A new woman

Diana Thomas’s transgender diary

You may recall how Jeremy Clarkson was moved to fisticuffing fury by being denied a nice, hot meal one evening. Now imagine how he would have felt if his hapless producer had said, ‘Look, Jez, I’m really sorry, but there’s no hot food. And, ah… it’s not just tonight. I’m afraid hot food’s off the menu… for ever.’

Or consider the Vesuvian eruption of semiliterate Twittery from the @POTUS account if an aide ever told Donald Trump, ‘Bad news, Mr President. The world supply of fake tan has been exhausted. Oh… and we’re flat out of gingery-blond hair dye. You’re on your own now, Sir.’

Well that’s how I’m feeling just now. And not just me, you can add every other trans woman who was ever a tall man. Not to mention all the tall women, who’ve never been anything else.

Sure, there are advantages to being a six-footer. You can reach high shelves and see over crowds. And then there are the legs. Say what you like about us human giraffes, but we have pins that just won’t quit.

The cons, though, are obvious. If I put on heels, I’m suddenly sixthree or four. It’ll be hard enough to find a man, whatever happens. But finding a man who’s taller than me… suffice it to say that whenever I see a picture of Penny Lancaster towering over Rod Stewart, I think, ‘That’s me one day. If I’m lucky.’

But the real drag about being this tall is that a lot of clothes designed for average women just don’t work on us. I would love to have a wardrobe filled with neat little waisted dresses. Trouble is, the neat little waists sit halfway up my ribcage. Any jeans that don’t come in a ‘Long’ size are ankle-length, at best. and the only way to get tights whose crotch rises much above knee-high is to buy Sasquatch-sized ones that contain suffilycra cient to stretch over those long legs I was bragging about. But if, like me, you were born with narboyish row, hips and slender, fat-free thighs (I appreciate that I’m not garnering much sympathy here), big tights may pull up high enough, but then they just slip right down again.

Above all, there’s the shoe problem. For tall women, whose feet are in proportion to the rest of their skeleton, finding nice shoes in a size nine and above is a nightmare.

Luckily, there’s always Long Tall Sally, which has, for 44 years, supplied plus-height females with jeans, waisted dresses that sit on waists and Ugly Sisters shoes that are pretty enough for Cinders.

Or there was Long Tall Sally. But now, thanks to that blankety-blanking corona-bug, LTS has run out of cash and will cease operations in August. And suddenly, tall girls and trans girls alike will have nowhere to buy their shoes.

Imagine, if you will, a world with no new shoes. That’s not just a crisis. That’s footwear Armageddon.

Oddly enough, I had a premonition that there might be trouble on LTS’S horizon. Back in February, doing a photo shoot for this very column, I left a big bag of my shoes at home by mistake. ‘No problem,’ I said, ‘we can get some size 10s biked over from the Long Tall Sally shop in Marylebone.’

But we couldn’t, because it had closed. So I added ‘LTS shoes’ to the long list of items I was tucking away in preparation for lockdown. And I’ve kept buying them ever since. The day the imminent demise of LTS was announced I snaffled another whole batch. Well, I might never be able to get basic ballet flats, loafers and espadrilles in my size again.

Evidently I wasn’t the only one. It’s taking ages for my last-ditch LTS footwear to arrive, because every other tall woman in Britain has had the same reaction as me and they’ve been swamped with orders.

This makes me wonder whether there isn’t a nine-to-13-sized gap in the market for a small, niche, onlinebased business selling a limited range of elegant, high-quality, jumbo footwear at mid-market prices. Just a bit cheaper than LK Bennett, say.

I’m too old and too lazy to start such a business myself. Plus I know nothing about the making or selling of shoes. But if anyone who does know needs a consultant to advise on What A Female Bigfoot Wants, I’d be happy to oblige.

Whenever I see a picture of Penny Lancaster towering over Rod Stewart, I think, ‘That’s me one day. If I’m lucky’