num_pages: 368
description: "There’s no news like hearing irrefutable proof that you’re not the sole cause of your parents’ woes, your father’s drinking, your unshakable feeling that you’re not put together quite right and finding out the problem all along was your father’s unrequited yearning for angora." —Noelle Howey from Dress CodesThroughout her childhood in suburban Ohio, Noelle struggled to gain love and affection from her distant father. In compensating for her father’s brusqueness, Noelle idolized her nurturing tomboy mother and her conservative grandma who tried to turn her into “a little lady.” At age 14, Noelle’s mom told her the family secret straight “Dad likes to wear women’s clothes.”As Noelle copes with a turbulent adolescence, further confused by the male and female role models she had as a girl, her father begins to metamorphose into the loving parent she had always longed for—only now outfitted in pedal pushers and pink lipstick. Could becoming a woman make her father a completely different person? With edgy humor, courage, and remarkable sensitivity, Noelle Howey challenges all of our beliefs in what constitutes gender and a “normal” family.
language: English
title: Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine
titlecomplete: Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine
genres: Queer, LGBT, Gender, Memoir, Biography, Transgender, Autobiography, Biography Memoir, Coming Of Age, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 495
awards: awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Stonewall Book Award
category: Non-Fiction, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Lambda Literary Award
category: Transgender
publisher: Picador