Photo by Rachel Mills
It’s always nice to get feedback from any article, and recently it’s been nice to have girls come up to me with positive comments about things they’ve read in this column. Everything that I put in here is from my personal experiences and I would like to think that relaying these would help some of you girls out there.
I would usually begin with an experience from my early femme life. This time it is more of a ‘non-event’ really, but it’s something that still sticks in my mind. Drama class at secondary school, the teacher had given our group a play to perform centred around two groups of pupils from two socially different schools. The original plan was for the boys to play the toffs, while the girls were to be the wild set, a task they couldn’t manage. So the teacher decided they could probably manage to take the upper-crust character, this would mean the boys would act the rowdy group. ‘So we’ll make it a St Tinian’s style’ says teacher. ‘Girls, you can wear trousers, and boys you’ll need to borrow your sister’s skirt and tights, we’ll arrange some makeup on the day’. Now, as excited as the thought of this made me, my main concern was how to explain it all to my Mother, having no sisters. Any clothing would need to be borrowed elsewhere. This event came at a time when we were having great issues generally about my wanting to dress up in mother’s clothes (I knew not why back then) to the point that she had me ‘under the doctor’ - I think mother had a bigger issue with it than me, but that’s another story. Anyway, I managed to deal with the school-play issue in the only way I could see not to cause upset. I threw a sickie! Yes, I missed out on the chance to appear before my year-group in a skirt - who knows where that could have led!!!