Evan Urquhart

I have been thinking about talking about this and so I have a lot to say and I decided to do a quote tweet. https://twitter.com/e_urq/status/1368240036458733569 …

I grew up reading women's fashion magazines that were full of advice about how dressing femininely would make me feel sexy and attractive. And I was desperate for attention and love. I always had felt as if there was something terrible and wrong with me and so I believed if....

...I followed the advice of the magazines then I would somehow become a woman for real because I knew on some unacknowledged level that I didn't feel like one.

Looking at pictures of me when I was younger I can see that I was very androgynous. But it was possible for me to "clean up good" if I did put the effort into dressing feminine, and I did sometimes and it would get me attention.

Younger people have a misconception of androgyny, since it's more accepted now and they see media from the past such as fashion magazines and rock stars and think that it always acceptable for girls to dress like that. This is false. It was ok to wear pants, but not boy's pants.

But the magazines lied. Dressing feminine didn't make me feel sexy or attractive even though I could see it had an effect on other people. In fact, it made me feel worse, like I was putting on a costume for a play.

And there was something else that doesn't show up in pictures. Something in the way I moved around and existed in the world seemed to mark me. I tried really hard, to make me feminine. I didn't realize the extent until I stopped. I was policing myself constantly and reflexively.

I said to myself, that I could just let myself be. Whether it was masculine or feminine, it didn't matter. I could just be myself and comfortable. When I relaxed, I started to move and exist differently. And that felt good too...