Man Trousers.

Weird places I have celebrated my birthday over the years:

1994, age 8: Netley Marsh Steam Fair
2002, age 16: Stay Beautiful (in retrospect, my 21 year old not-boyfriend getting 'Barely Legal' dedicated to me was maybe a bit creepy)
2007, age 21: Tottenham Job Centre (aka The Day I Memorised My National Insurance Number, due to having to write it out no fewer than 23 times in a two hour appointment)
2014, age 28: Wood Green.

You may laugh, but I stand by my choice of birthday activities. I have been trying to steal Straight Best Friend's trousers for years now, ever since I hemmed them, tried them on to check whether they were hanging right, and discovered that man trousers are the most comfortable trousers in trouser town, make me look like Katherine Hepburn, and also have pockets as deep as the ocean. Seriously, you could fit a fucking marrow in those things. Sadly, it turns out that they are in fact his only pair of trousers, so their theft is unlikely to go unnoticed.

And my birthday was the day I realised that I could sidestep this whole apparel-appropriation attempt and just... go to a man shop to buy me some man trousers.

Now: due to having hippie parents (and old ones at that), a 'unique' dress sense, a big mouth and a big brain, my childhood was basically a crash course in People Are Going To Look At You Funny, It's Really Not Worth Getting Embarrassed.

Furthermore, I never stop banging on about restrictive gender roles and the irrational separation of clothing, behaviours, toiletries, jobs, emotions (I could go on! If you'd like!) into MALE and FEMALE piles.

And yet, wandering through the gentleman's department of Next, holding pairs of trousers up against myself to try to gauge what size I might be, and striding up to the changing rooms with several pairs slung over my arm: I got some weird looks. And I felt them.

It's not like they were enough to halt my quest for the perfect man trouser. Or enough to make me lie and say I was shopping for my boyfriend/brother/whatever. But it's interesting: this is how culture gets transmitted, norms and values and what we as a collective deem it okay to do. Thou Shalt Not Kill is inscribed in statute; Thou Shalt Wear Gender-Appropriate Clothing is inscribed in sidelong looks and half-hidden sniggers.

It's worth noting that I got off incredibly lightly, relatively speaking - a lady doing man stuff is always more acceptable than vice versa (because man stuff is obviously better, why wouldn't you want to move up the ladder? Whereas lady stuff is inherently inferior and a man choosing to move down the universal pecking order makes everyone nervous.). A femme-enough lady wearing dudely clothing is vaguely eccentric, but a stone butch in the same trousers is more often the subject of ridicule, disgust, and scorn. I'm thinking of Eddie Izzard shoplifting make up, not because he didn't have the money, but because he didn't fancy being outed as a transvestite at 15 in a town where the girl behind the till in the chemist knows everyone you know.

So I'm not telling this story to elicit pity - wahh! It is so hard to be me, shop assistants looked askance when I bought man trousers! - but to build a bridge, I suppose. To notice those little moments in your own life which are a flickering shadow of bigger oppressions that blight other people's.

I got the trousers. They are epic.