The Transgender Shoes on the Wrong Feet
By: Emma Holiday
Tags: LGBTQ, Equality, Transgender, Creative Non Fiction, Society

I have been trying to explain how it is possible to shockingly discover that I am transgender this late in my life and to have had absolutely no clue that I was. The single question that I have asked myself repeatedly and one of the first questions I am always asked by those I tell is:

“How could you possibly not know?”

The question always seems to presume that I am lying or at the very least, a total idiot. How can you possibly ignore something as significant in your life as that and not know it?

But that is exactly what happened. I am not lying and I hope I don’t come across as an idiot. I truly thought that I was the man my wife married.

I will claim that I shared a common ignorance with the society that I grew up in. It was incapable of understanding my problem, identifying the issues or effectively diagnosing my symptoms, while it ostracized, in its ignorance, those that suffered from a similar pain. My parents, my friends and my family shared in society’s ignorance and, unfortunately, some continue to share the same outdated thoughts even now.

Shoes on the wrong feet:

I will use shoes as a simple example.

We have all worn painful shoes at some time in our lives. It makes life unbearable. Suppose for a moment from the day you are born, your parents reversed the shoes on your feet. They put the left on the right and the right on the left.

As a baby you had no clue but as you got older you whined and complained. The shoes really hurt. At various times you parents tried to sooth you or scold you. They bought new shoes, which they again put on the wrong feet. Your parents then took you to the doctors and foot specialists to find out why you had problems with your feet. They told your parent that your feet were just fine.

They couldn’t understand what was bothering you, so you talked to your friends. “No”, they said, their feet felt just fine. You became convinced that the pain was normal. Nobody else was complaining, so it must be you.

You suddenly stopped complaining. Your parents were very happy. They thought you grew out of your childish issues but you just got used to the pain. As time went by, your tolerance for the pain got stronger. It didn’t go away; you were able to just ignore it. Eventually the pain became a minor thing in your life.

You never admitted to others that when you took your shoes off, that the pain finally disappeared. They couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. You always kept your sense of relief very, very private.

Time passed. Wife, kids, house, professional success then one day the pain caused by the shoes became excruciating. You couldn’t understand why. As hard as you tried you could no longer ignore it, so you finally sought out a professional who specialized in foot pain.

She simply took off the shoes and reversed them.

The pain stopped for the first time in your life.

The shoes were simply on the wrong feet. It finally made perfect sense.

Ok, so if you are cisgender here is an experiment. Take your shoes off and reverse them. Walk around for a while if you can. Feel the discomfort. Feel the oddness. Feel the pain. Realize that you are experiencing for a very short time what is a lifetime painful experience for someone with late life gender dysphoria.

It took a lifetime to discover that I had been living my life with my gender on backwards.

Even now people are still convinced I should put my shoes on backwards…but that will only make them feel better, not me.

Emma Holiday

Writers note: If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.

My writing has three specific goals:

1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand and I need to accept myself to move forward.

2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.

3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.

Thank you for reading my work.

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