Creative Non-Fiction
Running in High Heels and Other Skills of Trans Manhood
A response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt: “I’m LGBTQ, but You Don’t Know THIS About Me”
The capacity to run in high heels isn’t one that the stereotypical trans man will brag about, but I consider it a worthwhile skill.
I’m secure enough in my manhood to acknowledge that I can do this. If nothing else, it’s valuable for empathy. I know to check which shoes my wife is wearing before suggesting we take the scenic route on one of our walks.
Like most people in my community, I match some stereotypes, and obliterate other expectations of trans men. None of us are a monolith, and it does all of us a disservice to allow one of us to speak for everyone. Here is a collection of the surprising and maybe not so surprising anecdotes of my history.
When I was a child, I used to spend endless hours with a book full of tracing paper and an Atlas.
I painstakingly traced over the borders of countries that I didn’t yet possess sufficient alphabetical knowledge to read the names of aloud. Perhaps my gender is best described as layer after layer of tracing paper redrawing the boundaries of my existence until the resulting image became completely different from where we started.
I learned to run in heels simply because I wore them a lot during the long period of time that I tried hard to convince the world the doctor was right when they said I was born a girl.
I learned to run in heels simply because I wore them a lot during the long period of time that I tried hard to convince the world the doctor was right when they said I was born a girl. I used to practice running in them for safety, not wanting to be the first person to die if I ever ended up in a real life horror movie. I would later teach this skill to my wife, until they got much better at it than I ever was.
Another miscellaneous skill that I have is bee charming.
This was first discovered when I disappeared at the age of 3 one day, while my sibling was having a severe asthma attack that attracted attention away from me. After hours, I was found to have somehow climbed a tree. My father had to use a small ladder to get me down, and found me sitting right beside a beehive, laughing. He was able to get us both down without either of us sustaining a single sting. I still enjoy scaring new friends by letting them watch yellow jackets walk around on my palms.
In high school, I related to a lot of what Anna said in her piece called “Gender Dysphoria In High School During the 90's”, especially the sentiment behind these lines:
“At lunchtime, I would go for a walk. I walked through a residential area that led to a park. I’d go to this park no matter what the weather conditions were. I didn’t care if it was below zero, rain, sleet, snow. I didn’t feel the weather. Getting away from people and being by myself felt safe and peaceful. That’s all that mattered. I would think to myself, ‘I made it halfway through the day I can do this!’”
Instead of going outside to a park to find that safety, I developed a skill for getting into just enough trouble each day to get in lunch detention, without causing enough trouble to get kicked out of school.
I would wait outside of my school building each morning for the bell to ring, then immediately walk inside to join the line of “late students”. I still needed 3 tardy slips to get a lunch detention, so I made an effort to get caught breaking small rules throughout the day to cause just the right amount of trouble to get a break from the other students.
After several months of blissfully quiet lunch detentions, I had the luck to get my art teacher as my punishment monitor. She guessed more or less what was happening and just welcomed me to join her for lunch every day to work on my artwork and keep me out of trouble.
While I have made an effort to help build houses for Habitat for Humanity a few times, I can’t say I’m particularly handy.
I certainly don’t match the trans masculine stereotype of being able to rattle off the names of miscellaneous tools. I’m useless in a hardware store. I know absolutely nothing about cars, except how to drive them poorly. My mother tried and failed to teach me the skills of my grandfather, who was a mechanic and bus driver.
I sometimes wish I had a mentor to teach me how to better fit masculine stereotypes, so that I could fit expectations and reduce the number of times I get misgendered overall. Then, I remember that there are endless ways to be a man.
I just happen to be the sort of man who occasionally wears a little turquoise eyeliner and who can run in fabulous high heels.
It is not my responsibility to change the kind of man that I am in order to convince people to gender me correctly. That would be a waste of perfectly good manhood.
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Did you enjoy this writing? Here are other lists of writings that involve similar themes:
- Catalog of Posts About My Transgender Life | by Logan Silkwood | Jan, 2022 | Medium
- Catalog of Posts About Sexuality and My Queer Life | by Logan Silkwood | Jan, 2022 | Medium
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt: I’m LGBTQ, but You Don’t Know THIS About Me.
