The Pink Shoes

I grew up in the eighties and nineties, a period in England, if not elsewhere, where the word “gay” was still bandied about as an insult at the beginning of my secondary schooling, alongside “poof” and “fag” and (gasp) “lesbian”. By the end of school however, a large proportion of my peers no longer considered “gay” to be an insult, or “poof” and “fag” to be acceptable at all. The jury remained firmly out on (whisper it) “lesbian”. Did the jury come back on that yet?

This, I feel sure, was largely down to representation. Eastenders, Brookside, even Byker Grove, the soaps parading gay snogging like it was normal or something. Pop stars weren’t just rumoured to be gay, some were “openly gay”, a phrase du jour which seems problematic now, but was instrumental in changing attitudes then. By the time I hit my mid-teens, if you were actually gay, rather than just “gay”, which is to say if you were attracted to the same sex as opposed to just lacking in the kind of mainstream “rizz” that keeps a kid below the ridicule radar, there was a chance that you might NOT be beaten up at the bus stop on the way home from school. Of course, there was also a chance that you would be. There is still a chance that you would be.

I never saw Eastenders. Or Brookside. Or Byker Grove. I grew up with a father as disparaging of soap operas as I am of people who don’t pick up after their dog. So when I ask myself, where, for ME did I see representation which changed my perceptions, I struggle to answer. Perhaps I never did? Perhaps there was a steady normalisation which I matured alongside, like the next generation and the internet, or the one before and the home television. Perhaps, I never gave it too much thought.

I never felt a strong affinity to either my sexuality or my gender identity. Perhaps if I had grown up now I would have identified as queer, though in my youth this was a narrower term synonymous with "bent" or the more archaic “bats for the other side.” But I grew up then, and was identified as female, albeit “tomboyish” by those around me, and it is an identity which causes me no great angst. I mean, I am reasonably confident I am not a man, I suppose. My point here is that I have not had to butt my head or my heart up against a sense or feeling that I was other than what it is permissible for me to be. Not on this front, anyway. I mean, the catalogue of my other sins against humanity is more troublesome. Too lazy, boring, weird, too whatever is not acceptable at that moment. But we are not here to talk about that. We are here to talk about the moment when perspectives shift.

And I do know when that was. It was not when George Michael came out or Queer as Folk aired. No, for me, the shift came late. For 35 years, or thereabouts, I had trundled along accepting that a rainbow of sex and gender related hues ribbons its way through our world without too much worry. I was not dispassionate about the issues of discrimination, safety, human rights, as it pertained to the LGBTQ+ community, it was a part of my life. Indeed, I even wrote my undergraduate dissertation in this domain. However, what I perhaps didn't fully appreciate was that it was also something I could side step with relative ease, should I ever want to.

And then I had children.

My son turns 15 in a week. I know he identifies as male, which aligns with his sex at birth. I’m not certain, but I suspect he is straight. I have no intention of asking him to define himself to me. But when he was perhaps two, he started wearing dresses. “What do you want to wear?” I remember asking him, and I remember him picking out a light blue dress with strawberries printed on it that someone had passed on to us for our daughter, who was some years off big enough for it yet. “How do you feel?” I asked. “Beautiful” he told me. And he was.

He didn’t wear dresses often, but then, he didn’t wear day clothes often. He remains a pyjama lover to this day. Autism and clothes. Rarely a good fit. But for a couple of years, the line between the “male” and “female” sartorial choices he made was as seamless as it would later be for my daughter, whose wardrobe was a melee of hand-me-downs from different sources. He went to parties as Dorothy and Batman and Alice, and generally the parents got over it once their kids had blinked once and stopped caring. And sometimes, he would wear the blue dress. That or a purple cotton one that floats in a breeze, and he would be comfortable.

But first, he had to cross me.

Now I was cool with it. Yeah, wear the dress, be who you want to be, you are you and that is always, always, good enough for me. Until the day I wasn’t.

We were on holiday – The New Forest. Lovely spot, when the weather is good – and my son saw some pink sparkly sandals in the supermarket. I mean, they were cute. I challenge anyone not to have wanted them a little bit. He was three, knee high to a grasshopper, holding the sparkling shoes in one round knuckled hand and peering up at me with lashes people pay for and hazel-green eyes that could seduce stone. And I said no. “No darling, those are girl’s shoes.”

