FREEEDOOOOM!!

... for gender expression

I run in circles

It makes sense. A lot of fashion is showing off your wealth. It's also showing that you don't do manual labour. When I travelled in South-East Asia, a lot of taxi drivers had one very long fingernail. The accepted reason for that was that if you had that kind of nail, it showed you didn't do a job that involved physical labour.

There's a sort of societal pressure to present as your gender when you're trans simply because it's safer and the alternative is often being misgendered and marginalized. it's also really scary to change presentation early on so early in the transition is when you'll see many sort of "overcorrect" and go overly femme or masc, but many are perfectly happy to be gender non-conforming, and many try less hard as they get more comfortable with themselves.

There's also the growing trend of femboys or guys that present more feminine, and I see guys painting their nails more than before these days.

I think a celebrity making a gesture or doing something symbolically is really cool, but at the end of the day the real signs of a cultural shift is what regular people are doing casually, and to me it feels like there's something shifting, even if it's slow going and there's pushback.

PS the trans dress thing sounds sort of accidentally transphobic, but looking at your profile I don't think that was intentional and is just an issue of phrasing.

It seems like we’ve taken some steps backwards since then. Men wearing dresses is more accepted now, but only in the narrow confines of being trans. I don’t think Kobain or Bowie ever wanted to be defined as trans, they just wanted to be themselves and challenge cultural norms.

I wouldn't agree with that wording, it's more like people see wearing a dress or a skirt as something that makes you a woman (or woman-adjacent). They don't see it as socially acceptable for a man to wear a dress or skirt not because they think it's unacceptable but because they see him as a woman, or wanting to be a woman. Trans women aren't men wearing dresses, trans women are women, who sometimes wear dresses.

The conflict here is that men (or masculine/androgynous enbies) who wear dresses aren't women and don't see themselves as such. So other people seeing them as women or wanting to be women for their fashion choices sucks. I agree that Kurt Kobain and David Bowie if they were alive today probably wouldn't want to be defined as trans. Many GNC people today face hardship because society expects them to want to be women due to how they dress. Although I have noticed that getting better. Egging and Egg culture is way less acceptable these days, and most people in the community can recognize how nasty it is to dismiss someone's identity and call them the wrong pronouns on purpose. 4 years ago I wouldn't be so sure of that because it happened so much in queer communities I felt unsafe being open about my gender non-conformity online.

Sad bad genetics noises :(

I have long hair, and it's a major pain in the ass. Even though it's in a braid 99% of the time, I still find long hairs everywhere. And, wrestling it into that braid is annoying because the only time it's at all manageable is when it's still wet from the shower. I can't get a brush / comb through it any other time.

The main reason I stick with it is that I really hate hair styling sprays and gels, and I think parted hair looks really stupid. So, my choices are either very long and tied back, or very, very short.

Refrain from washing your hair everyday

i think that's a phase. my hair got fatty when it was 4-5 cm long as well, but that stopped somehow when it got even longer. i guess the body just takes some time to adapt or sth.

I get what are you trying to tell, but when i talked about everyone getting long hair, i mostly meant men, and how they should be more open to it. Its fine if people want to have long or short hair, but for men specifically, long hair is considered gay in my country, which is unfortunally homophobic, and ive heard stories about boys being bullied and even beaten in schools just because of long hair.

So it turns out kind of opposite. Men are socially pressured into having short hair, and generally "not being gay" in homophobic way.