skirtcafe.org

Anything commonly worn by men will no longer be women's clothing.

Until women decide to borrow said clothing. Which might be ironic, if men had previously borrowed these garments from women.

I am sorry but I can't understand the rational for using all these terms. MUG FUG for all intents it could be a TUG .

Before I joined the café I had no idea what unbifurcated if I spelled it correctly meant . And I am willing to say that 80 % of the educated population has no Idea what the word means.

What's to be gained by referring to what we are wearing in complicated terms.

I don't think anyone can show one news article using that term.

Just for information a TUG is one of those little boats that pushes and pulls other boats

crfriend wrote:

weeladdie18 wrote:The Kilt is a garment designed to be worn by the Male.....So what is the name of the garment which the Male wears when he does not wish to wear a wrap over pleated Kilt ? For example .....what is the name of the tartan garment which a Male may wish to wear which has no pleats ?

That'd be a skirt, unless it's one of the various specialised culture-specific types, e.g. sarongs, sulus, or the like.

There is precisely nothing "feminine" about the word "skirt"; recall that rockets have skirts, and it's difficult to get much more phallic than that.

Unless there is some new statistical fashion trend these figures will not change.

Or, just maybe, guys learn to get over their insecurities about the notion. What one wears does not define the character of the wearer.

Thank you Carl for your interpretation of my post....." Skirt "... is defined as a garment normally worn by the female ....this is where the issue occurs.. If it were clear to the "skirt spotters out in the wild " that skirts are commonly worn by the male as his fashion garment , the interpretation of the word "skirt " might be different. Perhaps if the male had chosen to commonly wear the skirt , as soon as the female had taken to the fashion of wearing trousers ,the situation today might be different today.....

There is no law preventing a man wearing a skirt.... The idea of a fashionably dressed man wearing a skirt is not perhaps totally socially acceptable in the 21 Century......

Perhaps I should Mis -quote you Carl. ...the next time someone asks ..." Why are you wearing a Skirt ? "....my response should be .... " I have a skirt because I am a Rocket ! " ...........

Am I correct in assuming that Rockets may have skirts , .... but spacemen have space suits.... ? I had a crazy issue regarding the wearing of skirts many years ago ... perhaps the issue should have been resolved by a Skirting Board..... Yes .....just a bunch of planks ............ weeladdie

oldsalt1 wrote:I am sorry but I can't understand the rational for using all these terms. MUG FUG for all intents it could be a TUG .

Before I joined the café I had no idea what unbifurcated if I spelled it correctly meant . And I am willing to say that 80 % of the educated population has no Idea what the word means.

What's to be gained by referring to what we are wearing in complicated terms.

I don't think anyone can show one news article using that term.

Just for information a TUG is one of those little boats that pushes and pulls other boats

I would agree with Old Salt that using an anacrconym might be misleading.....however there is no common single word to describe what we mean.

Perhaps in Skirt Café Jargon ..... a Tug... is a little person who wishes to control a male skirt wearers activities

or perhaps push or pull the male skirt wearer around.

I am not sure of the precise meaning of the anacronym " T.U.G. " ................weeladdie

weeladdie18 wrote:" Skirt "... is defined as a garment normally worn by the female ....this is where the issue occurs..

If one looks at the dictionary definition -- closely -- one will note the use of "fuzzy" words in attributing the garment to females: words like "commonly", "frequently", "normally", and "customarily". Those words refer more to the locality of the dictionary writers and editors more than the garment. It's social and cultural overloading, nothing more and nothing less. One occasionally needs to read dictionaries very closely, sometimes between the lines, to see the cultural bias. What, for instance, would an Indonesian dictionary have to say one the matter save for the fact that it's probably a different word?

Perhaps if the male had chosen to commonly wear the skirt , as soon as the female had taken to the fashion of wearing trousers ,the situation today might be different today.....

Here again we fall into the trap of modern cultural group-think. Skirts existed long before trousers, and the main reasons that trousers came into being was so one could sit astride a horse. This was useful when the only practical means for getting about was via beasts of burden, but aside from a niche market today not a lot of people ride horses very much. Hence, by following the logic, one could profitably go back to skirted garments is there wasn't so much social baggage -- very modern social baggage -- attached to the notion.

There is no law preventing a man wearing a skirt.... The idea of a fashionably dressed man wearing a skirt is not perhaps totally socially acceptable in the 21 Century......

True, in most jurisdictions it is not against any law for a man to wear a skirt. I can't say with any certainty that there isn't one somewhere, but if there is I haven't stumbled upon it. The rest is getting over the social bias. We are our own worst enemies in this regard. ("We have met the enemy, and he is us.")

Perhaps I should Mis -quote you Carl. ...the next time someone asks ..." Why are you wearing a Skirt ? "....my response should be .... " I have a skirt because I am a Rocket ! " ...........

That would be factually and demonstrably incorrect. And as far as "spacemen having space suits" goes, I'd point up that there are women astronauts (cosmonauts &c.), and a space suit is a fundamentally unisex device. The word "skirt" in this context points up the frivolity of assigning gender to objects based on societal norms (which change over time).

