H&M Made Me Trans and You Can Quote Me on That.

These first couple blog posts have really been an effort to work together a picture of me. Now that we’ve seen where I am and how I got here, I feel like it’s appropriate to take a look at the things that make me myself and my work mine. My background with cosplay and queerness.

Let’s start with the gay one, shall we?

As my time at school goes on, it is becoming clearer and clearer that being the queer one is just going to be my “thing.” I don’t know how exactly I feel about that, but it doesn’t feel like it is going anywhere. In all honesty it makes me feel awkward. I feel like I’m constantly bringing up the fact I am queer to the point of annoyance.  I’ve spoken to classmates about how “ I swear I don’t usually have to bring it up this much,” only to realize that, yeah, I  don’t bring it up that much because everyone else I hang out with us queer and thus it doesn’t have to be a thing that comes up, it’s just the default.

For the record, in the most detail possible, I am a bisexual nonbinary genderfluid demiboy. I’m bi and nonbinary works in almost all situations so don’t stress it.

For those not particularly in know, here is the cliff notes version. I am attracted to 1) genders that are my own and 2) genders that are not my own. 1, 2 , bi, there you go, simple if I do say so myself.

My gender on the other hand. Oompf.

 I do not fully align with any binary gender (i.e., man or woman) and more so find my sense of gender shifts and changes over time. Hour to hour, or day to day, or even month to month and so on changing from something that is more man than woman, to something completely neutral, to man and woman simultaneously, to no gender at all. However, in all of that I view myself closer to the male side of things. I partially identify with the “masculine gender,” but by no means completely. I am no man. More of a demi(partial)boy. Hence a bisexual nonbinary genderfluid demiboy.

Are all the cis people in the audience thoroughly confused? Good, don’t worry about it. I felt it would be good to have the details of my gender publicly written somewhere and now feels like a decent time, but as long as you use they/them pronouns for me and call me literally anything besides female we’ll no issues.

I’ve said it time and time again, and I will continue until it is no longer true: clothes are so important to queer people. Just see a trans woman put on a dress for the first time and tell me clothes aren’t important. Tell a trans guy putting on a button up with a binder on for the first time clothes aren’t important. Presentation can be everything. Clothes, your appearance, and how you look is who you are to other people. It’s the first thing they see as “you.” It is, at times, legitimately a matter of life and death for us. Sometimes it’s finally being able to feel like yourself for the first time in your life, and sometimes (unfortunately) it being able to pass enough so some guy at a bar doesn’t hate crime you. Clothing is all about how you present yourself and presentation is more important to us than any other group I can think of.

Let me tell you as story.

There was a night in my life I will not forget until the day I die. All I had done was mentioned that I wanted a suit. Not a lady’s power suit, no a normal suit like my dad had, with cufflinks and a tie and everything. That led to a two and a half screaming match in the Harris household. My dad was furious, and my parents were drilling and integrating me asking why? You’re not gay, are you?  (Which I answered, “I’m not gay!” in the way every panicked bisexual says because on a technicality they aren’t lying.) They asked “What so you want to be a man or something?”  Which of course I said no to, which is very funny in hindsight as I type this blog post days away from getting my first testosterone dose much to my father’s ire.

I remember being so scared that night. I couldn’t understand (Well I could I just didn’t want to admit it.) why this was such a problem. It’s just clothes, right? What made a suit from the other side of the store so different? Everything was falling apart because I was so adamant that I wanted to express myself in a way that felt right. I didn’t like dresses; I wanted a suit, but it led to me getting so close to being outed I was legitimately scared for my safety. If you were a queer kid you know, you hear the horror stories about kids getting outed and everything going south. There is a reason majority of homeless youths are queer; you hear those stories, and you know one thing: No one expects their parents to abandon them or turn on them until they’re out in the cold.

Luckily the argument slowly lost steam, but after that I decided to lean back on the whole gender nonconforming clothing thing for a while. I was just too scared, and besides it was just clothes, it couldn’t possibly be important enough to seriously hinder my quality of life, right?

Oh boy.

While trying to ignore the whole situation, I would stare at these people online dressing so queerly you wouldn’t even believe and all I could think was, “I want that I want to be perceived like that. I want to be happy like that. If I could make myself look like that, I would be happy. I would feel so much better about myself; I would feel like myself.” You know, super cisgender thoughts.

I just couldn’t let it go, unfortunately. It was like once I realized wearing more masculine clothes was something I wanted to do, doing anything else became like torture. This all lead to the turning point of my life, me gathering up the courage to walk into the men’s section of H&M. When I tell you I had to psych myself up for months to do it I am not kidding. I knew that if I walked over to that side of the store, that if I bought something and wore it, everything would be different because I knew that I wouldn’t stop there. I knew that if I stepped over there, I was admitting something I didn’t at the time want to at all. I had just navigated the whole sexuality crisis and knew I would be on shaky ground with my family. I knew they could grow to except that, but being trans? ME being trans? I knew there was a universe where I would get disowned at kicked out, and I was not eager to find out which one I lived in. (To the concerned reader at home, I do not live in that universe. My mom is pretty chill with the whole thing so that’s a win.)

Literally no one in that store cared at all that I was even over there, but you could see my hands shaking as I sifted through those button ups. But when I tell you I felt so good in that stupid shirt. I felt so happy I wanted to cry; when I got home and tried them on behind my locked door, I felt like I could move a mountain. It felt like it was the first real choice I made for myself, as myself.

That is why I want to do what I do. Clothes are such an important thing to queer people, and I feel like it is a way I can give back to and serve my community. Making clothes with us in mind, with express goal of making us happy and our lives better. To let us be seen in the industry we have been carrying for decades but have received little to no credit for. Unless they have been made to serve a specific purpose of a given gender, like my transmasculine[jh1]  loungewear line, then my collections have no gender attached. Sorting clothes by gender is dumb and not useful. The only thing that matters is “Do you like the style?” and “Can you fit into it?” Gender is not necessary for that. I’m not going to say it can’t influence those two facts, but it on its own should not be a category we divide things in.

Thanks to that H&M shirt I am much more comfortable with my gender. Turns out I didn’t dislike skirts, dresses, and makeup, I just hated being perceived as female. So ironically, now I dress far more feminine than I ever did when I was “female”. I dress more like a hyper feminine man, and that is what currently make me feel like myself and I’m so much happier for it.

I think everyone deserves to feel that way.