It is summer in the Midwest, hot as soup, and I don a frock the size of a twin bed sheet in cooling cotton. “Going full women’s studies professor today, are we?,” my wife comments appreciatively. I give her a magisterial stare over the top of my reading glasses.
“Where are my clogs?,” I ask, just for the theater of it. (It’s much too hot for clogs.) I am cruising toward my mid-40s and freer every minute.
Gone are the stilettos that filled the closets of my youth, gone are the corsets and shapewear and thongs. I am living a life beyond my wildest dreams, in a literal sense; I never knew to dream of this. I was not a tasteful young person, not in my clothing anyway.
Partly this was due to the body dysmorphia I suffered from, beginning in adolescence, when I developed early. I was already weird, with parents who sat outside the mainstream, before I reached an age where that became interesting. They had no interest in trends or keeping up with anyone.
We were brand-ignorant and thrifty, middle class but with poor origins. To pay more than a shirt was worth for status was abhorrent, alien to my parents. I was smart and artistic, qualities that didn’t count for much as a middle-schooler.
And when I was 11, my body changed dramatically, ahead of the schedule my peers were on. I walked down the school hallways in my new body amid my child-shaped classmates and felt ungainly and over-sexual, grotesque, as if I’d been turned inside out. Clothes became a means of disguis.