December 16, 2025 • 48 mins
Throughout history, certain moments have brought the fashion police and -- not to mention the acutal police -- around in full force. Why should schools, the government, our job, or anyone for that matter stay out of our closets? Kal talks to the poet, comedian, public speaker, and actor Alok Menon about the history of policing clothing as a way to control people's identity.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, I'm gonna put myself out here for a second.
If you look at old pictures on Getty images from
when I started my career, you'll notice a trend. I
wear a lot of hoodies. They're comfortable, and I thought
it was perfectly okay to wear a comfortable hoodie to
(00:21):
like a press event or a premiere. And I felt
good about that decision at the time. But as time
went on, I started to kind of fall in love
with learning about fashion and dressing well and want to
look like the dudes and some of these like GQ
type magazines. I remember meeting with a stylist for the
(00:42):
first time, which I understand is a very ridiculous Hollywood sentence,
but I remember he fitted me for this suit and
it looked awesome and it felt terrible, and I go,
this is too tight and I can't even breathe in it,
and he goes, well, babe, do you have to breathe
or do you have to look good? And I was like,
oh my god. So then there was a period of
(01:04):
time where I just like went back to wearing hoodies.
And recently, and by recently, I mean probably the last
five years, I feel like I found a balance between
wearing hoodies when I want to feel comfortable and also
really enjoying dressing up in the right way when I
have an event or when I have something that like
I kind of want to look fuckable for it. You
know what I'm saying, There's nothing wrong with that. So
as long as there have been clothes, I feel like
(01:26):
there have been some sort of a rule book around
who can wear them and when and how. There are
certain inflection points in history that seem to bring the
fashion police and the actual police around in full force.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
The purpose of the cross dressing law was not just
to criminalize people, but to make people live in fear
so that they wouldn't present themselves in public.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Today, I'm speaking with my friend alokmannon, someone who knows
so much about the history of fashion and the laws
surrounding it. We're going to talk about why external forces
keep trying to control people's identity through clothing, and why
institutions like schools, or the government, or our jobs, or
really anyone for that matter, should stay out of our closets.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Here we go again again again again.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Hey I'm Kalpen and this is Here we Go Again,
a show that takes today's trends and headlines, and asks
why does history keep repeating itself? Here we Go? Alokmanon
(02:47):
is an internationally acclaimed poet, comedian, public speaker, and actor.
Alok's literary works Beyond the Gender Binary, Femine Public and
Your Wound, My Garden have garnered global recogniz. Aloak's first comedy,
special Biology, was executive produced by Christopher Guest How Cool
Is That? And they are the subject of the docu
(03:08):
short Aloak, executive produced by Jodie Foster and directed by
Alex Hedison, which made its debut at the Sundance Film
Festival in twenty twenty four. They're also my Friend, Welcome
a Loak.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
And fashion critic Oh by the But this is a
great thing to open with.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
We have been friends for some time.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
There is, although not in public because it's just really
galling to be to be photographed in public.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
With you because of how badly dressed I am.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Just I mean, you do look like my private security
everywhere I did that.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
There is nobody I would rather call and not call
simultaneously to get thoughts on whether what I'm wearing is
hot or not, because the answer is always you can
do better. But the way in which that's conveyed could
be kind, scathing, everything in between, but it's always from
a place of love.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
We tell the things that we need to believe in
order to get by.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Oh my god, I need to show you my Mumbai
Fashion Week photos so that you can tell me whether
they were acceptable them. Oh you saw them and didn't
reach out? That tells me everything I need to do. Great,
we'll work on that for next year. Okay. I wanted
to talk about historical instances when an item of clothing
(04:24):
was made illegal to wear, and I know you're about
to say that everything I try to wear should be
made illegal immediately, but thankfully there's historical context for that.
Women were not allowed to wear pants in the US
until nineteen twenty three. I felt like that might be
an interesting starting point, especially for those of our friends
in the audience who maybe don't know the history of it,
and I'll put myself in that category, honestly, Can you
(04:47):
dive into the history in context there?
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah? So, first, I think it's important to name that
so often conversations around fashion are seen as superficial or apolitical,
that actually fashion is like common thread to understand how
so many ideas of race, class, and gender get made real.
So now in twenty twenty five, we look at a
(05:10):
woman in pants and we're like, wow, whatever, it's not
a big deal. But back in the day, when I'm
talking back in the day, I'm talking about in the
eighteen hundreds, actually women in pants would be part of
traveling freak shows, where people would come and say, what
is this outlandish figure? Women in pants would be part
of soft pornography of something so controversial and titilating that
(05:31):
it only could be depicted in an erotic lens. Women
in pants would be beaten on the street. Women in
pants would be thrown into jail. And the reason that
I find that history so propulsive and meaningful is because
if we can go from something that was once upon
a time seen as indicative of the collapse of Western
(05:52):
civilization to no, biggie, what's the potential for all the
things that we're taught are so transgressive and so transcendental,
And how can we actually realize those things now? So
there's a reason why women in pants were such a threat.
And when we're locating this, this is particularly around in
the early eighteen hundreds and late eighteen hundreds, it's because
(06:15):
the figure of a woman in pants interrupted this idea
that there was a pure separation of spheres. The idea
was that men own the public realm, that was the
realm of going to school, voting, participating in public life,
and women had to be relegated to the domestic realm.
And so the idea at that point was that the
(06:36):
term public woman was actually seen as a slur for
a sex worker, because men couldn't imagine why a woman
would need to be in the public unless she was
soliciting sex without a male escort. So the idea of
a woman in pants actually really threatened this idea that
woman's inherent place was in the domestic realm, and it
began to trigger men's latent anxieties that if women got
(06:59):
the right to vote, or the right to go to school,
or basically just equality, then we would see the entire
collapse of civilization and rule of thumb. Like if your
definition of civilization depends on something as like feeble as
what we're wearing, then like that's maybe not that's not
really something you should build a society out of.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Is that why we're witnessing the collapse of Western civilization?
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Yeah? I actually think that it's it's it's one hundred
years late, but we're getting punished for this triumph for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Okay, that's a lot to take in. And obviously a
lot of this has to do with clothing being gendered
and people's fear, as you outlined, of nonconformity within gender.
Can you kind of give us an overview of that
specifically within Western culture? And I want to ask you
about things outside of Western culture as well, obviously, because
that history is deeper in many ways. But maybe it's
(07:51):
just start because I'm brown, because we're brown, thank you,
But no, you know, I do think about that often.
I also think about you know, in exploring this topic.
It was even something like that women in pants as
part of a traveling show is you know you by
the way, Like, would the pants only travel and they
(08:12):
hire women in different cities or did they actually pay
these ladies to travel?
Speaker 2 (08:15):
They paid?
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Well? Hell yeah, okay, I mean it was.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
The history of the Freak Show is really fascinating because
it was often one of the only places that queer
people could present as ourselves because it was done through
the idea of a spectacle. Oh wow, So because we
were seen as a freak, And I always think about
what James Baldwin says. He says, the reason we call
people freaks is because what echoes in us is our
(08:38):
own repressed desires and fears. So we need to create
freaks as a way to outsource what we haven't processed ourselves.
And I think the history of the Circus and the
history of the Freak Show is so emblematic of that,
is we would put people with disabilities, racialize people. I mean,
there's a long history of human zoos where black and
brown people would have to restage their culture for white
(08:59):
people to come and eat popcorn and like learn about
the quote savage tribes of West Africa. The reason that
those existed was so that people in the audience could
get a reconfirmation I'm good, I'm normal, I'm not that.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
By the way, I'm just gonna interrupt you for a seconent.
We're recording this episode together in Paris, and one of
the last sort of documented instances of a human zoo
was in the nineteen nineties here in France, so it's
you know for folks listening. I mean, yes, a lot
of it was one hundred plus years ago, but a
lot of it also wasn't you know totally?
Speaker 2 (09:31):
And I think it's fascinating because oftentimes when we speak
about a thing like a human zoo, people like, that's
so horrible. But what is contemporary sports culture when you
look at how oftentimes the only proximity white people will
have to black and brown people or CIS people will
have to transgenderate on conforming people, it's still often through
(09:53):
a performance or entertainment context where there's a sense of
safety when these marginalized bodies are doing some performance act
or feat of athletic triumph, not when we're actually regarded
as human beings right next to them.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
So for the idea of people's fear with nonconformity in
Western culture specifically, what's your sort of simple overview for
somebody not familiar with the background.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
So basically, what a lot of Western civilization was was
a bunch of like dude ros who hated themselves and
like were too insecure to accept themselves, so they wanted
to create the entire world in their own image so
they never had to be confronted. And one of their
deepest fears was that they weren't as civilized as they were,
saying that they were. So, for example, you know, one
(10:42):
of the fears of women getting the right to vote
in the early nineteen hundreds, as white men would say,
white civilization is going to quote descend into savagery. We're
going to become like the natives if we allow women
the right to vote. Because Native tribes actually had women's
rights and women's leadership, they constantly had to prove that
they were more civilized than other people. And one of
(11:04):
the ways that they did this was they invented pseudoscience
as a way to justify all of their insecurities, which
they then made into social policies. One of the terms
they came up with something called racial atavism. So the
idea was that as a civilization develops over time, it
becomes more and more advanced, but it has the potential
(11:27):
to revert into a prehistoric ancestor, and that's what they understood.
