On the fashionability of houndstooth tweed

    About ten years ago I remember a conversation with my friend C in which I predicted  fashion trend. Not usual for our conversations which tend to be somewhat geeky.
    My prediction was a simple one: that within the next decade we'd see a return to fashionability of houndstooth tweed. Think about it, ten, twenty or thirty years ago did you see anyone wearing that fabric?
    C works in the television business. He writes software that runs digital TV studio equipment, you've probably watched TV that passed through his code somewhere. Our conversation was about one of the projects he was working on, as an electronic engineer who started with scrap TV sets it's a subject of interest to me.
    At the time the UK and other countries were on the cusp of moving from analogue to digital TV. For most consumers this probably meant more channels, a better picture or high definition, but for us it also meant the end of the analogue colour encoding systems, PAL, SECAM and NTSC.
   Analogue telly was sometimes referred to as compatible television, meaning that a colour signal was compatible with a black-and-white receiver. The colour information coming from the studio was split out from the luminance information and cleverly encoded such that it wouldn't show up as noise when viewed on a black-and-white set. The PAL, SECAM and NTSC colour encoding processes each took different approaches to the same problem, but shared the same aim.
    PAL was developed in Germany in the early 1960s. We Brits got it in the late '60s, on our third TV channel, BBC2. PAL tackled some of the problems found in the earlier American NTSC system, but in doing so it introduced a few quirks of its own. The one you'd have seen from time to time is the so-called Hanover bars, colour noise appearing whenever any close-together stripes appeared on the picture. It's one of the reasons PAL test cards have striped regions.
    As you've probably guessed, houndstooth tweed produced intense Hanover bars on a PAL TV, resulting in a riot of colour noise on the picture. As a result, the pattern disappeared completely from the fashion scene sometime in the 1960s.
    So why my prediction? Digital TV has its own picture quirks that you can spot if you look carefully at some of the lower qualty channels, but it doesn't use PAL. Instead, you get the full unadulterated colour signal, so Hanover bars are a thing of the past on a digital set now PAL has been turned off.
    And as if by magic, houndstooth tweed has made a reappearance. You won't see me wearing it as it's never been a favourite of mine, but there it is on the High Street. Technology influences fashion.

Baptism of fire

    Yesterday was a good day. A day of firsts, for yesterday I spent the day as girl in Manchester with my sister.
    The premise for my trip was Sparkle, the UK's transgender pride celebration, but the real value of the day went far beyond that because I spent far more time in town with my sister than I did in the park holding the festivities. Don't get me wrong, there was plenty going on and I saw a load of friends, but the event made me acutely aware that Sackville Gardens and Canal Street were simply a giant safe space and the main event for me was being a girl at large, shopping with her sister in the wider city.
    An early start to catch the train north. My wife was working so I was alone. Early morning over the countryside, then the suburbia and endless industrial dereliction, the urban explorer's playground of the Black Country. Waste ground reverting to urban forest, punctuated by the waterways of the Birmingham Canal Navigation. More canals than Venice in Birmingham y'know, as they say around there. Then a progression of stops as the train passed through the Potteries and the Manchester satellite towns. One station had a sign proudly proclaiming it to be Cheshire's best kept, looking at it I shudder for Cheshire's worst kept.
    Manchester Piccadilly's airy train shed, and there's my sister waiting for me. A quick walk round the corner to meet J and her wife at their hotel, and I disappeared into the bathroom to leave the scruffy bloke behind.
    My sister had never seen me in girl mode. I don't think she was disappointed. Her first critique was of my colour choices, it seems I'd not done too badly.
    So off we went. Straight out into Manchester City Centre. Yes, a crowded city centre on a Saturday morning, a baptism of fire. Shopping in the Arndale Centre, not finding anything in the sales, lunch at Yo! Sushi. Very cosmpolitan. And very normal. Two sisters spending the day in town. Amazingly my experience in Swindon was repeated, I didn't see anyone noticing me. What's wrong people, a  nearly seven foot woman has just walked past you and you didn't notice? In all honesty though I'm sure I didn't pass unnoticed because I don't rate my passing skills highly. Where I did succeed though was not in passing but in blending. I was wearing fairly normal summer clothes for going shopping in, not wildly different from any number of other women shopping that day. If someone looked closely they could see who I was, but in the mass of people I was not remarkable enough to stand out.
    Off to Sackville Gardens, and the party was in full swing. The Equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, gave us a speech about how the government was anxious to do stuff for us, and a lone Labour heckler tried to disrupt her. Any Government politician talking to us is a good thing IMHO, I can't imagine a member of John Major's Cabinet doing the same thing.
     All of trans life was on display in front of us. Yes, all of it. With frilly bits. A load of friends to say hi to, time to sit and people-watch some of the more flamboyant people. It's like a Godwin's Law for trans people, the longer you people-watch at a trans gathering the more the probability of seeing someone in a red dress with white polka-dots approaches one. Being able to go shopping in town made me appreciate this much more, hanging out in the park was fun but being almost just another woman in town was much more feeding the beast.
    So off into town again with my sister. A stop at LTS to buy some jeans in the sale. Nowhere else does 'em in my length. Another first, first solo over-the-counter trying-on and purchase of women's clothing. Then a coffee and a long chat about family stuff, more shopping and a return to the park for a while. I experienced that female thing of being looked up and down for the first time, outfit analysis. From both trans and natal women. Wow.
    All good things come to an end. Back to J's hotel, the scruffy bloke emerges. Say goodbye to my sister and I'm on the train, back through the Midlands as the sun went down. Back home, present my wife with some of her preferred fragranced stuff from my Manchester shopping as an apology for leaving her at home, then collapse into bed, exhausted.
    All in all a good day. And a massive thank-you is in order for both J and my sister. There will be the inevitable let-down, but feeding the beast is sometimes necessary. Knowing you can do it though is a dangerous thing, it satisfies the need but that's a need that keeps coming back.
    As I've said before, it doesn't get any easier, does it.

