Tights / Collants

Tights, like skirts, are a garment type that has crossed the gender line. Originally tight thin pants for medieval men, they are now in the western world thought be to female attire. According to Wikipedia: "anything up to 40 denier is known as pantyhose and anything over can be classified as tights". Although both male and female Jockeys, Fishermen wear pantyhose, brought in the ladies section for stores as they great for keeping warm, Pantyhose are almost exclusively female, while there are athletic tights which becoming unisex   

I have gone thought many pairs of tights or pantyhose in years I have buying my own. Besides tights getting worn and runs in them, many of fallen victims to purge of my feminine clothes. Below are pictures of current tights from MyTights.com or Macys

my tights and scrunched up with hosiery bag and washbag

my tights,pantyhose,holdup,footlets,etc spread out. Made of nylons or nylon and are sheer to opaque

Further descriptions of some of the items pictured..

• Nylon Footlets designed to be worn inside high heel shoes such as pumps, but not visible to anyone.
• Hosiery Washbag to protect your tights from getting wrapped in the rest of your washing machine load.
• Falke Hosiery Bag to store your tights in nice package. 
• Falke Soft Merino Wool Tights - Wool tights are great. Very warm and thick and unlikely to get runs as easily as nylons, plus they can replace Socks under trousers for cold winter days. 
• Berkshire Tights, Ribbed - Made in USA. Warm and available in the large size Queen1 and Queen2 sizes. I have 2 pairs of Queen1, one is pictured still in it's box, the other is the extreme right of the pictures. 

Crossplay / Cosplay

Cosplayers at a Cherry Blossom festival

Japanese Comics (Manga) and Animation (Anime) cover very board areas. But some of the most popular have interesting and strong female characters and much higher ratio of crossdressing than western fiction, just check out TG Anime Weblist. Just put "I My Me! Strawberry Eggs" into a search engine.

It seems to me that Anime/Manga conventions have popularized costume play (Cosplay) to mostly female characters, although maybe my reading of Maddybell.com Anime days has exaggerated this phenomenon. But I noticed that cosplay.com has a FAQ question How do you convert a man’s shoes size to a woman’s shoes size?. By no meaning, I am implying the majority Cosplayers are crossdressing. For example I don't think any of the Cosplayers in the picture (to the left) taken at a Cherry Blossom festival are. Crossplay is actually the term for crossdressing cosplay. 

In Japan Cosplay is very popular, check out Metropolis's article on crossplayer Jienotsu Nagashima. He is unusual and trailblazing for calling his professional kick boxing career a hobby to support his crossplaying. I like translated quote "A Dutch opponent called me gay for wearing my dresses, saying it disgusted him. I'm not gay. But I thought, "What would it matter if I was?" which came from this Australian Broadcasting Corp's Lateline video report. 

Thanks to the recent piece on femulate.org for inspiring to write this.