“What I Wanted to Wear”: The Battle for
Self-Expression amidst Transphobic Street Violence
On Sunday, July 12th, 2015 at 11:10 pm, Alok
Vaid-Menon, one of the two members of the Trans South Asian poetry collective, Darkmatter,
posted a picture on Facebook of themselves in a dress. The caption stated, “The
story goes something like this: Every morning when I wake up and look at my
closet I ask myself, ‘How much do I want to be street harassed today?’”
(Vaid-Menon). Vaid-Menon, who prefers the pronoun ‘they,’ answers their own
question with, “This means I usually gravitate away from the skirts and dresses
and move begrudgingly toward the more conventionally ‘masculine’ clothing. I
consider for a moment how peculiar it feels that I have been made to find
safety and security in masculinity—this thing that has been such a site of
violence and anxiety in my past.” This post was particularly salient in the
social media world, receiving almost twenty-thousand likes and producing
valuable dialogue on what it means to be trans and gender non-conforming in a
world that demands conformity to gender binaries in exchange for physical and
emotional safety. This post’s capacity for discursive production, however, was
not limited to the world of social media. It also inspired a movement called
“What I Wanted to Wear” on the website, Medium, which is a self-proclaimed
online
“community of
readers and writers
offering unique perspectives on
ideas large and
small”
(“About Medium”). “What I Wanted to Wear” extends
Vaid-Menon’s post into a project centred around trans and gender non-conforming
subjects’ clothing selections, fixating on the disparity between what they
desire to wear and what they ultimately choose to wear to avoid street
harassment and life-threatening transphobic violence. Each contribution to the
project follows a similar pattern: the user creates a post that contains two
juxtaposing photos—one that resembles relatively cis-normative attire,
representing “what I wore,” and one that reveals the individual’s authentic
gender expression, representing “what I wanted to wear.” The term “authentic”
in this context refers to the gender expression with which the individual most
closely identifies, although the notion of authenticity is often used in
dominant gender discourse to dismiss trans and gender non-conforming
individuals’ identities, which will be discussed later on in this paper.
Beneath each set of photographs are quotations from the trans or gender
non-conforming subject that foster a discussion about the connection between
clothing, gender fluidity, and transphobic violence. Each post ends with the individual’s
preferred pronoun use and the statement, “Feeling deep ambivalence about how we
dress is something the trans and gender non-conforming communities experience
acutely, but it’s not just about us. We’d love to hear from everybody about how
we navigate self presentation each day.” I use the words “trans” and “gender
non-conforming” in accordance with the movement’s terminology, although many
contributors have more specific identities, such as “transwoman” for Aaryn Lang
or “agender trans male” for Pax Gethen. This combination of visual presentation
and text depicts clothing choice as a symbol of self-expression and raises
awareness about the daily struggles that gender non-conforming people endure,
which are potentially life-threatening, to express a fluid gender that defies
the
“two-sex model” of binary gender, “radical
dimorphism, [and] biological divergence” that has dominated gender discourse
since the “late eighteenth century” (Lacqueur 5-6).
