Non-Binary Fashion Tips for Professionals

fashion

From Medium

At the opening of my New York Times interview, I told the writer, “I’m fully prepared to think of this as a pleasant chat that you and I are going to have, none of which is going to get printed,” and I was pretty close to right. I’m neither surprised nor mad that the rabble-rousing parts of the interview didn’t make it to print, even if I’d had a sliver of hope that I was going to be able to pair a cute outfit with some anarchist propaganda on a larger-than-usual platform.

But hey, it’s the Times, not De Arbeter Fraynd, we manage our expectations going in, and nobody can stop me from talking all I want on my own time about the inextricable entanglement of aesthetic and revolution.

Plenty of ink has been spilled about how the law is inherently deradicalizing as a strategy and as a profession. It’s hard to spend all day contorting into the logical and ethical backbends that are necessary for what we do without sustaining some injury. It’s made harder by existing within a legal services and advocacy arm of the non-profit industrial complex that treats radical idealism as a resource to be extracted.

Young attorneys tumble out of law school into a scene that bounces them from project to crushingly exploitative project, racking up first- and second-hand trauma with no support until they inevitably burn out and end up out of the field or in the hospital. In such a scene, and beneath the one-two punch of mountains of law school debt on one side, and on the other, a system that unforgivably and irreparably dehumanizes not only our clients, but also us, while instructing us that if we just did a little bit better, we could “save” them from its violence — a radical politic staggers.

And it’s tempting to think that if we can make a legal profession that has room for us, us with our queerness, us in all our non-binary glory, us in our refusal to be sanitized and contained in the boundaries of a professionalism that was always a proxy for white supremacy anyway, that maybe that by itself would change something substantive too. I also desperately want my commitment to banging my head against the strictures of the profession to mean something — if not for myself, then for the next generation of people like me. It’s the same urge, I think, as the desire to get that “X” gender marker, to insist that a bailiff not misgender us, to plant a flag firmly in the realm of demanding recognition from the institution and simply keep demanding it until either it comes or we break.

As someone who is watching my colleagues and friends break around me, I want to question the assumptions that strategy rests on: specifically, the assumption that the institutions that govern us can and should recognize us, that their recognition of us is something to be desired and fought for for its own sake, and that the best possible outcome is a fully inclusive state, a prison system with men’s, women’s, and non-binary people’s institutions, and gender-neutral bathrooms in the corporate counsel offices of Shell and Amazon. If we imagine that we can ride our own identities to an inclusive profession, and that an inclusive profession is an end in and of itself, there’s no reason not to throw ourselves into this role.

This is the line of thinking that led me to say to a very sweet New York Times journalist, “I know this will never be printed, but I fully believe that a non-binary aesthetic must be backed up by an anarchist politic or it’s nothing but a lewk.”

Now on one level, this is a basic critique of identity politics. We can’t assume that doing the profession of law non-binarily is necessarily doing it in a radically transformative way, any more than doing anything while holding a marginalized identity is necessarily radically transformative. Non-binary people are as capable of holding regressive values, of universalizing our own experiences, of prioritizing our comfort over solidarity, as anyone else.

But I think non-binary identity gives us a precious opportunity in the way that it forces us just a little ways outside the institutions and systems that govern us. For a lot of non-binary people — especially white non-binary people — that exclusion is something new, and newly painful.

And it’s cold out here! Of course we want to go back inside. Of course we want to hammer at the door and yell to be let back in, to have space made for us, to be welcomed into those institutions and systems despite our identities. But maybe it’s possible to tolerate the discomfort for long enough to really look at what we’re being excluded from, and what our exclusion means about the thing we’re being excluded from, and who else is out here with us, and what we might be able to do together.

Anything that creates experiences of marginalization in an individual’s day-to-day life is an entry point for solidarity. Without much hope that it would work, I asked the Times writer to let my interview be an invitation into that beautiful and necessary space, into the complexity and expansiveness that opens up before us when we turn our backs on the state and turn instead to each other.

So where does that leave us and our day jobs and our loans? There’s no single right answer, but for me, I’m prioritizing being strategic.

