A Point of View: Gender on My Nails 

When my wife began her transition – four years into our marriage and eight years into our relationship – I had a lot of feelings. Most of them were no surprise: I felt afraid, isolated, and confused.

I also experienced a few feelings that came as a shock, though. The biggest one was jealousy.

As my wife began exploring her identity as a woman in the world, my brain kept saying, “Why does she get to paint her nails green?” I hadn’t painted my nails in years at that point and could only recall having done it for prom and our wedding.

“Why does she get to go out clothes shopping at the mall with girlfriends?” Most of my work clothes came from the thrift store down the road, at which Washington, DC’s upper-class white women dropped off their gently used LOFT, Ann Taylor, and White House Black Market items.

“Why does she get to wear colorful floral prints?” My closet was filled with black, navy, and grey. 

Eventually, I noticed the silent ending to all of these questions: “Why does she get to do these things…and I don’t?”  

Once I heard that coda, the uncomfortable truth set in. No one was stopping me from painting my nails, shopping at the mall, or wearing colors, but myself. I knew myself to be a serious, career-focused woman who did not align with many traditionally feminine activities, and so by my own order – and by that of the patriarchy within which we all live – that meant I lived in a woman-box of bare nails, black blazers, and brown ballet flats.

Given the dichotomy between the pink paisley of the women I grew up among and the navy pencil skirts of the women I worked among, my choice felt clear, even if it was unconscious. I just didn’t especially like the options, once I identified them.

Noted DEI leader Lily Zheng said in their interview with the Women at Work podcast that trans people’s presence in cis people’s lives can be “a deeply liberating experience” that allows cis people “to see someone and go: wow, I could do that too.” The first time I said the silent part out loud of all my “why does she get to” questions, I heard Lily in the response: “Wow, I could do that too.” 

There was nothing stopping me but my own fear of leaving my woman-box, and as my wife’s transition progressed, I went truly wild. I bought sparkly blue nail polish and discovered that I loved painting my nails when I had choices other than pink, red, and clear. I went out to the store and bought myself a floral blouse that was not only green but red and pink and blue. This year, I even bought a pair of noisy boots!

All of this may seem like low stakes, but it remains for me a clear lesson in the false, invisible walls of gender that many of us cisgender people take for granted — even when we chafe against them. The binary I saw in being a pink paisley woman or being a navy pencil skirt woman was fake and rooted in internalized misogyny that could not possibly fathom a serious person in a feminine-coded color. And if those were the only two options, how could blue fingernails have even come into question?

Gender is not a binary nor even a spectrum, but a universe, and the presence of trans people at home, in the workplace, and everywhere else is a reminder of this. For some cis people, that reminder is terrifying. For others, it is liberatory and that liberation is life-changing. I am grateful to the trans people in my life for many reasons, but that liberation is among them. And having received it, I am pledged to work for their liberation as well, in all the ways that my cisgender identity allows me.