Sissy

by Jacob Tobia

  I took a moment to think about it.

  “Not really.”

  “Well, we can fix that. Also, is anyone else hungry? Actually, it’s my car so I don’t care. I want a McFlurry. We’re going to McDonald’s!”

  We drove to McDonald’s and got some McFlurries and French fries, and Katie proceeded to give Davis and me a runway coaching session, Miss J. Alexander style, in the parking lot. Now that I was out of the mall and away from the prying eyes of other shoppers, I could put on my shoes and really give it my all. The anonymity of the empty parking lot was exactly what I needed to really shine. Despite the shoes being too small and very high, I was something of a natural. In my mind’s eye, I’d like to think that I looked glamorous. Or at least as glamorous as one could expect to look while strutting around in a McDonald’s parking lot in North Raleigh.

  On the ride back to Katie’s house, I looked at the open shoebox, high heels standing at attention on the seat next to me. Though the box read “Charlotte Russe” in swirly letters on the side, I could’ve sworn it read “Property of Pandora: DO NOT OPEN.”

  When I opened that shoebox, I’d experienced my first adult taste of emancipation from the gender binary. I think Davis experienced something similar. And though we didn’t realize it at the time, neither of us would ever be able to close it again. There was no turning back.

  * * *

  —

  When I got home that night, I ghosted swiftly through the front door and immediately up the stairs. Fortunately, my parents were asleep, so I was spared an awkward conversation about my purchase. I gingerly avoided the places I knew creaked, discouraging my plastic shopping bag from crinkling too loudly.

  Once in my bedroom, I took the shoes out of their box, buried them in the bottom drawer of my dresser underneath some papers and T-shirts, and made quick work of disassembling the shoebox and discarding it at the bottom of the large trash bin in the garage. This would’ve been damning evidence if it’d been discovered, so I needed to be thorough.

  Because I didn’t have the courage to wear my high heels in public yet, I found any opportunity I could to wear them in private. I’d started staying up late to finish homework, which meant my parents went to sleep before I did. After they’d been asleep for half an hour or so, I would scurry up to my room, grab my high heels, and put on a little runway show for myself in the kitchen. I’d sit on what we’d affectionately deemed my “homework couch,” bobbing my ankle in five-inch stilettos while casually studying French adverbs, reading about the temperance movement, or solving differential equations.

  These late-night study sessions were responsible for some of my greatest personal discoveries. One night, I sat down to write an assignment about which of my identities were most important to me. Eyes bleary from a long day, my feet clad in black pleather, I listed the following:

  High-Achieving and Intelligent person

  Gay Advocate

  Volunteer

  Neither a man nor a woman: Genderless

  Privileged

  Non-smoker and non-drinker: non-partier in general

  White? Maybe . . . Arab, too.

  Christian?

  I looked at what I’d written, fixating on the fourth bullet; the others fell away. It was the first time I’d written that down. There was overwhelming power in seeing it on the page.

  On another evening, I was perched on my homework couch—reading Walden by Thoreau and studying the transcendentalist movement—when I found myself brainstorming in the margins of my book:

  Gender Transcendentalism?

  I chewed on those words. Wasn’t that what I wanted? To go into the woods, into a world of my own, build a gender of my own design, and set my own rules, free from the influence of the outside world? Didn’t I want to transcend the binary? Float above the idea of manhood and womanhood, float above and beyond the idea of gender altogether, transcend to a higher spiritual plane?

  I twirled my hair with my finger, and after another moment’s thought, scrawled:

  I’m a gender transcendentalist!

  The words radiated back at me from the page, as if emblazoned in gold.

  Some nights, when I was feeling my friskiest, I’d give up on studying altogether and put on a show instead. I’d choreograph little dance routines in my heels. Using the reflection in the kitchen bay window as my mirror and the breakfast nook as my studio, I would dance as softly as I could, almost in slow motion, so that my parents wouldn’t hear the clip-clop of my heels on the hard tile floor. One time, I even choreographed a little routine to Lady Gaga’s “LoveGame,” using a brass fire poker in place of a proper disco stick.

