The Garments of Gaslighting

The politics of clothing is getting serious.

I’m pretty sure every generation has their games of pretend.  Cultural rules and conventions shift and shape as we negotiate them to find our way to social, business and romantic success. Who is in control of our pretend games is a question pondered by theorist in more boring cultural studies papers than I could ever find patience to read.

For many academic feminists it’s the patriarchy, for the Marxists it’s the ruling class, driven by their desire to keep hold of the surplus capital generated off the backs of the working class. Conservatives are not big on cultural theory, but they always seem to think they have the best set of rules to follow that will lead to a world of strong responsible men and blissfully happy women. 

These are simplifications of course, and the dream of the liberal secular state was that we would all live together appreciating and respecting each other’s cultural and religious diversity.

As an interesting cultural phenomenon, I posted a picture on social media of Harry Styles at the latest Grammy Awards event, next to pictures of Shirley (Graham) Strachan when he was the lead singer of Skyhooks in 1976, in pretty much exactly the same style of sparkly jumpsuit. 

Edie Wyatt @msediewyatt

The Skyhooks, for those who don’t know, were a very straight band. Their music was very hetro, they were very hetro type guys (correct me if wrong). But they never appropriated gay men’s oppression, they never advocated for the removal of women’s safety boundaries 1/

The nuance of the post was not immediately obvious, and I got the usual mix of conservative and “liberal” comments. Even after fifty or sixty years of pop starts performing femininity some conservatives are still firmly in the “men shouldn’t wear women’s clothes” camp and that’s exactly how the progressive like it.  The conservative Vs the progressive narrative is what the American political culture feeds off, but underneath is a dark reality for women and girls.

Gendered dressing in the 70’s and 80s was play, but it also was political and sexual, it was an extension of the sexual revolution and represented a shift in popular distaste for the powers that were again sending young people to another bloody stupid war. Men dressing in feminine style now inevitably connects itself to what is known as the culture war.

While men wearing feminine clothes was once part of the breaking of normative gender presentations, it is now almost impossible to separate feminine clothes on men from the deliberate confusion that state equity religions use to erase the connection from women’s rights to the bodies of women and girls. 

The incoming changes the Queensland Births, Death and Marriages Legislation, allows a person to change legal sex with a declaration of gender identity.  Included in the declaration that must be made is that the person “lives, or seeks to live, as a person identified by that sex”. 

We can’t see identity with eyes, and nobody knows what it means to live as a person identified as a woman, but women will need to be able to tell, on sight, this special type of Queensland man that she is now compelled to welcome in the changing room where her children are in stages of undress.

Don’t worry, the government has assured us these men are completely free of male pattern sexual behaviour.  Therefore, we must welcome these men without challenge, because their delicate gender souls are not robust like ours, their souls can be irreparably harmed when someone recognises their sex or when women show natural protective instincts.

According to Shannon Fenitman, the Queensland Attorney General, trans identifying males can’t display male pattern violence (MPV). Fentiman displayed overt and performative disgust at the mere suggestion that any man would change his sex marker and still retain male pattern sexual behaviour in any way. 

This is quite miraculous if true, but we would still need to be able to give teenage girls the skills to recognise these no risk males when they are vulnerable. Our teenage daughters spend a lot of time in the care of state institutions like schools and facilities that are under the regulatory management of the state. Girls between 10 and 14 are statistically the most vulnerable people in Australia to sexual assault. Given that 97% of offenders are male, it would seem to be a critical skill for these girls to identify one of these men who are immune form male pattern sexual behaviour, so they know to welcome them into the space where they are undressing without worry.  But how do we teach these girls to distinguish one of these men on sight, as distinct from the bog standard regular strange men they have been able to clock on sight since they were toddlers?

The key is in the definition of “gender identity” in the legislation that is about to pass through our corrupted Queensland parliament. On page 177 we find a definition of gender identity that now supersedes sex in law.  The definition revolves around the invisible “self”, of which there are few outward indicators, except “dress, speech and behaviour”. 

Since speech and behaviour are not immediately visible, feminine dress is the single most consistent externally identifying factor of a MPV free man that enters into women’s infrastructure. Once, we looked toward a world where women’s clothes were merely garments built to fit a female body, now they are protected in law as an identifier of a female person.

When a man walks into a female facility, wearing the clothing of the feminine, we are to place that man’s need for affirmation above the most statistically vulnerable people in society and pack our own instincts for personal safety away. We are not given any “peer reviewed” research on how this person is not the same danger as other men; just the claim that we haven’t seen enough women and girls raped for us to have the power to stop it.

The idea that clothes are political because of conservatives, is a handy narrative that will only take progressives so far.  The reality is that governments are telling women that women’s clothes on a man are a pass of access to their vulnerable bodies and those of their children. Feminine expression in a man, we are compelled to accept, is an indicator for the special priest class that are completely immune from male pattern violence (MPV).  Clothes are more political than ever before, because they are being protected in law as an identity expression.

Women who live in the world know that their lives and those of their children depend on their own ability to spot propensity to MPV in unknown men and in prospective partners.  Dating women’s conversations are littered with descriptions of suiters in terms of clues, tells and specific forms of behaviour that enable women to recognise that a man may have a propensity to aggressive or controlling behaviour.

Women’s clothes have become a way for men to culturally signify that they are separate form MPV, that they occupy the ground of officially declared immunity from the suspicion women cast on unfamiliar males. This is not the doing of Styles, and he is not to blame in anyway. But to pretend feminine dress ups provoke only the eye of conservatives and wowsers is part of the gaslighting embedded in the politics of gender.  Politics that has brought a new and not very progressive reality to regular women in workplaces, pools, playgrounds and for lesbians to their dating apps.

We have seen a basic straight bloke in a sequined suit before and it is genuinely shocking to nobody in 2023. But if stars play the “gender queer” card or live in the joyous speculation that he may be on some kind of spectrum toward having identity access to women’s hard won rights and infrastructure, it’s another issue.