By Clara Griffiths
“Oh, I promise – it’s one of a kind”.
I flash my widest smile at the pair in front of me. They’re all schmick glasses and polished accents; he’s wearing an animal print jacket, and her hair looks professionally blown out. Having spent the last 20 minutes picking through the Ethiopian headrests on the top shelf, the man has now taken to quizzing me on the fossilized wood stool I was comfortably sat on about five minutes ago, scrolling reels.
I’m electric – laughing, chatting, pulling it out of its alcove in the corner of the shop to demonstrate the concentric rings left by the wood’s growth, some 390 million years ago. I pop to the back for the pricelist and adjust the fringe on my pixie cut. I will sell this stool today.
They ring up on Tuesday. Her tone is muffled and crackly down the phone line.
“Hiiii, It’s Sarah (names have been changed). We wanted to know about delivering the petrified wood stool. We spoke to your very friendly sales … person, the other day and…”
I stop. The pause between “sales” and “person” can’t have been that long, but it’s a pause I am well acquainted with. It’s a pause that echoes the lesbian allegations in year 11; it’s the hesitation of gender assignment to a stranger who is just a little too androgynous for you to confidently use any set of pronouns. That looong break you take before deciding what to call to the 5’9, short-haired, trouser-and-shirt-wearing, makeupless sales rep at the interior design shop.
I’d be lying if I said Sarah’s hesitation offended me. In fact, I commend her for her efforts to keep up with the times. I’ve never been deliberately androgynous, but every couple of years, I’ll cut off my long, straight, dark blonde hair and spend a few months cosplaying as a 60s Paris girl. Each time, I note a difference in how I’m treated. The leery stares at the pub and in the street stop…
Strange pauses emerge in sentences.
Indeed, these pauses, and specifically Sarah’s well-meaning omission of the world “girl” can be attributed to the emergence in the zeitgeist of a new category of gender;
‘Everything In Between And Also Alongside’.
According to Samiksha, President of UCL Libertarian Society, this new category has been handed to us on a plate, and there is no space to question its inclusion in our language. She calls this compelled speech.
I sat down to interview Samiksha in Gordon Square, on a rainy midday around two months before publication of this magazine. Over the years, I’ve become curious as to what clothing can say about gender, and considering the contentious invitation of Connie Shaw (gender-critical influencer and graduate of the University of Leeds) onto UCL campus this year by the Libertarian Society, I thought Samiksha might help illuminate one side of this debate.
The first question I ask is what message Samiksha is conveying through her clothing today. It’s a common question in my street interviews, and one I always find interesting to hear the answer to. She tells me she is trying to avoid judgement; she wants to be perceived through her words, not her appearance. She briefly mentions a left-wing propensity for nose piercings, and “MAGA face” as examples of politically aligned dress.
Samiksha is of the school of thought that gender and sex are one and the same, and ultimately dependent on which set of chromosomes you were born with (XY for males, XX for females). She views trans women’s use of feminine clothing as an appropriation of harmful stereotypes; for her, “transgenderism” (a term she clarified as political) reduces womanhood to stereotypes; liking pink and having long hair, she says, does not make you a woman. Therefore, asking others to call you a woman is harmful and can be classed as compelled speech (under free speech law, forcing someone to say something they disagree with is just as harmful as preventing them from exercising their right to free speech). Instead, Samiksha grounds her perception of gender in science, which, at first glance, seems to offer a clear distinction between men and women.
Might we question that? Samiksha feels that the “accept people’s pronouns or face socio-political retribution” stance is frustratingly irrefutable.
Does the claim that gender is defined entirely by 1 out of 23 pairs of chromosomes not to carry the same reductive determinism?
History has been defined by set after set of irrefutable beliefs ; first ardent theology, and now the facts of science. It’s a confusing world, and the temptation to reduce our definitions to easily defined binaries is strong. Indeed, successful schools of thought such and religion have succesfully done this : good vs evil, marmite vs vegemite are examples. But we might see it as a gift that we live in a society where there is space for debate; could gender instead be grounded in spirituality, or in cognition? Could hormonal balances be responsible for the spectrum of gender identities? Samiksha tells me that she used to identify as genderfluid – which surprised me. She also suffers from PCOS, a condition affecting 10-14% of women involving excess androgen production (androgens are a group of hormones that trigger the development of male characteristics).
My next question to Samiksha; might there be an empathetic approach to accommodate diversity?
Unlike Sarah, the well-dressed petrified wood stool purchaser, Samiksha doesn’t believe that “lying” to people, and approaching gender inclusion from a compassionate lens, is productive. She sees the following as a non-statement;
“I am wearing a dress, therefore I am a woman”
Saffron Solstice, trans woman and drag performer extraordinaire, agrees.
Both Samiksha and Saffron see their circles as countercultural – Saffron recognizes that drag is about pushing gender expression and gender roles, while Samiksha attempts to put them back into familiar boxes. They pull on opposite ends of the gender tug-of-war.
For Saffron, her identity as a woman preceded any form of dressing. She arrived at UCL this autumn after a sojourn in India, where she spent her teenage years. Throughout our interview backstage at the UCL winter show, Saffron reveals to me that she hesitantly joined drag society while still dressing as a man. She hoped to get through uni presenting as a man and engaging with society as such, before attempting to find a space for her feminine self after leaving university.
Unfortunately for her, she joined drag society. Dressed as a man, she walked into their “weekly hangout”, and met Dawn, another trans woman, who Saffron says instantly took her under her wing and introduced her to drag performance. Since then, Saffron has dressed and presented as a woman more and more frequently, and now does so almost all the time, which she wouldn’t have believed possible a year ago.
Saffron tells me that for her, drag is an escape into sexuality. Drag, in its essence, is the playful pushing of extremes when it comes to gender roles. Samiksha, somewhat surprisingly, takes no issue with drag, but for Saffron, it’s something more than the playful and impermanent adoption of female stereotypes. She says the world doesn’t allow her to feel sexy very often, but in drag, that is exactly what people want. It’s about selling a fantasy; for Saffron, that fantasy just happens to be sex.
Being up on stage, she feels impenetrable.
She’s wearing six layers of tights and corsets, so in a way, she sort of is.
She doesn’t come across as someone asking for compassion. To compliment their armour of corsetry and lace, her and Dawn have an unapologetic air to them; their identities are independent of the public reaction to them.
It’s possible to see how Samiksha’s reductive definition of womanhood is helpful when trying to sort the world into understandable and stable binaries. I empathise deeply with her affront at the poor taste in jeans displayed by some women.
But does clothing make a gender? Trans women are hugely overrepresented in cultural debate; much like your cisgender neighbour might wear too much lipstick and a bad skirt, the act of a Trans woman wearing a dress will most likely never be used, by her or by anyone, as a justification for womanhood.
I do wonder if I should grow my hair out.
