Perhaps I Should Have Paid More Attention at School

By Amanda J.

My schooldays ended almost half a century ago.  In the intervening period , practically every piece of knowledge that my long suffering teachers managed to plant in my brain has withered and died.  Declinations of Latin and Greek verbs, critical analysis of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, French grammar, geographic phenomena and much more are just hazy memories.  And those hazy memories are just that, in the dim and distant past, I learned about them – as for what I actually learned at the time, forget it.

To be honest, I’m not that bothered.  With the exception of French where what knowledge did manage to retain just about suffices for a day trip across The Channel and woodwork which gave me a good grounding for putting up shelves, nothing else was of any practical use to my subsequent life at all.  There were, however, two subjects that I not only enjoyed but was also reasonably good at – maths and physics – and which I carried on through university before ditching.  Unfortunately, though, I perhaps viewed these more as theoretical intellectual challenges than having much in the way of real world relevance; something that would return and bite me on the proverbial as I started to spread my feminine wings.

Let’s start with physics, and specifically gravity.  It’s a fact of life, blindingly obvious to us when we step onto the scales.  I can perhaps console myself that, on the moon, I’d weigh only 13.2kg/29lb but the reality on earth is around 6x that.  In fairness, apart from the shock of stepping onto the bathroom scales, gravity generally behaves itself.  With one unfortunate exception.

As a CDer, I love skirts, whether it’s the constriction from a pencil skirt as I walk or the flowing fabrics of a midi length skirt caressing nylon clad legs.  Legs are free to cosy up to each other (no true lady would dream of sitting with her legs apart) without the impediment that trousers normally impart.  Of course, trousers are an essential part of every woman’s wardrobe and I have been known to wear them as part of a feminine outfit but when the inner woman comes out to play, a skirt is a far more powerful reminder that maleness has been left behind.

But there’s a problem which I discovered during an early outing en femme.  Women are a different shape to men; think wider hips and slimmer waists.  Much though we dream of having the classic 36-24-36 figure, the reality for most of us is quite often that our waist size is equal to, or even greater than, our hip circumference.   As guys, we deal with this with belts and practically every pair of trousers we buy has loops for them.  For women, it’s different as they don’t really need them – a skirt cut for a 24 inch waist will not fit over 36 inch hips once the zip is done up and therefore remains resolutely in place.

Put a skirt on a guy, though, and the situation is markedly different.  Gravity starts tugging on the skirt almost straight away and, with nothing to impede its journey, it doesn’t take long for a skirt that should hang an inch or two above the knee to start hanging an inch or two below it.  And without urgent remedial action, it’ll just keep going down.

The bad news is that all of this could happen so quickly that it’s impossible to prevent once it starts.  We know this from the formula:

T = √(2 x d ÷ g)

Where T is the time the skirt takes to fall, d is the distance it falls and g is the acceleration due to gravity (9.8 m/s/s on earth).  So if the waistline of the skirt is 1 metre above floor level, it’ll take just 0.45 seconds for it to hit the ground.  Fortunately, friction and wind resistance slow things down a lot but I learned the hard way that there’s something rather unbecoming about hitching one’s skirt up to its rightful place in public (although admittedly not as unbecoming as it suddenly dropping to ankle level, a situation that mercifully I have not (yet) encountered) and, from that point on, it was strictly dresses only.

I could go on.  Newton’s third law – for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction – is a case in point although where CDing is concerned, the reaction often considerably outweighs the action that prompted it – think  wife’s reaction to her husband’s CDing confession!  To be honest, though, I think that’s enough physics for now.  As long as I stick to dresses, I should be OK.  Unfortunately, though, there’s still maths to contend with.  Let’s start with trigonometry…

As anyone with the fortitude to read my back catalogue of posts will quickly realise, I love my heels.  Some of my earliest memories are of lying in bed in the early 1960s and hearing the click-clack of stiletto heels on the pavement outside so it’s hardly surprising that as the inner woman started to make her presence known, high heels were top of the list of ‘must haves’.

Though I say it myself, I can walk pretty well in heels.  It hasn’t always been the case but practice makes perfect and I recently bought a pair of boots with four inch heels that I can walk around in without issue.  Even slender stilettos no longer phase me and so it was inevitable that when I broke free from the confines of the closet to mingle with others in the outside world, heels would be an essential part of my outfit.

