When I was nine, my mom wrote, “You have always enjoyed playing with girls’ toys and playing with girls and I know that sometimes you wish you were a girl. That’s OK. Josh, you can’t change your feelings.” Then, when I was sixteen, after coming out to them as gay at the time, she writes, “It’s not always easy being different. I bet that it’s really hard to be you most of the time — ‘the real Josh.’” The fact that my mom recognized me by trying to help me see my intrinsic self at times in my life when I started to lose touch with that shows how much she loved me and cared about my own truth. These letters were opened with anticipation and excitement whenever we would receive them. They embodied the unspoken feelings of my parents, of our family at challenging times when, depleted by the pressures of parenting and professional demands, they were not always able to discuss everything out in the open. The letters were reflective and motivational. Now, reading them again, I understand that they were writing to themselves as much as they were writing to me and my brothers.
My dad’s letters advise me to “surround myself with great people” and ask me to “understand and be patient with me as sometimes I try to rush you into acting your age or be a certain way.” Dad made an effort to tell me I was special, but he also admitted to wanting to control who I was through disciplining me, expecting me to behave with a maturity beyond my age or be more responsible as the eldest child in the family.
A consistent theme in these letters is apology. They are sorry for yelling, being mad at me, “losing my temper,” “crossing the line.” These behaviours established a pattern in my relationships with them for years to come. And my parents’ apologies have spilled into my relationships with others, where I feel cautious about people wanting to control me or encouraging me to be more like who they want me to be instead of simply being myself. They try to help me by telling me how to be someone who I’m not. I see through these gestures. People want me to be more similar to them to ease their discomfort.
My parents submitted me to the testing because they had questions about my identity and how best to support me. They were trying to help me. They had no idea that the type of testing Dr. Turner performed would be damaging. I was born at a time when most people didn’t understand what transgender meant, or know that trans people even existed. I was telling people at the young age of seven that God had made a mistake, that I was a girl living inside a boy’s body, because language didn’t exist to think about myself as something other than a girl or a boy. I would meet someone with my parents, and a proclamation would soon follow about my gender, to their embarrassment: “Oh, God made a mistake, you know? He really meant to make me a girl!”
I can remember feeling like a freak, like there was something seriously wrong with me whenever I saw my parents embarrassed in social situations. I’m sure they dismissed my declarations by saying that I was just confused: “You know how children are. Josh is a very creative child. This is just a phase. He’ll get over it.” I know that I told people God had made a mistake and that I was meant to be a girl because I could see only two options for gender: I could be a boy or I could be a girl, there was nothing else. Why wouldn’t my parents seek help if I was saying this consistently at age seven?
I didn’t learn about Dr. Turner’s diagnosis until I was in my thirties, recalling pain and trauma from the experience, and I finally asked my parents what had happened. They told me that Dr. Turner had diagnosed me as a “cross-dresser,” noting that I would always want to dress in “women’s clothing” unless corrective measures were enacted to fix, or convert, my gender confusion back into the identity of a boy. She told my parents that they should enrol me in boys’ sports, that my dad should spend more time with me, and that they should encourage me to play with boys my age.
At that time, the only term for trans people used in medical discourse was transsexual, which described people who transition to match their gender identity often opposite to sex assigned at birth. Non-binary expression was understood back then only as a form of “cross-dressing”; Dr. Turner and her colleagues simply could not see anything beyond the binary.
Still, it was shocking to discover that Dr. Turner had instructed my parents to “fix” me using gender corrective measures that would help me be more like a “normal” boy. Otherwise, she warned, our family would continue to face “issues” and “problems” with my gender identity and the way I expressed myself. What damaged me for so long was that her testing had a goal to correct my identity, to convert me into a “normal” boy. But, I wasn’t a boy and I wasn’t a “cross-dresser.” I honestly can’t say how successful she was, or speak to what measures she enacted to achieve her goal of “curing” my gender-creative self. I just know how the trauma has haunted me from that time, initiating a split of self that caused a dangerous and destructive form of self-hatred and lack of self-worth. Thankfully, my parents didn’t follow the corrective measures she recommended. They didn’t entirely believe that Dr. Turner’s diagnosis was accurate, and instead chose to see me as I was. It’s an understatement to say that I’m thankful for their decision to reject Dr. Turner’s instructions to convert me into a “normal” boy. I’m not sure that I would have survived if they had forced me to be a certain way.
At my request, they enrolled me in ballet and local theatre and they didn’t object to the fact that my best friends were all girls, Kristin in particular, who was my best friend in elementary school and with whom I felt like I could be myself, the gender-creative expressive weird kid. And I did play some sports as a child — baseball, basketball, soccer, and tennis. The understanding seemed to be that I would benefit from the exertion of my physical body with other bodies that appeared like mine, playing with “other” boys, as if sweating it out on the field would somehow begin to reshape me into the boy they had imagined when they named me Josh. But even when I was playing with other boys, I still didn’t feel like I belonged. I can remember one night, while driving home from a basketball game, my mom saying to me, “The mother sitting next to me at the game tonight asked me if you were a boy or a girl.” Embarrassed, I asked why this woman would say that. Mom smiled and looked at me. “I told her you are a boy, but that you are pretty for a boy. She said you had a very soft face.” I responded with a smile and turned my gaze to the blackness outside the car window. If a person who knew nothing about me thought I was a girl, then why was I trying to hide my truth by playing sports with the boys? It was all so confusing, as I struggled to make sense of other people’s thoughts and feelings about me. They wanted me to be a boy, the one they called Josh, while I struggled to hold on to the gender-creative child, the Joshua that I knew was inside me.
