A couple months ago I wrote about how much easier it is to find garment-compatible menswear compared to women’s dresses. One of the comments asked if it is women’s garments or the fashion industry that is the problem. It is both. I want to share my experiences. In this post, I will focus on youth and young adult experiences. I will talk about later life stages in other posts.

I cross dressed for a decent percentage of the first few years of my marriage. Part of this was due to garments: I think I only ever found two marketed-to-women shirts that covered the neckline of my preferred garment tops (chemise, before the newer styles came out). Part of this was due to the fashion industry: vanity sizing, the introduction of spandex into denim, and styles that were tight through my thighs and loose on my hips made it incredibly difficult to find pants that wouldn’t fall off my skinny bum. Also, I wanted functional pockets (this was the peak of chapstick-depth front pockets), and I wanted to be able to ride my bike around campus (it took me years to figure out that I should have been shopping at $porting goods stores to find women’s pants that allowed for better range of motion.) So I often wore men’s cargo pants and a unisex* t-shirt or hand-me-up button-up shirts from my “little” brother. I was wearing what most of the men wore in my male-dominated graduate studies program. I got lectures from my female advisor about needing to present myself professionally.

Before I go further I want to acknowledge that the way I move through the world is privileged by my social position as a thin, able-bodied cisgender white woman. I love my body and the amazing things it’s capable of. I have a hard time relating to other women when they talk about body image issues. However, I have a unique perspective on fashion because my body is not very curvy. The most nicely fitting pair of shorts I’ve owned was marketed to husky boys. I shop in all the departments: women’s, men’s, girl’s, and boy’s. This is a privilege because I have such a wide range of clothing choices to represent who I am, but I also feel a little bit like a perpetual tween—in between all the sizes.

The first time I wore boy’s clothing was in sixth grade. That year the style for girl’s shorts was cut for more hips than my child’s body had, and they were too short for my public school’s fingertip-length dress code. This was in the mid-90’s. This might have been the same summer flannel plaid shorts were in style. At any rate, it was well before the longer Bermuda shorts were popular. None of the Mormon women I knew ever wore shorts because they never worked with garments. I was just a kid though, and I could not fathom wearing anything other than shorts during the desert’s summer heat. My mom was not going to buy me shorts that I could not wear to school. She convinced me to buy some from the boy’s department. I didn’t want to dress like a boy, and I felt self-conscious about my shorts. Sixth grade is pretty much the peak of trying to fit in and be cool. I haven’t forgotten how I felt when the fashion industry and school dress code didn’t give me an easily accessible choice to wear girl’s shorts to school.

There is generally no physical need to have different styles of clothing for boys and girls until puberty (thank you, indoor plumbing!) The differences in clothing style is cultural and reflects what our society values in males and females. Boys’ clothing is generally more durable and utilitarian. Girls’ clothing is generally more creative and ornamental. It’s hard to be a boy who wants a shirt with flip sequins or a girl who wants a pantsuit.

My sixth grade bus driver was the first adult that I met where it was not immediately obvious what their gender was. They wore loose black t-shirts and baggy black pants. They had long hair and tattooed Celtic knots around their wrists. My world neatly divided everyone into male and female. The radio game show we listened to every morning on that bus did too: it was called “The Battle of the Sexes” and when the man won they would play Village People’s “Macho Man” and when the woman won they would play Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman”. I couldn’t easily categorize my bus driver, which was good for me to experience, but it also lead me to decide that if I ended up having small breasts when I grew up, I wanted to dress so that people could tell I was a woman. I’m grateful that non-binary people are considerably more visible today than they were when I was a kid. I can only imagine the amount of emotional labor gender-nonconforming folx go through in finding clothes to wear. For me, I still want to present as a woman, even though I don’t understand why that feels so important to me.

Men’s clothing is pretty much the same as boy’s clothing, just in bigger sizes. Women’s clothing is substantially different than girl’s clothing. I took my 5^th grade daughter shopping for new snow boots. She was dismayed at how hard it was to find boots in women’s sizes that did not have high heels and were waterproof. I took my tween daughters swimsuit shopping. The girl’s section had a number of one-piece or rashguard options, but they weren’t fitting great. The only swimsuits in their size in stock in the women’s section were bikinis. My girls wear tank tops and short shorts, but they still feel self-conscious when they try on lower cut women’s shirts, even ones they know I’ve worn with garments. Both boys’ and girls’ bodies change during puberty, but our culture expects girls to show off the changes through the way they dress.

In my late teens and early twenties (I got married at the ripe old age of 20) I was still trying to figure out women’s fashion. I came to appreciate that boy’s and men’s clothes are predictable. They come in standard sizes, they cover predictable quantities of skin, pockets are always deep enough to be useful, movement is fairly unconstrained when you wear them and you don’t have to divert much mental energy to being aware of how men’s clothing moves with the wind or gravity. Women’s clothing on the other hand…One day I tried on a pair of size 0 pants that were too big and a pair of size 9 pants that were too small. It can be very difficult to determine if a shirt will cover a garment top without trying it on. It’s ridiculously exciting when you find anything with functional pockets. And I feel so seen by this line from Audre Lorde:
“who would have believed that once again our daughters are allowing their bodies to be hampered and purgatoried by girdles and high heels and hobble skirts?”**

Compared to women’s fashion, garments are amazingly predictable. If you manage to find a style that you like, you can purchase the exact same style a few years later. That isn’t possible with most items of women’s clothing. This consistency is one of the things I appreciate the most about garments, which is ironic because 1) garment sizes are notorious for being inconsistent, and 2) the slow pace of garment innovation is frustrating. Before the newer garment styles came out, I remember taking a survey from the church about them. It asked where the waistband of the old style fell on me (above my natural waist even with the petite style), and where the waistband of my normal clothing sat (I chose the lowest option on the survey, but it still looked a little high). The disconnect between garment style and clothing style was one of the most challenging things to get used to as a newly endowed, already-accustomed-to-dressing-modestly woman. I didn’t love the mental load of having to figure out which style of garment top would work with each of my women’s shirts, so I often chose to wear men’s shirts. Because they worked with everything.

I don’t think that God cares what clothes I wear. I think God cares about why I choose what I wear. God knows that I don’t love the heavily-sexualized, limited-utility brand of womanhood the fashion industry often tries to sell me. God knows that heavily-sexualized, limited-utility is also how I often feel as a woman at church. The fashion industry wants female sexuality on display, the church wants it contained in an almost impossible feminine-but-not-tempting box. I just want to be me.

There are more posts in this series about church dress codes and fashion!
Part 2 discusses maternity garments
Part 3 discusses swimwear and church cultural expectations

*Unisex t-shirts are just men’s shirts that are marketed in a way that it is socially acceptable for women to wear them. Old Navy has a Gender-Neutral department on their website. Most of the items listed are t-shirts that use a men’s sizing chart.

** Lorde, Audre, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches 1984. Ten Speed Press, 2007, pp. 109, 113.