I had an unusual experience a couple of days back. One for which you need to know that as a very cis teenager who was very good at boy, I owned a girl’s school uniform.
I went to the same school my older sister did. She actually left school the same year I started. And when she went off to university I – struggling with my gender identity as I was – would occasionally put on her school uniform and just *be* in the house. Both my parents worked and I was so wildly unable to function as a boy even at that point, so when I got home I’d often just kick around in my school uniform for a bit, reading or playing games. When I realised I could pilfer my sister’s and do the equivalent but expressing this bit of me that I desperately repressed the rest of the time, it was just this strange relief.
A year or so after my sister went off to university, she cleared out her wardrobe sending her school uniform to the school’s second hand uniform shop. And so…I decided to get one for myself. First I had a couple of stabs at seeing if I could get one from lost property. They’d throw stuff out every so often, but I never quite got the nerve to go through the pile of stuff to be chucked.
So instead I went to the shop and told the totally believable lie that my sister who happened to be the same size as me needed stuff. The extremely skeptical woman asked a lot of questions about my fictitious sister and I’m certain I didn’t come across as at all suspicious.
And it being me, and me being excellent at being a temu copy of a boy, the whole “only wearing it around the house” lasted about a hot minute. The experience of being a girl or a woman in the world is so very different to that of being perceived as male. I’d gathered that much from the other girls around me, from my sister’s comments about feminist concepts, and from my mum’s frustrations in the world. I don’t think I really gathered this on a conscious level. I was so busy just trying to ignore the screaming voice in my head, but in the end I just had to see what it was like, so I snuck that uniform out in my bag, slipped out of school early, and went to the local shops. And once I’d let the genie out of the bottle it absolutely wasn’t going back in.
Fairly soon we reached the point where I was pretty regularly my own sister at the local shops.
The reason this is relevant is that that uniform had a pleated skirt. Since then I haven’t often one. I don’t think until – eh – last year, I’ve owned one. But I picked up a cute pleated skirt on sale last year and decided on Tuesday to wear it. I have worn it a couple of times before, but not a bunch.
And it happened to coincide with this urge to listen to All Saints – Pure Shores. Which happens to only exist on my music folder in this random assortment of files that I put there back when disk space was at a premium so I’d only have specific songs encoded and on the computer.
That folder’s helpfully called “unsorted”.
Anyhow, when I hit play on Pure Shores, Emby populated my playlist with whatever rando stuff is in that folder. And as I was driving back from my bass lesson, sun shining, driving in my wife’s Kia Soul with the windows down, a bunch of random stuff that I listened to in the late 90s/early aughts came on and I was thrown back to my younger self.
Music has this ability to do that.
I sung my little heart out and car-danced, and suddenly in the pale grey of the interior of the soul I was reminded of the pale grey interior of the 205XE that I learned to drive in. And although I’m pretty certain I never drove that car in my school uniform – time wise it wouldn’t be quite right – I think started learning to drive in 6th form – when the school uniform requirement was some kind of neat casual (like I did that, ha) – it felt like a memory.
Long ago my brain overwrote the memories of the cardboard copy of boyhood I tried to represent with me as the girl I was desperately fighting to hide. I’ve been out as me for much longer than I ever existed as that pile of rules of acceptable things to say and acceptable behaviours.
But in that moment as I was singing my little heart out I could feel the confusion in my memories of “this never actually happened but it feels like it did.”
And that was kinda joyous and kinda sad.
