School run

When I was first transitioning, I followed a complex set of rules about how I would present to the world. Like much of how I lived at that time, I reasoned that these rules were built around my son’s needs but were equally a product of my own neuroses and fears. I see now that some of them were about not feeling like a ‘real’ trans person, while others were about not wanting to be talked about behind my back. After all, what better place is there for prodigious gossip than a community of school parents?

Because what I gradually learned is that the kids, by and large, didn’t care. The kids were just as accepting as the best of my friends and required essentially no explanation.

One of my friends talked to her son after I had come and gone from their house in a dress. It went like this:

“So, did you notice anything unusual about our friend?”

Him: shrugs. “He looked weird”.

Friend: “because he was wearing a dress?”

Him, dismissively, already moving on to the next stage in the Lego kit he and I had been constructing together: “yes but he always looks weird”.

…

So, my rules for school were like this:

High heeled boots or shoes are okay, but they have to be with pants, not skirts or dresses. Women’s hairstyle and earrings are okay, but makeup is not. Women’s blouses are fine, but breastforms that shape the blouses: not so much. Women’s calf length flowing cardigans, or structured purple wool overcoats are perfectly acceptable.

I followed these rather eccentric rules for several months.

There’s no question that people looked at me regularly. But it took me a long while to realise the real reason for their glances. It was not that I was presenting as an indeterminate gender. It wasn’t that there was a tranny at the gates. It was that I was chronically, obviously, ridiculously, stridently overdressed. I was picking up from the school gate at 3pm like I was going to cocktails at six. I wasn’t dressed for the education system; I was dressed for the theatre.

Changing my wardrobe code took a long time, and it came not by my own efforts, but those of my son.

One day, we pull up by the school oval, three minutes past school bell – which is on time for our household. But my son dislikes being late and gets a sad face.

“Will you walk in with me?” he says.

I’m in the passenger seat in a skirt, tights, heeled boots. I’m not code compliant. “No”, I say, “I’ve got to get going.”

I watch him trudge disconsolately up the path, the winter wind whipping around his bare legs – he wears shorts every day of the year. I do a three-point turn in a driveway, navigating the stream of school-drop parents dispersing from the school. I get a last glimpse of his head of long unruly hair and feel guilty at the lack of any meeting to go to right now. I refused to walk in because I was in breach of my self-imposed school dress code. What would his friends say? Wouldn’t he start to get teased? I go back to the umbral darkness of our flat.

I push the experience to one side, and tell myself that I’m being very disciplined in supporting my child, protecting him from possible bullying, or isolation.

Now, my boy regularly looks me over. It is a flicker, a glance, but clearly it is registering, appraising my changed appearance. He doesn’t seem to care in the least what he wears each day. As long as he has a pair of shorts, and a T-shirt that doesn’t match but has a snake printed on it, he’s happy.

But he knows exactly what I am wearing, how I look.

The morning drop-offs continue. Then one day, we are as more-or-less usual, late. I pull up by the oval. It’s hot now. Dust eddies spin up and over the construction scaffolding that shrouds the school building. They are installing roof insulation, a mere half a century after the place was built. He mumbles “will you walk in with me?”

“No”, I recite, “I better get to my meeting.” As it happens, while not urgent, today it is true. He growls and slumps out of the car, slams the door and starts moping away toward the gates. I look at myself. Black high-heeled slingbacks, bare legs, skirt above the knee, silk blouse, breastforms, half-done makeup. As someone observed to a friend recently, I have really nailed elegant middle-aged woman. Or would have, if I had finished doing my face.

My heart quivers every time I see my child wandering up a path alone.

I yank open the car door. “You know what, yes, I will walk in,” I call out.

We head through the giant black steel gates that give the main courtyard the feel of a low security detention centre. He’s trotting along now, comfortable. We make it to the front office. I get a smile and wave from the admin staffer who is arranging late notices. There was nothing to it.

“Bye”, he says already turning, and now his hat-suppressed mop of hair recedes down the corridor, scurrying to class.

I murmur to his receding back. “Bye”.

I try not to cry. Because the lurching realisation I am having, as I tap-tap-tap back along the path in my heels, is that all this time my son hasn’t been wanting to keep me out of the school, he has been trying to bring me in.