We all remember the freedom we felt as children, the purity and innocence we felt about the world and the people around us. There is a magic in childhood. We grow up boxing ourselves in, reducing ourselves, slipping into comfortable spaces and identities to carry on with our lives, and for some of us this simply doesn’t work. Being told who you are creates suffering. We can lose touch with ourselves. This leads to a painful existence.
I was always in search of something that felt lost. But the truth is that I’ve been there all along. I was just lost to myself. I’m ready to share me, myself, and they, with you.
We emerge, though always here
Renewing liminality
Eschewing rationality
Abandoning humanity’s sea of fear
Swimming in fluid subjectivity free
as my self with others who are not, never, others
Unbroken from assignments
Untamed from narratives amassed from masses
Free in fluidity, eternally
one
The Child
I can recall almost every detail of the room. The shadows holding layered depths of suffering that filled every inch. A large window overlooking a nearby park suggested something, some life, existing beyond this claustrophobic space, where I began to think that I was wrong, out of order, incomplete.
My body didn’t feel sick, and yet I was being treated as though I was ill. This is the very bottom of a reservoir of trauma collected in my body, in my mind, that will never leave. There were tests, measures, questions, penetrating gazes, photographs, bloodwork. Emotions overwhelm me recalling this room. The space holds waves of sadness, confusion, and pain. Why?
Little Joshua — or, at the time, little Josh — a confused eight-year-old child, sat in this room with a large toy house. It was almost big enough to climb inside. The house was hard to ignore, beckoning me to think beyond the clinical space that I occupied. Other toys lay scattered across the floor and spilled out of boxes. It was a space of illusion, and I could feel it. A medical fix was being spun to dispel my “sickness,” my foolish, childish, “gender-creative” self, and to enforce a false narrative that determined who I should be in adulthood.
Sitting across from me was Dr. Turner, a woman in her early senior years with short, curled white hair, round glasses that sat on the edge of her nose, and a slight smile. She seemed kind enough. Dr. Turner encouraged me to play while she observed my behaviour and asked questions. I had no choice but to open myself up to her “testing.” During each session, I held on to a three-inch plastic toy. This toy had the exemplar “Barbie” body that was supposed to represent women, the narrow representation that we are taught at a young age to read as female: breasts, long hair, small hips, and a shapely yet slim figure. I picked this toy time and time again out of the hundreds of options in the room. I clung to this tiny plastic figure during my sessions with Dr. Turner, even as I had the feeling that I was being studied. Over the course of my visits, I began to feel like some sort of alien or monster from the cartoons that I watched on television, as though I must have something to hide. Was there something I didn’t know about myself? Was there something deeply wrong about me?
I didn’t realize at the time what was happening, but I was being tested because of my gender-creative expression and identity. Gender-creative is a term for a kind of gender nonconformity in which children can be free to explore their gender expression and identity across a spectrum of possibilities not limited to the binary, and not be told who to be. In the late 1980s, gender creativity was considered an abnormality. Testing me, the human being, the child that I was, carved a hole out of me and ripped from me the self I was born to be. Slowly, I was becoming aware of the conflict between my identity and what people thought I should be simply because of the body that I was born into.
The gender testing with Dr. Turner went on for months. I was studied like an animal in a laboratory. I became the aberration, soaking up a sense of dehumanization with every sting of the needle that took my blood, the pages and pages of questions that made up antiquated psychological tests, and ink-blot Rorschach images that were flashed in front of my face illustrating monsters for the child “monster.” I worried that the world would disappear from under my feet if I gave the wrong answer, or that people might suddenly rush into the room to take me away from my parents, from my home. This process stripped away the curious and creative Joshua, it stole away a part of me, and instead I became an object of study.
My parents always switched places with me at the end of these tests. I would sit alone outside Dr. Turner’s office on a cold plastic chair, feeling confused, while they received their “directions” from the doctor. I can hear my mom’s muffled crying through the door. I see her worried face. I sense their desire for me to be “normal” like the son they expected, the boy named Josh they both thought they could hold on to for their entire lives.
* * *
• • •
My life began with a fiction. The script was crafted. Birth came with baggage that took me almost three decades to unpack: Joshua Mark Ferguson. And then an amendment to that script was drafted by Dr. Turner. I had somehow been living outside of the acceptable terms. But there was no sickness. This was the first of many instances in my life in which the truth of others tried to shape me into something else — another person or identity that was more other people’s fact than my own truth.
The tests were meant to make some sense of me, or to help my parents understand me. The more insidious aim was to correct me along the lines of a pathology, to recraft me into a “normal” child. I didn’t present to my parents with an urgency for health care intervention. I was gender-creative. There was nothing wrong with me. My gender creativity was right, not wrong. It was a perfectly valid form of exploration in my childhood, something akin to the experience of most children. Gender-creative children express themselves beyond what is expected according to the gender assigned to them at birth and the behaviour, mannerisms, and play that society assumes from boys or girls.