Women and queer people ask white women were seen as
a racial lag of white men that white men had
actually developed farther along a civilizational hierarchy. People of color
were seen as a racial lag, a kind of pre
existent ancestor to white people, and white men in particular
(11:49):
were seen as the pinnacle of that civilizational drive. So
when you saw a visibly gender non conforming person, what
their first point of reference would say is this is
someone who is not gone through racial evolution. And the
reason I'm bringing this up is so often now gender
and race are discussed as separate phenomenon. But when you
(12:10):
explicitly look at what these eugenesis, what these pseudoscientists were
saying in the nineteenth century, they weren't saying intersectionality, but
the way that they were speaking about gender, they're talking
about race. They speaking about race, they were talking about
gender because in their perspective, the difference between people of
color and white people was that they would justify white
(12:31):
people's conquest of people of color across the world by saying,
we're more civilized. You want proof, Look, we have a
clear distinction between the sexes. So what they would do
is go to places like India and say, look, the
men in India and the women in India dress the same.
They're all wearing skirts. That means they're not as civilized
as us. Or they would go into Native American communities
(12:51):
and say, oh, look these men have long hair and
are wearing accessories. They're not as civilized.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
As us.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
So the reason that this sexual separation of years, this
idea that women belong at home and that men belong
in the public, was so near and dear to Western culture,
it was because it was a primary way with which
white people could differentiate themselves from the very people that
they were seeking to colonize.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
That is super interesting, and it then begs the question
of the idea of resistance. Right. Obviously, where there's enforcement,
there's also resistance. Can you tell us about some of
the past resistance to let's just start with something like
clothing enforcement.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, there's so many great histories of this. First, I
think Native American folks who were forcibly assimilated into these
Western gender norms and residential schools. Many Native folks actually
were like, Nope, I'm going to maintain the length of
my hair. I'm going to continue to wear my cultural artifacts,
and would often be punished for that. But I spent
a lot of time trying to encounter trans ancestors who
(13:48):
I call transcestors, who found ways to resist these Can
we just that's.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
A fucking solid way. I'll just brush over that. Yekay,
that should be a line of t shirts on your website.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
It should be yeah, you may continue. And one of
them that I think is so important to speak about
in the context of this conversation is a black transman
in Los Angeles named Sir Lady Java. So, Sir Lady
Java was a drag performer who would often be criminalized
because there were laws in the book and tell like
the seventies really and sometimes even further beyond in different
(14:22):
places that were called anti crossdressing laws, and you weren't
allowed to appear in public in the clothing of the
quote opposite sex, which is really awkward because last time
I check, like, we're all born naked, so I don't
really know what that means, like clothing doesn't have in
inherent sex. And so LAPED officers would come to Sir
Lady Java's performances and she would have to show them
(14:44):
away otherwise risk arrest. And so she ended up suing
the LAPD and actually helped repeal the anti drag laws
in Los Angeles. And I think it's so important to
uplist stories like that because oftentimes, when we think about
these histories, we just think that queer people, that women
were hapless victims to these draconian policies. But there are
(15:04):
always people like Sir Lady Java who found a way
to resist and actually win.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
There was a long stretch of human history before where
clothing wasn't gendered, and now I'm talking specifically outside of
Western culture. Can you talk a little bit about that
and also why it changed.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, what is so baffling to me is that when
people talk about this idea of men in dresses or
men in skirts, I'm like, come with me to visit
my family in South India, Like, allegedly all these dudes
are men and skirts, we call them lungi's or you know.
And so I think many of us, as South Asian
people actually grow up with such blatant examples. Otherwise, my
(15:48):
mom's side, Punjabi and Punjabi guys are always at the
beauty salon getting eyebrows threaded, like wearing honestly more gaudy
outfits than any drag queen in the West village. Hell yeah,
truly stunning, very ornate clothing. And yet I think many
of us in diaspora don't recognize that gender is racial
(16:11):
and race is gendered. We still say man and woman
as if they hold us. But we grow up always
feeling not masculine enough or not feminine enough, because the
definitions of gender that are being used to describe us
weren't made with us in mind. And that's historically true.
So historically the idea was that gender and the gender
(16:34):
binary was created specifically with white people in mind. When
it comes to us, as South Asians, we actually recognized
multiple genders for thousands of years, and it was only
through British colonization where they put into place something called
the Unique Ordinances Law, which began to criminalize gender nonconformity,
and so British colonial officers would actually target transgender non
(16:57):
conforming people who at the time had many various names
hydras quote these arvanis, and would actually create a police
registrar of a list of all of the Hydras in
town to go double check to make sure that they
weren't quote, cross dressing, and then would steal their clothes
and then make them put on men's clothes. And when
you look at the British colonial records, they were trying
(17:20):
to seek the complete eradication of hydraw people. So a
lot of times when people think about colonization in South Asia,
they differentiate it to say colonization on Australia, which was
an explicitly genocidal project. They say in South Asia they
just wanted South Asians to use as labors, they wanted
to extract resources. But when it comes to the hydra community,
the goal was actually eradication. And what I think is
(17:43):
so powerful is that hidras and various transgeneral condorning. People
resist to that because now there's still such a vibrant
part of our community and population today, and so I
get really frustrated often when people will say to me,
this non binary thing is new, or being outside of
the binary is some white phenomenon. It's actually been here
(18:03):
for thousands of years. What is new is forcibly placing
billions of complex souls into one of two genders. The
reason why the British wanted to impose the gender binary
in India was because they were trying to superimpose a
definition of family that wasn't actually native to who we were.
They wanted to install an idea of property that wasn't
(18:24):
native to who we were. The only way that they
conceived of the state was through a patriarchal state. So
you needed to have a father who transmitted his property
down to his son, whenever you actually had people playing
with gender and had communities that weren't just tethered to
your immediate biofamily. That made the consolidation of private property
(18:44):
and the transmission of a colonial state more difficult. So
I think from that history we can learn that the
reason that trans and gender non conferring people are targeted
is not just because of our gender presentation. It's because
our very existence calls into question so much of how
the state works. I wasn't even made aware of this legacy,
(19:05):
so growing up in the US, I felt like I
didn't have any language to describe who I was, and
it took me going to college to actually learn, Oh
my god, there have been people like me forever. And
I think it's because Indian Americans respond to the racism
we experience in the US with homophobia and transphobia. The
idea is, Okay, we're already being targeted for looking different,
(19:27):
so we have to hide and fit in as much
as possible, iron out all the creases, and pretend to
being more normy than we actually are. And that has
a history as well. So in the US, in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century, increasingly gender nonconformity became abstracted to
communities of color as a way to once again maintain
this mirage that all white people were straight and gender normative.
(19:49):
So when we look at anti Asian immigration campaigns, both
against Chinese and Indians, one of the most successful campaigns
against Indian migration would be saying, look at these men
in turbanes, they're actually women. We can't allow them in
because they're degenerate sodomites. They're going to come in sodomite Americans.
Or with Chinese folks, there would be commenting on Chinese
(20:11):
fashion and being like, look at them wearing these effeminate garb.
This is going to spread opium. They would literally say
opium to the masses and convert all of these people
away from traditional Western gender vice.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Does it all sound like fucking great nights?
Speaker 2 (20:24):
I got out really great, But I think that we're
still in diaspora haunted by that sense of being made
to feel perverse based off of how we dress. And
so notice at a lot of our functions now it's
often only the women wearing our traditional dress and not
the men, and that has a history. It's because often
(20:46):
our cultural garb is seen as feminine when it's not
the only reason it's perceived as feminine is because within
a Western history, ornament and decoration and color and patterns
are seen as feminine, but within South Asian textiles and history,
that makes no sense.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
It is. That's one of the things that I think
you notice first as a kid, that there's an age
after which at a family function or a wedding. You know,
it's not anything that's spelled out, but people go from
wearing a nice courtA to just wearing like a clip
on tie and a and a button down, while the
ladies are continuing to wear traditional clothing. And you know,
(21:28):
I'm a I'm a weirdo. I'm an artist, so I
was always like, no, I need a new courtA. I've
grown it right. But it's I'm glad you mentioned it
because it's still a real thing for for a lot
of folks in the community. I'm going to go back
to Western civilization for a minute, because I.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Think it's really courteous for you to keep on going
back to them.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
That's well, it's the majority of our audience.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
It's important to do charity.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
It's okay, before I before it's so mean, before I
do that to whom I don't know. It just sounded mean.
How does and and maybe we need to have a
third person here who's an expert in this, but you're you,
you are a quite the fashion expert. How does something
like western attire that might fall into the same category
(22:06):
that you were talking about, so kilts, for example, how
does that play into this conversation or is it a
separate thing entirely?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Okay? So basically, in the seventeen hundreds, there wasn't as
clear distinctions between sexual dress within Western fashion, and in fact,
a lot of the things that we perceive of as
feminine garb, things like purses, heels, wigs, were actually predominantly
worn by men. But then there was something in fashion
called the Great Masculine Renunciation, where fashion became less about
(22:39):
beauty and presentation and more about utility and function. And
so what happened is that men wanted to present themselves
as natural and physically agile and agentic, as opposed to
women as fictional and abstractions. So what you begin to see,
especially the Industrial Revolution, is a widening chasm between men
(23:00):
fashion in women's fashion, where a lot of things that
were previously seen as masculine now were seen as feminine,
and that was part of justifying this idea of the
sexual separation of spheres, the idea that women were somehow
inherently inferior and had to remain at home. So that's
why fashion has always been political. Now when we're thinking
about things like kilts, we're thinking about sort of ethnic whiteness.
(23:26):
There's a way in which that I think can be
an opportunity for a lot of white people to realize
how silly and ridiculous these gender norms are too, because
what's important understand about gender norms is that they're all
mythical projections, they're not actually based off of empirical reality.
