At my first job after college, my boss didn't like my visual presentation. He told me it would be objectively better, or that I should make an effort, to look more "approachable." I lacked the social skills to understand what he meant. To me, an "approachable" person was someone who looked artsy, counter-culture, free-spirited, queer, because those were people I genuinely wished to say hello to and knew how to talk to. But to him, "approachable" was someone who was dressed in a boring way to go to a boring job, because those were people he had experience talking to. He thought it was just obvious that certain types of people — the people he thought mattered — would not want to talk to me if I looked a certain way. (Whatever that way was.) And I had been so used to talking to people on my liberal university campus — environmentalists, literature majors, queer students — that I'd half-forgotten that some straight people, far out in the off-campus world, would brazenly tell me to look straighter so that other straight people they cared about (if only hypothetical ones, in their imagination) would feel more comfortable approaching me. A straight boss at a straight workplace with straight clients may expect and "need" me to look straight — but that's not all there is to communication and community. More can potentially happen at that workplace, and especially beyond it in other workplaces or non-workplaces I might find. There are other ways to be.

I've always understood on an individual level that I can only be my authentic self. Figuring out what that means relationally is more complex. On any given day, I don't pay much attention to what shirt/pants I put on, yet others may read something into it. The straightest pair of pants is not the objectively "correct" pair of pants. It depends who I'm talking to or who I want to be in which community.