Gender is Shoes
Or, one trans man reconciles identity with life before transition.
I didn’t know I was trans until my mid-thirties.
Or rather, I didn’t understand I was trans until then. I knew when I was very young, and just beginning to feel the pressure of social expectations and gender norms, that the role the world had assigned to me… It just didn’t fit.
I struggled to reconcile this in recent years. I questioned, and wondered: How could I really be trans — or perhaps, trans enough to count — given that I spent over three decades living as the gender assigned to me at birth without figuring out it was a problem? Why is being misgendered so utterly unbearable now when I was able to bear it for as long as I did?
The best metaphor I found to understand it, for me, is… Shoes.
Imagine, for a moment, you’re a very small child living in a world not entirely unlike our own. You run around barefoot 24/7. If you notice that adults and bigger kids all wear shoes — whereas you, in comparison, do not — it’s just one of those grown-up things. Maybe you really want to be a grown-up and wear shoes too because they look cool; or, maybe you think it’s silly and decide you are never going to wear shoes even when you are grown up.
Regardless, one day… your life changes. You’re given a pair of shoes, and you’re informed that you have to wear them. All the time. You can take them off in private, maybe — to sleep, to have a bath; that sort of thing — but otherwise… it’s shoes for you, kiddo.
You hate them.
They’re uncomfortable. They just don’t fit right, no matter how much you fiddle with the laces. You really, really don’t want to wear them.
But you have no choice. You’re just a little kid. When you complain and say they don’t fit right, everyone tells you, “it’s fine, they’re the right size.” And, “you’ll get used to them.” And, “you just need to break them in a little.”
So you wear the shoes.
Every day, you wear the shoes. As you grow, you’re given bigger pairs of the same shoes. And they never, ever get more comfortable.
What does happen, though, is… you do get used to them.
The painful blisters where those shoes rub? They eventually turn into callouses. You change the way you walk and find a stride that makes your feet hurt just a little less. Maybe, as you become a young adult and start getting new shoes yourself, you try different colours or change up the laces for something that you really like the look of. But they are, under all that, still the same shoes, and you just learn to ignore the pain and the discomfort so you can live your life like everyone else.
By then, if anyone were to ask you whether your shoes fit properly, you would shrug and say, “sure,” because you know that shoes are just uncomfortable. It’s a fact of life; uncomfortable is the essence of shoes. Obviously everyone must know that, even if nobody talks about it.
Right?
Right.
Except…
Except then you meet people who said, “well these shoes suck, I’m getting different ones,” and then they went and did exactly that.
You stare, and you process, and you finally, finally realize something that nobody told you when you were growing up.
You can just wear different shoes.
That was my journey. Once I finally clued in to the fact that I could try out different gender-shoes until I found something that actually fit me, my life changed — and this time, for the better.
First, I went barefoot for awhile. I wanted to know how I felt without any shoes at all. Then, nervously, tentatively, I tried on completely different shoes for the first time in my life.
I loved them.
Ever since then, I find it hard to fathom how I managed to wear — to be — something so uncomfortable for so many years. I have to remind myself that it only seems obvious now because I finally know how good the right thing feels. I have something to compare it to, when I never did before.
It’s wonderful, but it also makes my old shoes feel infinitely worse than they did when I didn’t know I had other options. Think of the most painful or uncomfortable piece of clothing or footwear you’ve ever worn in your life, and imagine how it would feel to have loved ones, friends, colleagues or random strangers force that thing onto your body all over again, against your will, when you know there’s something better.
I didn’t understand I was trans until my mid-thirties. I didn’t know I was wearing the wrong shoes all that time. Now that I do, I can’t ever go back.
Gender-shoes are different for everyone. Some people are most comfortable barefoot. Some people have multiple pairs of favourite shoes that they’re most comfortable in on different days, or in different situations. Some people wear socks with sandals, and others just really like boots.
But if you’re out there, reading this, and you think your own shoes — whatever they are — are maybe not as comfortable as they could be?
You can try something else just to see how it feels.