In the early nineteen hundreds, there would be eugenic fars
(23:47):
where white people would come together and basically have baby
contests to see which of the white babies were the
most ideal and quote eugenically fit. And there was a
touring pair of sculptures called norm and Norma, which were
the ideal proportions for an American male and female, And
they would have contests where women would come and measure
their bodies in comparison to the statue and then get
(24:09):
different prizes if they more closely approximated the statue. So
that's such an explicit example of how these norms precede reality.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
So it's like modern day television.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yes, we're constantly trying to shape ourselves to these mythologies.
And what's so upsetting about gender norms is that even
though every single person in the world can wear a dress,
we still maintain this fiction that dresses are just for women.
And that's what's so confusing to me. When someone says
women's clothes or men's clothes, I'm like, nothing is holding
(24:41):
you back from putting on a skirt except for societal convention.
It's not like you'll like melt off if you put
it on.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
More with Look, after this break, Okay, we're back with
Here we go again with localmen in Okay. The activist
moment of the nineteen sixties is also an interesting watershed
moment for personal freedom and clothing. And as we transition
(25:11):
from the past to sort of present and future, can
you talk about that era and what that shift meant
in terms of resistance.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Sure so, Folks might be familiar with the Stonewall Rebellion,
which happened in nineteen sixty nine, which is when a
group of queer people resisted police tyranny at the Stonewall
Bar in New York and catalyzed the modern gay movement.
But what they often don't know is that a lot
of these gender nonconforming people were being targeted by cross
dressing laws for years before Stonewall. So the reason they
(25:40):
were so exhausted and fed up with this police brutality
was because they had often been just profiled on the
street and thrown into prison. So queer people would be
thrown into prison twenty eight to forty times just by
existing in public. Our community colloquially referred to these laws
as the three article law, meaning that you to wear
at least three articles of clothing with your assigned sex
(26:00):
otherwise risk being thrown into prison. And so when you
see the Gay Liberation Front, which is an activist organization
start in the late sixties early seventies, one of the
political programs that they have was the degendering a fashion
and the idea that people should be able to wear
whatever they wanted to wear. So they began to question
how heterosexual social norms made us feel like femininity was
(26:23):
somehow weaker than masculinity, and that there was a prescribed
uniform on how to act. This is not to say
that queer people have always been on the vanguard of
challenging gendered fashion norms. We had an era called the
clone era that happens right after that, where a lot
of gay guys are just trying to look as masculine
as possible and as aggressively non gay as possible, as
(26:46):
cowpen as possible, so to not dry a screwney or
ire to themselves. And so gay and lesbian and buy
and trans people have also participated in the propagation of
these gender fashion norms as well. And I think that's
why it's important to learn history, because time and time
again we learned that these norms were not put into
place to protect us. They were put in place to
(27:07):
control us.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
Just to be clear, I wear camo baseball hats and
hoodies because I think it's a fucking sexy look, not
because of my insecurity. I'm telling you talks as my insecurrat.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Think a lot of closety gays in the nineteen fifty
said the exact same thing about suits. In fact, when
gay activists put together some of the first gay rights protests,
they would tell gay men, you have to come wearing
a suit to protest.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
I mean MLK did similar things, right, There is a
long history actually of oppressed communities dressing. I don't know
if this is even the language that they would have used,
but like dressing the part dressing for church almost if
you're going to go and get into an ACTI of
civil disobedience. So let's talk about the regulation of clothing today.
(27:48):
And I feel like if we recorded this episode even
a year ago, there obviously would have been quite a
bit to talk about. But in the last several months
and year even more so, what's happening now in terms
of laws and regulations surrounding how people dress. And I'm
also mostly curious in what ways the enforcement that we
(28:11):
talked about in the first half of the episode is
coming back. I was going to say into style, but
that's a terrible pun.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
I'm here for terrible puns. So the same rhetoric that
was weaponized against women wearing pants in the early nineteen
hundreds is now being used against the specter of men
in dresses. So one hundred years later, we're finding ourselves
in the same conundrum where people think that someone's outfit
is going to crack apart all of Western civilization, And
(28:40):
what I'm really interested in is like, Okay, why didn't
we learn our lesson one hundred years ago? That was
obviously a manufactured fear that didn't manifest. Women got the
right to wear pants, But now here we are in
twenty twenty five, where women in pants are often conservative
political commentators saying that men shouldn't be wearing dresses. In
(29:00):
order for them to be able to wear the pans,
they had to become normalized in society. That used to
be seen as an act of cross dressing. So what
we're seeing in the past few years is an intensification
of the gender binary and consequently an increase in anti
trans legislation. And part of these laws are the rise
of anti drag laws. So in places like Montana and
(29:22):
Tennessee and Florida and Texas, there were various attempts to
put into law that appearing visibly gender non conforming in
public was a form of indecent exposure. Fortunately, the majority
of these laws were struck down because they are deeply
unconstitutional and violate people's First Amendment rights. But that's not
the point. The point is that a playbook that was
(29:44):
put into place with cross dressing laws is coming back,
and what that playbook was was trying to intimidate gender
non conforming people from existing in the public realm. The
purpose of the cross dressing law was not just to
criminalize people, to make people live in fear so that
they wouldn't present themselves in public. And so we're seeing
(30:05):
the exact same project now, which is how do we
disappear trans and general on confirming people from the public space.
We debate their lives as if they're just hypothetical. We
create opinions, we manufacture misinformation, and teach the entire world
that this vulnerable class of people is in fact violent
and malevolent, which creates a kind of atmosphere in our
(30:26):
country and in our world were at large where many
of us feel uncomfortable existing in public. I could say
that in the past two years I felt significantly less
safe appearing as myself in public than I did even
a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
That floors me. As your friend, you know, and I
think for a lot of folks, I just want to
take a pause to sort of think about that. Right
that you experienced this obviously, but it's one thing to
read about something in a clinical context and quite another
when folks you know and love experience it. And I
wanted to ask you about that in a minute, but
(31:02):
I don't want to lose track of what you were
sort of saying. Obviously the we're way past just the
very simple women can't wear pants sort of a thing,
but also maybe we're not right, Like, what does it
mean to you that people in power keep saying this
argument that gender non conformbiing and clothing is new, it's
a new idea. It's only because you know everything from
(31:26):
you know, I don't know what do we hear? We
hear shit like it only started at post nine to eleven,
or it only started because Michelle Obama is secretly a man,
It only started like all of this crazy fucking shit
that when you first hear sounds absolutely insane, and I
think a lot of us dismiss it, and then you
see it kind of growing, and I'm just I'm curious
what your take is on that.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
What's fascinating is that every single decade, this idea that
this is new happens again. And that's what I think
is interesting is that the headlines from today could have
been there in nineteen forty in nineteen fifty and nineteen
sixty when Christine Jorgensen, who was one of the first
public transitions in the United States, a US Army vet transition,
(32:08):
that was the exact same conversation in the fifties, And
here we are seventy years later. And so I think
the experience of being a queer person is being like
time as a washing machine that you're just constantly swimming into.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
You know.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
I recently got the opportunity to tend an amazing exhibition
of queer life pre nineteen thirties in Germany, and it
was a traveling exhibition in Munich, and it was all
of these beautiful portraits of trans people in the early
nineteen hundreds in Germany, because places like Berlin were actually
epicenters of queer in trans culture, with people like Magnus
Hirschfield who are actually producing some of the most robust
(32:45):
scholarship and knowledge on gender for being care at the time.
And the Nazi regime annihilated Magnus Hirschfield's research and sent
many of these transgender on contorning people to concentration camps.
And I was looking at these photos and I felt
hunt because I was like this, these could have been
me and my friends, and then history will say that
(33:06):
this was new again and again and again. And I
think that the reason that LGBTQ people, and specifically trans
in general and converting people continue to be targeted over
and over again is because we represent possibility. Is because
authoritarian regimes want to masquerade the status quo as reality.
(33:27):
And when you see trans people, you remember what is transition.
But the practice is saying out loud, I don't like
this shit, and I'm going to do something about it.
Trans People represented a kind of embodied hope and an
idea that the status quo can in fact transform. Trans
people actually teach the world that our bodies belong indisputably
to us, and that no one gets to jurisdic what
(33:48):
we look like. That directly challenges any state which coheres
its sense of authority and power through control. And so
the reason this keeps on happening is because we still
rehash these boring talking points like trans people are a
woeful minority, and I've been trying to push back against
it to say, the reason trans people are being targeted
right now is because we are a viable alternative to
(34:10):
the status quo. Is because we're powerful and magnificent. It's
because our existence calls into question all of these illusions,
and it's because we clarify what truth means. We have
to actually call a spade a spade, and unfortunately we don't,
and and so until we do, we're going to keep
on being haunted by these things.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
I'll be back with my conversation with Aloak after this break.
The one thing that has changed, right, we've talked about literally,
we've talked about this over a period of five thousand
plus years contextually, what role does social media and the
internet play in the policing of clothes or is it
(34:50):
resistance to policing or is it both.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
One of my hot takes is that the cross stressing
laws never ended and they still exist today through binary
gender and fashion. So when we walk into stores and
we're told this is the woman's section and this is
the men's section that does the job of a cross
dressing law without having it to be on the books,
the cross dressing law still structure our imagination. When we
(35:16):
look in an article of clothing and we're like, I
wouldn't wear that it's too feminine, or I wouldn't wear
that it's too masculine. Why how did that come saturated
with gender meaning? It's because of advertisement. Advertising has taught
us that certain bodies should be wearing certain clothes. What's
been powerful about social media is that we've been able
to cast ourselves as the models and actually show no,
(35:39):
I can wear what I want to wear. And that's
created a widening repository of images for people in the
ether to see an image of someone like me who
they probably wouldn't have seen if it wasn't for social media.
