"How Exactly Do You Teach Femininity?"

"Monica has worked with hundreds of transgender women, helping them navigate the tricky terrain of feminine signifiers. For around $130 an hour, Monica’s standard rate as a stylist (“I’m not going to upsell them just because they’re trans”), she will provide hair, makeup, and wardrobe makeovers, not to mention guidance on facial feminization and gender reassignment surgery, vocal training, home redecoration, and “comportment.” She’s helped clients write letters to their families. She’s paced their transitions, recommending that they give themselves time to process each change as it comes. And she can be relied upon to give her honest opinion about what looks feminine—and what doesn’t. “Passable is kind of a dirty word. It’s not okay to impose upon somebody the idea that they need to look a certain way,” she’d told me earlier. “But if somebody comes to me and says, ‘I want to look and sound and talk completely like a woman,’ I’ll give them what they want.”...

Monica had also learned how few resources there were for the trans community. The scattered boutiques that catered to them peddled spandex miniskirts, thigh-high boots, and fishnet stockings. “The shittiest pieces of clothing for twice what they would cost you anywhere else,” says Monica. “It was as if that boutique was saying to that individual, ‘Your feminine self is only for sex."...

Monica doesn’t believe it’s fair to hold her clients to a higher standard than cisgendered women and demand that they buck traditional gender stereotypes. “I hate teaching the things I have to teach sometimes,” she says. “My hope is that we surpass our current idea of gender and sexuality as binary and that what I do becomes antiquated and ridiculous.” But until that day arrives, she doesn’t expect her clients to be feminist warriors. “So what, because they were socialized as men, now they have to overcompensate and be the women of all women? It doesn’t make sense... oh my God, it kills me that they think that suddenly because they look like a woman their right to have their food cooked the way they asked is stripped from them. I think it says a lot about how we socialize our men, right? Because the people who I work with were socialized as men to have an idea about what femininity is, about what being female means.” And what that subconscious idea entails is that women should not expect to get what they ask for or insist on having what they want.""
http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/04/inside-the-world-of-femme-coaching.html?fb_ref=Default

There is so much in here, so much unpacking of gender. It's like, she's this amazing social-gender-engineer/architect person.

(credit to EG)