Flat Hunting in Shoreditch

I was recently viewing flats in Shoreditch with my great-aunt’s godson (my god-uncle?), who is moving to the big city. At one address we were welcomed into a smart ex-council flat by Clarissa – cheerful, blonde-haired, in a black and white polka-dotted dress. Though Clarissa’s bra-straps were visible, and the bra itself seemed to be housing protuberances of some variety, incipient stubble and an imperfectly suppressed laryngeal rumble told us what the previous day’s text-message exchange never could have.

Flats in the trendy East End get snapped up before you can say ‘Shoreditch High Street’. Securing one requires a day of traipsing and text-messaging, and a decision by the next morning. With 15 minutes to look around before hurrying off to the next viewing, beyond essentials – price, location, flatmates, bad smells, can you imagine sleeping in a room with that colour curtains? – you end up relying on gut feeling: an instinctive sense of whether this is a flat where things go well or go wrong, sharpened and heightened only by having put yourself through the whole process several times before. Which is why I was there.

One of the things you must judge is how reliable the prospective landlord is: whether faulty appliances will be speedily replaced, or generate months of wrangling; whether, once tucked away in his or her wallet, you have a hope of seeing your deposit again.

The learnt expressions of integrity, honesty and amiability are – it’s no secret – to a great extent gender-specific (wouldn’t alarm bells have been ringing the day before if the text-messages adorned with ‘xxx’s and ending ‘I can’t wait to meet you! ;)’ had been signed, not ‘clarissa’, but ‘charlie’?).

These outward expressions are the ones we exaggerate at job interviews, when speaking to a group, and on being introduced to someone for the first time – all the situations in which transgenders fare worst. As for this prospective landlord, his or her individual idiosyncrasies – the hair-toss, the hand-flaps, the yet-to-be-mastered mince, the drawl – coagulated under the instinctive gaze of my gut into one outlandish affectation: that of a man pretending to be a woman. This discounted, there was nothing left to go on.

I told my god-uncle he should take the flat – you can afford to be experimental when advising others. But, in overruling my initial unease as discriminatory, I couldn’t help feeling I was consigning experience itself to the flames.

Image by Robin Grant courtesy of Flickr