Because so often what makes money and what makes profit,
like the reason that we divide baby's toys into girls
(36:00):
toys and boys toys is because it makes more money
if you can sell too of the exact same thing
just by putting it in a different color. And so
when people see visibly general and conforming people on media,
they actually get to realize like, oh, maybe there's another
way to be I would hope that people would see
an image of something they've never seen before and be like,
I'm going to get curious and I'm going to do
my research and listen to Colpen's podcast, But unfortunately what
(36:22):
they do is say like burn it and fire instead.
But maybe it just takes time.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
You know what's changed in the conversation and policing around
clothing between the past and today, Like what's gotten more
entrenched or worse, what's gotten better?
Speaker 2 (36:38):
I think we've made a lot of powerful strides. It
can feel very easy to be cynical and to just
pay attention to everything that's calamitous and wrong, but there's
been a lot of traction in progress. First, I would
say that we're seeing boys wear crop tops, and I
think that is so powerful and so special that would
not have happened a while ago, and that's a real
(37:00):
gender gain. What we're also seeing is people have a
common vocabulary to understand that clothes have no gender. That
was such an abstract concept, maybe even seven or eight
years ago, But now most people understand, even if they're
not personally challenging gender norms with their fashion, understand the
(37:21):
idea that anyone can wear whatever they want to wear.
That as a framework is a recent framework. And that
makes me feel really happy, because I think the way
that my trauma brain works is I'm like, uh, everyone's
going to be upset about this, But the reality is,
walking down a street in New York City, the majority
of people are just like nice shoes, and that's so
(37:43):
sacred because had I been born maybe fifty or sixty
years ago, that would not have been physically possible for me.
So I can't just be cynical knowing that my existence
in public is already a testament to progress.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
That's really well said, and it reminded me of of something.
You know, I think in a lot of these types
of conversations that you and I can have because you're
well spoken, while researched, this is your life's work, we're friends.
A lot of people don't have that privilege, depending on
where you live in the country or the circles that
you operate in. And I've been thinking about this a
lot lately, not just in terms of this particular topic,
(38:18):
but overall. Right, we have the yelling and screaming and
fear mongering of an MSNBC or a Fox News, and
I'll put them in the same category because they're both
ad driven and they both want to scare the shit
out of you to stick around for what happens after
the commercials. In the digital space, there's no shortage of podcasts,
many of them on the right, that are sort of
(38:39):
stoking a sense of fear and then on the left,
you have a lot of folks, like you said, you
know what is our response to trauma, and oftentimes within
our own communities, we double down because that feeling of
being seen and seeing yourself is something that's needed. Right,
So I want to take an opportunity, and I like,
let's imagine that we're fortunate enough to have a wide
(39:01):
group of listeners, including people who have never thought about
this particular issue, and the only sort of offerings out
there are the ones that are appealing to the worst
in us, saying you must oppose somebody who dresses this
way because oh my god, here's the anxiety that you
should feel when you see that. Or on the flip side,
(39:21):
you should never talk to I mean a half joking,
but like you should never talk to the guy in
the cameo hat drinking a beer with a hoodie, because
that guy is never going to love you for who
you are. If we have somebody who's listening who isn't
familiar with the idea that clothing doesn't have gender, how
(39:43):
would you explain that to somebody?
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Right?
Speaker 1 (39:44):
If we've always grown up walking into that store seeing
that there are two sections and for a lot of people.
They gravitate towards the section that they've identified with for
whatever reason. So how do you explain to that person
the love, the acceptance, and the beauty that comes from
not having to only stick to that one section in
(40:05):
terms that aren't out of a book. You know?
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Well, I think there's a couple parts to your question.
I think the first is, like, most of what we
need to coexist in this world we learn in kindergarten,
Like these are not highly high falutin abstract concepts. They're
quite simple, like don't judge a book by its cover,
Like if we actually created a society that believed in
that everything I'm saying would make sense, And that goes
(40:30):
in both ways. We've been taught that people's internal being
peaks out through their external surface. That's in the case
of mental health, that's the case of gender, that's the
case of politics, and that is all wrong. My deep
belief and conviction is that each one of us is
so fucking complex that we could never know who one
(40:54):
another are just by looking at one another. We have
to get to know one another. And so what I
would say to people is, I'm so sorry, because when
you make these assumptions about people. You're robbing yourself of
the experience to get to know someone, and that goes
both ways. We have continually relied on esthetics as a
(41:14):
way to demonstrate our selfhood, and I think that's really
superficial and we need to actually start recognizing that people
are so contradictory, so confusing, and that's so wonderful and
beautiful and part of the joy of being human. And
then second part, how it'd explain to someone who'd never
encountered this concept that clotes have no gender? Is what
I would say to them is did you know that
(41:38):
you can wear whatever you want? And they'd be like, yeah, certainly,
of course, and I'm like, no, no, no, I want
you to really think about it. When you were younger,
who told you what you were supposed to wear? And
I would hear that story and people would often say, well,
you know, as my MoMu told me this, my dad
told me this, And I'd say, did you ever ask
yourself what you wanted to wear? Because I think the
issue that often comes in to the four when we're
(42:01):
talking about this is I'm talking about autonomy to many
people who have never been able to be told that
they belong to themselves. We grow up in a culture
that glorifies and normalizes other people making decisions about our bodies,
and so when people see people like me who are
just dancing to the beat of our own drum, they're like, wait,
(42:22):
we get to do that, and then that becomes anger.
So what I've moved away in my advocacy is it's
not actually about accepting me. It's about accepting yourself. And
if you really recognize, oh, I'm kind of wounded from
being made to feel like I have to act, dress,
speak a certain way, and I actually get to make
those decisions myself, then inevitably people will come to these conclusions.
(42:46):
I think the issues we often lead with theory, politics
and intellect, when in fact these ideas began firstus emotions, feelings,
and traumas. And so when we meet people at a
profoundly human and biographical level and hear the stories of
why they believe the things that they do, the feelings
that are behind the politics that they have, I think
(43:07):
that's how we make the real change.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Looking to the future, this is the part where we
talk about what's possible, what's happening now that could play
a part in the future of this particular issue what
needs to change to help us avoid a fashion policed future,
And most importantly, honestly with these questions is yeah, I'm
(43:31):
curious about the macro of it, but what are the
little things that each of us can do? You know, well,
aside from dress better?
Speaker 2 (43:39):
The future's not looking very good right. We're seeing the
resubmergence of an old playbook which is policing people's right
to wear what they want and prescribing people very fixed
and rigid gender roles as a way to justify their
role in society. So we're seeing a lot of people
actually with this tad wife return and resubmergence, begin to
(44:03):
make claims again that women's natural role is within the
home and is just to be a reproducing agent and
therefore should be wearing certain clothes. That rhetoric that was
so present for us one hundred and fifty years ago
now is coming back. And the way that we can
resist that actually is doing our own part to challenge
(44:24):
gender norms in our own lives. What I would ask
all of you listening to think about is are you
doing things because you want to do them or because
you feel like you should be doing them? And every
time you're doing something because you should have to be
doing that descent, and that descent can look small, like
I don't want to diminish like what we're up against,
(44:45):
but like painting your nails, if you want to paint
your nails is a way of challenging that. Wearing that
cropped up because you want to is a way of
challenging that. Putting on a suit for a formal event
when you feel I have to wear a gown as
a way of challenging that this idea that you have
to wear or a suit in order to be taken
seriously in a professional context. Challenge that. Find small ways
(45:06):
to tap into this history of using fashion as a
way to be subversive. And I don't expect everyone to
like join me in a mini skirt in a practical
seven inch pump, but I do think that there's a
way in which each one of us in our own
world can challenge these gender norms. And when people start
saying things like oh, you're having a boy, like certainly
he should be having this, or you're having a girl,
(45:27):
interrupt that and say why, Like we shouldn't have to
default into these basic gender norms. And then I think
the second piece there is to really support trans and
general conforming people, because even if these gender norms end
up impacting all of us, they're disproportionately targeting trans in
general conforring people right now, and it's very dire and
(45:47):
very bleak for many of us, and many of us
feel like it's difficult to even go outside. Many of
us are even considering fleeing from the United States because
of an administration that is so ruthlessly targeting us. So
many incredible local organizations working to protect transgender and can
wearying people that deserve your support and your attention, and
(46:08):
so that feels like a really tangible way to show
up right now.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
That was the iconoclastic, wonderful and of course extremely fashionable
aloak men on. If you want to support an organization
that's high on a loaks list, Alok recommends trans Justice
Funding Project. They support trans initiatives all over the United States,
especially in rural areas that are transled, and do a
great job of reaching groups that don't often get funding elsewhere.
(46:37):
We'll put a link to them in our show notes
to keep tabs on a loak in their projects. You
can follow them on Instagram at aloak v men on.
They have a great comedy tour slated for twenty twenty six.
You can check that out I have I've opened for them.
They do a hilarious show. You can also read their
three books, Beyond the Gender Binary, fem in Public and
(46:59):
Your Wound, My Garden wherever you get your books, and
watch All Oaks Full Special Biology on YouTube. Here we
Go again as a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snaffo
Media in association with New Metric Media. Our executive producers
are me Calpen ed Elms, Mike Falbo, Alissa Martino, Andy Kim,
Pat Kelly, Chris Kelly, and Dylan Fagan. Caitlin Fontana is
(47:23):
our producer and writer. Dave Shumka is our producer and editor.
Additional writing from Megan tan Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino.
Tory Smith is our associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly,
logo by Matt Gosson, Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline
Johnson and Meghan Halson. Special thanks to Glenn Basner, Isaac Dunham,
(47:43):
Adam Horn, Lane Klein and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but
especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Etour. This has
been here, we go again. I'm your host, Cal Penn,
subscribe rate review, tell your friends about the show and
helped a lot and it would mean a lot. Thanks.