  Just past midnight, out of my parents’ sight, I carved out a precious slice of femininity just for myself. It was mine to enjoy privately, in the dark, a textbook in hand. I was Cinderella in reverse. When the clock struck midnight, my fairy godmother returned, my pumpkin turned back into a carriage, my ball gown unfurled, and I could dance in my glass slippers once again.

  But also like Cinderella, I knew my fantasy was on the clock. It would always come to an end. My dream was ephemeral and kept on a strict timer. Even in my happiest moments, as I twirled across the kitchen floor, I was haunted by the specter of impossibility. Claiming my truth in the quiet of the night was one thing. Claiming my femininity in the light of day, for the world to see, would be something else entirely.

  * * *

  —

  The summer after my junior year, I was lucky enough to attend a North Carolina program called Governor’s School. Many states have something similar, but in case you aren’t familiar, it’s a state-funded program for high schoolers who love school so much that they want to do more of it over the summer. Over six weeks, nerds, geeks, and artsy freaks from across the state live together on a small college campus, exploring their minds, the world, and one another’s bodies. It’s got all the debauchery, drama, and scandal of normal summer camp, but unlike summer camp, the jocks and the cheerleaders aren’t there. Which meant that yours truly, who was usually just “the overachiever,” finally got a shot at being “the cool kid,” or at the very least, “sort of edgy.”

  Given how methodical and strategic I was about the process of coming out as gay, it should be no surprise that I took the same approach to sharing my nascent femininity with the world. In my trademark coming out style—obsessive, slightly maniacal, and overplanned—I’d determined that Governor’s School was the perfect place to publicly experiment with my gender and push some boundaries free from penalty. I had six weeks and six weeks only with kids who I didn’t go to school with from across the entire state. If I took a risk and it proved disastrous, it was fine, because I never had to see any of those nerds again. So when packing, I made the rash and ultimately beautiful decision to throw my high heels in my suitcase, wrapped up in a sweater so my parents couldn’t see them.

  I hadn’t anticipated just how perfect Governor’s School would be. To this day, it was still six of the best weeks of my entire life. It was the freedom of college, without the pressure to keep up your GPA. It was the freedom of Burning Man, without the sunburn and the dust. It was the freedom of adulthood, without the bills or the landlords or the choice between taking a corporate job in order to get healthcare or pursuing your dream of being a writer/actor in LA with no healthcare.*

  The release of pressure was so vital for me. For six beautiful weeks, I didn’t have to accomplish anything. I didn’t have to worry about managing thirteen extracurriculars in order to “fully round out” my college applications or about taking just one more AP class on top of the four I was already enrolled in. For the first time in my anxious, stressed-out, college-preparatory life, I had six weeks to just fuck around, chill out, explore my gender, take a few ungraded classes, and try to seduce boys on the quad. I had the freedom, space, and time necessary to care for mysel
f, to ask myself hard questions, to write bad poetry while sitting on a picnic blanket. I could think about who I was and, college be damned, who I wanted to be.

  The heels sat unnoticed under my bed for the first four weeks, but by the fifth, the pressure was on. As each day ticked by, my window of opportunity was diminishing. One day, I decided that enough was enough. I was going to wear those fuckers out and about, and I was going to look great, goddamn it.

  That day forever changed my life and altered the very shape of my shiny, too-trans-to-function consciousness. Just the process of putting on the shoes, of stepping out of my room and into the hallway, impacted me so much that I ended up making it the subject of my college application essay, and it is through that lens that I’d like to share it with you.

