Dress For Success

…Or the difference between gender identity and gender expression.

Just because someone dresses in either male or female clothes does not mean that they feel that they are that gender. In this video the fact that these women dress in men’s clothes does not necessarily mean that they identify as male.



This a good example of difference between gender identity and gender expression, the women in the video still identify as female but their expression is more towards the masculine.

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The PBS NewsHour has an interesting article about how the laws have changed about crossing dressing over time. The Stonewall Uprising was in part because the police were there to check that everyone wore the at least three items of clothing of their birth gender, the same thing was true for the Compton Cafeteria Uprising, the Dewey Lunch Counter Protest, and the Cooper Do-nuts Uprising, the police were harassing the customers by checking the way they were dressed.

Arresting dress: A timeline of anti-cross-dressing laws in the United States
PBS
By News Desk
May 31, 2015

But some similar landmark rule changes in the United States were only a few years ahead.

In fact, a person perceived as male who dressed in clothing customarily designed for women could technically be arrested in New York for “impersonating a female” as recently as 2011 — the remnants of a 19th century statewide law prohibiting wearing “the dress of the opposite sex.”

In Columbus, Ohio, where one of the earliest ordinances was instituted, an 1848 law forbade a person from appearing in public “in a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” In the decades that followed, more than 40 U.S. cities created similar laws limiting the clothing people were allowed to wear in public.

The wave of laws in the 1850s represented a “new development specific to gender presentation,” according to Susan Stryker, an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona.

In effect, the anti-cross-dressing laws became a flexible tool for police to enforce normative gender on multiple gender identities, including masculine women and people identifying as transgender or gender non-conforming.

It was because of these laws that we are where we are today; it was the open defiance to these laws that started the modern LGBT movement. Which lead first the overturning of the dress code laws by the courts and then on to demanding our human rights and marriage equality.

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Which now leads me to the third article about clothing…

VINTAGE PHOTOS OF ‘DRAG QUEENS’ BEFORE IT WAS SAFE TO BE OUT AND PROUD
Dangerous Minds
May 22, 2015
Here’s a collection of historical “drag queens” dating back to the 1800s and then onwards. The reason I’m using “drag queen” in double quotes is because I’m not entirely sure if these people were transgender, cross-dressers, dressing up as women for theatrical purposes or just for the of fun it. The information is very limited for each image. Either way, they’re all gorgeous and seem quite comfortable with themselves in front of a lens during a time when society looked down on such self-expression.

Brigham Morris Young

Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton AKA “Fanny and Stella.”

Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton AKA “Fanny and Stella.”

German crossdresser, Paul Storsberg

All this people were probably law breakers of their day but were willing to have their photos taken and they were able to find friendly photo studios to take their photos.