I Bought the Action Figure at 50: A Trans Man's Story of Reclaiming the Boyhood He Never Had

I was forty-seven when I bought my first action figure. It was a Spider-Man — the classic red and blue, fully articulated, the kind with the joints you can pose. I stood in the Target aisle for ten minutes holding it, turning it over, feeling the weight of the plastic in my palm. A grown man. Gray in his beard. Holding a toy. And what I felt wasn't embarrassment. It was grief so sharp and clean it cut through everything else.

I had wanted action figures my entire childhood. I had wanted the superhero bedsheets. I had wanted to play in the dirt and scrape my knees and be called 'buddy' by a dad who saw a son. None of that happened. Because I was a girl, and girls didn't get action figures. Girls got dolls with brushable hair and outfits that taught you how to be looked at. I learned to perform femininity the way other kids learned multiplication — by rote, under threat, with no understanding of why it mattered except that getting it wrong had consequences. The Spider-Man sat on a shelf in a room I wasn't allowed to exist in. For thirty-five years.

Transitioning at forty-six meant learning to be a man in public. Learning the handshake, the nod, the way men take up space in a room — and also the way they make space for each other, the unspoken rules of recognition and respect that nobody teaches you when you weren't raised in them. But it also meant learning to be a boy in private. A boy who got to pick out his own toys. A boy who could be loud and messy and not apologize for it. A boy whose interests weren't policed by someone else's idea of what a girl should want. That boy had been waiting since 1976. When I finally let him out, he had forty years of catching up to do.

I now have a collection of action figures. They're on a shelf in my home office. Some people find it odd — a fifty-year-old man with superhero toys. But those toys are not about the man I am. They're about the boy I wasn't allowed to be. Every figure I buy is a letter to that kid: I see you. You were always real. You deserved a childhood, and I'm giving you one now — as much of one as I can, one action figure at a time. It's never too late to be the boy you were. The toys are the evidence. The joy is the proof.

— A reader of The Unadulting Society

About The Unadulting Society

The Unadulting Society is a collective of writers, advocates, and lived-experience experts exploring what adulthood looks like when you reject the milestone factory and build a life that actually fits. We publish community voices alongside our regular contributors to make sure as many perspectives as possible find a home here. If you have a story to share about reclamation, recovery, or the radical act of staying soft, we'd love to hear from you.