Concerning men’s dress worn by women
By Giuseppe Cardinal Siri | 11 June 2025
Extract of Christian Fashion in the History of the Church by Virginia Coda-Nunziante (Calx Mariae Publishing, 2022).
Letter to those responsible for Catholic associations and education, 12 June 1960
This year, the first signs of our late-arriving spring showed a certain increase in the use of men’s dress by girls and women; even by mothers of families. Up until 1959, in Genoa, such dress usually meant a person was a tourist, but now there seems to be a significant number of Genoese girls and women who are choosing, at least on excursions, to wear men’s dress (men’s trousers).
The spread of this behaviour obliges us to give serious consideration to the subject, and we ask those to whom this notification is directed to kindly give this problem all the attention it deserves, as befits those who are aware of being answerable to God.
We seek above all to give a balanced moral judgment upon the wearing of men’s dress by women. In fact, our thoughts bear solely upon the moral question.
A moral judgment
a) It does not constitute a grave offence to modesty per se
When it comes to the covering of the female body, the wearing of men’s trousers by women cannot be said to constitute a grave offence against modesty, because trousers certainly cover more of a woman’s body than do modern women’s skirts.
b) But it could be one depending on the fitting
Considered from the point of view of fitting, however, it cannot be said that trousers are not sometimes made to fit more tightly than skirts. On the contrary, they are generally of a much closer fitting, such that they may sometimes be of no less concern than exhibition [of the body]. It is therefore a consideration that should not be neglected in the overall judgment, even if it must not be exaggerated.
The gravest aspect
There is, however, another consideration in women wearing men’s trousers, which seems to us the most serious. The wearing of men’s dress by women:
- alters the psychology proper to woman;
- tends to vitiate relationships between women and men;
- easily harms the dignity of the mother in the eyes of her children.
Each of these points is to be carefully considered in turn.
1. Men’s dress changes the psychology of women
In fact, the motive that pushes women to wear men’s dress is always that of imitation — nay, of competition with those who are considered stronger, freer, more independent. This motive shows clearly that male dress is the apparent means of bringing about a mental attitude of being “manly”. Moreover, since the world began, the clothing a person wears so determines and conditions gestures, attitudes and behaviour, that clothing comes to impose, from the outside, a particular frame of mind.
It should not be ruled out that the wearing of men’s dress by women conceals, to a greater or lesser extent, her response to her own femininity, which appears to her to be inferiority when, in fact, it is only difference. The perversion of her psychology becomes evident.
These reasons, whilst there are many others, are sufficient to alert us to how the mentality of women becomes deformed by the wearing of male dress.
2. Male dress tends to vitiate relationships between women and men
In fact, relationships between the sexes, when they blossom with the coming of age, are dominated by an instinct of mutual attraction. The essential basis of this attraction are those differences between the sexes which are all that makes complementarity possible. If these differences are made less evident by the elimination of their external signs and the stifling of their normal psychological conformation, it results in a fundamental element in the relationship being altered.
That is not all, however; attraction is naturally preceded, chronologically, by that sense of shame which restrains, imposes respect and tends towards lifting up to a higher level of mutual esteem and healthy fear those impulses which would otherwise give rise to less controlled acts. To transform clothing which, in its difference, would set boundaries and encourage resistance, tends, instead, by removing distinctions, to break down the protection provided by the sense of shame. It, at least, impedes it. Without the restraints of the sense of shame, relationships between man and woman are prone to degrade into pure sensuality, without respect or esteem.
Experience tells us that when woman becomes like a man, defences are impaired and weakness increases.
3. Male dress harms the dignity of the mother
All children instinctively have a sense of their mother’s dignity and decorum. Analysis of the inner crisis which children experience when they awaken to life around them — even before adolescence — reveals how important is the sense of the mother in the life of a child. Children are very delicate on this point. Adults, in general, have forgotten all this and have lost their sense of it. We would do well to reconsider the immense instinctive needs of children for their mother, and the deep and even terrible reactions roused by discoveries of their mother’s misbehaviour. Many traits in later life are sketched out — and for ill — in these first innermost events of infancy and childhood.
A child does not know the definitions of exhibition, frivolity or infidelity, but has an intuition of these things, and an instinct to suffer and to be bitterly wounded by them in his soul.
In the long run, this practice is macerating the human order
Even if one acknowledges that a woman’s appearance in men’s dress may not immediately give rise to the same disturbance as grave immodesty, let us reflect carefully abot everything said above:
a) Fundamental damage can become irreparable
The alteration of female psychology represents fundamental and, in the long run, irreparable damage to the family, to conjugal fidelity, to the affective sphere and to human coexistence.
