It's a Queer Old Blog…

“Here is a story / All about how / A kilt flipped my life / Turned it upside down”, sang the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, not even once.

I always struggle for first lines, do you? Virginia Woolf said that first sentences ought to be like the first steps on a staircase; firm and well-placed, although whether she was talking about your footsteps or the first few risers themselves is pleasingly vague. Mine are more like the first steps out of a taxi when you should have taken it home, not to the club, and when you get out you catch your heel in the hem of your skirt and end up face-planting some gutterpizza. For better or worse, the first is written. Maktub.

I wanted to talk to you today on the subject of kilts. On non-bifurcated garments in general, to be fair, including skirts, sarongs, and the Danni dress from Lucy & Yak. First, however, we must map the probability vectors, do a foldback on the temporal isometry and perform a swift time-jaunt back to 2018-ish.

My friend’s Mum Sherlocked my family tree for me. It’s an actual work of art, an A4 ring binder packed with charts, family trees, photos, certificates of birth, death and whooping cough, and all manner of pleasingly painstaking paraphernalia.

I learned that scoundrels a-plenty exist on the maternal bough of the family tree. World War One deserters, young men hung for stealing pigs, and a distant cousin who follows Elon Musk on Xitter. None of this antiestablishmentarianism exists in the mothership herself, it must have skipped a generation like it’s said the twins gene does. Funnily enough the twins gene skipped my generation and landed on my daughter. When she found out she was having twins instead of the standard issue single-serving child she posted ‘BOGOF’ on Facebook and everyone assumed that she was out drinking.

My late Dad never knew much about his side of the family. I knew my paternal grandmother, but not grandfather who died just after I was born, or any generations prior to that. In fact I’d never heard any mention of great-grandparents on that side, nothing and no-one, not even the faintest whiff of fallings-out or familial feud. However, the brilliant detectivery in front of me laid it bare. My great-grandmother hailed from Aberdeen, which made me one-eighth Scottish (in fact, when they moved down, they moved onto the very same street as the family of the person who did my family tree. They may have even known each other. Normal people here would say, “it’s a small world” but they’d be wrong, it’s 26,000 miles round the equator and they should stop saying stupid stuff).

Scottish. Suddenly, so much more of my life made so much more sense, from my Peter Capaldi-esque eyebrows that the corporate might of Benefit has only just managed to tame, to my indescribable fascination with airfrying things just to see whether I can. I’ve always had an unexplained draw to the (great-grand)motherland which I had previously put down to the frequent need to get away from people and be up a hill somewhere (it’s why I didn’t leave my bedroom until I needed to procure a copy of ‘Disintegration’ by The Cure).

Smitten with my new part-English and part-Scottish identity I bought my first kilt. It was a simple 5-yard, 24” drop, plain black woollen kilt which unexpectedly served as an improvised explosive device for both my wardrobe and my life.

The first time I wore it out was to a Steps concert. It was the sort of bitterly freezing day that northerners are apt to call ‘taters’ and as a previously non-kilt and non-skirt wearing person I had utterly failed to take this into account. By lunch I felt like Scott of the Antarctic and my scrotum needed succour.

Finding flesh-coloured tights for my #FFFFFF-coloured legs was far harder than anticipated. The only pair I found was in Next. The shop assistant clocked my kilt, took in the tights, and resolved the equation. 

“Let me give you a tip,” she said unexpectedly, coming around the front of the counter. The store was quiet and we were towards the back of the shop. She looked round, then quickly gathered up her tea dress until the hem was around her waist. I don’t typically have that sort of effect on people so I wasn’t sure what etiquette demanded of me here.

“Cycling shorts,” she said, apparently apropos of nothing. When I could bring my nonbinary gaze to bear, I understood. “Tights will keep your legs warm to a point but if you’re wearing tights in this weather, put cycling shorts on over your tights like this.”

It wasn’t just my benevolent flasher at Next, I regularly caught women checking my legs out and then smiling at me (also something I was not used to). People have stopped me at gigs to find out where I buy them (I have about ten kilts now in various designs) and aren’t satisfied until they have a full description, in-depth user review and a link to the website. WOMEN STOP ME TO FIND OUT WHETHER THEY HAVE POCKETS. Some do, as it happens, especially some of the models from my favourite brand, Damn Near Kilt Em – the Techlite Rogue has seamless trouser pockets, but many other models have cargo pockets (including the Rhona kilt in the women’s section, although, if this blog post has a point and most would validly argue that it, like all my blog posts, doesn’t, but if it did the point would be that gendered clothing is an absurd notion). By the way, if anyone from DNKE is reading and they want their first nonbinary influencer and the awesome purchasing power of my seventeen newsletter subscribers, I take a size M and I already have the Techlite in two colours. What I really want is the Overkilt in black but spunking £140 in a kilt is a distinctly ‘not in this economy’ transaction.