We'll be back next time.
All right, I'm gonna put myself out here for a second.
If you look at old pictures on Getty images from
when I started my career, you'll notice a trend. I
wear a lot of hoodies. They're comfortable, and I thought
it was perfectly okay to wear a comfortable hoodie to
(00:21):
like a press event or a premiere. And I felt
good about that decision at the time. But as time
went on, I started to kind of fall in love
with learning about fashion and dressing well and want to
look like the dudes and some of these like GQ
type magazines. I remember meeting with a stylist for the
(00:42):
first time, which I understand is a very ridiculous Hollywood sentence,
but I remember he fitted me for this suit and
it looked awesome and it felt terrible, and I go,
this is too tight and I can't even breathe in it,
and he goes, well, babe, do you have to breathe
or do you have to look good? And I was like,
oh my god. So then there was a period of
(01:04):
time where I just like went back to wearing hoodies.
And recently, and by recently, I mean probably the last
five years, I feel like I found a balance between
wearing hoodies when I want to feel comfortable and also
really enjoying dressing up in the right way when I
have an event or when I have something that like
I kind of want to look fuckable for it. You
know what I'm saying, There's nothing wrong with that. So
as long as there have been clothes, I feel like
(01:26):
there have been some sort of a rule book around
who can wear them and when and how. There are
certain inflection points in history that seem to bring the
fashion police and the actual police around in full force.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
The purpose of the cross dressing law was not just
to criminalize people, but to make people live in fear
so that they wouldn't present themselves in public.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Today, I'm speaking with my friend alokmannon, someone who knows
so much about the history of fashion and the laws
surrounding it. We're going to talk about why external forces
keep trying to control people's identity through clothing, and why
institutions like schools, or the government, or our jobs, or
really anyone for that matter, should stay out of our closets.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Here we go again again again again.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Hey I'm Kalpen and this is Here we Go Again,
a show that takes today's trends and headlines, and asks
why does history keep repeating itself? Here we Go? Alokmanon
(02:47):
is an internationally acclaimed poet, comedian, public speaker, and actor.
Alok's literary works Beyond the Gender Binary, Femine Public and
Your Wound, My Garden have garnered global recogniz. Aloak's first comedy,
special Biology, was executive produced by Christopher Guest How Cool
Is That? And they are the subject of the docu
(03:08):
short Aloak, executive produced by Jodie Foster and directed by
Alex Hedison, which made its debut at the Sundance Film
Festival in twenty twenty four. They're also my Friend, Welcome
a Loak.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
And fashion critic Oh by the But this is a
great thing to open with.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
We have been friends for some time.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
There is, although not in public because it's just really
galling to be to be photographed in public.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
With you because of how badly dressed I am.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Just I mean, you do look like my private security
everywhere I did that.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
There is nobody I would rather call and not call
simultaneously to get thoughts on whether what I'm wearing is
hot or not, because the answer is always you can
do better. But the way in which that's conveyed could
be kind, scathing, everything in between, but it's always from
a place of love.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
We tell the things that we need to believe in
order to get by.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Oh my god, I need to show you my Mumbai
Fashion Week photos so that you can tell me whether
they were acceptable them. Oh you saw them and didn't
reach out? That tells me everything I need to do. Great,
we'll work on that for next year. Okay. I wanted
to talk about historical instances when an item of clothing
(04:24):
was made illegal to wear, and I know you're about
to say that everything I try to wear should be
made illegal immediately, but thankfully there's historical context for that.
Women were not allowed to wear pants in the US
until nineteen twenty three. I felt like that might be
an interesting starting point, especially for those of our friends
in the audience who maybe don't know the history of it,
and I'll put myself in that category, honestly, Can you
(04:47):
dive into the history in context there?
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah? So, first, I think it's important to name that
so often conversations around fashion are seen as superficial or apolitical,
that actually fashion is like common thread to understand how
so many ideas of race, class, and gender get made real.
So now in twenty twenty five, we look at a
(05:10):
woman in pants and we're like, wow, whatever, it's not
a big deal. But back in the day, when I'm
talking back in the day, I'm talking about in the
eighteen hundreds, actually women in pants would be part of
traveling freak shows, where people would come and say, what
is this outlandish figure? Women in pants would be part
of soft pornography of something so controversial and titilating that
(05:31):
it only could be depicted in an erotic lens. Women
in pants would be beaten on the street. Women in
pants would be thrown into jail. And the reason that
I find that history so propulsive and meaningful is because
if we can go from something that was once upon
a time seen as indicative of the collapse of Western
(05:52):
civilization to no, biggie, what's the potential for all the
things that we're taught are so transgressive and so transcendental,
And how can we actually realize those things now? So
there's a reason why women in pants were such a threat.
And when we're locating this, this is particularly around in
the early eighteen hundreds and late eighteen hundreds, it's because
(06:15):
the figure of a woman in pants interrupted this idea
that there was a pure separation of spheres. The idea
was that men own the public realm, that was the
realm of going to school, voting, participating in public life,
and women had to be relegated to the domestic realm.
And so the idea at that point was that the
(06:36):
term public woman was actually seen as a slur for
a sex worker, because men couldn't imagine why a woman
would need to be in the public unless she was
soliciting sex without a male escort. So the idea of
a woman in pants actually really threatened this idea that
woman's inherent place was in the domestic realm, and it
began to trigger men's latent anxieties that if women got
(06:59):
the right to vote, or the right to go to school,
or basically just equality, then we would see the entire
collapse of civilization and rule of thumb. Like if your
definition of civilization depends on something as like feeble as
what we're wearing, then like that's maybe not that's not
really something you should build a society out of.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Is that why we're witnessing the collapse of Western civilization?
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Yeah? I actually think that it's it's it's one hundred
years late, but we're getting punished for this triumph for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Okay, that's a lot to take in. And obviously a
lot of this has to do with clothing being gendered
and people's fear, as you outlined, of nonconformity within gender.
Can you kind of give us an overview of that
specifically within Western culture? And I want to ask you
about things outside of Western culture as well, obviously, because
that history is deeper in many ways. But maybe it's
(07:51):
just start because I'm brown, because we're brown, thank you,
But no, you know, I do think about that often.
I also think about you know, in exploring this topic.
It was even something like that women in pants as
part of a traveling show is you know you by
the way, Like, would the pants only travel and they
(08:12):
hire women in different cities or did they actually pay
these ladies to travel?
Speaker 2 (08:15):
They paid?
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Well? Hell yeah, okay, I mean it was.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
The history of the Freak Show is really fascinating because
it was often one of the only places that queer
people could present as ourselves because it was done through
the idea of a spectacle. Oh wow, So because we
were seen as a freak, And I always think about
what James Baldwin says. He says, the reason we call
people freaks is because what echoes in us is our
(08:38):
own repressed desires and fears. So we need to create
freaks as a way to outsource what we haven't processed ourselves.
And I think the history of the Circus and the
history of the Freak Show is so emblematic of that,
is we would put people with disabilities, racialize people. I mean,
there's a long history of human zoos where black and
brown people would have to restage their culture for white
(08:59):
people to come and eat popcorn and like learn about
the quote savage tribes of West Africa. The reason that
those existed was so that people in the audience could
get a reconfirmation I'm good, I'm normal, I'm not that.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
By the way, I'm just gonna interrupt you for a seconent.
We're recording this episode together in Paris, and one of
the last sort of documented instances of a human zoo
was in the nineteen nineties here in France, so it's
you know for folks listening. I mean, yes, a lot
of it was one hundred plus years ago, but a
lot of it also wasn't you know totally?
Speaker 2 (09:31):
And I think it's fascinating because oftentimes when we speak
about a thing like a human zoo, people like, that's
so horrible. But what is contemporary sports culture when you
look at how oftentimes the only proximity white people will
have to black and brown people or CIS people will
have to transgenderate on conforming people, it's still often through
(09:53):
a performance or entertainment context where there's a sense of
safety when these marginalized bodies are doing some performance act
or feat of athletic triumph, not when we're actually regarded
as human beings right next to them.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
So for the idea of people's fear with nonconformity in
Western culture specifically, what's your sort of simple overview for
somebody not familiar with the background.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
So basically, what a lot of Western civilization was was
a bunch of like dude ros who hated themselves and
like were too insecure to accept themselves, so they wanted
to create the entire world in their own image so
they never had to be confronted. And one of their
deepest fears was that they weren't as civilized as they were,
saying that they were. So, for example, you know, one
(10:42):
of the fears of women getting the right to vote
in the early nineteen hundreds, as white men would say,
white civilization is going to quote descend into savagery. We're
going to become like the natives if we allow women
the right to vote. Because Native tribes actually had women's
rights and women's leadership, they constantly had to prove that
they were more civilized than other people. And one of
(11:04):
the ways that they did this was they invented pseudoscience
as a way to justify all of their insecurities, which
they then made into social policies. One of the terms
they came up with something called racial atavism. So the
idea was that as a civilization develops over time, it
becomes more and more advanced, but it has the potential
(11:27):
to revert into a prehistoric ancestor, and that's what they understood.
