Bewitching Threads Pt. 2
Trans-formative magic.
CW: Discussion of homophobia, gender dysphoria, and whatever that place is between dysphoria and euphoria where you can just….be.
If you haven’t read Bewitching Threads Part 1 go back and read that first!
All my stockings, with all their overtly feminine sensuality went in the purple sack of doom.
Searching for a new skin after stripping away everything I knew, at first I doubled down on some initially (rather boring) conventional “masculine” aesthetics. However I rapidly found I was starting to build another kind of restrictive packaging.
Only this one had less crystals and looked a little bit too much like the mens deodorant section at the supermarket
“Hey SISSY boy use Graphite Turbo Rock MAN-STINK for MANLY men!”
So aiming for frat-boy-turns-gym-bro-finance-nepo-hire wasn’t my vibe. Now what? Now of course I know that sometimes I quite like being a sissy boy. At the time though, I felt a bit lost, and more than a bit disconnected from my sexuality and my body.
How peculiar, given I am by trade, into dress-ups and have a vast creative imagination. But exploring this felt different. It felt raw. I wasn’t looking for a costume.
Expression of sexuality had been such a defining source of strength that in the amoebic haze of restructuring and learning about myself anew, I couldn’t immediately reach for the things that made me feel like I had some level of control.
It’s not all discomfort of course, there’s nothing like being called “Buddy” (the ultimate non-threatening little guy) by dudes in grocery stores trying to get past you to reach the tinned tomatoes.
There’s a thousand ways to explore and express gender, and for me my exploration of what I perceived as femininity was a thing of ease because not only do I explore it like I explore any other character, concept, or dress-ups that is part of being on stage…I spent my whole life practicing and being taught.
There was resistance of course, being raised a girl comes with constant and intense critique from every possible angle and yet the kind of resistance that comes with femininity was still a known quantity. I grew up in the 90s, in the fullness of the Heroin-chic era, with the oppositional force of the sunny, toned-and-tanned beach culture of QLD.
Growing up a girl meant constant body commentary. Too skinny and there were comments, put on weight there were comments, wrong kind of clothes and you looked tarty, or dowdy, wrong kind of haircut and you “looked like a lesbian”. Obviously now I’d be flattered but at the time there was a warning in it.
I’m not unfamiliar with being called a dyke or a lezzo like it was a bad thing, and after some particularly ruthless bullying in my early years, I realised the danger lay in whether anyone could “tell” you were gay.
If the critique wasn’t aimed directly at you it was aimed at someone else, but the lesson was still the same. Figure out how to make everyone happy, figure out how to make everyone comfortable, figure out how to be just eye-catching enough that people find you interesting and want your presence, but not so far that you put yourself in danger, and figure it all out fast.
So I became very good at moulding myself to fit the right kind of feminine to suit whichever group of people I was around. Wielding it like a weapon, a shield.
Figuring out who I was as a non-binary person was like starting over. Like being pre-teen again, and NOBODY likes being pre-teen. It’s awkward, frustrating, you feel like everyone is laughing at you, watching you, judging you, and you don’t feel right in your skin yet because there’s no way of knowing how to feel right until you’ve tried a few things that don’t work for you.
Only this time, it was like being in this figuring-out stage but societally, politically, the tide is against you from almost every angle.
At best, for me it’s the relentless “she” of it all. An annoyingly complex thought, as there is a lot of pride for me in ‘she’, as well as frustration.
At worst, it’s because people are watching us and it’s not because they don’t like our outfit that day, it’s because they hate what we represent, and they hate us personally with a deep venom.1
This is however, not an article about the current culmination of this hate which we’ve watched being intentionally cultivated for years. This is just a little story about a little piece of my little life.
So…while the stockings had gone in the purple sack of doom, unlike many of the dresses and skirts they weren’t given away, sold or thrown out.
I like to think perhaps it’s not because I forgot they existed the moment I couldn’t see them in order to take them to that specialist stocking recycling place, but that deep down I knew one day I’d be back.
Trans-formative magic
They would be back when I’d figured out how to feel like my flesh & bones fit inside my skin again. When it stopped feeling like all the practiced feminine performance in me wasn’t jumping ahead saying, “It’s probably safer if I take the lead here”. When I started to feel like I was just…me in whatever way I express myself in any given moment and not a collection of ill-fitting costumes.
That femininity doesn’t have the monopoly on sensuality or is barred from strength…even though I knew that already. That masculinity can’t include softness, attentiveness, curves and playful tease.
When I found guidance, it came in the form of community.
Chatting to another trans non-binary performer at a birthday party. They shared that they’d been through the exact same thing and encouraged me to think about who I actually admired when it came to masculinity. Unsurprisingly many of the style icons who came to mind had aesthetics which were either deeply queer, soft, or hyper-sexual. Prince I believe featured somewhere high on the list along with the Emcee in cabaret & a stack of other rather dramatic real life and fictional characters.
It wasn’t until I found other trans people to talk to, listen to, that I started finding a sense of equilibrium within myself. They offered a safe place to land, to try, to be vulnerable without the expectation of “passing”. That my worthiness wasn’t conditional on whether I was convincingly anything within our social expectations of gender. It was other trans people who offered the perspective that I didn’t have to pry myself from one poorly shaped package only to wedge myself uncomfortably into another.
It wasn’t until I stopped attempting to erase one part of me to let all the other parts out that I started to feel any sense of inner calm again. To allow the feminine to join in the conversation now it had stopped trying to dominate it.
I cannot change the fact that on the rare occasion I wear a dress in certain places I notice the shift in some as they see me as finally behaving as I’m “supposed to”, finally sitting in the packaging they wish I would stop climbing out of. I cannot pretend that the *snap* doesn’t irritate, even if it doesn’t sting. But the secret is, the packaging is long gone. Probably languishing in the abandoned soft plastics recycling stockpiles somewhere.
Wearing a dress one day doesn’t make me a “sometimes-cis”. I like the way I look in a dress too. But I look great in a lot of clothes, and clothes don’t have a gender.
So stocking are back on the menu.
And what is it about stockings that feels so…
looks so…
you know…?
Whether artfully removed by the aloof and untouchable Prima Donna showgirl with an arched bitch-brow and quirk of their blood-red lips...
Or part of a slow-burn that explodes as a gauzy slingshot of silken mesh which releases the firey stripper from their bonds and exposes their perfect leg...from the delicate skin of their thigh down to pointed toes. The art of the stocking peel is hyper-glamorous and sensual.
What is it about the stocking peel that endures as part of the striptease lexicon of burlesque? An object of desire and fetish.
A soft translucent veil.
Clinging to every dip and curve, encasing and showcasing a bodily feature seen readily at any beach, as if by magic, turns our legs into an altar to worship quite literally at the foot of.
Held up by the clips of a garter…4 or 6? It's up to the wearer, or perhaps nestled lovingly into the crease where thigh meets buttocks.
It is art indeed.
This Bewitching Threads series is about my personal story, but right now trans people are being used as political pawns and the safety of trans people is under direct attack around the globe. I encourage you to make yourself aware of legislation in your local area, what the positions of your local, state and federal politicians are on the issue, and how you can support organisations which exist within your communities to protect and defend trans rights.
Despite watching and subsequently yelling about fascists using the “trans agenda” as a dog whistle for oppressive politics for years, here we are. Welcome. If you’re part of a marginalised community you’ve probably been yelling about this for quite some time as the canaries in the coal mine, but nobody is safe from the fumes when they’re this strong.