Step up
In a short memoir post, Teetering, I recount a failed attempt as a young man to find women’s shoes that would accommodate my feet.
From this very superficial foray into the world of gendered retail, I reached a definite conclusion: women’s shoes won’t fit me. Yet the mainstream high street stores I visited need not have been my only option. I knew about drag. From seeing Kenny Everett on television dressed as the B-movie blonde Cupid Stunt, through to joining the throng of allies supporting the Mardi Gras as it shimmied down Oxford Street, men wearing women’s clothes, including precarious stilettos, were familiar to me. But I also knew I was not gay, and the footwear on the Oxford Street floats seemed to me to be stage show outfits for queens.
Regardless, on the strength of that single shopping expedition, a fixed idea formed. This firm belief was clung to with an irrational degree of confidence. Now I look back and wonder if I was erecting a narrative barrier to an internal desire that was trying to get my attention.
Fast forward to two years ago. It is the very early days of me wearing occasional women’s tops, but still with my men’s, admittedly purple, boots. My best friend has a way with me, finding the gentle paths around defences I don’t even realise I have erected. She sends me the link for a website set up specifically to clothe tall women. She suggests I look at their shoes.
I can’t think of anything more difficult to order over the internet than footwear, but I click through anyway. I discover ladies shoes for feet bigger than mine. It seems my size is not so unusual. For the first time I wonder what happened all those years ago. I scroll through a lot of hideous sneakers and espadrilles. I find a pair of flats and a pair of high black sandals with silver embroidery on the heel spike. I order these, and wait.
Weeks later, I open a large parcel. Immediately I find that the flats are so big they almost fall off my feet. In any case they look cheap, and are discarded. I pick up the other pair and turn them in my hands, feeling the velvet-clad hardness of their form. My toes slip inside and I tighten a spidery strap around my ankle. Nothing in the world of men’s footwear has prepared me for these.
Standing cautiously, I shuffle in front of the mirror and gaze down, one hand on the wall for balance. That they fit is not the important part; it is that they feel right. After admiring them for a little while, I concede that I’m not ready yet to walk anywhere. I put them away.
Later in the week, my friend comes over. She’s bubbling with excitement when she hears they have arrived. “Well?! Put them on!”
She plonks herself on the end of my bed, from which there is a corridor to the entrance hall. Her voice is encouraging and teasing in equal measure: “let’s see you try and walk”. So I do, hesitating as I establish how to put the vertiginous heel down just before the toe. I do it cautiously, arm out to the wall, then turn and come back. Nervous tittering on my part.
“Far out!” she exclaims. It takes her back to teenage years, when she and her girlfriends would practice. Later, they would wobble out into the evening.
Difficult though it is suddenly to be viewing my flat from the vantage point of a professional basketballer, and while I may have a hand out for balance, my feet feel at home. I grew up hearing feminist manifestos against many things, from workplace misogyny to miniskirts, and among the targets of critique absolutely were high heels. But as I walk, my hip joints swing easily. My body moves like it was made to be in this position. In five minutes, I am walking comfortably around my apartment in shoes intended solely for show at a nightclub.
Which is when my friend gleefully says, “Right, let’s go in the stairwell”.
At the top of a flight, as though standing at the edge of a cliff I exclaim, “how do I get down there?” The answer is, “very carefully”. But within days I can walk anywhere in heels. I feel them straighten my back. I look down and see myself standing with feet poised in a way I know is feminine, slightly offset, toes pointed outwards. I wonder why I did not stand like this as a man. Is it the biomechanics of the shoes, or the cultural mechanics of my gender psychology? I have no idea.
But I do know that when brand-new blue leather boots with fur trim and eight-centimetre heels arrive, I pull them on and stride three kilometres into the city, as though they are joggers.
*
High heeled shoes have a long history of being intertwined with power, gender and class. They have utilitarian origins, whether to better hold feet in horse stirrups, or to keep the wearer elevated from the muck of mediaeval streets. Then they became a fashion of the wealthy. In the court of Louis XIV, red heels were used to denote elite status among men. They have been fashionable for both women and men, in both east and west; but in the eighteenth century became gendered in the way we experience them today.
They can be instruments of sexist oppression, but the situation is complex. A review of health studies observed that “high heels bring psychosexual benefits to women but are detrimental to their health”. An experiment found both men and women rated women’s bodies as rendered more attractive in high heels - even though the shoes themselves were not visible.
When I hunt online for high heel shoes for men, search results and websites deliver sexualised visions. The marketing is around erotica, some of the imagery pornographic. Some sites sell shoes but treat them as pole dancing accessories.
Wading through the world of marketing I find myself made uncomfortable, as an everyday wearer of heels of many kinds, by the sexualisation of what it is to be transgender. The text from one retailer exemplified this: “Transgender Women, Drag Queens, Cross-Dressers, and pretty much anyone else with larger feet than standard women's sizes normally allow, with this fabulous collection of sexy shoes available in UK sizes up to a 14 then it is now possible for pretty much anyone to slip into a pair of sexy high heels and get their catwalk swagger on.” Certainly, the bulk of the shoes on sale are fetishising; glossy black platforms with stiletto points long and thin enough to knit with. If one were a knitter.
Of course, my reaction to these sites comes not specifically from a trans woman’s experience; it is a subset of women’s experience. I used to be a man for whom women were sexual objects on which i gazed. Now I am the object and I am disconcerted. Well, next time I pull on my stiletto boots and feel my ageing spine twinge, I can consider it karma.