Cultivating a style

    Until now, clothing has not emerged as a topic on this blog. You see, because we're all serious about this business, we can't be caught talking about frivolous things like clothing. That would make us all sound like a bunch of transvestites, and we couldn't be having that, oh no.
    So apart from the occasional rant about socks, I've kept schtumm on the subject. But a few weeks ago Lucy revealed "It ain't about the clothes" to be a deplorable cliché, and that opened the floodgates, at last I can hold forth on matters of fashion.
     I suspect it must be something we who are born male bodied but aspire to be female all suffer from at some time or another, an obsession with passing. (Do FtMs share this, or do they lapse into comfortable blokedom and not have a care how they look?) Some girls never seem to lose it and no matter how far into stealth they run or how much painful and expensive FFS they endure they still see the bloke looking back at them in the mirror when nobody else can detect a trace of him. Others take a diametrically opposite tack and flaunt their impassability, shaking off adverse comments with boundless self-confidence. I admire this last group of ladies immensely, they seize life and just go with it in a way I simply would not have the courage to do.
    My obsession with passing has largely er... passed. It took the form not of an obsession with making myself passable but a crushing depression that as an oversized bloke I'd never make it or fit in as an extreme oversized woman. The experience of going out presenting as female has taught me that the whole experience has a lot more to it than simply how you look, and that a face that betrays your origins or physical size that makes you the first person people look at in a group are only components of a much wider mosaic of female presentation.
    In short, to be accepted as female you don't need to pass as such, but to mount a credible picture, to present to the world with style. And it is acquiring that style that has replaced passing for me as a consuming interest in this line, particularly at this time of year when the sales can place so much temptation before you.
    Compared to some in my position, I am fortunate in my history. I was never a closet crossdresser. As I spent my early adulthood suppressing all this, I never had a stash of clothes, I never had awkward visits to charity shops, there was no cache of lingerie for my wife to discover and I never purged. So I never evolved an inappropriate look or wardrobe and I never found myself tempted into any of the multiple "scenes" that hover round the edges of our grouping. As my friend Dawn puts it, "It all looks like a lot of fun, but you wouldn't wear it to Tesco now, would you!".
    Instead, as I began to explore cross-dressing as an adult I did so in the company of my wife. I was able to tap into her enviable sense of style as well as to expand on my own tastes and in doing so I hope I managed to avoid the more grievous faux pas that so many women, both FaB and otherwise fall in to. I might only have had the mirror and my wife as critics at the time but I avoided the "Mutton dressed as lamb", the "Mother-of-the-bride", the "Bet Lynch", and worst of all for a tall girl, the "Short fat girl on stilts"¹. So at least when I stumbled from the closet, I knew I didn't have to worry whether my clothes were age or occasion appropriate, my wife's training through many hours of sitting together drinking coffee and people-watching had seen to that.
    It comes down to why you decide to crossdress. My simple desire in all this is to be accepted as female in my everyday life. For reasons I've covered in depth, that isn't about to happen, but part of keeping the girl quiet involves dressing as though that were the case. So when making my choices the consideration is: If I were full-time, would I wear that to work, or would I wear it to Tesco? Thinking about the outfits some of my female colleagues choose to wear to work, that's a rather wide target.
    One of my biggest surprises in all this is that I have become a label victim. No, I don't flash my wad by wearing designer logos in an attempt to prove to the cognoscenti that I too have no taste, instead I've found myself becoming very picky about the brands I buy. It was inevitable that I would not look at brands aimed at different groups such as teenage girls or petite women, but I've found the brands that have the style I want, and have become a devotee of their products. Hardly surprising when you think about it, it's one of those Duh! moments, I'm just doing exactly what I've observed all the women around me doing for years.
    My sister made an observation to me a few months ago, that I have never cared for my clothes as a bloke. In fact what she said as someone who was five years old when I was born, was that when I was a very young child I didn't like wearing my little boy clothes and couldn't wait to take them off. Now she knows all about Jenny she said, so many things about me made sense to her.
    So I've cultivated a style. I'm not flattering myself that it brings passing in itself, but that's not the point. My wardrobe contains outfits in which I feel confident because I feel they flatter my ungainly shape, fit in with the environments I wear them in (Or would wear them in, in some cases) and do not draw attention to me in themselves. And if there's one thing that all those years of people-watching have taught me, it is that if I've achieved those three things then I'm ahead of the game compared to a significant number of the people who pass our coffee shop window. And none of them ever think for an instant about passing.