  While the essay I submitted to colleges was adjusted somewhat, tamed and sanitized to be more appropriate, more palatable, more focused and intellectual, I feel that the first draft shines the brightest. The first draft is the crystal in its true form: a gorgeous chunk of rock hewn from inside the earth, rough edges and imperfections unpolished. To me, the crude theory and unfiltered moments of minor incoherence are everything. They are what bring out the full rawness, the disorienting, visceral, messy quality of what I was exploring at that stage of my life. Also, I wrote this essay at the beginning of my senior year of high school, so please take a moment to appreciate that I was a goddamned prodigy, thanks.

  I knew I could do it; I had done it before.

  My foot contorted, I pointed my toes, I wiggled my foot, straightened my ankle, and tried again. And after a minute or two of somewhat exasperated effort, there was a moment when my ligaments were aligned in just such a way that my foot managed to make it into the shoe. It was a very tight fit, and I had to readjust my toes manually, but the shoe was on my foot nonetheless. It felt strange, wearing a size 10 in women’s when I was used to wearing a size 11 in men’s.

  I stood up, and immediately thereafter, I sat back down. I did not know how to walk in high heels. My body just couldn’t quite get the mechanics right. I couldn’t keep my calves constantly engaged and I didn’t understand how to swing my hips in the manner requisite for being mobile while wearing such contraptions around my ankles.

  It was an experiment really. I had heard some of my friends complaining about the blisters on their feet, the aching of their toes, and the pain in their backs as they strutted about daintily in three-inch pumps; I’d had numerous conversations with one of my friends about why she felt the need to wear high-heeled boots every day, in spite of her severe back problems; I could hear the “click-clack” of my teachers walking on the hardwood floors in the upstairs hall of my school—the sound evoking images of patent leather. I’d been observing silently, intrigued by why a woman would ever make the choice to wear a pair of heels and by what that choice indicated about the world around us. I wanted to understand the reasoning behind it all, because while the sex appeal in wearing heels was evident, I couldn’t seem to grasp any sort of logical reasoning that really seemed to justify it all.

  So I bought a pair at Charlotte Russe, a women’s clothing store. They were a pair of four-inch stiletto pumps that were encased in synthetic black leather—the kind that would make many women cringe. But they were exactly what I wanted, subtle enough in color as to not be apparent on first glance, but tall enough that I could gain a real perspective into American womanhood.

  I stood back up and strode over toward the full-body mirror that hung on the door of my dorm room. The silhouette of my foot was somewhat alarming—it was overtly sexualized in a way that I had not quite expected. It was still a hairy foot, but aside from that it was much more feminine than I would have expected—a sort of anachronism of the body. As my initial state of alarm faded, I was pulled back into the reality of the situation. I was about to leave my male dorm room, into a guys’ hallway, in the men’s dormitory, all of which while astride four-inch stilettos. Thus, my sense of amazement with my feet faded into fear of them. I sat back down on my bed in order to regroup, in order to reanalyze the situation.

  Outside of my room, I could hear rowdy teenage guys throwing a football back and forth down the hallway. I could hear their exclamations of disapproval at someone dropping the ball, or throwing it incorrectly. Their words obliterated whatever sense of courage I had and conjured within me a recollection of the ever-pervasive presence of masculine expectation. The word “faggot” kept ringing in my ears and, before I quite knew what was going on, I realized that my room had shrunk to the size of a closet.

  With each successive “thump” of the football hitting a wall and with each verbal expression of masculine dominion, a multitude of closet doors were slammed in my face. Some of these doors were ones I had never seen before, some led to rooms I had never known existed, and some were doors that I thought I had opened long ago. They were the doors of fluid sexuality, of ominous white privilege, of pervasive masculinity, of continual and sustained affluence, of reformed gender identity, of under-the-rug misogyny, of flawed moral principle. By opening the door of my dorm room and crossing the threshold of private life into a public forum, I would be opening so many other doors simultaneously, obliterating every preconceived notion of my identity and self-definition, chipping away at the supposedly infallible obelisk of societal expectation. I took a deep breath, hoping that maybe with more oxygen I would be able to gain the courage, the audacity, to step outside.

