Nurses' Uniforms

"They're so stainless, and yet you feel that once you get under their starched uniforms..."

By Fiona Duncan

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If anything the real thing is even less obtainable for transvestite school girls. There are plenty of school girls about, and genuine school uniforms are, of course, on sale in every town in the country. The real problem is of size. For obvious reasons, the uniforms are mostly in small sizes. Most transvestites are large by the standards of adult women, let alone by those of young girls. I'm lucky enough to fit into a size 14, but I know trannies (not enormous by male standards) who need dress sizes in 20's. Some nurses, on the other hand, are pretty big.

There are large nurses and, of course, male nurses - but there remains something very feminine about being a nurse. A character in a story called "TV Nurse" certainly sees things that way.

"I wish I had a proper nurse to work with," Anne said.

"What do you mean?" demanded Madge. "John is a proper nurse"

"Go on, men don't make good nurses. They just get the good jobs because they are men".

John was standing half-amused by this chat.

"That's not true," Madge said. "I bet John would do just as well as a girl".

"Huh! I bet he couldn't even put a proper nurse's uniform on."

Well, I'm sure we can all guess where the story is heading (And wouldn't you like to be in John's shoes? - or at least in the pair he will soon be wearing). However, several points of interest arise in this passage, apart from the idea that men don't make proper nurses. One is the idea that a proper nurse's uniform is obviously considered to be a female one. Less obvious is the way Madge defends John: I bet John would do just as well as a girl. The conversation has slipped, with no one apparently noticing, from how well John does as a nurse to how well he would do as a girl. The two are obviously not the same, but I wonder how many readers noticed the slide in meaning on a first reading.

TV Nurse was included in TVs in Uniform, TMC's second venture into uniform. In the magazine, maids and school girls outnumber the nurses in the photographs, but (as in Uniform Special) there is a nurse story. Obviously, the editors thought you wanted to read more about transvestite nurses, and they were probably right.

The femininity of the nurse is confirmed by the origins of the word. The original sense is of the wet nurse - and who but a woman is capable of breast feeding? The word comes from the same root as nourish. In Middle English, the language of Chaucer, the word for nurse is norice - which sounds very much like a compromise between nursing and nourishment.

If the nurse is literally a substitute mother - something of the same also applies to the medical nurse. When we are ill as children, who makes our beds, brings us medicine, takes our temperature...? Clearly, a mother's tasks include a quantity of medical nursing. More, ill in hospital, helpless and vulnerable, there is a sense of return to childhood. Inevitably, nurses appear as mother figures, even if they are younger than their patients (as they often are).

Nurses, however, have not always seemed so maternal. To many Victorians they appeared little better than prostitutes or actresses (much the same thing, most would have said). When nurses went to war (Florence Nightingale and all that) they were regarded as indistinguishable from the other camp followers.

Possibly this had something to do with their work calling upon them to handle men's private parts - or maybe it was merely their unchaperoned condition. Almost certainly, it is yet another example of the narrow mindedness of too many of Queen Victoria's subjects.

If a trace of the prostitute image remains, it would act as a turn off for few of us. Many transvestites, of course, enjoy dressing as whores. Perhaps trannie whores outnumber transvestite nurses.

Although the nurses we know today seem so prim and proper (so pure, so stainless) - they also have a certain reputation as ravers. Air hostesses have a similar reputation. Why don't I know any transvestites who dress as air hostesses? (I'd love an air hostess uniform!) Possibly, contact with human frailty has to do with their being less inhibited than most women, but who knows? Certainly, a lot of people are frightened of flying - as well as frightened by hospitals.

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