Women and queer people ask white women were seen as
a racial lag of white men that white men had
actually developed farther along a civilizational hierarchy. People of color
were seen as a racial lag, a kind of pre
existent ancestor to white people, and white men in particular
(11:49):
were seen as the pinnacle of that civilizational drive. So
when you saw a visibly gender non conforming person, what
their first point of reference would say is this is
someone who is not gone through racial evolution. And the
reason I'm bringing this up is so often now gender
and race are discussed as separate phenomenon. But when you
(12:10):
explicitly look at what these eugenesis, what these pseudoscientists were
saying in the nineteenth century, they weren't saying intersectionality, but
the way that they were speaking about gender, they're talking
about race. They speaking about race, they were talking about
gender because in their perspective, the difference between people of
color and white people was that they would justify white
(12:31):
people's conquest of people of color across the world by saying,
we're more civilized. You want proof, Look, we have a
clear distinction between the sexes. So what they would do
is go to places like India and say, look, the
men in India and the women in India dress the same.
They're all wearing skirts. That means they're not as civilized
as us. Or they would go into Native American communities
(12:51):
and say, oh, look these men have long hair and
are wearing accessories. They're not as civilized.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
As us.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
So the reason that this sexual separation of years, this
idea that women belong at home and that men belong
in the public, was so near and dear to Western culture,
it was because it was a primary way with which
white people could differentiate themselves from the very people that
they were seeking to colonize.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
That is super interesting, and it then begs the question
of the idea of resistance. Right. Obviously, where there's enforcement,
there's also resistance. Can you tell us about some of
the past resistance to let's just start with something like
clothing enforcement.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, there's so many great histories of this. First, I
think Native American folks who were forcibly assimilated into these
Western gender norms and residential schools. Many Native folks actually
were like, Nope, I'm going to maintain the length of
my hair. I'm going to continue to wear my cultural artifacts,
and would often be punished for that. But I spent
a lot of time trying to encounter trans ancestors who
(13:48):
I call transcestors, who found ways to resist these Can
we just that's.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
A fucking solid way. I'll just brush over that. Yekay,
that should be a line of t shirts on your website.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
It should be yeah, you may continue. And one of
them that I think is so important to speak about
in the context of this conversation is a black transman
in Los Angeles named Sir Lady Java. So, Sir Lady
Java was a drag performer who would often be criminalized
because there were laws in the book and tell like
the seventies really and sometimes even further beyond in different
(14:22):
places that were called anti crossdressing laws, and you weren't
allowed to appear in public in the clothing of the
quote opposite sex, which is really awkward because last time
I check, like, we're all born naked, so I don't
really know what that means, like clothing doesn't have in
inherent sex. And so LAPED officers would come to Sir
Lady Java's performances and she would have to show them
(14:44):
away otherwise risk arrest. And so she ended up suing
the LAPD and actually helped repeal the anti drag laws
in Los Angeles. And I think it's so important to
uplist stories like that because oftentimes, when we think about
these histories, we just think that queer people, that women
were hapless victims to these draconian policies. But there are
(15:04):
always people like Sir Lady Java who found a way
to resist and actually win.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
There was a long stretch of human history before where
clothing wasn't gendered, and now I'm talking specifically outside of
Western culture. Can you talk a little bit about that
and also why it changed.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, what is so baffling to me is that when
people talk about this idea of men in dresses or
men in skirts, I'm like, come with me to visit
my family in South India, Like, allegedly all these dudes
are men and skirts, we call them lungi's or you know.
And so I think many of us, as South Asian
people actually grow up with such blatant examples. Otherwise, my
(15:48):
mom's side, Punjabi and Punjabi guys are always at the
beauty salon getting eyebrows threaded, like wearing honestly more gaudy
outfits than any drag queen in the West village. Hell yeah,
truly stunning, very ornate clothing. And yet I think many
of us in diaspora don't recognize that gender is racial
(16:11):
and race is gendered. We still say man and woman
as if they hold us. But we grow up always
feeling not masculine enough or not feminine enough, because the
definitions of gender that are being used to describe us
weren't made with us in mind. And that's historically true.
So historically the idea was that gender and the gender
(16:34):
binary was created specifically with white people in mind. When
it comes to us, as South Asians, we actually recognized
multiple genders for thousands of years, and it was only
through British colonization where they put into place something called
the Unique Ordinances Law, which began to criminalize gender nonconformity,
and so British colonial officers would actually target transgender non
(16:57):
conforming people who at the time had many various names
hydras quote these arvanis, and would actually create a police
registrar of a list of all of the Hydras in
town to go double check to make sure that they
weren't quote, cross dressing, and then would steal their clothes
and then make them put on men's clothes. And when
you look at the British colonial records, they were trying
(17:20):
to seek the complete eradication of hydraw people. So a
lot of times when people think about colonization in South Asia,
they differentiate it to say colonization on Australia, which was
an explicitly genocidal project. They say in South Asia they
just wanted South Asians to use as labors, they wanted
to extract resources. But when it comes to the hydra community,
the goal was actually eradication. And what I think is
(17:43):
so powerful is that hidras and various transgeneral condorning. People
resist to that because now there's still such a vibrant
part of our community and population today, and so I
get really frustrated often when people will say to me,
this non binary thing is new, or being outside of
the binary is some white phenomenon. It's actually been here
(18:03):
for thousands of years. What is new is forcibly placing
billions of complex souls into one of two genders. The
reason why the British wanted to impose the gender binary
in India was because they were trying to superimpose a
definition of family that wasn't actually native to who we were.
They wanted to install an idea of property that wasn't
(18:24):
native to who we were. The only way that they
conceived of the state was through a patriarchal state. So
you needed to have a father who transmitted his property
down to his son, whenever you actually had people playing
with gender and had communities that weren't just tethered to
your immediate biofamily. That made the consolidation of private property
(18:44):
and the transmission of a colonial state more difficult. So
I think from that history we can learn that the
reason that trans and gender non conferring people are targeted
is not just because of our gender presentation. It's because
our very existence calls into question so much of how
the state works. I wasn't even made aware of this legacy,
(19:05):
so growing up in the US, I felt like I
didn't have any language to describe who I was, and
it took me going to college to actually learn, Oh
my god, there have been people like me forever. And
I think it's because Indian Americans respond to the racism
we experience in the US with homophobia and transphobia. The
idea is, Okay, we're already being targeted for looking different,
(19:27):
so we have to hide and fit in as much
as possible, iron out all the creases, and pretend to
being more normy than we actually are. And that has
a history as well. So in the US, in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century, increasingly gender nonconformity became abstracted to
communities of color as a way to once again maintain
this mirage that all white people were straight and gender normative.
(19:49):
So when we look at anti Asian immigration campaigns, both
against Chinese and Indians, one of the most successful campaigns
against Indian migration would be saying, look at these men
in turbanes, they're actually women. We can't allow them in
because they're degenerate sodomites. They're going to come in sodomite Americans.
Or with Chinese folks, there would be commenting on Chinese
(20:11):
fashion and being like, look at them wearing these effeminate garb.
This is going to spread opium. They would literally say
opium to the masses and convert all of these people
away from traditional Western gender vice.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Does it all sound like fucking great nights?
Speaker 2 (20:24):
I got out really great, But I think that we're
still in diaspora haunted by that sense of being made
to feel perverse based off of how we dress. And
so notice at a lot of our functions now it's
often only the women wearing our traditional dress and not
the men, and that has a history. It's because often
(20:46):
our cultural garb is seen as feminine when it's not
the only reason it's perceived as feminine is because within
a Western history, ornament and decoration and color and patterns
are seen as feminine, but within South Asian textiles and history,
that makes no sense.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
It is. That's one of the things that I think
you notice first as a kid, that there's an age
after which at a family function or a wedding. You know,
it's not anything that's spelled out, but people go from
wearing a nice courtA to just wearing like a clip
on tie and a and a button down, while the
ladies are continuing to wear traditional clothing. And you know,
(21:28):
I'm a I'm a weirdo. I'm an artist, so I
was always like, no, I need a new courtA. I've
grown it right. But it's I'm glad you mentioned it
because it's still a real thing for for a lot
of folks in the community. I'm going to go back
to Western civilization for a minute, because I.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Think it's really courteous for you to keep on going
back to them.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
That's well, it's the majority of our audience.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
It's important to do charity.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
It's okay, before I before it's so mean, before I
do that to whom I don't know. It just sounded mean.
How does and and maybe we need to have a
third person here who's an expert in this, but you're you,
you are a quite the fashion expert. How does something
like western attire that might fall into the same category
(22:06):
that you were talking about, so kilts, for example, how
does that play into this conversation or is it a
separate thing entirely?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Okay? So basically, in the seventeen hundreds, there wasn't as
clear distinctions between sexual dress within Western fashion, and in fact,
a lot of the things that we perceive of as
feminine garb, things like purses, heels, wigs, were actually predominantly
worn by men. But then there was something in fashion
called the Great Masculine Renunciation, where fashion became less about
(22:39):
beauty and presentation and more about utility and function. And
so what happened is that men wanted to present themselves
as natural and physically agile and agentic, as opposed to
women as fictional and abstractions. So what you begin to see,
especially the Industrial Revolution, is a widening chasm between men
(23:00):
fashion in women's fashion, where a lot of things that
were previously seen as masculine now were seen as feminine,
and that was part of justifying this idea of the
sexual separation of spheres, the idea that women were somehow
inherently inferior and had to remain at home. So that's
why fashion has always been political. Now when we're thinking
about things like kilts, we're thinking about sort of ethnic whiteness.
(23:26):
There's a way in which that I think can be
an opportunity for a lot of white people to realize
how silly and ridiculous these gender norms are too, because
what's important understand about gender norms is that they're all
mythical projections, they're not actually based off of empirical reality.
In the early nineteen hundreds, there would be eugenic fars
(23:47):
where white people would come together and basically have baby
contests to see which of the white babies were the
most ideal and quote eugenically fit. And there was a
touring pair of sculptures called norm and Norma, which were
the ideal proportions for an American male and female, And
they would have contests where women would come and measure
their bodies in comparison to the statue and then get
(24:09):
different prizes if they more closely approximated the statue. So
that's such an explicit example of how these norms precede reality.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
So it's like modern day television.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yes, we're constantly trying to shape ourselves to these mythologies.