Good luck to you all in the sales!

¹A lot of female clothing in larger sizes is designed to flatter short fat women. If a girl with legs up to here wears those kind of clothes that's what she looks like.

Paved with good intentions

    The Ridgeway is one of our more accessible long distance paths, a neolithic flint trading route that snakes its way along the crest of the Chiltern escarpment from Buckinghamshire, crosses the Thames and then follows the Berkshire Downs all the way to Wiltshire. You can see for miles on a clear day like today from up there, it's a spectacular sight!
    Or so I'm told. I wouldn't know, I wasn't there today.
    Today we'd planned to take the train to Goring, walk up the Ridgeway for a few miles, then drop down off the hill to Cholsey, from where we'd catch the train home. A perfect walk on a lovely sunny day. We had a minor errand to run, so why not stop off the train at Reading, nip into town, then catch the local train to Goring? Fantastic idea!
    We'd forgotten that this weekend saw the Reading Festival. Reading station, when we arrived, resembled a war zone as the massed ranks of disheveled and mud-spattered youths had descended on it and changed mass transit into mass queuing. We could leave the station, but going back in would have meant a wait of several hours. What could we do?
    Simple. We went shopping. My wife was particularly pleased to find a shop that carries OPI nail products, even though they were at an eye-popping price when you're used to them in dollars. Rip-off Britain! I think a Desigual top she found in the sale might have helped soften that particular shock though.
    People-watching, a favourite pastime of ours. The Oracle turned out to be fertile ground today. The "Did I really just see that?" prize went to a lady in an adventurous cross between a pair of pajamas and a romper suit. You had to be there to believe it.
    So when we'd judged that the rock-fans would be long gone we wandered back to the station, which had mud everywhere from the festival-goers' wellington boots. A very successful day for both of us, but not the healthy outdoor exercise we'd planned.
    Never mind, there's always tomorrow for that, isn't there!