I would lake to thank Carl for his reply to my post......fair comment ... we could spend the rest of our lives discussing the issue of

boys wearing girls clothes rather than just going out on the street and doing it.

I personally feel that our agenda at the Skirt Café is the discussion of men wearing skirts rather than trousers.

In our Western and perhaps originally European Based Community the male does not traditionally wear Garments which look like the garment

which we call a skirt.......To be more precise the shorter modern style of skirt is perhaps more practical for the male wearer than the traditional

ankle length skirt ,as traditionally worn by the female.

Perhaps we should remember that the traditional activities of the male were .... hunting ...shooting and fishing for his food , farming and wearing

suitable clothes to fight to defend his territory......

Perhaps the European based clothing requirements have changed as the Human Life Style has changed.

Perhaps we as males see the modern skirt like garment as a more practical and comfortable garment for the male to wear.

The very thin line in the sexual divide is the male who wishes to appear as a male ,and wear a skirt as part of his wardrobe.........

and the male who wishes to appear as a female....or cross dress ........

Perhaps the whole issue is the way in which the skirt wearing male is seen by the female as being a smart attractive skirt wearing male ...weeladdie

weeladdie18 wrote:I have a skirt because I am a Rocket !

I'm sorry, but I just have to...

"Is that a rocket in your skirt, or are you just happy to see me??"

Lol @ Moonshadow

Jim wrote:Words are continually changing their meaning. We might just encourage the mistake many of us have run into. If a man wears a skirt, it's a "kilt".

No, not for me. People only make that "mistake" because they feel uncomfortable using what is to their ears a feminine word to describe something on a man. They do it mostly to not offend the wearer of the skirt. I used to let it pass, but when people do that around me nowadays, I correct them -- "no, this is a skirt".

I had a guy the other day approach me in the checkout line of the grocery store and ask what clan my black pencil skirt represented. He was in earnest. This is not an error I want to promote for the sake of speeding along social acceptance.

Words are only "continually" changing their meaning in the long term: ie. over many generations. Change in language in the short term is usually either fad or deliberate agenda-driven manipulation (eg. the reification of "gender"). Even today "skirt" has many ungendered senses, such as the skirt on a hovercraft, or skirting the potholes in the road. Even "dress" is still used in masculine senses: eg. "military dress uniform". I don't think we have such a huge language hurdle to overcome that we need to consider language the site of our campaign.

crfriend wrote:What one wears does not define the character of the wearer.

It does for me!

I mean, if one is not what one does, what is one?

pelmut wrote:We each know our own underlying genders (how we want to interact with society) and it cannot be changed. Our gender presentation is something we can change, but that doesn't react back on our inderlying gender. Unfortunately our mode of dress is lazily assumed by society to be our gender expression; but for most of the people here, it isn't

Baugh. "Gender presentation", "gender expression", et al, presume the existence of gender as a real thing, which it is not. They confuse the issue. One does not have a gender to express or present; one merely has preferences that other people may associate as being like unto the preferences most commonly held by males or females -- one or the other of the sexes. Gender isn't even an emergent phenomenon; it is merely a shorthand of speech.

How I want to interact with society can in fact change and be changed. You are spouting activist assertions as objective facts, which they are not. The Y chromosome is an objective fact. "Gender" is merely a reification. That men can display preferences more commonly seen in women doesn't mean that they are responding to some mysterious force inside them called "gender". It just means that people are variable and highly diverse in reality.

I feel compassion for people who feel that some mysterious inner essence is directing their preferences, because they are suffering from the delusion that such an essence is real, not a product of imagination, and their lives become more complicated for it as they try to align with their imaginary "true selves" in ways that wind up making them caricatures of whatever it is they think they are "inside". There is no inside/outside dualism -- no binary falleness versus state of grace.

And I feel anger towards those in the medical community who popularised the idea that sex was mainly a social construct, during the height of avant garde philosophical imagination that inspired that idea, and who then led people to think that it was a "mistake" of nature or God that could be "corrected" with surgical and hormonal intervention, and then cause people to ideate around that. The real mistake was the stultifying oppressive culture that demanded adherence to rigid sexually-defined ideals of bevaviour and character -- the oppressive culture that made the idea of medical "correction" seem to be the escape hatch for people whose own characteristics left them socially marginalised and often needing to lead dual-lives or commit suicide.

Correcting one mistake with another is a recipe for a very bad soup, and we are seeing that play out today.

skirts4me wrote:If we were really free to wear what we like, without others telling us we are dressed as women, would you still fell that you are woman in a man's body?

moonshadow wrote:Here's an interesting hypothetical to ponder.... what if all the women and men in the world suddenly reversed their positions on everything: clothing, style, mannerisms, habits, societal roles, etc.... would you still think of yourself a woman?

crfriend wrote:The main thrust here is to get skirts accepted as everyday attire options for men -- to "de-gender" the skirt.

jamodu wrote:Personally, I frequent this site because I like to wear Skirts and Dresses as a Man's alternative clothing choice - a freestyle clothing choice. In an ideal world, all Men, like Women, would have equal access to any clothing of their choice. Let us not derail this ideal by inappropriate discussion.

