No Woman would do that!

    "No Woman would do that!"

    They mean well, they really do.
    Natal women, that is. Or more accurately,  some natal women, when faced with a trans woman friend, family member or acquaintance.
    They think they're helping you escape some unimaginable faux pas of either clothing or appearance. Sometimes they're right in that a little of the bloke has shone through, mostly though it's simply a shorthand for "I wouldn't do that!".
    'Cos here's the thing: women are not an army of clones, they dress and behave in a huge diversity of ways. So the chances are that whatever the behaviour or look, many women do it.
    It's indicative of an acceptance crisis in the mind of the originator, by saying that no woman would do what you are doing they are in effect saying that you are not a woman. Fair enough, it they've known the scruffy bloke for a decade that's a tough ask for some people. Give it time. And I don't need to be told I'll never be a natal woman, I have the lived experience to prove it. But the upsetting thing isn't that. Instead it's the suspension of the normal rules of commenting on female appearance.
    Consider this, your friend asks whether her bum looks big in that skirt. Do you say "It's nice, but maybe the other one has the edge", or do you tell the truth and say "Your bum looks like a continental shelf and your legs look like tree trunks, make it go away!". Of course you say the former. Gently passing comment on appearance disasters is something all women have hard-coded, the latter is definitely something no woman would say to another.
    Perhaps "No Woman would say that!" is an appropriate response.

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.

Never out of style

    As a very young child with a quietly desperate desire to cross-dress, I used to fixate on the fashions of the day that I found pretty. This is probably a tale that could be told by many readers of this blog who found themselves in the same situation.
    For me in the early 1970s this meant the brightly coloured prints, long sweeping skirts, floppy hats and frills that the adult women I encountered were wearing at the time. Laura Ashley's influence lay heavy upon rural England at the time.
    I still have something of a weakness for the looks from that era, watching an episode of The Sweeney from those days I find my attention divided equally between the cops, the cars, and the fashion.
    I was less of a fan of late '70s and early '80s fashion. The Shake 'n Vac lady's blouse and skirt didn't do it for me, but as a teenager later on in the '80s the fashion excesses of that decade caught my fascination once more. Those meringue-like ballgowns you'd see on television spectaculars back then were probably the pinnacle of my deeply closeted teenaged aspirations. Yes, I was a mixed-up youth who seemingly preferred quantity over quality.
    Now I am a no-longer-closeted adult with a fashion sense all of my own it is interesting to look back at the past few decades and re-evaluate those looks. My life fitting in as a scruffy bloke has left me without the fashion baggage that a natal woman might have of having to move with the times and update my own look, but it has left me with something of that cross-dressers burden, the risk of being attracted to something inappropriate simply because I like it. Browsing vintage fashion web sites it's easy to spot the bad choices, the 1970s huge collars and paisley for example, but what about the ensembles that don't quite cross the line? One of the women who made an impression on me back them was my cousin, at an inch shorter than my current height the tallest natal woman I know, and from her example I learned that tall women can carry off a large brightly coloured print with aplomb.
    Good style is good style, whatever the decade it was produced in.