The Revolution Begins in Your Closet

How do you take a picture of yourself in the men's room?

Over the last three years I’ve become increasingly obsessed with how I dress. I’ve grown passionate about each day’s ensemble. My obsession is not merely vanity nor is it just about looking good.

For me, style is life. American dress can be dreary, and, in an all-too-typical manifestation of the paradox of too many choices, unimaginative.

Yet style is entirely within my control. With so many of my rights and the rights of other lgbtq people always contested, why would I relinquish to ralph lauren my body and spirit?

With style I can choose to revolutionize my surroundings by making the world a bit more interesting through my apparel. We all know how we feel and act around someone who has style. I strive to be that positive force.

As an FtM, tweaking my body doesn’t stop at the doctor’s office but begins anew each day in my closet. There I free my mind of the stereotypes that say I’m not a man; of the internal messages that say I should hide my body in ill-fitting baggy clothing; and of the cultural imperative that claims style doesn’t matter.

“In life courtesy and self-possession,” wrote William Butler Yeats, “and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind.”

I believe all transsexuals and gender radicals and gender queers possess the potential to manifest this free mind in beautiful and intoxicating ways.

Please don’t relinquish this freedom to an arid fashion scene of the same, more of the same and again, the same. We’re too bright and too strong to waste our time and the world’s senses dressing in a too unthinking manner.

If the revolution does indeed begin at home, perhaps our fiercest weapons are to be found in our closets and our dearest comrades will be the mirror (do we have the spiritual moxie to gaze back?) and the friend who tells us when we’ve lost our style.

Exercise your free mind. Dress well and show the world how much you love yourself – and it – in the process.

The The Revolution Begins in Your Closet by Jay Sennett, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.