When Being a Boy Turns Deadly
For decades, I dreamed of the perfect pedicure… without understanding the real dangers
I was just a tween when I first pictured my toes being splendidly feminine.
Uncomfortable in my flabby, testosterone-filling body, I would lay awake on the wrong side of the gender spectrum and reimagine myself.
Inevitably, it would always begin with my toes.
For thirty years, on and off, I would replay this same mental and emotional exercise.
In the meantime, I met and married the woman of my dreams, began raising a family of four boys, and excelled in both personal and professional endeavors.
In all that time, I never spread one layer of lacquer on my big beautiful nails.
At times I convinced myself that I had been confused in my adolescence. Other times I was simply too overwhelmed with life to revisit feelings that had never fit my lifestyle.
I was positive I could live a good enough life without adding the complexity of an endless spectrum of nail polish to my weekly routine.
It turns out I was wrong.
I didn’t know it at the time, but every turn of revisiting and repressing my full gender identity simply packed the…
