I remember the first time I saw my childhood girlfriend put on men’s underwear. I don’t remember the exact time. I don’t remember if we were in high school, or if *Zee was already in college, but I remember the feeling I had when she deliberately pulled men’s underwear out of her dresser drawer, held them up to show me, and then put them on with all the pride of a bride putting on her bridal gown. Zee pranced around the bedroom while I lay on the bed admiring her. Before that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that women could wear men’s underwear.
The underwear my mother bought me was ugly and ill-fitting, and the lingerie I saw in Frederick’s of Hollywood stores (we didn’t have Victoria’s Secret stores in the Midwest yet) did not appeal to me. I hated underwear. I hated bras. I hated makeup. I hated frills. I hated dresses. I hated everything my mother and my sisters and my girlfriends and my teachers and the television and the magazines told me I should desire.
Every Easter, when I was a child, my mother dressed me in itchy dresses with impractical shiny black shoes whose soles had no tread and then expected me to compete with boys on Easter egg hunts. I hated Easter and still hate Easter to this day because of those dresses and those shoes. I was traumatized by the forced girliness. I felt awkward and vulnerable and misunderstood and alone when wearing those ridiculous clothes.
In first grade, my elementary school, Chapel Elementary in Raytown, Missouri, dropped the dress code requirement that girls wear dresses to school. I remember hearing the principal’s announcement over the intercom “Girls may now wear pants to school” and jumping out of my desk chair and dancing a happy dance and the kids laughing at me and the teacher scolding me and none of that ruining the joy I felt knowing I would no longer be forced to be girly at school. I could play on the jungle gym without worrying my “panties” would show when I hung upside down. I could avoid the perversions of the second-grade teacher who lifted girls’ skirts when standing in line on the playground. I could run and roughhouse and I would be safe!
But until I saw Zee put on those men’s underwear, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could be free to be me underneath my clothes, too!
We didn’t have access to the worldwide web like we do today, so I couldn’t jump online and run a search for men’s underwear, and although I could buy men’s underwear at a department store, I wasn’t yet brave enough to try. When I was a bit older, in my 20s, I asked my first spouse to buy me some men’s underwear. He reluctantly did so, but they didn’t fit right, so I gave up. I went years wearing women’s underwear, compromising by wearing “granny panties” because they were the most comfortable, and seething inside because the world in which I lived insisted I conform to a standard and way of being that rubbed me wrong and made me feel like I didn’t belong.
I learned to mask my gender queerness enough to get by in school, the workplace, and among my friends, but the masking came with self-harm. I drank too much. Did too many drugs. Was promiscuous. And although I was openly bisexual, I only slept with women when I was half out of my mind on booze and drugs because I couldn’t face my bisexuality sober. Anger was always seething beneath the surface.
I was angry at the shoe store salesman who tried to chase me out of the men’s section when he caught me trying on wingtips.
I was angry at my boss at my first professional job for asking me to dress more feminine.
I was angry at my girlfriends who tried to make me “pretty” with make-up.
I was angry at the barber who chased me out of his barbershop when I asked for a man’s haircut. I’m still angry at women stylists who won’t give me a fucking man’s haircut!
I was angry at fashion designers for designing clothes only for small and feminine women, at professional sports for being segregated by gender, at the run-of-the-mill person on the street who dared to call me “girl” or “lady.”
My anger has been subsiding as our understanding of gender grows, as the language changes. My anger has been subsiding now that I found a romantic partner who understands me because she’s had similar experiences as a transgender woman. My anger has been subsiding now that I can go into Target and buy a packet of boy cut underwear that fits my body and size and it’s no big deal.
Unfortunately, my anger still crackles and my heart is breaking (the reason I haven’t been attending to my blog is because of health issues — I’m wearing a heart monitor in this moment, because my heart may literally be breaking). My heart is breaking as politicians and white supremacists and Christian nationalists and ignorant people try to push us gender non-conforming and trans folx back into the closets. My heart breaks and my anger reemerges as I see families flee Texas ( and maybe now Missouri) to save themselves and their gender queer and trans children. My anger turns from a crackle to a sun-sized explosion when Florida enacts “Don’t Say Gay” and my heart goes from breaking to shattering as conservative states enact new legislation against trans care, as school boards infected by Moms for Liberty ban books about inclusivity and social justice.
For a brief moment in time, I was at peace thinking that at our kids wouldn’t have to suffer the same indignities my spouse and I and multitudes of us have suffered under the enforced gender binary. For a brief moment of time, I could take solace in small things such as underwear that fits all of me.
*name changed for privacy
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