Transitioning is expensive.
There’s any amount of therapy, because the World Professional Association for Transgender Health has no minimum recommendation.
Then come hormone or testosterone therapies, potentially followed by surgeries.
And throughout the transition, there are new clothes to buy for the changing body.
After Reilly Clemens transitioned, she was in $11,500 of debt. To her, a surprising amount was in clothing alone.
But there’s a resource in Gainesville to help alleviate some of those clothing costs. The Free Store downtown in the Civic Media Center is usually open twice a month to help trans people find clothes for free. The next store will be held Saturday from 2 to 6 p.m.
To prepare for the store, volunteers from Wild Iris and the LGBTQ+ community heave cardboard boxes and reusable shopping bags into the bed of a single cab pickup truck and out onto tables. People sort and place the clothes by masculine, femme and then by size.
“Imagine if someone came in and threw away all your old clothes, and you had to buy new ones starting from scratch,” the 27-year-old UF women’s studies master’s student said.
Crisp ironed pantsuits; worn, gray sweatpants; 6-inch high Jimmy Choos; and red-and-white-striped Keds sat on a weathered picnic table in early February for the store.
Shirley Roseman, 25, is the organizer of the store. While she was at UF studying psychology and sociology, she volunteered at the LGBT Affairs office in the Multicultural and Diversity Affairs department.
She and some of her friends had a clothing swap among themselves, and it sparked the idea of the Free Store.
“A lot of our community members are struggling,” she said. “Homelessness and job discrimination are just a few problems. We are always thinking about how we can protect them.”
Clemens transitioned while at the University of Alabama’s School of Law in Tuscaloosa. Often, she said, for people who are transsexual and beginning to change their bodies, passing is paramount, especially considering how safe each person feels.
“In Alabama,” she said, ”I didn’t feel super safe.”
For her, being comfortable meant being able to pass as a woman most of the time and being free of the mistreatment that comes with questions like: “Are you a boy or a girl?”
Now, being comfortable is liking the way her body looks in her clothes.
LB Hannahs, the director of LGBT Affairs at UF, said one of the more difficult parts of finding clothes as a trans person is finding clothes that feel good in a way that expresses gender comfortably.
“Because you’re brought up in a culture that says you have to wear the clothes that fit the sex you were assigned at birth, you don’t have the cues and the training built in to know necessarily how to dress ourselves in the gender identity,” said Hannahs, who identifies as genderqueer.
No one was there to teach Hannahs how to tie a tie, or teach Clemens how much or how little makeup she needed. But the knowledge that comes from the experiences of people at the Free Store can help fill those gaps.
“You’re getting the knowledge that usually leaves that community when people are done transitioning,” Clemens said. “You get the, ‘Sweetheart, you don’t need a primer, a base, a foundation and a filler. You need one of the four,’ which is something I didn’t know, but you get that education in those sort of informal locations.”
It took a long time for Clemens to learn how to alter clothing and find jeans at thrift stores that have already been worn in and fit well. As her body was changing, the clothes she bought before didn’t fit anymore, and she spent a lot of money that way.
To save money, she shut the Internet off at her apartment. Then, no more Netflix. She kept the air conditioner at 80 degrees for the dog and the heat at 60 degrees for the pipes.
Then she gave up her apartment, and, finally, her vehicle insurance.
“There are so many little things that you learn to give up,” she said. “Transition is expensive. What can you do?”
[A version of this story ran on page 4 on 4/20/2015]
Clothes can be dropped off at Wild Iris, 22 SE 5th Ave, Gainesville, FL