As a gender-creative child, I played with Barbies, was obsessed with the cartoon Jem and the Holograms, and knew every word of Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop,” which I would spin and dance to for hours on end at four years old. Jem was a favourite because the theme song, “Truly Outrageous,” was a fierce declaration of identity. At the beginning of every episode, I would stand up and prepare myself, barely able to contain my joy when the theme song started to play. My parents watched their four-year-old “boy” become excited by a fantasy of becoming this female cartoon character who had light-purple hair and pink makeup, with all of its 1980s punk-rock flair. They could see the joy in my eyes while I danced and sang along to the show. I was undeniably happy expressing myself in ways that weren’t expected of me and my gender assignment. I wanted to explore my identity through my expression, to be creative with my gender, and not wholly accept the expectations that I should like the cartoons, music, and activities that other “boys” around me were expected to like.
Though Dr. Turner’s tests instilled in me a deep self-hatred, I don’t blame my parents for subjecting me to them. I blame the system. I was born in the early 1980s, when all trans people were classified as having a mental illness. To be “transgender” meant that a person was sick, an idea that persists as a way to strip us of our human dignity. The only way parents could understand children who presented confusion about their gender identity or sex was through the lens of the medical system and the dominant societal understanding. The gender testing that I experienced existed in a framework of pathology that led in one direction only: towards “gender identity disorder” (as it was called in the 1980s). There was nothing in the medical lexicon that would allow for an understanding of gender identity and expression beyond “boy” and “girl.”
The conceptual framework employed by physicians and specialists in medical and therapeutic fields has evolved significan
tly since that time. Today, trans kids don’t necessarily face the same dehumanizing and objectifying methods that broke me as a child. However, many trans people are still being subjected to a process known as gender conversion therapy (also known as gender reparative therapy, or cure therapy), a regressive and transphobic practice denounced by health organizations around the world. Gender conversion therapy aims to “cure” children and adults by repressing their identity and converting them into the boy or girl identity assigned at birth. This attempted conversion of trans children still occurs despite the widely adopted health care standard for treating gender dysphoria (the current and acceptable medical definition for people experiencing emotional and psychological distress related to the sex and correlated gender assigned at birth) that simply accepts and supports trans children for who they are. Conversion forces trans kids to try to accept the gender they were assigned at birth in much the same way that the medical profession once attempted — and still does in some places in the world — to convert gays and lesbians to heterosexuality.
It was almost three decades later, while writing this book, that I realized I was a victim of the now widely and justly condemned gender conversion therapy. It is a stamp on the very essence of who I am. It is a stamp on my spirit. This “therapy” was the beginning, at age eight, of an incessant dehumanization that became a burden almost impossible to bear. A child should never be damaged by having their very identity, individuality, ripped from them. This wound will be with me forever. A monster of hate and shame took its painful shape within me.
* * *
• • •
There are gaping holes in the fabric of my childhood memories. The pervasive testing, the wounds that were made by breaking me as a child, and the trauma that ensued account for these failures. They are suspicious blanks that are inaccessible. Perhaps these blockages save me from pain and enable me to move forward with my life. These memories may never be found. They’ve vanished to help me survive. It disturbs me. Some of the smells, colours, emotions, and words that make up our many moments and that others seem to be able to recollect in vivid details are gone. Much of my life seems to be gone, tucked away, and trauma has taken its place.
Yes, I was born into an incorrect sex assignment and correlated gender identity. I was born into a gender already manufactured. But I was born from two very beautiful people whose love for me transcended all the confusion, even their own. Two people who always accepted me, despite trying to help me in the damaging way they thought best. These two people, Mark and Kimberly, followed their dreams, created a beautiful family, and did their best as parents in spite of their own challenging histories.
My father’s favourite photograph of himself shows him in a kilt, wearing all the Scottish accessories you can imagine, and holding a high-quality replica of the sword from Braveheart. My dad studied biology at McGill University and met my mom, Kimberly, while they were both at university in Montreal. He was a fish and wildlife biologist with the Ministry of Natural Resources in Ontario. Later, he worked for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. None of my friends’ parents did anything nearly so interesting, and the uniqueness of his work life intrigued me. I was proud to have a father who was an expert in his field. His professional passion to protect fish and wildlife habitats influenced how I was raised, and I spent much of my time in the outdoors. He taught me to notice and respect non-human sentient beings. I gained an appreciation for the sensitive systems at play in habitats, and how human beings have endangered nature and sentient life. Although he worked within a system of government enacting policy and law, he was propelled by a passion in his work as a biologist that inspired me to care deeply about enacting change, to use knowledge and voice in action to make a difference. Both of my parents, each in their own way, are caretakers of nature, the land, and people.