But here’s the thing.  Heels present a significant challenge to legs and feet more used to little or no lift in footwear.  Take my new boots and their heel of 4 inches or 10cm as an example.  The height of the heel is generally measured at its highest point at the back and this means that the foot needs to be angled so that the ball of the foot is in contact with the ground.   This in turn the part of the foot between the ball and the ankle is now at an angle of around 38° depending on the shoe size.  If you’re interested (which, by now, you almost certainly aren’t), the formula is

Angle = arctan(h/l)*180/π

where h is the heel height and l is the distance between the back of the heel and the nearest point of contact between the sole and the ground.

Now women who have worn heels since their teens tend to have very flexible ankles – ballerinas on point being the most obvious example – whereas guys who’ve lived a lifetime in ‘flats’ do not.  But given time and perseverance, ankles do loosen up a bit and shoes with a decent, but not vertiginous, heel hight become within reach.

When I go out and about, I tend to park my car away from the house to reduce the chance of discovery – a random blonde leaving the house will not raise nearly as much suspicion among the neighbours as a random blonde driving the family car, especially when they know that Mrs A has brown hair.  So dressed in my finery, I leave the house on foot and walk up our drive onto the road.  Now, our driveway has an upward slope from the house of around 8° which means that, as I walk up in my heels, my ankle now needs 8° less flex than walking on the flat. Unfortunately, on the way back, it’s a different story as, walking downhill, I now need to add the slope angle onto the angle of my foot in the shoe.  Sadly, I learned this the hard way the first time I went out in my highest heels – I was fine walking around the house with them, the walk up the drive was a doddle as the 38° angle of the shoe reduced to just 30° but, as I returned, it quickly became apparent that my ankle would not tolerate the 46° flex needed to walk back down.  How I managed it remains a mystery but I have vague memories of going down sideways like a crab!

Sadly, that’s not the end of the mathematical conspiracy.  Probability has left a trail of destruction in the trans community and we ignore it at our peril.   When I studied maths, probability was my Achilles heel – I could never get the hang of it.  But I understand the basics.  Toss a coin and there’s a probability of 0.5, or 50%, that it’ll come down heads.  I also know that if you toss a coin ten times, it’ll be almost impossible for it not to come down heads at least once.  Again, if you’re interested, the probability is 0.5 to the power of 10 which is 0.00098 or 0.098% – less than one in 1000.  Toss the coin 20 times and the probability of it being tails every time drops to a miniscule one in a million.

By any stretch of the imagination, that’s pretty unlikely but ‘almost impossible’ does not mean the same as plain ‘impossible’.  There’s still a chance that the unthinkable will happen and it’ll be tails every toss.

‘Yeah, Mand’ I hear you say ‘but what relevance does this have to a bit of recreational CDing?’

Well, imagine for a moment that tossing a coin is analogous to spending a day en femme.  And imagine that the coin coming down heads is analogous to being discovered.  Whilst, with a bit of care on our part, the probability of being discovered is a lot lower than the probability of tossing heads, the basic method of calculation is the same and the more we take the risk, the more likely it is that we’ll get caught!

‘It’ll never happen to me, I’m too careful’ you protest.

I thought that too.  Despite Mrs. A knowing I do this, she doesn’t want anything to do with it and I have to keep it well away from our marriage.  It was only a chance text message about an imminent delivery that prompted me to change back into drab 11 minutes before she unexpectedly returned home from work feeling unwell.  Next time, I may not be so lucky!  And I know that many others have not been so lucky – being caught in the act or accidentally leaving laptops full of photos, items of clothing or receipts lying around and many other things have led to unwanted spousal discovery.

I’m sure you’ve got the picture by now.  Perhaps I should console myself with the fact that I took sufficient interest in these subjects at school to figure out exactly what was going wrong in my CDing life.  Or thank my lucky stars that I didn’t pursue advanced level biology at school and, in the process, avoided the need to reconcile the two genders taught in the syllabus with the 72 that a Google search suggests are now in existence.  Or maybe I should stop overthinking and just get out more.  But perhaps there are valuable lessons to be learned here, the main one being that ‘dress appropriately’ doesn’t only mean dressing to blend in; skirts will follow the route of least resistance to the ground , ‘killer’ heels were given that moniker for a good reason and there’s a simple rule of thumb that we all; need to follow – even if the chances of something bad happening while we’re all glammed up are one in a million, it’s the one we need to worry about, not the million!

But if you do throw caution to the wind and end up with your skirt around your ankles as you walk down a steep hill in agony before being confronted by a very angry wife, don’t say I didn’t warn you – we’re taught all of that boring stuff in school for a reason!