Nothing On Top

When I was "cross-dressing"--which is to say, when I was dressing for the gender of my mind and spirit, the one in which I now live my life--I experimented with all kinds of clothing, shoes and accessories. 

But, to use a familiar (and possibly trite) metaphor in its completely literal sense, I didn't try on very many hats.  Actually, I hardly ever wore hats at all, and rarely wear them today.  For that matter, I almost never wore hats while I lived as male.

I guess I'm a product of my place and time:  Hats have never been an important fashion accessory during my lifetime.  In fact, I have a hard time wrapping my head around (pun intended) the notion that a proper gentleman or lady did not leave his or her home without some item of millinery adorning his or her head.

In other words, I wasn't around to see something like this:

This photo appeared today on another one of my favorite non-bike blogs: Old Picture of the Day.

Doing Their Good Deed Daily?

On my other blog, I've mentioned that The Bowery Boys is one of my favorite blogs that isn't about bicycling or gender. Now I'm going to introduce you to another: Old Picture of the Day.


Like Bowery Boys and Nikon Sniper (another favorite), OPD is not normally bike- or gender-related. However, today's photo featured two Boy Scouts giving rides to girls. The question is: To whom do those bikes belong?

As you've probably noticed, those bikes have girls'/female frames. Now, we've all seen guys on girls' bikes: Come on, admit it, all of you guys have ridden your wife's, girlfriend's, sister's or mother's--or some other woman's--bike. Maybe you didn't know whose bike it was. That's OK. ;-) Or, maybe you even owned the bike. That's OK, too. At one point of my life, I was commuting on women's bikes because they were completely out of fashion, so they weren't being stolen as much as men's bikes were.

But how likely is it that both of those Boy Scouts owned girls' bikes?

Were they riding men's bikes, I would have guessed that those boys were following the Scout pledge: Do A Good Deed Daily. However, if those bikes belonged to the girls, I would have to wonder whether they "picked up" those Boy Scouts. From what I understand, that would have gone against the gender norms of 1937, when that photo was taken.

And it looks like the Scouts' troop is standing in the background, off to the left in the photo. Could it be that those girls went up to that troop and picked the two boys they thought were the cutest? Now that would be a real breach of gender norms of that time!

Or do you think there's some other story behind the photo?