Ask a GG - Three

[ReineD]

how do you feel about the double standards that prevail when it comes to clothes?

I don't see it as having double standards. Jeans, trousers, and button-down shirts have become staples of women's wardrobes. They have become a new standard of feminine. It's not the clothes that makes a woman feminine, it's the way she looks in them. Women's button-down shirts are not shaped like men's, they are shaped to flatter a woman's figure. Same with women's slacks or jeans. They are generally tighter, you can tell that a woman has a derriere, and the pockets are useless. You can't even fit a cell phone in them. Also, is the woman attempting to look like a guy? Does she have a guy's haircut, is she wearing men's shoes, is the average woman big like the average guy in terms of height, hand and foot size, neck size, etc? No.

Do you know when the wearing of pants became mainstream among women? It was during WWII because so many women were contributing to the war effort by working while the men were gone. It's so much more practical to wear pants in a factory than a dress. Shoulder-pads became fashionable during the 1940s to emphasize the woman's newly found independence and power. There was a bit of a backslide in fashion during the 1950s after the men came back and life returned to normal, the economy was booming, the middle class was growing, and people were having families. And so women's fashions turned to the ultra-feminine for about a decade, until my generation came along. LOL. We said, "No, thank you". We wouldn't settle for the woman's 1950s secondary role in society. We wanted equal career opportunities with equal pay. Equal power and equal say. And along with that came the appropriate fashion styles, which brought pants back in fashion again. Even shoulder-pads came back for awhile.

So no, women don't dress like men. They dress and look like independent women. You can still tell they are women.

If you asked a trans-man whether he thought cis women wearing today's styles look masculine, I think he'd have a good chuckle. Trans-men wear men's haircuts, actual men's clothes (that are cut differently than women's), and men's shoes. They camouflage their breasts, they don't wear makeup, feminine jewelry or perfume, and they have a masculine demeanor because they want to be taken as men. There's a difference.