Relearning to Walk, a Personal History
This winter, for the third time in my life, I began learning how to do something I was sure I’d mastered 60 years ago: how to walk.
I have photographic evidence of the first go-round: my shy, dignified father, drenched in 1950s suburban sunshine, trying to show a 1-year-old me the ropes.
Forty years later, when I came out as trans, I got a different tutorial on how I was supposed to walk. Swing your arms, one friend told me.
Swivel your hips. “Women don’t swagger,” someone else told me. “We glide.” Like a lot of the advice I got early on about how to be a woman in the world, most of this turned out to be poppycock. (I was also told that I could never order baby back ribs in a restaurant again because, according to this expert, “Women don’t eat baby back ribs” — a rule I was relieved to learn was false.) Still, over time I discovered there is a distinction between walking in the world as male and as female, but it doesn’t have anything to do with swaggering or gliding.