I heard it come out of my mouth. Me! I said that! Little miss “I don’t want to raise my children restricted by a gender conforming environment.” Little holier than thou “The Early Learning Centre should be ashamed of the way they gender toys” me! Those. Shoes. Are. GIRL’S SHOES. Because when I looked down at my boy, at his shamelessness, at his openness, his trust, his hope, his faith that the world would be kind to him, I saw it beaten out of him. I saw him pointed at, questioned, mocked, pushed and hit. I saw him overlooked, rejected, sidelined and pigeonholed. I saw him quashed and made to feel lesser, or if not, then having to perform a bravado he might not feel in order to own his own ground. I saw him hurt. My baby. I saw him being told “no.” And so I told him no. Call myself an ally? In that moment, I believed I was being an ally to my son. Helping him to fit in, you know? And I don't believe that I was wholly wrong, we need to prepare our children for the world as it is. But nor was I right.

And this is the moment that I saw representation that shifted my understanding. My child, holding a pink shoe, looking perplexed. Me, denying him, because my mind was full of representations of LGBTQ+ people having a shit time, (sometimes with a smattering of debauchery along the way).

Now, I do not wish to imply that a young child liking a sparkly pair of shoes would automatically mean that said child was gay, or his wearing dresses meant that he was trans. He liked nice things, which is a pretty good indicator of being human, but not a lot else. But I'm also not going to pretend that in that moment it didn't raise a question in my mind. Particularly as my boy already did not conform to much of the "maleness" enacted by his pre-school peers. "Is this child expressing an identity other than that which our binary culture has positive narratives for? Is he stepping out of the normative position prescribed for him?" Yes, reading too much into a sandal, for sure, but I had been breast feeding or pregnant for more than four years at that point, I was in full maternal hormone mode and I could read too much into more or less anything my children did. A sneeze? Call the doctor! Tears on the playground? Who hurt my baby? A sparkly shoe? Who is GOING to hurt my baby?

Suddenly, shit got salient. Oh it had MATTERED to me before. But here I was perpetuating the problem. Here I was responding to the narratives of subjugation I had heard over and over again. Here I was telling someone to quash themselves for their own good. Yes, I had encountered representation, but it made me fearful for my child, not accepting, as I wanted to be. Here I was, looking at the single most important person in my world (well, the double most important person. The sun shines out of both my kids’ arses. People say “people say we don’t have a favourite but we do” but I don’t) and telling him to deny his joy based on gender norms. Here I was not just allying myself with an oppressive perspective, but enacting it. Because I was scared. Until this point I had ridden into war in bullet proof fatigues. Of course I was happy to put my head above the parapet! The worst I was in for was a light bruising. Now, suddenly, I was on the field and unclothed, and frankly I have long forgiven myself for running for cover.

What I didn't do is stay there. This was a moment that forced me to reflect on my own attitudes and behaviours, and I hope I am the better for it. Below is the post I made on Facebook a few days later.

This week I dishonoured my son. As he coveted sandals with sparkle in pink, for the first time I explained to him that some people thought boys and girls should wear different clothes, that at home he could dress as he pleased but he might find life easier if he didn't wear clothes people thought were for girls when out. I got confused. I know how it fit in, to feel lonely. I thought perhaps my job as a parent was to help him fit in. But I knew in my heart I was wrong. Today, when he told his sister she could never be a boy, I told him more. I told him about the rainbow of gender, the choices in dress, the options in medicine. Straight away he said he wanted to be a girl and departed happy.

Whoever he may be, if you raise your child to spurn or scorn him, worry for them, because I now know what my job as a parent is. I will raise him to give no quarter to narrow mindedness, to bigotry, to laziness of thought. I will raise him to shred opinions presented as truths and to shatter oppressing conformities. I will raise him to know that whether he fits in, or stands out, whether he rises up singing or moves wraithlike through his social world, as long as he lives with compassion, he is beautiful.

Today, my children appear to be cis-gendered heterosexual young people. That might change, it might not, it doesn’t matter. My hope is that however they walk out into the world, it is with the full confidence that they are acceptable, and that they have my support. Even if they are lazy or boring. And I would prefer that they could count on that from the wider world, as well. They’re worth it, I promise you. And millions of other kids, all coming into a world in which their right to be who they are without attracting harm to themselves remains uncertain, they're worth it too, and they deserve representation which acknowledges that challenges they might face, but alongside that, representation which fosters confidence, too.