When you're trans, every choice to be more feminine could mean life or death

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/26/trans-choice-be-more-feminine-life-or-death

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I’ve worn these boots down to the heel base – the wooden part to which the soles are nailed. I should take them in to be re-soled, because every step I take on the mangled pavement whittles away another percentage point of the shoe repair guy’s prognosis of its potential to be made anew. But I don’t run as well in the sea green patent leather Mary Jane pumps that I’d have to wear while these were in the shop.

When I was young, newly out – “fresh out of the oven” as we older trans ladies often say, giggling behind glasses of wine in kitchens while hordes of brunching baby queers roam the sunlit streets – I mistook the rush of purchasing a new pair of girly-girl heels for the thrill of freedom fought and won.

But now I know I could be killed in these shoes. A man’s plan to “rid the community of these Aids-ridden faggots” is made more actionable when that “faggot” has to pull off her shoes to run away. Maybe my girlfriend, having so informed my taste and knowing I’d want to go down a warrior, will ask them to cremate me in these shoes.

Maybe I’ll wear them anyway and go to a party where a nice girl will compliment them, and later offer to hold them as I brave the walk home barefoot to “spare my ankles”, and we’ll giggle through a one-night stand that becomes a few weeks of hand-holding by the lake before she moves back to Portland.

We just won’t ever be able to go to the movies: two movie tickets and a Diet Coke to split is too magnanimous gesture to make when I’m broke for someone that’s just going to move to Portland – and there is almost certainly a “shemale” joke or a casual reference to rape on the other side of the evening, which will leave me $30 poorer and nothing to show for it but a bad taste in my mouth and the unshakable air of “shoulda known better”. I’ll have a sick feeling of shame where three days worth of food and a thrift store belt ought to have been, full up with disgust but so empty my hands shake.

I feel as if I start every day in the center of an empty cafenasium of infernal design, the floors covered with booby-trapped hopscotch boards. Take the boots in for repair. Eat. Buy lipstick. Pick up my prescriptions. Every interaction with capital is a new game, a new prayer. Feet don’t fail me now.

If the lipstick doesn’t look as good on me outside as it did in the store, if it gives anyone the impression that I’m not in control of my femininity (or trying to broadcast my variance upon the hapless bystander), the bus might not stop for me. The interviewer might not give me the job. The server at the one place on this street I can afford to have a working lunch like the non-broke daywalkers do, the doctor at the one appointment I can afford this month – the slightest perceived misstep in feminine presentation makes many an enemy of the people you rely on for day-to-day life.

Wear the wrong of lipstick and kiss your life goodbye on an empty stomach.

But, gosh: a good lipstick is like the Dr Bronner’s of your soul. It can elevate your self esteem, enable your personal expression as a woman (and thus counter claims that you’re some gender chameleon who has no sense of identity) and help you really nail that interview for the job for which you’re overqualified anyway, so you can pay rent to the landlord who needed that “extra convincing” you weren’t a contemptible, thrill-seeking deviant from whom he’d have to suffer the occasional pronoun correction.

I was once stopped by the police and told not to “work that corner”. When I asked them why they thought I was a sex worker, they pointed to my stubble and visible garters. But plus-size tights are expensive and I can’t shave every day: shaving gives me ingrown hairs, and then that’s three, maybe four days of people lingering longer on my face when I pass by (or, at least, walk by, not-passing).

If to keep from being stopped by the cops I need special plus-size tights, and hair removal treatment, I won’t be able to afford to fill the prescription for my hormones, which keeps the hair from growing and my acne under control.

Estrogen in pill form is relatively cheap – but risky for your liver, which your doctor will be watching like a hawk because transgender people have a higher rate of addiction and substance abuse than cisgender people. Homelessness, rate of suicide, percentage of hate crime victims – we’re just walloping cis people across the board. Maybe one person’s crime scene is another’s winner’s circle.

I like to celebrate our little wins with some injectable estrogen when I can afford it, but it’s considerably more expensive than the pill-form estrogen, because not all pharmacies in my health insurance network carry it.

And sometimes, when I have the money to walk to the pharmacy that carries it – I don’t want to wait until I can scrape together the public transportation fare, too – and pick up my other meds, I stay home anyway, worried that, in the walk to the pharmacy, I could miss out on an interview request, or an editor emailing me with a story on a tight deadline, locked in by FOMO.

We, as trans people, as marginalized writers, are trained to chase the ball, even when we know when it will explode in our mouths at the slightest pressure. Write for free and be “paid in exposure” – the thing many of us spend our offline lives avoiding – but women, of all stripes and other assorted fabric prints, leap frog over each other for it anyway because we’re so used to our stories and lives not mattering to anyone at all. So we stare, intently, at a world that casually hates and occasionally destroys us in the hopes we might get a few bucks or some retweets out of telling exotic tales of our own suffering.

Some days, my only relief from a world slowly pricing me out is that danse macabre of a new pair of shoes that I can’t really afford. Get laid or get bashed – life, death – but the promise of fleeting, but tangible selfie-gratification. If I have no choice but to press my foot down on a booby-trapped hopscotch square, I can and will fight for the right to have that foot cradled in fashionable attire.

So I take my shoes to be repaired, assuming I’ll live long enough to get them back.