It is true that the effects of wearing inappropriate dress are not all to be seen in the short-term. But it is essential to understand that, slowly and insidiously, it has an influence which is undermining, corrosive, and destructive.
b) What may be lost
Is it possible to imagine a satisfying reciprocity between husband and wife if feminine psychology is altered? Is it possible to think of any true education of children — so delicate in its procedure, so interwoven with imponderable factors — in which the mother’s intuition and instinct play the most decisive role in those tender years? What will these women be able to give their children when they have worn trousers so long that they think more of competing with men than of being women?
c) The testimony of the human race
Why, since the world began (or rather, since civilisation has been on the move), has there always been an irresistible tendency for everyone to differentiate and divide the functions of the sexes? Is this not perhaps the clear testimony of all mankind to a truth and a law superior to itself?
In conclusion: the question of men’s clothing for women must be considered as something which, in the long run, is breaking down human order.
The state of alarm for all those responsible
The logical consequence of everything presented thus far is that a serious and decisive sense of alarm should take hold of all those in positions of responsibility.
a) To form a clear and resolute conscience
We address a grave warning to all parish priests, to priests in general and to confessors in particular; to members of every kind of association, to all men and women religious, especially to teaching sisters.
We invite them to form a clear and resolute conscience on this subject. It is this kind of conscience which matters. It will propose what is needed at the right moment. But it will not let us be resigned, as if we faced something ineluctable; as if we were confronted by the physiological evolution of mankind, etc.
b) The rules of nature and of the eternal law do not change!
Man will come and go as he pleases, because God has left him great liberty of action; but the basic rules of nature and the no-less-substantial rules of eternal law have never changed, are never changing and will never change. There are limits beyond which one may rage as far as one likes, but the result is death; there are limits that can be derided by empty philosophical outpourings, but which constitute the conspiracy of fact and nature against their violators. And history teaches sufficiently, and with terrible evidence in the life of peoples, that the recompense for violating this rule is always catastrophe, sooner or later.
c) Violating the rule of God has dire consequences
Since the Hegelian dialectic, we have heard nothing but fables, and by dint of hearing them repeated, we end up acquiescing to them, if only passively. But the truth is that both nature and truth — and the law which is bound up in both — go on undeterred and crush the naïve who would believe, on no grounds whatsoever, in great and radical changes in human physiognomy itself.
These violations do not lead to a new rule for humanity, but to disorder: harmful instability, the horrendous aridity of souls, the astonishing growth of the waste of humanity; expelled prematurely, left to live out their decline in boredom, sadness and contempt. Broken families, interrupted lives, extinguished hearths, old renegades, degenerate children and, ultimately, despair and suicides — all take root on the ruins of eternal norms. These things attest that the rule of God does not give way and does not admit of any adaptation to the deliriums of so-called philosophers!
How those responsible for souls should act
1. Balance and firmness of principles
We have said that those to whom this notification is addressed are invited to form a clear and resolute conscience about the problem at hand.
Thus they will know what they have to say, starting with little girls in nursery school. They will know that they have to severely limit their tolerance, in a habitual way, without falling into the errors of exaggeration and fanaticism.
They will know that they must never be so weak as to let it be believed that they are condescending to a practice which is a slippery slope towards undermining morality. Priests will know that the rule of the confessional must be decisive and strict, even if the use of men’s dress [by women] is not to be considered a grave fault in itself. Everyone will willingly reflect on the need for a rule, reinforced on every side by the contribution of everyone of good will and enlightened mind, so as to create a veritable dam of resistance.
2. Make allies with artisans, journalists and craftsmen
Those responsible for souls, in any capacity, understand how useful it is to have men of art, media and crafts for allies in this defence.
The direction of fashion houses, of their brilliant designers, of the clothing industry is of decisive importance in all this. The confluence of the sense of art, refinement and good taste can find convenient but worthy solutions as to the dress of women who have to use a motorcycle or engage in certain work or exercise. The important thing is to preserve modesty together with the eternal sense of femininity, by which — more than anything else — all children will continue to recognise the face of their mother.
3. Contingent experiences must yield to the great values to be saved
There is no denying that modern life poses problems and makes different demands to those of our grandparents. But we affirm that there are values much more in need of saving than incidental experiences, and that — for everyone of intelligence, common sense and good taste — there are acceptable and dignified solutions to problems which arise.
For the sake of charity, we are fighting against that debasement of mankind which is perpetrated by attacking the differences on which the complementarity of the sexes rest.
When one sees a woman in trousers, one must think of her but also of humanity as a whole: of what it will be like when women are masculinised. It is in no-one’s interest to promote a future age of the indefinite, the equivocal, the incomplete — and ultimately, of monstrosities.
This letter of ours is not addressed to the public, but to those responsible for souls, for education and for Catholic associations. Let them do their duty, and let them not be caught asleep at the infiltration of evil.
Giuseppe Cardinal Siri
Archbishop of Genoa
Christian Fashion in the History of the Church by Virginia Coda Nunziante is available to buy from Calx Mariae Publishing.