There are two things that come to mind with an invitation. Being gender nonconforming often puts you in the public arena for comment. Often these daily interruptions are exacerbated from without, when someone’s inclined to read all they know about transness and gender into you. It bears the weight of a typology, where each trans folk becomes, in that moment, a locus for a loud conversation happening somewhere else. I’ve been in situations where I’ve found myself a spectacle for someone’s projection, when I’m offered a kind comment on “looking gorgeous,” or a topic, when an interlocutor tries to assail me with the sex binary, usually on a train. Dressing for me has often been a mixture of safe and pleasurable solipsism, alongside a process of curating something interesting. I’m not willing to condemn the total attention it brings, but if I am honest, that’s entirely a collateral thing. The second point is that dressing may be, at best, a shibboleth for those with who I want to be in communion. If you know, you know. Clocking and the secondhand joy parceled around an acknowledgment are an effect of that first commitment, to articulate one’s own grace.
By: Sadhbh O’Sullivan