Flying too close to the flame

    A morning shopping. Every girl's dream, you'd think. All the shops of the High Street there before us, my wife and I with a few hours to kill in a strange city before our train home. We didn't buy anything, save for a kitchen essential from a department store, but we spent a long time in that not buying anything and we saw a lot of shops.
    I'm lucky to be able to go shopping with my wife. It's something we can do together that we both enjoy, and it gives me access to a world that would otherwise be closed to me. I play the Dutiful Husband to a T, following her through the rails, carrying her prospective purchases and holding her coat and bag while she disappears into the fitting room. If anyone has ever noticed that occasionally one of the things she buys that she doesn't try on is many sizes too large for her, then nobody's said anything.
    Yet for all that it's something I can never be part of. I'm better off than the red-faced blokes wishing the earth would swallow them up as their other half peruses the underwear, but even then I'm still an island of drab in a sea of colour. Sometimes, as yesterday, this gets to me and I come away from the experience depressed instead of on the high I should be, and yet again as yesterday my low mood gets to my wife and affects her too.
    This time it was  standing outside the fitting room that did it. A large party of women were there, I think they were shopping for outfits for a wedding, and they were all so happy. From the attractive twenty-something in the green number to the beaming short fat middle-aged lady who looked for all the world like a boldly rose-printed tea-cosy, they were there to have fun and it showed. And for the first time, while waiting for my wife to emerge having tried on the orange dress that turned out not to fit as she'd hoped, I wished I could have been anywhere else.
    Like a moth near a candle flame, I can perform several orbits of the light that fascinates me. But eventually, as yesterday, I'm going to pass too close to it and get singed. Unlike the moth though, in time I'll come back for more.

Lost in space

   A very short post about nothing more exciting than a morning spent wandering round a town centre with my wife pursuing that most basic of modern comforts, retail therapy.
   This morning I had a wig fitting with a very friendly hairdresser. It's important that my hair is right, if you're endowed with the level of presence I have people turn round to look at you in bloke form: so as a girl far more so. I only present as female in safe environments so it's not a forlorn hope of passing that's my concern, it's more a matter of pride, if something's worth doing it's worth doing properly. The outcome of this quest for perfection is that my new hair won't have arrived in time for my next TG support group meeting so to make up for this minor setback we hit the shops.
    What followed was a fairly unremarkable morning of girl shopping, mostly for her but with a few things for me. Boots (Chemists) had us hooked with their five pound cosmetic vouchers, Mrs. J had amassed several of these and since they had to be used in separate transactions I was pressed into service as Customer Number Two. My prize for this expedition, a colour matched concealer pen to better deal with an insomniac's panda eyes. Beyond that we tramped the halls, dodged the chavs and the speeding grannies on mobility scooters, considered several outfits for either of us and bought nothing. We ended up in Debenhams(department store) where Mrs. J bought some stuff for herself and one item for me. As she searched for her purchases I was amused to see the cohort of slightly shifty and embarrassed-looking blokes hovering at the edge of the lingerie section waiting for their wives. Having pursued that role in the past I was having none of this and played the New Man to perfection, even holding some of her prospective purchases for her as she sought more. A couple out shopping: fantastic stealth t-girl camouflage!
   Lost in space? With twenty minutes left until our train was due to depart, we decided it was time to leave Debenhams and head for the station. What a labyrinth that store turned out to be, I swear that exit was mobile! I was almost at the stage of leaving chalk marks on the mannequins to plot our route before we found the path to freedom.

Here's to St. Valentine!

Enough heavy stuff. On to important matters. Clothes.

It's that magic time of year again. Blokes, even oversized undercover transgendered blokes, can go into lingerie stores and buy stuff and nobody bats an eyelid. Here's to St. Valentine!

I can't miss this opportunity so I shall certainly find my way to my local well-known quality specialist lingerie chain store over the next week or two. Trouble is, I can't just buy for myself, my wife will slaughter me is she finds I've been there and not bought her anything. So I'll have to buy different stuff in two distinct sizes.

Logic dictates that I should buy each from two separate stores. But the mischief-maker in me can't help thinking it would be fun to buy both at once. Now, do I go with the truth, or "That one's for my wife and that one's for my mistress"?

Good luck shopping, and remember: thinking about a joke helps a lot when you are nervous.