RBG and Me: A Memoir of Fashion Dysphoria
By: Tamar Enoch
Tags: Fashion, Gender Nonconforming, Gender Nonbinary, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Culture

RBG and Me: A Memoir of Fashion Dysphoria

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (left) was a titan in the battle for equal justice under the law. But I will always remember her for rocking the New York Times Style Section wearing glasses and a plain pony tail. That’s me on the right. (Photo credit: Montage of creative commons photos and author photo created by T. Enoch.)

I will never forget the first time I saw her. I was flipping through the pages of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, on Halloween morning, 1993. There, in the Style Section of all places, was a glossy color photograph of The Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg, taken on the day she was sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice. She was standing on the steps of the Court, wearing a jacket in my favorite shade of moss green. Her straight brown hair was parted down the middle and pulled back into a pony tail, almost the same way I wore my hair. She also wore glasses, as I did, instead of contact lenses, even though, according to the conventional wisdom of the time, glasses made a woman so much less attractive.

The columnist, Carrie Donovan, was lauding Ginsburg for choosing a tailored jacket for her first day at a new job, instead of one of the frilly fashion concoctions that were in style then. I gazed at the photograph in delighted disbelief. Could it be that a woman who looked and dressed sort of like me was being celebrated in the Style Section of the New York Times? At the time, I was thirty-four years old and had just been appointed to a faculty position at a medical research institute. Like Justice Ginsburg, I was now at a professional level where women were very much in the minority. But, unlike the Justice, I had no idea what to wear.

Like Justice Ginsburg, I was now at a professional level where women were very much in the minority. But, unlike the Justice, I had no idea what to wear.

I have hated wearing skirts and dresses for as long as I can remember. There was a time when girls couldn’t wear anything else to school. I was an early rebel against this dress code. In 1969, when I was in sixth grade, I led a delegation of girls from my class to the principal’s office, demanding to be allowed to wear pants when the weather was cold. We were sick and tired of freezing our asses off in the biting chill of the Kansas winter. Of course, that wasn’t the vocabulary we used, but that was the point.

“I sure like seeing your girls in your skirts,” Mr. Rice responded, after listening to our demands. He was almost pleading.

We countered that his pleasure came at the risk of our hypothermia. He hemmed and hawed, not sure what to make of this sudden flush of feminist radicalism at Pinckney Elementary School.

“We can learn just as well in slacks as we can in skirts,” I piped up as we faced off across the impasse.

“Okay,” Mr. Rice conceded, “if the temperature is below 32 degrees in the morning, you can come to school in slacks, but they have to be nice slacks. When it’s warmer, I want to see you girls in skirts.”

We marched out of the office in triumph, but our unity was short-lived. As soon as we were out of earshot, Mary Houston began to giggle, and soon the rest of the delegation had joined in.

“I’m glad we get to wear slacks when it’s cold — but that part about learning no matter what we’re wearing — how did you come up with that, Tamar? Girls are supposed to wear skirts and dresses. Are you trying to be a boy or something?”

Advocacy to keep our butts from freezing was one thing — interrogating the underlying rationale for gendered clothing was a horse of a very different color.

Advocacy to keep our butts from freezing was one thing — interrogating the underlying rationale for gendered clothing was a horse of a very different color.

By then I had begun to wonder if there was something strange and different about me. Unlike many girls, I couldn’t stand pink. I still don’t like it. I also didn’t share the urge so many of my friends had to dress up in flowing skirts, fluffy tutus and our mothers’ high heels. I did admire Glinda, the Good Witch of the East, but it was her magic powers I yearned for, not her rosy gown and golden curls. She was one of the few role models I had of a powerful, independent woman.

It wasn’t that I wanted to be a boy. I was scared of fights, I was terrible at sports and I adored cuddling animals. As I grew older, I had terrible crushes on boys and thrived on those long meandering conversations I could only have with other girls. But I continued to loathe getting dressed up. I just couldn’t understand why I had to try to look like someone else’s idea of beautiful.

My older sister loved clothes and saved her allowance for shopping sprees. She chose cute mini-skirts, flowered bell bottoms and puffy-sleeved peasant blouses — it was the sixties after all. I was stuck wearing these outfits once she outgrew them. I didn’t like them, but I didn’t know what I did like, so I couldn’t find the words to object. And anyway, my thrifty mother wasn’t going to invest in separate clothes for me, when there were perfectly serviceable hand-me-downs available.

I came to hate Halloween. As far as I was concerned, I had to wear a costume every day, so there was nothing exciting about putting on a different disguise. I went along with it for a while, because, like any kid, I loved that treasure trove of candy. Then one year, I somehow ended up in a pumpkin fairy costume, consisting of a cardboard pumpkin strapped to my front and gauzy orange wings attached to my shoulders. There was also an orange wand I could wave around, just in case anyone wasn’t instantly enchanted by the sight of me. I lasted less than a block in that get-up. After that night, I gave up trick-or-treating forever. I just couldn’t walk around wearing things that made me feel gross and weird, even though it meant no more Tootsie Pops.

By the time high school started, the dress code had become much less prescribed. I could wear T-shirts and jeans to school every day, supplemented with a men’s flannel shirt when it was cold. This continued to be my basic outfit through college and then on into grad school in biochemistry, and a postdoctoral fellowship in microbiology. I reasoned I had an airtight excuse not to dress up for work, since I handled corrosive chemicals regularly. Even after my faculty appointment, I couldn’t manage a fashion upgrade. I hoped, perhaps naively, that I would be judged by my data, not my wardrobe.