The last thing anyone committed to the idea of "transgender" should want is to de-gender things, because without markers of gender there would be no way to "present" or "express" gender and thus no way to be transgender.

And this is the precise spot where the interests of the community of men in Skirt Cafe conflict with the interests of the trans community. Those interests don't merely sit with each other uneasily. They are in direct opposition to each other. Trans requires the maintenance of gender norms while equality requires the destruction of gender norms.

How we move on from here is unclear in the extreme. Muddling our way through seems the only likely course, and to that end I see little utility in drawing too many hard lines. I think if the topic of how to get SRS surgery came up, this would definitely be the wrong place to have a whole discussion on it, but the political and social dimensions of gender, and the lived experiences of individual participants, need more leeway, in my view.

Daryl wrote:

pelmut wrote:We each know our own underlying genders (how we want to interact with society) and it cannot be changed. Our gender presentation is something we can change, but that doesn't react back on our inderlying gender. Unfortunately our mode of dress is lazily assumed by society to be our gender expression; but for most of the people here, it isn't

Baugh. "Gender presentation", "gender expression", et al, presume the existence of gender as a real thing, which it is not.

It is not easily measurable but it is real and everyone has it except for a few, very rare, agendered people. You may not be aware of your own gender because it matches your sex, just like most of the people you know; so for you it is a non-issue.  For others it dominates their lives.

Imagine you were a left-hander living a world where everyone denied the existence of handedness because they always used the hand they preferred (the right hand) and everyone they knew used that hand too; so it was a non-issue for them. It doesn't mean that handedness doesn't exist, it simply means that for those people it isn't a concept they think about. If you want to get a feeling for why gender is a bigger problem for some people than for others, follow up this analogy and try using the opposite hands for everyday tasks. Then imagine that society makes you do this for the rest of your life.

If you were left-handed but were forced to use you right hand (as many children were until a few years ago), your underlying handedness would not have been changed, but your 'handedness presentation' would have had to change to avoid punishment.

They confuse the issue. One does not have a gender to express or present; one merely has preferences that other people may associate as being like unto the preferences most commonly held by males or females -- one or the other of the sexes. Gender isn't even an emergent phenomenon; it is merely a shorthand of speech.

This is like saying handedness is just a preference; it is far deeper than just that - and it is very real for people who have awareness of it forced upon them. They say they prefer to use one particular hand, but the underlying force which generates that preference is not something they can choose to change - so the handedness itself is not the preference.

How I want to interact with society can in fact change and be changed.

No, what you change is how you actually do interact with society, not your underlying nature that drives you to do it. Your choice, or preference, is to decide whether or not to respond to that underlying nature when it conflicts with the demands of society.

You are spouting activist assertions as objective facts, which they are not. The Y chromosome is an objective fact. "Gender" is merely a reification.

No.  I agree that gender has not yet been quantified, but recent research has found particular types of brain activity that strongly correlate with sex in cis-gendered people, but are the opposite way around in trangendered people. This strongly supports the concept that innate gender is a biological fact. This is equivalent to the stage that our understanding of chromosomes was at before the double-helix was discovered: we knew something was going on, we gave it a name but we could not prove it as fact.

It is unfortunate that the word "gender" already exists and has been applied indiscriminately to biological sex, gender presentation and underlying gender for many years. Perhaps there would have been less baggage to clear away if someone had invented a new word for underlying gender to distinguish it from the other uses of the word.

That men can display preferences more commonly seen in women doesn't mean that they are responding to some mysterious force inside them called "gender". It just means that people are variable and highly diverse in reality.

Yes, of course, but that is gender presentation, not gender - or it may just be fashion choice. It is often called "gender" by people who haven't grasped that wearing certain clothes is not necessarily an indication of your gender, your sex or your sanity.

And I feel anger towards those in the medical community who [...] then led people to think that it was a "mistake" of nature or God that could be "corrected" with surgical and hormonal intervention...

I agree with you on most of this, transgender is a natural variation which certain parts of society are refusing to accept; but it is they, not the medical community, who are calling it a mistake. Faced with the vile way in which society can treat people who do not conform to their prejudices, suggesting their natural state is some sort of perverted choice and calling them mentally ill, who can blame transpeople for begging the medical community for surgical and hormonal intervention to try to make their bodies less unacceptable.

A bit of bedtime reading for some perhaps:

"The maintenance of gender categories depends on reinforcement in day-to-day
behavior. Male and female could not persist as structurally important social categories if
we did not perform enough gendered and gendering behavior – if distinct groups of people did
not continue to act like “women” and like “men.” In other words, the gender order and the social
categories – male and female – on which it rests exist in virtue of social practice."

Eckert, P., & McConnell-Ginet, S. (2013). An Introduction to Gender, in Language and gender: Second edition. (p.33) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Here it that chapter: https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/PDF/Chap1.pdf