And what's so upsetting about gender norms is that even
though every single person in the world can wear a dress,
we still maintain this fiction that dresses are just for women.
And that's what's so confusing to me. When someone says
women's clothes or men's clothes, I'm like, nothing is holding
(24:41):
you back from putting on a skirt except for societal convention.
It's not like you'll like melt off if you put
it on.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
More with Look, after this break, Okay, we're back with
Here we go again with localmen in Okay. The activist
moment of the nineteen sixties is also an interesting watershed
moment for personal freedom and clothing. And as we transition
(25:11):
from the past to sort of present and future, can
you talk about that era and what that shift meant
in terms of resistance.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Sure so, Folks might be familiar with the Stonewall Rebellion,
which happened in nineteen sixty nine, which is when a
group of queer people resisted police tyranny at the Stonewall
Bar in New York and catalyzed the modern gay movement.
But what they often don't know is that a lot
of these gender nonconforming people were being targeted by cross
dressing laws for years before Stonewall. So the reason they
(25:40):
were so exhausted and fed up with this police brutality
was because they had often been just profiled on the
street and thrown into prison. So queer people would be
thrown into prison twenty eight to forty times just by
existing in public. Our community colloquially referred to these laws
as the three article law, meaning that you to wear
at least three articles of clothing with your assigned sex
(26:00):
otherwise risk being thrown into prison. And so when you
see the Gay Liberation Front, which is an activist organization
start in the late sixties early seventies, one of the
political programs that they have was the degendering a fashion
and the idea that people should be able to wear
whatever they wanted to wear. So they began to question
how heterosexual social norms made us feel like femininity was
(26:23):
somehow weaker than masculinity, and that there was a prescribed
uniform on how to act. This is not to say
that queer people have always been on the vanguard of
challenging gendered fashion norms. We had an era called the
clone era that happens right after that, where a lot
of gay guys are just trying to look as masculine
as possible and as aggressively non gay as possible, as
(26:46):
cowpen as possible, so to not dry a screwney or
ire to themselves. And so gay and lesbian and buy
and trans people have also participated in the propagation of
these gender fashion norms as well. And I think that's
why it's important to learn history, because time and time
again we learned that these norms were not put into
place to protect us. They were put in place to
(27:07):
control us.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
Just to be clear, I wear camo baseball hats and
hoodies because I think it's a fucking sexy look, not
because of my insecurity. I'm telling you talks as my insecurrat.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Think a lot of closety gays in the nineteen fifty
said the exact same thing about suits. In fact, when
gay activists put together some of the first gay rights protests,
they would tell gay men, you have to come wearing
a suit to protest.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
I mean MLK did similar things, right, There is a
long history actually of oppressed communities dressing. I don't know
if this is even the language that they would have used,
but like dressing the part dressing for church almost if
you're going to go and get into an ACTI of
civil disobedience. So let's talk about the regulation of clothing today.
(27:48):
And I feel like if we recorded this episode even
a year ago, there obviously would have been quite a
bit to talk about. But in the last several months
and year even more so, what's happening now in terms
of laws and regulations surrounding how people dress. And I'm
also mostly curious in what ways the enforcement that we
(28:11):
talked about in the first half of the episode is
coming back. I was going to say into style, but
that's a terrible pun.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
I'm here for terrible puns. So the same rhetoric that
was weaponized against women wearing pants in the early nineteen
hundreds is now being used against the specter of men
in dresses. So one hundred years later, we're finding ourselves
in the same conundrum where people think that someone's outfit
is going to crack apart all of Western civilization, And
(28:40):
what I'm really interested in is like, Okay, why didn't
we learn our lesson one hundred years ago? That was
obviously a manufactured fear that didn't manifest. Women got the
right to wear pants, But now here we are in
twenty twenty five, where women in pants are often conservative
political commentators saying that men shouldn't be wearing dresses. In
(29:00):
order for them to be able to wear the pans,
they had to become normalized in society. That used to
be seen as an act of cross dressing. So what
we're seeing in the past few years is an intensification
of the gender binary and consequently an increase in anti
trans legislation. And part of these laws are the rise
of anti drag laws. So in places like Montana and
(29:22):
Tennessee and Florida and Texas, there were various attempts to
put into law that appearing visibly gender non conforming in
public was a form of indecent exposure. Fortunately, the majority
of these laws were struck down because they are deeply
unconstitutional and violate people's First Amendment rights. But that's not
the point. The point is that a playbook that was
(29:44):
put into place with cross dressing laws is coming back,
and what that playbook was was trying to intimidate gender
non conforming people from existing in the public realm. The
purpose of the cross dressing law was not just to
criminalize people, to make people live in fear so that
they wouldn't present themselves in public. And so we're seeing
(30:05):
the exact same project now, which is how do we
disappear trans and general on confirming people from the public space.
We debate their lives as if they're just hypothetical. We
create opinions, we manufacture misinformation, and teach the entire world
that this vulnerable class of people is in fact violent
and malevolent, which creates a kind of atmosphere in our
(30:26):
country and in our world were at large where many
of us feel uncomfortable existing in public. I could say
that in the past two years I felt significantly less
safe appearing as myself in public than I did even
a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
That floors me. As your friend, you know, and I
think for a lot of folks, I just want to
take a pause to sort of think about that. Right
that you experienced this obviously, but it's one thing to
read about something in a clinical context and quite another
when folks you know and love experience it. And I
wanted to ask you about that in a minute, but
(31:02):
I don't want to lose track of what you were
sort of saying. Obviously the we're way past just the
very simple women can't wear pants sort of a thing,
but also maybe we're not right, Like, what does it
mean to you that people in power keep saying this
argument that gender non conformbiing and clothing is new, it's
a new idea. It's only because you know everything from
(31:26):
you know, I don't know what do we hear? We
hear shit like it only started at post nine to eleven,
or it only started because Michelle Obama is secretly a man,
It only started like all of this crazy fucking shit
that when you first hear sounds absolutely insane, and I
think a lot of us dismiss it, and then you
see it kind of growing, and I'm just I'm curious
what your take is on that.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
What's fascinating is that every single decade, this idea that
this is new happens again. And that's what I think
is interesting is that the headlines from today could have
been there in nineteen forty in nineteen fifty and nineteen
sixty when Christine Jorgensen, who was one of the first
public transitions in the United States, a US Army vet transition,
(32:08):
that was the exact same conversation in the fifties, And
here we are seventy years later. And so I think
the experience of being a queer person is being like
time as a washing machine that you're just constantly swimming into.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
You know.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
I recently got the opportunity to tend an amazing exhibition
of queer life pre nineteen thirties in Germany, and it
was a traveling exhibition in Munich, and it was all
of these beautiful portraits of trans people in the early
nineteen hundreds in Germany, because places like Berlin were actually
epicenters of queer in trans culture, with people like Magnus
Hirschfield who are actually producing some of the most robust
(32:45):
scholarship and knowledge on gender for being care at the time.
And the Nazi regime annihilated Magnus Hirschfield's research and sent
many of these transgender on contorning people to concentration camps.
And I was looking at these photos and I felt
hunt because I was like this, these could have been
me and my friends, and then history will say that
(33:06):
this was new again and again and again. And I
think that the reason that LGBTQ people, and specifically trans
in general and converting people continue to be targeted over
and over again is because we represent possibility. Is because
authoritarian regimes want to masquerade the status quo as reality.
(33:27):
And when you see trans people, you remember what is transition.
But the practice is saying out loud, I don't like
this shit, and I'm going to do something about it.
Trans People represented a kind of embodied hope and an
idea that the status quo can in fact transform. Trans
people actually teach the world that our bodies belong indisputably
to us, and that no one gets to jurisdic what
(33:48):
we look like. That directly challenges any state which coheres
its sense of authority and power through control. And so
the reason this keeps on happening is because we still
rehash these boring talking points like trans people are a
woeful minority, and I've been trying to push back against
it to say, the reason trans people are being targeted
right now is because we are a viable alternative to
(34:10):
the status quo. Is because we're powerful and magnificent. It's
because our existence calls into question all of these illusions,
and it's because we clarify what truth means. We have
to actually call a spade a spade, and unfortunately we don't,
and and so until we do, we're going to keep
on being haunted by these things.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
I'll be back with my conversation with Aloak after this break.
The one thing that has changed, right, we've talked about literally,
we've talked about this over a period of five thousand
plus years contextually, what role does social media and the
internet play in the policing of clothes or is it
(34:50):
resistance to policing or is it both.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
One of my hot takes is that the cross stressing
laws never ended and they still exist today through binary
gender and fashion. So when we walk into stores and
we're told this is the woman's section and this is
the men's section that does the job of a cross
dressing law without having it to be on the books,
the cross dressing law still structure our imagination. When we
(35:16):
look in an article of clothing and we're like, I
wouldn't wear that it's too feminine, or I wouldn't wear
that it's too masculine. Why how did that come saturated
with gender meaning? It's because of advertisement. Advertising has taught
us that certain bodies should be wearing certain clothes. What's
been powerful about social media is that we've been able
to cast ourselves as the models and actually show no,
(35:39):
I can wear what I want to wear. And that's
created a widening repository of images for people in the
ether to see an image of someone like me who
they probably wouldn't have seen if it wasn't for social media.
