Remember How to Walk

      

1982

I'm the brunette, transgender wife.

I was in high school, a Freshman. My brother was a Junior, and he didn’t want anything to do with me, at school. I was destructive to his reputation, he felt, and probably not unfairly. He had been in fights and had friends who were convinced that he was very manly. I, on the other hand, got along much better with girls, and not in a boyfriend/girlfriend sort of way. Rather, I just had several female friends.

Sometimes, Laughter Cuts

One day, I noticed that some older guys at school would snicker when I walked past. I had no idea why and asked this girl named Lisa, who was in some of my classes and I was friends with if she had noticed. She was a reasonably pretty brunette who always wore the most awesome looking tops. I had no idea where she shopped at, but she always wore stuff that flattered her. 

She laughed and said something like “I would think it is because of how you walk”.

What? What’s wrong with how I walk? I was surprised and asked her to explain. She just laughed and said I’d figure it out. I honestly didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

Though a freshman, I was already active in school events. I was on the soccer team, though honestly, I was a slow runner. I played chess, and was in the orchestra, and involved in the school plays and musicals. A few days after my talk with Lisa, I was walking to the drama room to help work on the set for the fall drama. At the end of the hallway, by the stairway that went up to the stage, was a large, full-length mirror. The hallway was quite long and descended in a slope. The mirror was at the bottom of the slope. I was plainly visible to myself as I walked down the hallway, and despite the distortion of the mirror at a minor angle to me, suddenly I noticed something odd. I didn’t walk normally.

The previous year, there had been this boy, an 8^th grader, in my class, who was gay. He had enough of the hazing and ridicule he had gotten, and had walked in front of a train, resulting in his death. Because people are cruel, he was mocked for committing suicide too. I had seen him around the school and had seen him walk, and it looked rather feminine all the time. I was shocked to notice I was walking just like he had. Shocked is probably an understatement. It had never seemed to me before that I walked more like a girl than like the jocks in class. Most guys seemed to walk the same, you know? Kind of a lumbering stomp.

When I had a chance, I asked Lisa again, had that been what they were talking about? She laughed and said yes, that was it. In a moment, I was on the bathroom floor in 6^th grade again in my head. For the first time ever, my brain wondered “am I gay, or something?”

The Man in the Mirror

You’ll probably find it amusing, but over the next several school days, in the evenings while working on the set, I would practice walking in that hallway, watching in the mirror, hoping no one saw me. I also watched a few different guys walking, and noticed the traits of their walks. Then I practiced some more. I was determined to walk like a man, rather than like something else. I learned to stomp, rather than step. I learned to take longer strides than I was used to. I learned to swing my arms differently and to hold my body rather still in the middle, so I didn’t look so feminine. Though it didn’t feel like me, I got pretty good at it, I suppose, though the end result was something a bit more Frankenstein than masculine, a hodge-podge of masculine and feminine walk that leaned more toward the masculine. I made a point of reminding myself how to walk, because the last thing I dared to do, wanted to do, was to be perceived as something, anything, other than masculine.

It worked because I noticed over time that those guys who had been snickering had stopped. I suppose they found someone else to make fun of.

By the time the marching band season started up my Sophomore year, my walk had changed noticeably toward the masculine. My dad even observed that I looked "very manly", as he said, when I marched.

This even followed me over into the military, where I had a unique walk that was a mix of masculine and feminine, a rather upright, too quick to be manly and too slow to be feminine. The woman who was then my girlfriend and is now my wife observed many times that she could spot me in an instant by my unusual walk.

But the overall result? Years later, I was still doing that. I walked intentionally. I reminded myself on an ongoing basis that I had to. 

I'm out publicly and don't need to walk in a manly manner to protect myself. Now that I am free to just be me, I still catch myself doing it sometimes.