Mel Martinez’s dad had an unusual (and very much unofficial) title in the Air Force: stitch bitch. Decades later, that title — given to the many men whose duties included sewing — has now become something of a rallying cry for queer sewists like Martinez, who put gender affirmation at the center of their creations. Martinez and many others are updating their craft to subvert status quo designs that don’t quite fit, building, instead, a world of underwear, lingerie, and intimates in which everybody (and body) is welcome. 

“I have always been really particular about the way clothes fit; I have very sensitive skin and some skin allergies and some sensory stuff,” says Martinez, who uses both they and she pronouns. In the realm of underwear, this means that it often takes her months to find the perfect pair. So, knowing how to use a sewing machine, they eventually just decided to make their own.

When it comes to getting dressed, gender affirmation can mean a myriad of things: a celebration of oneself and one’s body, functional — and perhaps unconventional — tailoring, and, of course, comfort. But there’s not a lot of accessible information on the topic out there, Martinez says. 

They’re right: communities like Sew Queer and The Sewcialists (which shut down in 2021) have served as digital gathering spaces for queer people who want to make their own intimates. But it’s a pieced-together effort of sharing information and pattern hacks — worlds away from the mainstream sewing companies who have been mass-producing patterns for generations of (mostly) women. Queers are searching for something often overlooked: binders, gaffs, lingerie for trans women, boxer briefs for nonbinary folks; designs that have simply never existed in the universe of McCall’s or Simplicity patterns.

While conventional, gendered bra patterns are a dime a dozen, Emilia Bergoglio, a queer sewist in Tokyo, Japan, saw that there were “basically zero resources” when it came to sewing binders. It led them to write a blog post titled “The Great Binder Story” for The Sewcialists as part of a larger series called All Chests Welcome, which cobbled together knowledge and how-to’s from a diverse array of hobbyists. 

“Binders are essential for many trans folks, and they are not cheap,” they say. “Sometimes it’s impossible to find something that fully represents who you are in the market, so sewing helps you with that. You can create it yourself. The fit, the fabric, the silhouette — it’s very empowering.” 

The Sew Queer blog has a similar page of resources more specifically aimed at queer sewing, full of links to tutorials, Facebook community groups, patterns, and suggested materials — which range from posts like the Floozy Doozy DIY Underwear Strap On Hack, which comes with a complete pattern available for purchase, to a Facebook group hosted by Rad Patterns, where folks can share pattern hacks, adjustments, and alterations to better fit their needs. It’s a small but growing Rolodex of vital information. 

The queer community has been rooted in a do-it-yourself mentality for generations, making their own clothes, media, music, and so forth, says fashion historian Valerie Steele — who, in 2013, curated the FIT exhibition “A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk.” Because clothing is one of the clearest forms of nonverbal communication, it has been essential in enabling under-the-radar queer dialogue. 

“When you start looking at fashion, you realize there were all these hidden histories — hidden at least to the general public now, not necessarily to people at the time,” she says. “If you look at your sexuality, your gender, your sexual orientation, your sexual presentation to the world — all of those things are related to your identity, and fashion is very much about that interface between your feeling about who you are and who wider society thinks you are.”

From this standpoint, it was clear to Martinez that the queers who could sew are often making their own undies. The queers who couldn’t needed an alternative. That’s what led Martinez to start Aqua Underwear, a boxer brief (for now) brand that began mid-pandemic out of her home in Salt Lake City, Utah. “At that point, a lot of people started talking to me about their underwear frustrations. Underwear isn’t necessarily a casual conversation you have with people, but when they find out that you make underwear, all of a sudden it’s like, yeah, everyone wants to talk to you about underwear!” 

Martinez was tapping into a market that exploded during the pandemic; women’s lingerie alone was worth $42 billion in 2020, and is expected to reach $78.66 billion by 2027. Of course, those statistics don’t include the nascent categories like gender-affirming and gender-expansive underwear that makers like Martinez specialize in. 

It’s a niche whose growth is driven by community need, says Rae Hill, founder of Origami Customs, which offers custom, hand-sewn lingerie. Hill estimates that gender-affirming items now make up 85 to 90 percent of their sales. 

“My community really informed the direction that the company grew in,” they say. “We’re not reinventing the wheel. These things already exist. And I think people really needed to feel good and safe about where they were coming from, knowing that this is a queer and trans company, that it’s ethical manufacturing, that they feel good purchasing it and that it fits — size inclusivity, body inclusivity — that they can message us. Everything is really made on a one-on-one basis.”

Of course, hyper-customized pieces don’t come cheap. Hill partners with over a dozen community organizations in order to provide low- and no-cost options (Martinez also runs a pay-what-you-can program). 

