Are clothes gendered?

This is a topic that comes up often within the transgender community and sometimes is especially important to freshly hatched eggs (people who just came out). So I would like to explain my approach to this question.

From my perspective clothes indeed have a gender. It's not inherent or sewn in. It's attributed by society and individuals. Like gender itself the gender of clothes is a social construct. Skirts are women's clothes, because it's the agreed upon definition. Unless … unless you live in a culture where skirts are or are also worn by men.

So whatever we attribute as gender to clothes is the result of a sociological, psychological and cultural process. This shifts over time and is different for different cultures. 

There is a gendered aspect in regard to the fit and design, because some clothes have a cut that fits one gender's body better than the other's.  But keep also in mind that the variance of body types and forms within one gender is larger than the difference between the two binary genders.

This sometimes is called effect size. Which means: let's say every gender has a distribution of body types and forms. So for a binary model there would be two probably bell shaped statistical curves. The question is now: given only the body measures of a person, can you determine if they are male or female? Well, this depends on the ratio of how broad the curves are compared to their distance. So broad curves with a small distance will overlap significantly which means that you can not determine, to which curve a person belongs for a large amout of people.

But this also explains two emotional aspects:

• "Gender benders" get part of the motivation for their way of self expression from the notion that they break these societal rules that seem to exist even thogh no one ever explicitly defined them. 
• Some trans people get a lot of gender euphoria from wearing clothes that match their real gender. Be that one of the binary poles or a androgynous, genderless style.

This also goes deep into semiotics, the science of signs and symbols and their meaning making. Semiotics e.g. states:

Meaning is not an ontological property of signs, but an effect of their use by the speech community.

So it's the agreed meaning, where the agreement doesn't need to be an active one but also can just be how a sign or symbol is used in general. So yes, if you belong to some minority that attributes a different meaning to a symbol than the genral population, you will create some confusion or irritation.