I reasoned I had an airtight excuse not to dress up for work, since I handled corrosive chemicals regularly. Even after my faculty appointment, I couldn’t manage a fashion upgrade. I hoped, perhaps naively, that I would be judged by my data, not my wardrobe.

As a scientist, I was not the only woman who eschewed a feminine presentation. While my personal style put me on the unfashionable end of the spectrum, it did not make me especially remarkable. With hindsight, I wonder how much of my freedom came with my white skin. As a white woman, I was respected and perceived as non-threatening no matter how I dressed, a privilege I took for granted. A woman of color, on the other hand, who could be ignored, shadowed or profiled even when dressed to the nines, would have been taking on a whole different set of risks by dressing the way I did.

Sadly, my days of wardrobe freedom were destined to end. At the age of forty-four, I embarked on a new career as a speech therapist, inspired by my father’s recovery from a debilitating stroke. It was a risk to make such a drastic midlife career change, but I took it joyfully. I wanted to work with people I might be able to help instead of test tubes. What I did not consider was the implication of moving from a male-dominated profession to one that was almost entirely female.

As a speech therapist, I had to set aside my jeans and T-shirts once and for all. I knew I needed to look “professional,”presumably so clients would trust me, but more probably to signal the other “speechies” that I belonged in their tribe. Getting dressed each day turned out to be more stressful than teaching surly autistic teenagers. No matter how many clothes there were in my closet, I never had a thing to wear. Many mornings found me standing in front of the mirror, weeping tears of anxiety as I tried on and discarded outfit after outfit. I would end up throwing something on in desperation, just so I could leave home in time to get to work.

After a period of agony, I gave up on trying to look fashionable. I acquired five different oversized shirt jackets and assigned one to each weekday. I learned to throw the jacket of the day over a navy or black shell and dark pants without stopping to look in the mirror. I still had no idea how to apply makeup nor the interest to learn, and hairstyling for me consisted of brushing my hair and tying it back out of my face in a braid or a pony tail. In contrast, my colleagues were all elegantly dressed and coifed. It was a mystery to me how they found the bandwidth to plan the lush variety of outfits they wore to work, day after day.

My work as a speech therapist was emotionally rewarding and I came to love many of my clients and their families. And yet, for some reason, I felt ill at ease in professional circles. I changed jobs often, never staying at any position for longer than two years and never receiving any invitations to rise through the ranks. Looking back from retirement, I wonder if my wardrobe was part of the problem. Most of my bosses were the kind of spiky-heeled power women who wouldn’t be caught dead in a supermarket without makeup. For some reason, this kind of woman seems to be drawn to Special Ed Administration. Did they experience my dowdy gender-concealing style choices as some kind of subversive political statement? Were my colleagues unable to bond with me because I couldn’t chat about cute shoes? Was there some kind of profound cultural incompatibility lurking just below our conscious awareness?

Did they experience my dowdy gender-concealing style choices as some kind of subversive political statement? Were my colleagues unable to bond with me because I couldn’t chat about cute shoes? Was there some kind of profound cultural incompatibility lurking just below our conscious awareness?

Meanwhile, I had started spending time in Buddhist monasteries on my vacations. In these settings, what to wear was strictly prescribed and shapeless. It was such a relief to put on the same thing day after day, and to have it be a unisex black, brown or grey robe, depending on the flavor of Buddhism. Priests, nuns and monks, who ruled the roost in monasteries, all sported shaved heads instead of hairdos. It was my idea of nirvana; a world where I didn’t have to worry about making a fashion statement. Too bad monasteries don’t hire speech therapists.

In these last few years, transgender and gender non-binary folks have finally started the conversation about gender expression that I couldn’t have back in sixth grade. They are insisting that the human experience of gender does not always fall neatly into either the “masculine” or “feminine” boxes and does not necessarily correlate with a person’s sex chromosomes. It’s as if all these years we’ve been told there are only two colors in the world, pink and blue, and if you’re assigned the female gender at birth, pink is the color you get. I’m starting to believe I just don’t have the right genes to feel comfortable in the clothes I have been expected to wear all my life. People who feel themselves to be in the wrong body are said to have dysphoria. What it you feel you are in the wrong clothes? Is there such a thing as fashion dysphoria?

Which brings me back to my first fashion heroine, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She passed away in September 2020, a few months after I retired from speech therapy. She had continued to wear glasses and to tie her hair back in that plain pony tail for the duration of her storied career on the Supreme Court. Hair scrunchies were her favorite fashion accessory. I’ve looked through scores of pictures of her, and I can’t find a single one of her dressed in pink.

By the time she died, her approach to fashion had become iconic. That Halloween, there were women in RBG costumes everywhere. My neighbor was RBG. My three-year-old cousin was RBG. So was the cashier at Trader Joe’s. That night, I dreamed I was parading through the streets of my old neighborhood, costumed in my favorite jeans and a loose-fitting cotton T-shirt. I went from door to door shouting “Trick or Treat” and was greeted with cheers and smiles wherever I went. And soon, my bag was filled to the brim with Reese’s Peanut butter Cups, Tootsie Pops and Hershey’s Kisses.