When I’m at work, my focus is on my clients in the practical realities of their lives. If I correct a judge who calls me “Mr.” or “Ms.,” how will it affect the judge’s perception of my client and their case? If my presence, my appearance, my body, makes an Attorney for the Child uncomfortable, what impact will that have on my client’s ability to stay in connection with their child? If a prosecutor refuses to take our conversation seriously because of what I look like, will that change the outcome of an arraignment? If I’m late to a hearing because I got pulled out of the courthouse security line because of mismatched gender markers on my IDs, how does that impact my client’s life? And how can I ethically rank the importance of my own feelings of comfort or affirmation against these things?

And I always talk this strategy through with my clients, because supporting their autonomy in the context of a state that seeks to crush it is the bottom line of how I think about my job. I just transferred a client in a rural jurisdiction to a cisgender colleague after we decided together that the risk of a judge being prejudiced by my presence was a risk neither of us wanted them to take. Whether the obstacles they identify to their autonomy are the name or gender marker on their IDs, the strictures of civil, criminal, or immigration law, or the entanglement of the state with things like healthcare or family building, my priority in supporting them is their autonomy, not recognition. Keeping that focus helps me advise them and prioritize within my own work.

The only line from my interview that actually ended up in the article was “I try to be as invisible as possible…I overshoot masculine because I can’t predict, when someone looks at me, what they’re going to see. If they think that I’m a woman in a suit, that’s fine, right? That’s not weird. That doesn’t make anyone want to punch you.”

I remember saying to the interviewer, “If you can keep them from cutting one line, don’t let them cut that professionalism is always a proxy for white supremacy,” but this is not my first rodeo. I know that even when a journalist is a comrade (they were!) and doing their best (they were!) they don’t make the final decisions on a lot of parts of how an article comes out. I know that the process by which an interview becomes a live article is a meat grinder into which you can pour your most nuanced and deeply considered opinions, and if you’re lucky, what comes out the other end is a comprehensible sentence. So I’m saying it here: what non-binary people wear in the workplace is a conversation worth having only when it implicates a critical eye to what professionalism is and where it comes from. Non-binary identity is beautiful and amazing and, at its best, is an opportunity to divest your self-understanding from the state and throw your heart into community. We cannot make a state that recognizes us or cares for us in a way that matters, because that is not what states are for; the bad news about this is that the state is just the consolidation of legitimized violence and that’s a bummer, but the good news about this is that we recognize each other, and we care for each other, and that’s the whole point of why we’re here.

Or maybe you’re actually just here for the non-binary fashion tips, so here are a few of those:

  • Get your suits at thrift stores and then get them tailored. You should get them tailored anyway, and you might as well pay $80 to tailor a $10 suit as a $110 one.
  • Beauty Bakerie makes great quality, high pigment lip colors that will hold up to a KN-95.
  • If you want to wear heels and most “women’s” shoe brands don’t make your size, try Pleaser. They’re best known as a stage brand, but they do actually make cute regular pumps and ballet flats, and they go up to size 16.
  • Clothes rules are made-up in the same way that money rules are made-up — they’re not “real” in some universal sense, but they still affect your life materially. Choose to conform or deviate strategically and with a solid grounding in your values.
  • If you’re engaging in less socially sanctioned strategies, leave the flashy outfit at home and don’t forget to cover all visible tattoos.
  • Always practical solidarity; never practical shoes.

There are 17 Comments

I don’t know if the author will read the comments here, but I’d very much like to read more about the history of professionalism as a white supremecist project. At face value, I believe it but I would like to understand how the identity of the professionals is constructed historically and today.

I'm not the author of this piece, but I see where this is coming from. In reading of how modern westernized schooling was imposed in different colonies and colonial subjects, and how proper behavior was disciplined, including norms for attire. Think of how unprofessional it would be to dance shirtless, instead of sitting still with the shirt tucked in. Yet this is only in the colonizers mentality, since in some of these people's culture's they didn't even wear shirts or go to school. The same thing extends to adults and their expected behavior, things like standing in line, respecting hierarchy and authority, not being loud (inside voice vs outside voice, etc), being stiff, sitting in chairs instead of squatting down or sitting on the floor, etc.