  After a moment or two had passed, I turned the door handle, heard the latches click, and pushed open my door ever so gingerly. I stepped outside of the room, locked my door, and proceeded to walk down the hall and into the stairwell. The boys in the hall said nothing, although an absence of words in many cases can be indicative of something much more terrible than approval. I carefully continued down the three flights of stairs, all the while holding on to the railing for stability and praying I wouldn’t break my ankle. I walked through the lobby and toward the dining hall for breakfast.

  I could hear the *click clack* of my heels on the brick walkway.

  *click*

  A boy starts a ballet class and doesn’t worry about what his friends will say.

  *clack*

  A college student reads Judith Butler.

  *click*

  A transgender person understands that, while they have a difficult life to face, they will not be alone.

  *clack*

  A sex worker reclaims her dignity and autonomy from a world that says she’s worthless.

  *click*

  A woman finds freedom from her abusive husband.

  *clack*

  A friend, struggling with bulimia, realizes that she is beautiful.

  *click*

  All people, man and woman, realize that in some small way, they have not been true to themselves, and the bonds of gender stereotypes and heterosexism dissolve into truth.

  *clack*

  It was eight a.m. and I was feeling the foreshocks of morning hunger. But that hunger never seemed to be able to take a firm grasp, because somewhere in my soul, I was satisfied beyond explanation.

  Upon rereading my first draft of this essay, the roughness is obvious: At the age of seventeen, I had to come up with a justification for wearing high heels, something other than the full truth. I told the world, told myself, that I was trying to gain some kind of empathy with women, that it was all an intellectual experiment and nothing more. I still didn’t know how to claim to anyone else—or, for that matter, to myself—that I wanted to wear high heels simply because I wanted to wear them. I didn’t know how to say that I wanted to wear high heels because I thought they were great, because I thought I looked good in them, because I was a motherfucking goddess and you’re just going to have to deal with that.

  I also know that in the part where I wrote about “a transgender person,” I didn’t yet realize I was talking about my own heart. Back the
n, I had such a narrow definition of what transness could be. I thought you were only trans if you wanted to change your body in a serious way. I thought being trans was a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all identity, one that certainly didn’t seem to fit me. Along with not knowing how to claim that my desire for femininity was mine, I was also years away from claiming my proper place as part of the trans community.

  But for everything I got wrong in the essay, there is so much more that I got right; in some cases, without even realizing it. I understood intersectionality—the way that white supremacy props up patriarchy props up poverty props up environmental destruction props up white supremacy again—on a gut level, even if I didn’t know to call it “intersectionality” yet. I understood that sex workers are often stigmatized, barred from claiming their full humanity, by sexist culture and feminist movements alike. I understood that the idea of “The Closet” applied to so much more than just queer people, that we are all in a closet of one kind or another. And, contrary to all of my actions since, I understood that high heels and back problems were, in fact, related.

  What stands out to me most is that, at the age of seventeen, I seem to have understood the full stakes of what I was doing. I understood that by challenging gender norms and conventional masculinity, I was challenging, well, everything. Through challenging the idea of manhood, of being “a good man,” of “manning up,” I was burrowing deep into the core of power, privilege, and hierarchy. On a gut level, I understood that my freedom and liberation were wrapped up with those of so many others who were facing oppression.

  Ironically, it might’ve been helpful if I were a bit, well, dumber about the whole gender thing. It might’ve been a lot easier to strut out in a pair of heels if I didn’t already perceive the weight of the world on my shoulders, if I hadn’t already begun to calculate it. It might’ve been easier to don stilettos in public if I were just another stereotypically ditzy queen. But I’m not a ditzy queen. Most people who are perceived to be “ditzy queens” aren’t even ditzy queens. We’re all pretty damn brilliant. It’s just that we aren’t understood as such because we love glitter and sequins and vintage dresses from the 1980s and our grandmother’s clip-on earrings, and patriarchy deems all things feminine to be less intelligent.