Clothes Do Not Make The Man

[June 2026]

​I am a gay trans man. I am 46 at the time of this post. I have known I was a boy since I was 4, but I did not come out as trans until a week before I turned 34. I did not hear the word "transgender" until I was 28. Despite making jokes-that-weren't-really-jokes about being "a gay man trapped in a woman's body" in my late teens through twenties, it took me five years after hearing the word "transgender" to realize it applied to me. It took that long to understand that I could be both gay and trans. The trans men I had known up to that point all had a lesbian history. That detail made my own path feel confusing at first.

The first year and a half I was out as trans and living as male, I dressed a bit flamboyantly. Not really feminine, but flamboyant. Lots of purple in my wardrobe, paisley tunics, funky jewelry. I felt confident. And it makes sense when you consider I am an artist: I enjoy creativity in what I put on to show the world every day.

That confidence did not last. In 2015, I got Internet-dogpiled by a former friend. This person cast aspersions on my identity. They called me a "trender" and referred to me with they/them pronouns even though they knew perfectly damn well I used he/him exclusively. The attack hit hard. It made me question how I presented myself to the world.

So I spent the next ten years dressing in a more societally-accepted masculine way. Hoodies, T-shirts and jeans became my uniform. I wore all black all the time. Sometimes navy and grey made it into my wardrobe. I tried to blend in and look like what I thought people expected a man to look like. But what happened was I felt like I was fading. I was compressing myself into a tight little box that does not fit. I was asking permission of the world to exist instead of truly living. I was not allowing myself permission to take up space.

The change happened gradually. Each day I looked in the mirror and saw someone smaller than I needed to be. The colors drained away. The patterns vanished. My jewelry stayed in a drawer. I told myself this was safety. I told myself this was how real trans men dressed. I told myself a lot of things to justify the slow erasure of the parts of me that felt most alive. But the truth was simpler. I was punishing myself for being visible. I was letting one person's cruelty (and a bunch of Internet strangers) dictate how I moved through the world. Ten years is a long time to live in grayscale.

In 2024 I got sober. During the withdrawal I checked myself inpatient for a week. That hell week broke something open inside me. In the middle of the fear and the raw pain of it all, I made a promise to myself. I would stop hating myself, especially for things I cannot help. Being fat. Being trans. These facts about my body and my life were not flaws to be fixed by shrinking. They were realities to be lived with honesty and without apology. That promise became the foundation for everything that followed.

In 2025 and 2026 I began to give myself permission to express myself with clothing and accessories again. I am Jewish, and I cover my head in public. Usually I do it with a tichel, a headcovering worn mostly by married women. I am not a woman. But headscarves go with my bohemian aesthetic. They give me a way to acknowledge that G-d is watching, but also that G-d accepts me the way I am. I also have color in my wardrobe again. Paisley, tie-dye and even floral prints. I let myself wear jewelry, like layering my Star of David necklace with a longer necklace. These choices do not make me less of a man. They make me more of myself.

To me, whether or not you are trans is based on dysphoria and not aesthetics and vibes. I am a trans guy who experiences a body-brain mismatch. I want a flat chest. I want a beard. I want chest hair. I would rather have a penis, but my top dysphoria is worse than my bottom dysphoria. I want to have sex like a gay man. There may also be some biological reasoning for why I have a "male brain." I am 5 foot 10 and wear a size 14 mens shoe. I have broad shoulders. I was diagnosed with non-classic congenital adrenal hyperplasia last year. These physical facts matter to me. They confirm something I have always known. But even without them, the dysphoria would be enough. The sense of wrongness in my body has been there since childhood. It is not about clothes. It is not about how I decorate the outside. It is about the map of my body not matching the territory of my mind.