Yup the professional is the foreman of the hierarchical services sector, approaching the peak exclusive master class, so yes, white supremacy is woven into the status condition.

ok but that doesn’t explain anything for societies that aren’t based on colonizing people of color, so why and how did these norms and styles emerge to begin with? Yes of course they were imposed on subjugated peoples later but that doesn’t mean there is anything particularly white about the norms.

In the USA, the race categories are reified and in a Manichean fashion in discourse. The important qualification, if you want a simple slogan that can be extrapolated to everywhere else in the world, is the problematic aspects of work, hierarchy, civilization. But it's important to note that modernity as westernizing project has the white male at the top of its hierarchy of castes. He is the figure the universal human is molded after. Of course there isn't anything particularly white about the norms, as race is a construct, there's nothing essential about being european either. It just so happens they were the ones that did the recent big colonialism and are still benefiting from it and maintaining those relations. You could imagine an alternate history in which Asia or Africa colonized America, but that didn't happen. Why is international business fashion suit and tie? Where did this clothing style originate and become popular? Why aren't people wearing loincloths or hula skirts to work or to court or whatever limit of imagination scenario people are wearing indigenous attire to modern settler lifestyle?

I’m not wondering how the USA got its professional norms. I’m wondering why those norms developed in England and maybe other European countries. You said, “ Why is international business fashion suit and tie? Where did this clothing style originate and become popular?” Yes, that is what I am asking. I know Beau Brummell (not an American) had an impact on a lot of the fashion, but I am asking for more than a lesson in fashion history.

In another thread I pointed to the impact of war on our archetypes of masculinity. I am looking for similar sorts of causal explanations for our archetypes of the Professional.

I think I made this confusing because of the way I asked the question, so let me put this a different way…

The way “whiteness” developed was in relation to the populations Europeans were subjugating. There isn’t a notion of “whiteness” until well after European empires colonized various regions. Whiteness is something that comes from the relationship of white supremacy, in other words.

I don’t think that this is the case for “professionalism,” but I am willing to accept that it is. However, before I do, I’d like to understand how it is that “professionalism” develops in the relationship of whites to non-whites, within the context of white supremacy. As noted above, a lot of what I understand to be the components of “professionalism” developed in England and other European contexts. Not in the colonies of European empires, but in their motherlands (or whatever the hell you call them). So we know, for instance, that the cravat comes from Croatian mercenaries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cravat_(early) That isn’t a context of white supremacy. Again, we know that Beau Brummell reformed mensware… Also. not a context of white supremacy.

But there is a lot more to professionalism than clothing. If we deconstruct what “professionalism” stands for, what is the history of its components. What is the history of the characteristics that are considered essential to the professional? Are they the characteristics of scribes? Are they the characteristics of lawyers? Doctors? Or does it actually have more to do with symbolizing racial domination in the form of white supremacy?

Like I mentioned, if the desire is to reduce it to simplest common thing one can project to all times and places, then civilization, with its specialization of tasks and labor, with trades such as the scribes that you mention, with artisans and merchants, accountants, etc. Guilds and castes. All trades had their proper behavior conducive to productivity and allegiance to the powers that be. Religious norms could inform these behaviors and attires. Respectability cultures of all eras. Anthropology and speculation.

But I will insist that our current notion of professionalism is much more modern and its tied to the notion of meritocracy in technocracy. It's tied to schooling, to academia, and to bourgeois manners.

Towards a working definition:

From the first link:

"...a "culture of professionalism"—a culture stemming from the delimitation of clearly defined, service-oriented careers occupied by experts; sustained by schooling; restricted by gatekeeping..."

From second link:

" ...compliance with regulatory requirements."

Therefore, one could say professionalism refers to the mannerisms of the aspirational upwardly mobile servant.

Those old style horn rimmed reading glasses are the new professional's look, like chic academic, thought you'd appreciate this Cyber. Also chiffon banker's drag with traditional white cotton shirt ;♡)

show me the goods! Please

These are just people who still listen to ska

that was a reply to the pinterest

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