Jenny began her transition in 2000, and subsequently shared the experience on Oprah. “For me, being trans was about the body that I was in, and the body that I am in now, and that feels like home, that feels like I’m at peace,” she tells me.
Her relationship with fashion, however, remains largely unchanged. “If you told me that I’d spend the rest of my life wearing blue jeans and flannel shirts, that would be perfectly fine” she says. “I’m not saying that dressing up is without pleasure for me, and occasionally when I put on a dress and makeup (put on the dog, as I like to say!) that’s really fun. But it makes me worry that people think, about transgender people, that you go on this tremendous quest because you want to wear dresses… Look, wear dresses, but that does make you a woman and you don’t need a vagina for that.”
Ultimately, she says of “people who care about fashion; sometimes it seems to me that what they like is striking a pose and playing. I know that’s a thing that brings a lot of people pleasure and more power to them, but for me, that was really never what it was about.” Fashion’s just packaging after all.
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