I do not think of clothing as gendered for the most part. I reject the whole "I'm non-binary because I do not like wearing feminine clothing" and so on. Clothing is fabric. It is color and cut and comfort. It can be an expression of joy or personality or culture. It does not define the core reality of who you are. I will admit that I do give the side-eye to people who identify as transmasc and also look indistinguishable from cis women with wearing dresses and heavy makeup, especially if they are also really into mpreg fanfiction. To me that tells me you are more into being Not Like The Other Girls than wanting to be an actual dude. But at the same time my own gender performance has been policed so I am very "live and let live" about it. I just personally feel uncomfortable closely associating with trans men who are too comfortable with femininity because it usually goes hand in hand with attitudes where we will end up butting heads.

To me, my own love of floral shit and colors like purple and even sometimes pink, though teal is my favorite, is not so much feminine as it is flamboyant in a stereotypically swishy way. Though I do not intentionally try to be a walking gay stereotype, I just kind of am. To the point where when I came out as trans, my best friend at the time, a cis gay guy, said, "No shit, Sherlock. Honey, I knew you were a gay man the moment I met you."

Historically, pink as a color "for girls" only happened within the last century or so. In the 1800s it was well-known as a color for boys. In fact, even in the 1980s it was cool for guys to wear pink. Colors cycle through culture. What one generation calls masculine another calls feminine. The same goes for patterns and cuts and accessories. Men have worn lace and heels and jewelry throughout history. They have worn bright colors and flowing fabrics. The idea that real men only wear drab, boxy clothes is a recent and narrow invention. It has nothing to do with some eternal truth about gender. It has everything to do with fashion trends and social control.

I see this play out in trans spaces all the time. When trans men try to "masc up" by wearing flannel shirts and hoodies, a lot of them tend to look like butch lesbians unless they have facial hair. At best, it looks clocky. If your goal is to not get clocked, and if you have dysphoria about being perceived as female, perhaps do not be so quick to judge someone like me who looks like a swishy gay guy. If you look like a butch lesbian instead of a dude, maybe the clothes are not doing what you think they are doing.

I have lived both versions. I have worn the all-black uniform of approved masculinity. I have hidden my colors and my patterns and my jewelry. It did not make me more of a man. It made me less of a person. It made me smaller. When I let the purple back in, when I draped the necklaces around my neck and wrapped the tichel around my head, I did not become less trans. I became more honest. My dysphoria did not vanish. I still want the flat chest and the beard and the body that matches my brain. Those desires remain constant. But my daily existence does not have to be a performance of someone else's idea of manhood.

Clothes do not make the man. They never have. The man is made by the persistent sense that something is wrong in the body you were given. The man is made by the knowledge that you belong in a different category than the one assigned at birth. The man is made by living that truth even when it is hard, even when people question it, even when the Internet decides you are not real. The rest is decoration. The rest is joy. The rest is the way you choose to walk through the world once you stop asking for permission.

One of the things I ask myself when my former friend's insults play through my mind is, "Would I still wear this if I was a cis man?" And the answer is resoundingly yes.

There are different ways of being male. There are different ways of being female. Some men are bros and some are queens. Some women are femme and some are butch. None of these variations cancel out the underlying reality of sex and gender and the mismatches that some of us live with. My way of being male includes loving floral prints and bright colors and layers and textures. It includes covering my head for G-d while dressing like the gay man I am. It includes being in love with a man who sees all of me. These things do not contradict my transness. They complete it.

I am learning it is OK to be my fabulous self. After years of compression, after a decade of black hoodies and self-erasure, I am taking up space again. I am letting the colors back in. I am letting the patterns speak. I am wearing the jewelry and the tichel and the layers that feel right. My body still carries dysphoria. My mind still knows what it needs. But my spirit is no longer asking the world for approval. I am here. I am trans. I am gay. I am flamboyant. And none of that is canceled out by a paisley tunic or a pink shirt or a beaded necklace resting against my chest.

The promise I made to myself in that inpatient week holds. I will not hate myself for what I cannot change. I will not shrink to make other people comfortable. I will not let one cruel former friend define the next ten years of my life. Instead I will wear what makes me feel alive. I will move through the world as the swishy gay man I have always been. Clothes do not make the man. But they can certainly help him breathe.