Whether custom or homemade, queer sewists around the world ultimately share the same goal: helping people feel comfortable in, as Bergoglio puts it, “their chosen skin.”

“I think it comes down to just feeling at ease with yourself,” Hill says. “I really hope that [our pieces] can be an entry point for people starting to play with their gender — literally, we try things on and see how they feel.”

Almost exactly one year ago, Theo Hendrie thought he might have to drop out of school. His partner had lost his job, and they were struggling to pay bills and make ends meet. He worried that X Marks The Spot, his newly released anthology, might be the only creative project that he’d ever be able to complete. And then, at just the right time, Tuck Woodstock’s Gender Reveal mutual aid program came through. 

“Up until then it was always, you know, when we’ve got a tenner we’ll put it into so-and-so’s top surgery fund, and they’ll probably put something into mine later on, and it all gets swapped around,” Hendrie says. “Whereas I think Tuck’s thing was the first time I saw something that was helping the community as a whole, and helping us to do something creative rather than just paying for medical bills.”

Hendrie received £75, and credits the money with allowing him to stay in school. Admittedly, that doesn’t sound like a lot. But since then, he has graduated from university and returned, for a master’s degree in media and communications. Like the thousands of other folks who have benefited in some form or fashion from mutual aid, monetary assistance empowered him to pursue his goals and stabilize his life, sans disruption.

Hendrie’s experience is not unique — all across the internet, people are accessing assistance and care through digital networks that, inevitably, spill into the offline, everyday lives of queer folks. When people in the LGBTQ community feel excluded from, unwelcome in, or underserved by mainstream health networks, groups like QueerCare, For The Gworls (FTG), and transanta step in, offering aid in the form of care and, often, cash. 

Woodstock launched their mutual aid fund via Gender Reveal at the beginning of the pandemic, when it became obvious that people urgently needed help. The fund replaced what was originally the Gender Reveal Grant, which required folks to present their work to a panel of judges. It wasn’t appropriate for the moment, Woodstock says. “It became just, ‘Do you need money to live? Do you need money in order to pay rent, to feed yourself, to pay for your medications?’” 

Woodstock’s pivot to mutual aid and away from the Gender Reveal Grant is emblematic of a larger shift that happened in 2020, courtesy of COVID-19. It’s been well documented that the pandemic exacerbated inequality across the board; in some marginalized communities, doubling down on care independent of mainstream systems was the recipe for survival. 

But this building of DIY care networks has been decades in the making. Queer people and other marginalized groups have been doing this grassroots work for generations, and the modern ubiquity of GoFundMe pages and Instagram accounts is merely the latest chapter in a long history of alternative care. 

Asanni Armon, founder of FTG, credits Langston Hughes and the rent parties of the Harlem Renaissance with the idea to raise money for Black trans people’s rent and gender-affirming surgery costs. “We are just following in those footsteps,” Armon says. “As long as we’ve been affected by the ills of capitalism, especially Black people, we’ve had to do this kind of work.” 

Mutual aid can look like a lot of different things, depending on what you need — while Woodstock has sent money in amounts as big as $800 (and as small as Hendrie’s £75) via PayPal and Venmo, FTG just helped raise $50,000 for 23 young people to receive a year’s worth of hormone replacement therapy, through Point of Pride’s new HRT Access Fund. Historically, mutual aid has been a way for folks on the fringes of mainstream economies to collectively access resources and provide care; look at the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program, or the AIDS activism of ACT UP, and you’ll see the same network formation, sans internet. 

It’s no coincidence that these networks typically form alongside activism work, says Kirsty Clark, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Yale School of Public Health whose research focuses on LGBTQ mental health. 

“When folks are pushed to the margins, they create social networks through formal or informal channels where people can give each other information and support,” she says. “It’s this coming together to push back against persecution and to forge a feeling of belongingness within the group. And these networks not only produce peer support, but then can also lead to resources for medical care.” 

While the pandemic has put a stop to FTG’s rent parties, and forced organizations like Trans Defense Fund LA (TDFLA) to host their self-defense courses online, it has not slowed the proliferation of mutual aid programs within the queer community — quite the opposite. TDFLA just shipped out another 200 self-defense kits for trans folks in LA; FTG announced on February 8th that, since its inception in July 2019, $1.1 million has been redistributed to Black trans folks around the world; Woodstock, of Gender Reveal, raised $100,000 in one month alone. Clearly, the practical implications of mutual aid are real, and, often, life-saving. 

“The biggest success is that we are supplying people with the necessary tools they need and it’s going in their hands,” says Nikki Nguyen, the organizer behind TDFLA. “That’s the biggest part — just being able to provide this for the trans community.”