found excruciating in my student days), Astolfo has become a crossdresser in his modern animé reincarnation, which is fine in my book. But the justifications for men wearing softer, prettier garments, using Astolfo in this meme that has been doing the rounds, do remind me a lot of my own justifications as a youngster, which were exactly along these lines:

Being cutesy is very fun and it's good that non-trans guys increasingly seem to be choosing to wear something frilly, pink or soft again, as men used to do. If you like it, go for it. After all, some great men have indeed gone for part of this look, though none of them for all of it. More's the pity!

Not what they meant?

Talking of interpretation, this recent item from the Church Times probably doesn't mean what it seems to be saying.

It made me chuckle, though.

A dip in the archives

Here's another one of the photos recently sent to me. This is me with my lovely friend Kate at the Sparkle transgender festival in Manchester in 2015.

I'm putting this one up as Kate is very sick at the moment and I'm thinking of her a lot and hoping she will pull through.

Sue x