That night, H from Steps came onstage in a kilt and talked about living his truth. It came in the midst of a wave of male, masc and AMAB celebrities sporting skirts (good job I’m not a Daily Mail hack or I would have been contractually obliged to describe it as ‘flaunting their shapely pins’ like a fucking wifebeating drunk from the 1950s). Some, like Billy Porter or Lil Nas X, are doing it with the overt intention of disrupting the gender binary of presentation. Other, such as Oscar Isaac and Marc Jacobs, are content to wear skirts for no better reason than high fashion and looking hot as all fuck. It seemed like, after an interminable number of false dawns, that the stars were finally aligning on the subject of men wearing skirts.

Yvie Oddly enough, I found that the deeper I leaned into the benefits of breezy balls, the more destabilised my identity became. I have never received a single negative comment across any of the dozen times I’ve been clad in a kilt, donned a dress or styled a skirt – in fact the only abreaction I’ve had since I started embracing nonbinary wearapy (thank you, Shakaila Forbes-Bell) was when I was wearing a pair of 4” black Calvin Klein stiletto ankle boots, but that’s a whole other story. The general reaction is that strangers want to stop to talk to me about my bare legs – one older gent admitted he’d followed me all round town and then caught up with me in Tesco to talk about kilts and clan colours. If I have clan colours, I am clan Siobhan Mackenzie.

The problem is multifold. In getting positive feedback; in avoiding negative feedback; in finding a real interest in fashion, especially the intersection of fashion design and gender studies; in finding a way to express the way that I have always felt inside; and, in no small way, finding a new way to annoy the gammon who think people like me shouldn’t exist, or at least shouldn’t be allowed to be different, I find I am tempted to do more. To go beyond.

In her book “Bi”, Dr. Julia Shaw talks about her struggles to represent her bisexuality externally, through queer-coded clothing:

“In my first attempt to be more visible [as a bisexual] I simply wore a heavy black leather jacket. But while it made me feel more queer, it made no difference to how others perceived me. So I tried again. For bi 2.0, I went with less make-up than I would normally wear, flat black booties, ripped jeans, a black V-neck shirt, and an oversized camo jacket with flowers on the back.”

Dr Julia Shaw, “Bi”, p.125

This led me to wonder how I would express my identity through fashion.

This in turn led me to wonder how I would express my identity through words.

I don’t feel like ‘straight’ or ‘heterosexual’ applies to me any more. I purposely adopt an umbrella term like nonbinary (spell it with a hyphen and like Cleopatra, I’m comin’ atcha) for my gender identity because I don’t feel like a more specific identity applies to me. Linguistically, this presents a conundrum, but sexually, even more so. For a nonbinary person to be straight/hetero or gay/homo requires having a clear opposite/same. I don’t have that. It’s like asking what the opposite of grey is.

Technically – lexicographically – I probably should use the work ‘bisexual’. Referring back to Dr Shaw’s book we see that:

“A way that bisexual researchers often talk about this is that the bi in bisexual means two, but the two are not men and women, they are same and other.

Dr Julia Shaw, “Bi”, p.7

I would, theoretically, although in practice I have chosen not to date at all, date other nonbinary people (same). I would also date cisgender women (other). Ergo, by definition, I should describe myself as bisexual. I actually don’t mind this label, probably because so many people either deny, or are offended by, the existence of both the label and the people who use it. I also like the aesthetics of the flag. Both work for me.

But surely there’s a better label, I hear you say, or I imagine you would say, as the viewership numbers for my newsletter suggest that very few people actually get to this point. Even the imaginary ones. 

Consider this:

• In terms of my gender identity, I identify as neither male nor female, but exist somewhere else on that spectrum
• Similarly, for my gender expression, I don’t dress as either masc or femme
• Sexually I don’t subscribe to being straight or gay 

One make take this further as a thought experiment:

• One might be neither top nor bottom, but comfortable switching
• One might enjoy being Domme or sub as the mood takes them, and similarly…
• One might feel comfortable as both sadist and masochist by turn

Why stop at gender and sexuality?

• One could support lower taxes and zero tolerance for law and order; but still support a national health service and public ownership of utilities

Hmmm. So many binary options, when perfectly valid viewpoints exist for not positioning oneself at either extreme of the binary continuum. If only there were a word for that…

So I submit to you that we expand on the previously limited scope of the term ‘nonbinary’. The human experience is rarely defined by a complete, consistent and continued existence at one end of a spectrum. Such a position lacks nuance. After all, is it not set forth in holy writ that, “only a Sith deals in absolutes” by Obi-Wan Kenobi? All of us at some time adopt a nonbinary position on one important matter or another. Therefore, going forwards, I shall be using ‘nonbinary’ as a label for my entire identity, not just my gender.

Photo by Stephanie Lisa Kelly on Unsplash