Question: What Is The Correct Way To Be A Woman?

Answer: There isn’t any correct way.

There is a website that is making the rounds on Facebook about what is the correct way a trans-person to dress and I agree with the author, there isn’t a right or a wrong way to dress.

Last night I was with a friend at an avant-garde art gallery’s monthly cocktail party and we were talking about short skirts. There are those who are fashion police who believe that a trans-woman should dress a certain way or should be passible. In the website Autostraddle the author, Vivian, of the article “I'm A Trans Woman And I'm Not Interested In Being One of the ‘Good Ones’” wrote about a trans-woman that she meet…

She couldn't stand 'bricks.' She explained that bricks were women who looked "like a man in a dress." A cinderblock was even worse. A trans guy who was too femme was feathery.

The author didn’t agree and I also don’t agree, we each must follow our own fashion sense, she goes on to say,

It's a great double bind. If you present in a traditionally feminine way, you're just being a misogynistic parody of a woman, and if you fail to present in a traditionally feminine way, well ha! There's the proof that you're not really a woman right there.

And that is the trap that many of us fall in to thinking like that, that there is only one right way to dress.

Last night there was a trans-woman there with a short skirt and heels, but we also pointed that many of the women there also were dressed the same way. There was also a trans-woman there in jeans, but there were many women there also in jeans. There were all types of women there at the cocktail party and they were dressed from jeans, to short shorts, to short skirts, to cocktail dresses and no one questions the way that they dress. The thing is we all come in an infinite variety and there cannot and should not be one standard “Trans-person” we should be able to dress the way that we want and not put up on a pedestal.

Before I transitioned I hide and pretended to be someone I wasn’t. Now I don’t want to pretend any more, I want to be me. I don’t want to put on ten layers of make-up, I don’t want to wear high heels and I hate pantyhose; however, you may like all that and that is your right. We shouldn’t be forced into a role or an image.