I Gave Up Pants—But Femininity Is Just As Binding

I stopped wearing pants in the name of physical comfort, with the emotionally uncomfortable result that I now present as a woman who wears dresses all the time.

This is I Give Up, a new series from Catapult magazine on the things—habits, expectations, jobs, ambitions, futures, and more—that people have let go of in the past few years.

I am not built right for pants.

It’s something about fat, but also fat distribution: not just how much of it I have, but where it is and in what proportions. Jeans that most people would consider mid-rise or high-rise hit me right in the middle of a bulge, which is both uncomfortable and unworkable. They pinch, they roll down, they won’t sit right. Low-rise jeans don’t bind as badly, but they slide down all day; in my jeans-wearing days I would frequently wear out the belt loops solely from yanking on them to get my pants back up over my hips.

Up until middle school, I didn’t even own a pair of jeans. I wore leggings, which I could get away with, because it was the 1980s. But eventually preteen image consciousness caught up with me, not to the point of caring about cuts or brands—as a fat kid I had to wear what fit me, anyway—but enough to realize that wearing jeans was acceptably cool and not wearing them was not. So I entered the fray: the struggle of self-presentation, and the attendant struggle of managing the conflicts between my physical body and available clothes. I had several pants companions during this thirty-year battle: straight-leg jeans, boot-cut jeans I was always stepping on the bottoms of, men’s wide-wale corduroys, skinny jeans, black fatigues tucked into combat boots. But I had no pants allies.

And so, eventually, I simply gave up. I stopped wearing pants altogether, even the outrageously stretchy basically-leggings jeans I’d most recently been living in. I adopted an outfit formula: print skater dress, leggings, black cardigan, motorcycle boots. It looked pulled-together and a little tough and felt like pajamas, the ideal late-thirties uniform. I experimented with various brands of leggings to find ones that didn’t roll down, with medium success, but at least the ones that didn’t work weren’t as uncomfortable as jeans.

But this left me with only dresses, which presented its own set of problems.

*

I am not built right for dresses.

I always knew I wasn’t great at being a girl, that there was some ineffable aspect of girl-ness I lacked. I remember hearing a friend described as a “tomboy” in first grade and feeling wistful about it; “tomboy” was an understood category, existing in easily triangulated relation to ideas of binary gender. No one would have called me a tomboy—I was indoorsy as a child, fat and bookish, not athletic or bold. Still, more than anything I identified with Alanna of Trebond, from Tamora Pierce’s young adult fantasy series, who disguised herself as “Alan” so she could learn chivalry and swordplay—though of course she disappointed me by growing into a woman at the end.

I always knew I wasn’t great at being a girl, that there was some ineffable aspect of girl-ness I lacked.

I wouldn’t say I consciously modeled myself on Alanna; this would have seemed like hubris, since she was fast and determined and strong and magically gifted. But I did take up fencing, and I did make people start using a shorter and more masculine version of my name. We didn’t think about gender much in those days, but I suppose if anyone had asked I might have said I felt like a girl disguised as a boy—though really, it was femininity that felt like the disguise, a complex and protean ruse I was always learning years too late. A girl disguised as a boy, clumsily and effortfully disguised as a girl? What would that feel like? I’m relieved I didn’t have to put it into words.

I surprised myself by wanting to go to a women’s college; when did I ever hang out with women? I’d always positioned myself more as a liaison, spending time primarily with boys but occasionally offering my services as an interpreter raised in a different first language: Excuse me, stewardess, I speak girl. But while I did learn to be friends with women at college, much of my social life there was the fencing team—particularly the male coaches, who quickly accepted me as a brother, less fascinating but much more familiar than my real-girl teammates. This meant I was able to keep inhabiting my preferred liminal space: the go-between, the bilingual one. I recently found some old posts from the Usenet group I frequented during this time, in which I was answering a survey we sent around a few times a year but consistently leaving the “gender” question cheekily indeterminate. At one point I literally wrote “indeterminate.” (I know, but you have to remember: It wasn’t like today.)

I oscillated in college between long velvet and lace skirts with tank tops, and fatigues and a Thrill Kill Kult shirt I swapped from my coach. Privately I prided myself on the ability to shift from feminine to masculine mode; it meant my presentation could accurately reflect both my natural indeterminacy and all the work I’d put into learning girl magic. (I took costume-design and makeup-design classes in the theater department and was fascinated by the way the careful selection of garments or placement of pigment could change everything about your presentation, from perceived class status to the literal shape of your features.) I latched on to the grown-up version of Alanna: Britomart, the “martial maid” from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, who wears armor and bests all comers in battle—not quite disguised as a man but not really rushing to correct people either. I got a tattoo inspired by a stanza about her, which begins: “For she was full of amiable grace, and manly terrour mixed therewithall.”

This set the narrative for my life, at least as far as clothing went: I tried, with varying levels of enthusiasm and success, to present myself within a feminine idiom in a way that also felt authentic, and I also returned to boots and pants and industrial-music T-shirts as a baseline. These were my emotional comfort clothes; anytime I felt unsafe or overwhelmed, I would give up the effort of girly clothes for days or weeks and break out that Thrill Kill Kult shirt (yes, I still have it; no, Scott can’t have it back), or something similar, and whatever fatigues or jeans or jeggings I was tolerating at the time. Neither of these modes was exactly unwelcome or explored under duress, you understand. But one was more natural.

The trouble, of course, is that I wasn’t built right for pants.

*

And so here we come to the crux: I stopped wearing pants in the name of physical comfort, with the emotionally uncomfortable result that I now present as a woman who wears dresses all the time.

This performance was a better game, a camp indulgence, when I could balance it back to neutrality.

This is tolerable, but itchy. I don’t want the association people have in their minds with “a woman who wears dresses all the time.” Wearing dresses, sure, but wearing them all the time? Even when jeans are more called for? That telegraphs a level of commitment to femininity that I have never felt, regardless of all my efforts to figure out how to move within it. I don’t mind being in this room, but I’ve always lingered in the doorway, if not just outside. I don’t want people thinking I live here.

In my mind, to be embarrassingly honest, I’m dressed like Alanna of Trebond: a tunic and hose. My dresses are simple shapes in not-too-delicate prints, cut at the knee or above, worn always with short or long leggings, never tights. Anything that veers too far from this format—a dress a few inches too long, for instance—becomes a costume, fun in its way but also farcical. (I also cannot abide a hint of puff in a sleeve or ruffle at a hem, which is an issue in the year of our lord 2022, when every dress is suddenly a nap dress.) This performance was a better game, a camp indulgence, when I could balance it back to neutrality; giving up pants has put a thumb on the scales, and every frill and ribbon now feels weighty, tipping me dangerously toward the cliff’s edge of girliness. I recognize, though, that these distinctions are much more glaring in my mind than the minds of others. Most people are not looking at me and seeing a knight in a tunic. They’re seeing a woman in a dress.

So I’ve given up jeans, because they bind me, because I am shaped wrong for them, because they do not sit right on me. Because I can never quite forget they’re there, and when the awareness temporarily fades into the background, one wrong move makes them pinch.

In exchange, I get a more feminine presentation, which binds me, which I am shaped wrong for, which does not sit right on me. Which I try to ignore, but which tweaks me all the time. Gender is imaginary and physical bodies are real, as far as anything is, and so this bargain makes sense to me, imaginary discomfort for real ease. But it’s a bargain all the same, a choice I’ve made: the things I give up because they constrain me, and the things I do not.