Because so often what makes money and what makes profit,
like the reason that we divide baby's toys into girls
(36:00):
toys and boys toys is because it makes more money
if you can sell too of the exact same thing
just by putting it in a different color. And so
when people see visibly general and conforming people on media,
they actually get to realize like, oh, maybe there's another
way to be I would hope that people would see
an image of something they've never seen before and be like,
I'm going to get curious and I'm going to do
my research and listen to Colpen's podcast, But unfortunately what
(36:22):
they do is say like burn it and fire instead.
But maybe it just takes time.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
You know what's changed in the conversation and policing around
clothing between the past and today, Like what's gotten more
entrenched or worse, what's gotten better?
Speaker 2 (36:38):
I think we've made a lot of powerful strides. It
can feel very easy to be cynical and to just
pay attention to everything that's calamitous and wrong, but there's
been a lot of traction in progress. First, I would
say that we're seeing boys wear crop tops, and I
think that is so powerful and so special that would
not have happened a while ago, and that's a real
(37:00):
gender gain. What we're also seeing is people have a
common vocabulary to understand that clothes have no gender. That
was such an abstract concept, maybe even seven or eight
years ago, But now most people understand, even if they're
not personally challenging gender norms with their fashion, understand the
(37:21):
idea that anyone can wear whatever they want to wear.
That as a framework is a recent framework. And that
makes me feel really happy, because I think the way
that my trauma brain works is I'm like, uh, everyone's
going to be upset about this, But the reality is,
walking down a street in New York City, the majority
of people are just like nice shoes, and that's so
(37:43):
sacred because had I been born maybe fifty or sixty
years ago, that would not have been physically possible for me.
So I can't just be cynical knowing that my existence
in public is already a testament to progress.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
That's really well said, and it reminded me of of something.
You know, I think in a lot of these types
of conversations that you and I can have because you're
well spoken, while researched, this is your life's work, we're friends.
A lot of people don't have that privilege, depending on
where you live in the country or the circles that
you operate in. And I've been thinking about this a
lot lately, not just in terms of this particular topic,
(38:18):
but overall. Right, we have the yelling and screaming and
fear mongering of an MSNBC or a Fox News, and
I'll put them in the same category because they're both
ad driven and they both want to scare the shit
out of you to stick around for what happens after
the commercials. In the digital space, there's no shortage of podcasts,
many of them on the right, that are sort of
(38:39):
stoking a sense of fear and then on the left,
you have a lot of folks, like you said, you
know what is our response to trauma, and oftentimes within
our own communities, we double down because that feeling of
being seen and seeing yourself is something that's needed. Right,
So I want to take an opportunity, and I like,
let's imagine that we're fortunate enough to have a wide
(39:01):
group of listeners, including people who have never thought about
this particular issue, and the only sort of offerings out
there are the ones that are appealing to the worst
in us, saying you must oppose somebody who dresses this
way because oh my god, here's the anxiety that you
should feel when you see that. Or on the flip side,
(39:21):
you should never talk to I mean a half joking,
but like you should never talk to the guy in
the cameo hat drinking a beer with a hoodie, because
that guy is never going to love you for who
you are. If we have somebody who's listening who isn't
familiar with the idea that clothing doesn't have gender, how
(39:43):
would you explain that to somebody?
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Right?
Speaker 1 (39:44):
If we've always grown up walking into that store seeing
that there are two sections and for a lot of people.
They gravitate towards the section that they've identified with for
whatever reason. So how do you explain to that person
the love, the acceptance, and the beauty that comes from
not having to only stick to that one section in
(40:05):
terms that aren't out of a book. You know?
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Well, I think there's a couple parts to your question.
I think the first is, like, most of what we
need to coexist in this world we learn in kindergarten,
Like these are not highly high falutin abstract concepts. They're
quite simple, like don't judge a book by its cover,
Like if we actually created a society that believed in
that everything I'm saying would make sense, And that goes
(40:30):
in both ways. We've been taught that people's internal being
peaks out through their external surface. That's in the case
of mental health, that's the case of gender, that's the
case of politics, and that is all wrong. My deep
belief and conviction is that each one of us is
so fucking complex that we could never know who one
(40:54):
another are just by looking at one another. We have
to get to know one another. And so what I
would say to people is, I'm so sorry, because when
you make these assumptions about people. You're robbing yourself of
the experience to get to know someone, and that goes
both ways. We have continually relied on esthetics as a
(41:14):
way to demonstrate our selfhood, and I think that's really
superficial and we need to actually start recognizing that people
are so contradictory, so confusing, and that's so wonderful and
beautiful and part of the joy of being human. And
then second part, how it'd explain to someone who'd never
encountered this concept that clotes have no gender? Is what
I would say to them is did you know that
(41:38):
you can wear whatever you want? And they'd be like, yeah, certainly,
of course, and I'm like, no, no, no, I want
you to really think about it. When you were younger,
who told you what you were supposed to wear? And
I would hear that story and people would often say, well,
you know, as my MoMu told me this, my dad
told me this, And I'd say, did you ever ask
yourself what you wanted to wear? Because I think the
issue that often comes in to the four when we're
(42:01):
talking about this is I'm talking about autonomy to many
people who have never been able to be told that
they belong to themselves. We grow up in a culture
that glorifies and normalizes other people making decisions about our bodies,
and so when people see people like me who are
just dancing to the beat of our own drum, they're like, wait,
(42:22):
we get to do that, and then that becomes anger.
So what I've moved away in my advocacy is it's
not actually about accepting me. It's about accepting yourself. And
if you really recognize, oh, I'm kind of wounded from
being made to feel like I have to act, dress,
speak a certain way, and I actually get to make
those decisions myself, then inevitably people will come to these conclusions.
(42:46):
I think the issues we often lead with theory, politics
and intellect, when in fact these ideas began firstus emotions, feelings,
and traumas. And so when we meet people at a
profoundly human and biographical level and hear the stories of
why they believe the things that they do, the feelings
that are behind the politics that they have, I think
(43:07):
that's how we make the real change.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Looking to the future, this is the part where we
talk about what's possible, what's happening now that could play
a part in the future of this particular issue what
needs to change to help us avoid a fashion policed future,
And most importantly, honestly with these questions is yeah, I'm
(43:31):
curious about the macro of it, but what are the
little things that each of us can do? You know, well,
aside from dress better?
Speaker 2 (43:39):
The future's not looking very good right. We're seeing the
resubmergence of an old playbook which is policing people's right
to wear what they want and prescribing people very fixed
and rigid gender roles as a way to justify their
role in society. So we're seeing a lot of people
actually with this tad wife return and resubmergence, begin to
(44:03):
make claims again that women's natural role is within the
home and is just to be a reproducing agent and
therefore should be wearing certain clothes. That rhetoric that was
so present for us one hundred and fifty years ago
now is coming back. And the way that we can
resist that actually is doing our own part to challenge
(44:24):
gender norms in our own lives. What I would ask
all of you listening to think about is are you
doing things because you want to do them or because
you feel like you should be doing them? And every
time you're doing something because you should have to be
doing that descent, and that descent can look small, like
I don't want to diminish like what we're up against,
(44:45):
but like painting your nails, if you want to paint
your nails is a way of challenging that. Wearing that
cropped up because you want to is a way of
challenging that. Putting on a suit for a formal event
when you feel I have to wear a gown as
a way of challenging that this idea that you have
to wear or a suit in order to be taken
seriously in a professional context. Challenge that. Find small ways
(45:06):
to tap into this history of using fashion as a
way to be subversive. And I don't expect everyone to
like join me in a mini skirt in a practical
seven inch pump, but I do think that there's a
way in which each one of us in our own
world can challenge these gender norms. And when people start
saying things like oh, you're having a boy, like certainly
he should be having this, or you're having a girl,
(45:27):
interrupt that and say why, Like we shouldn't have to
default into these basic gender norms. And then I think
the second piece there is to really support trans and
general conforming people, because even if these gender norms end
up impacting all of us, they're disproportionately targeting trans in
general conforring people right now, and it's very dire and
(45:47):
very bleak for many of us, and many of us
feel like it's difficult to even go outside. Many of
us are even considering fleeing from the United States because
of an administration that is so ruthlessly targeting us. So
many incredible local organizations working to protect transgender and can
wearying people that deserve your support and your attention, and
(46:08):
so that feels like a really tangible way to show
up right now.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
That was the iconoclastic, wonderful and of course extremely fashionable
aloak men on. If you want to support an organization
that's high on a loaks list, Alok recommends trans Justice
Funding Project. They support trans initiatives all over the United States,
especially in rural areas that are transled, and do a
great job of reaching groups that don't often get funding elsewhere.
(46:37):
We'll put a link to them in our show notes
to keep tabs on a loak in their projects. You
can follow them on Instagram at aloak v men on.
They have a great comedy tour slated for twenty twenty six.
You can check that out I have I've opened for them.
They do a hilarious show. You can also read their
three books, Beyond the Gender Binary, fem in Public and
(46:59):
Your Wound, My Garden wherever you get your books, and
watch All Oaks Full Special Biology on YouTube. Here we
Go again as a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snaffo
Media in association with New Metric Media. Our executive producers
are me Calpen ed Elms, Mike Falbo, Alissa Martino, Andy Kim,
Pat Kelly, Chris Kelly, and Dylan Fagan. Caitlin Fontana is
(47:23):
our producer and writer. Dave Shumka is our producer and editor.
Additional writing from Megan tan Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino.
Tory Smith is our associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly,
logo by Matt Gosson, Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline
Johnson and Meghan Halson. Special thanks to Glenn Basner, Isaac Dunham,
(47:43):
Adam Horn, Lane Klein and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but
especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Etour. This has
been here, we go again. I'm your host, Cal Penn,
subscribe rate review, tell your friends about the show and
helped a lot and it would mean a lot. Thanks.
We'll be back next time.
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