'A woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women's clothing,
for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.'
- Deuteronomy, 22: 5
Really? I mean what's the problem here: why is God so troubled by everything?
I suppose it's because the simple pleasure of cross-dressing creates an element of uncertainty and causes the poles of male and female to vacillate via an abolition of differential opposition.
Cross-dressing demonstrates how the signs of sex can easily be separated from biology. In other words, it reveals gender and sexual identity to be nothing but a playful and performative game involving clothes, hair and cosmetics; a question of style, rather than a fateful combination of anatomical fact and metaphysical essence.
Personally, I have always found something enchanting about 'men dressed as women' and 'women dressed as men'. Like Wilde, I am of the view that wherever there is loveliness of appearance, then there is no fraudulence.
And besides, as Judith Butler points out: we are all transvestites.
Of course, as the writer well knows, the arguments concerning the competing role of 'biology' and 'culture' in engendering gender are literally raging. To wit, Germaine Greer's memorably vituperative comments to the BBC (albeit on transgender rather than transvestism) that:
ReplyDelete“[j]ust because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn't make you a fucking woman. I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that won’t turn me into a fucking cocker spaniel."
As the Little Britain team hilariously satirised in the character of Emily Howard (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INj6HPuKJnk), cross-dressing is surely far from a 'simple pleasure'. Rather, it involves courage, confidence and creativity on the part of the transvestite, generates complex semiological issues concerning a public's receptivity to (and hence the 'acceptability' of) socio-cultural gender cues/signs, and significant political questions concerning e.g. the right of a biologically born man to use a female bathroom.
So, while I loved looking at Martin Gore of Depeche Mode in the 1980s in his black skirt and faux pearl necklaces, I also salute his bravery, sartorial authority and transgressive perversity. (I suspect it's not 'easy' to be Eddie Izzard either, as a self-confessed 'lesbian trapped in a man's body'.)