I cannot remember a version of myself that was completely indifferent to feminine clothes.
The details changed as I grew up, but the interest itself seems to have been there for as long as I can remember. It was visual first. I noticed what girls were wearing. I noticed shape, colour and movement. I noticed the clothes that seemed to have far more going on than the things I was expected to wear.
Pleated skirts were a particularly big one for me.
At school I could see them moving as people walked, opening and closing, hanging differently when somebody sat down. I was fascinated by them, and I was jealous.
Not jealous of the girls themselves. Jealous that they were allowed to wear the clothes.
I wanted to know what that skirt felt like around the waist. I wanted to know what all that material did around the legs when you moved. I wanted the appearance too. I simply liked it.
The rule seemed incredibly clear and incredibly arbitrary at the same time. Girls could wear those things. I could not.
There was no useful way to talk about that when I was young. I knew it made me different, or at least I assumed it did, so it became something private. I could look. I could imagine. I could wish. That was about the extent of it.
What is interesting to me now is how persistent it was.
It was not a phase that disappeared when childhood did. I did not grow out of noticing clothes. If anything, I became more specific about what I liked.
A skirt had to have the right shape and weight. A fitted garment felt better than a loose one. Boots were not interchangeable with ordinary shoes. Hosiery mattered. Gloves mattered. A coat could change the whole experience. The outfit was not just a picture. I wanted to inhabit it.
For years, there was a gap between what I wanted to wear and what I felt I was allowed or expected to wear.
That gap has probably been one of the most constant things in my relationship with clothes.
I am not transgender. I have never needed to become somebody else in order to explain this to myself. I am a man who has always wanted access to clothes that society happened to put on the other side of a line.
That does not make the feminine aspect irrelevant. Quite the opposite. I like the femininity. I like the silhouette. I like the way the clothes look on me when an outfit comes together properly. The visual side matters just as much as the sensory one.
What has changed as I have grown older is not the desire. It is the amount of permission I give myself.
I can buy the skirt now.
I can wear the leggings.
I can put on the boots and the fitted jacket.
I can go out dressed in clothes I once thought I could only look at from the other side of the rule.
There is something almost funny about that. The clothes that carried so much significance when I was young can become completely ordinary once I am actually wearing them.
But the younger version of me is still there somewhere in the experience.
Every so often I put on a long pleated skirt, feel its weight settle at the waist, take a few steps and watch the pleats move.
I know exactly why that would have mattered to him.