My father is a sensitive man, well-read and well-educated, with a sharp intellect, one that was frequently challenged by me. His background in science meant that we had some heated debates when I began to engage with philosophical thought, but it was healthy to grow up with a parent who challenged me intellectually. During my childhood and adolescence, it felt like a constant struggle with my dad, and not simply because I was gender-creative. As a child, I was challenging, a bit wild, sensitive, emotional, and curious. My parents have often said over the course of my life that I was “difficult,” and that hasn’t always been entirely fair. I think it’s easy for parents to label a child “difficult” without ever wanting to understand the source of the difficulty.
I know that I overwhelmed my dad with being a “difficult” kid. I get that it wasn’t easy to raise a kid who expressed their gender beyond what was expected of me and said things like “I think God made a mistake with my body.” I know that it couldn’t have been easy on either of my parents. I tested them, pushed them, disobeyed them, and made them worry about me. I get it. But being told you are a “difficult” child places sole responsibility for the behaviour directly on you, rather than looking at the whole family structure and how it contributes to why the child is difficult in the first place. Kids soak up everything; we don’t give them enough credit for how aware they are, starting at a very young age.
I was my parents’ first child, born to them in their mid-twenties, and we lived in a small apartment in Brantford for the first year of my life. Apparently, I cried so loud at night that even the neighbours complained, and my parents had to pad the bottom of the door to my room with towels to get a little rest. I’m not a parent, so I wouldn’t know exactly how exhausting it is to have children. And I’ve never been sure if my parents calling me “difficult” was related to my gender-creativity and all the social pressures they must have faced because of it, or if I was just a child who challenged my parents as their first-born.
I know most parents need space from their children; they need time to themselves. But I was always deeply aware of my dad’s need to distance himself, and it bothered me. There were times when he lost his patience with me as I frequently questioned the order of things and asserted myself. I felt as though he had to shut himself down to get away from his “difficult” child. Their bedroom door would close, and the house would go dark sometimes. I’m not sure he ever understood how much this distancing isolated me even more.
Nevertheless, he never failed to accept me. I wasn’t forced away from my home because of my queer sexuality or gender nonconformity. And, thanks in part to a cultural shift that saw a greater social acceptance of LGBTQ people in the early 2000s and led to a broader understanding, both of my parents embraced my difference and let go of the guilt they had carried for trying to tame a child like me. My dad has always loved me. He loves me for who I am, including my non-binary identity, even though it brought him a great deal of worry and it wasn’t always easy.
My mom, Kimberly, was born and raised in York, Pennsylvania, and her family had deep roots in the city. She was a beautiful woman from a young age, and her beauty leaves an impression on everyone she meets. She has sharp, deep-green eyes with yellow rings around the pupils that look like the brightest sun coming out to greet you from deep within the forests of her soul. And, her smile. Her smile is a circle of happiness that carries forth her bellowing laugh, which always makes me feel love. She’s a free spirit with a deep heart-well.
In her professional life, my mom was a caretaker, not unlike my dad. But instead of caring for nature and wildlife, she channelled her kindness and compassion into taking care of people. She became a registered nurse in her early twenties working in emergency rooms, sometimes in rural areas, and so she was frequently confronted with suffering and mortality. She transitioned to serving in a forensic ward as a mental health nurse when I was a child. I have always been proud of her and impressed by her ability to treat mentally ill people. She is nurturing but she is also tough when she needs to be.
My mother is a deeply resilient and powerful woman. She survived both sexual abuse and viole
nce in her childhood home, and she struggled for decades with undiagnosed mental illness. When I was a young adult, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was the first of her three children, and her feminine beauty comforted me in a house full of masculine energy, and it somehow made me feel less alone. I can see myself in her eyes and her face, reflecting parts of me, reminding me of where I came from. She always saw me, saw herself within me, but she worried deeply about me, especially when I was young. Perhaps she worried about the parts of her that she had to hide to survive the suffering of her own upbringing. A part of me — the free soul aching to fly — might have scared her because it reminded her painfully of her own need to conform to survive in a different time, in a different generation.
During my adolescent years, my parents’ marriage began to break down. My parents were always apologizing to me, while at the same time calling me “special” for my free spirit, for my academic accomplishments at an early age, and for my expressive personality. Since I was both “special” and “difficult,” I grew up feeling like both a gift and a burden to my family.
My parents wrote me letters sporadically over the years, mostly at Christmastime, from the time when I was about six. I’d always wondered why they wrote out their feelings rather than communicating verbally, so I asked them while reflecting for this book. They wanted me to have a record, they said, a memory of my childhood years and how our relationship evolved. The letters — they wrote to my brothers, as well — were a gift to us. Each letter was meant to capture a particular moment in the life of our family. In reality, the conflicting perspective on my “special” and “difficult” personality was framed within these letters. I would read them over and over again. And often I would tear them up whenever I faced challenges with my parents. Destroying their words felt empowering, an outlet for my frustration with their frustration, and it made me feel more in control of their criticism. The tears in these letters, now yellowed by the ageing tape keeping them together, represent a tension I faced at home, too.
Me, Myself, They Page 2