* * *
• • •
As the years passed, the medical interventions continued. I can’t count the number of general physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, and counsellors that I saw during my childhood and adolescence. I can’t remember all of them, but I know there were at least a dozen people who examined me, mostly related to my gender identity disorder (more accurately called gender dysphoria now) and depression as a child. Therapy is necessary for some people, and I am grateful for the therapy now in my adult life, but being medically examined and dissected by others at a young age was traumatic and caused me to lose parts of myself.
And it turns out there was never anything wrong with me, or with other trans people. Gender dysphoria is no longer classified as a mental disorder in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 (DSM-5). Gender dysphoria is a distress, not a disorder or a disease. It is diagnosed when a person cannot achieve an alignment between the gender identity that they think and feel is who they truly are and the assigned-sexed body that they were born into. And much of this distress comes from the overwhelming pressure arising from the media and our culture about sex and gender. Part of my own distress comes from the social expectations people have about my identity and my body and the way these expectations are enforced upon me, somet
imes in violent and dehumanizing ways.
Many people struggle to make sense of this distress from an early age. And medical professionals are only now beginning to understand that trans kids are diverse. Some kids are binary-identified trans girls and trans boys, while others are gender-creative, gender-nonconforming, or identify with a non-binary or gender-fluid identity. The immense pressure from cultural scripts — from our families, teachers, friends, and the media — makes it impossible for some of us to truly understand who we are, our identity, particularly when we are children. We are inundated, from a very young age, with cultural messages that focus on the gender binary. The binary separation of boys from girls splits us into only two possible ways of being. Instead of just being who we are, we are pushed to fit into the mould of boys’ or girls’ clothes, toys, washrooms, sports, careers, classes, language, behaviour, bodies, hairstyles, clothing, music — the list is endless.
It’s overwhelming for some children, maybe all children, to be flooded with the either-or enforced gendered subjectivity. It isn’t just trans kids who are adversely affected by the binary.
There is nothing natural about the culture that has been created around dividing people into one or the other gender. In fact, we do this with everything. It’s easier for some people to understand life if we separate everything into either-or. It’s easy to count the masses, categorize and control people, if we are divided into two.
Culture is far from a natural order, and gender is a cultural construct. It doesn’t exist without us bringing it into existence through language, behaviour, repeated actions, and scripts. The way we think about gender today is different from a few decades ago, and it will change again. But we are, in part, stuck now in our current cultural understanding, which we project even into the future in speculative fiction, television, and film, presenting an unrealistic binary-based version of sex and gender as if the current model of binary sex and gender would even apply a hundred or two hundred years from now.
Joshua (my gender-creative self) turned into Josh (the identity that was determined for me) and the “male” sex assignment controlled the way people referred to me, the way people thought about me, and eventually how I started to understand myself. I was assigned a “male” sex at birth based on . . . what, exactly? Think about this for a moment. We allow our physical anatomy, particularly what is on the surface of our bodies, to dictate the way we identify with our sex, gender, and even sexuality throughout our life. Our genitalia literally places us under a certain set of medical, sexual, relationship, marriage, and behavioural terms that we never get to choose in the first place. Rarely do we stop to question why our external genitalia should matter so much for our identity. The physician makes a snap judgement based on a quick glance and then our identity is stamped by the script meant to keep us contained and easily counted as human beings. The script of “there are only two sexes” establishes itself as fact and we become acceptable babies on either side of the binary.
And just as my assigned male sex made me a boy, my sexuality was assumed to be heterosexual, because this is considered the default — any other identity for sexuality has to be declared. Heteronormativity, a term to describe the automatic assumption that people are heterosexual, also establishes itself as an unquestioned fact. It’s overwhelming to consider the baggage that this creates for everyone, not just for trans people.
I think about little Joshua. The Joshua who danced and sang so freely to the Jem theme song, Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop” and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and Madonna’s “Vogue” and “Express Yourself.” I explored who I was by dressing up in a variety of clothing to express my fluid gender identity. With my two brothers, Adam and James, I would create fantastical characters — one called Power Girl stands out — and we would put on performances for my parents inspired by the props and costumes we played with. James, nicknamed “Peanut” by my parents, is four years younger than me. His inquisitive and playful mind was apparent to me at a young age. Both brothers were open to expressing our expressive selves at this age.
It was a safe time from the ages of four to eight. It was a time when my gender expression was treated as a part of my free child spirit instead of a problem. I used to love spinning around and around while dancing with my brothers, the space around me blurring into a beautiful picture of complexity to match how I was feeling. The world was too slow to catch up to my spinning. I was existing in my own space, spinning around in a circle, feeling the rush of my energy in an in-between space where I felt free. Then I had to stop the spinning, snap back to reality and what awaited me in the years ahead. I was me back then. My spirit was able to breathe before the medical intervention that destroyed a piece of me.
I was lost within myself, in the layers of examination, the projected confusion from my parents, friends, teachers, and people in the community, simply for being different. Why couldn’t I just exist as I was? I got lost in the darkness; each test dimmed the light of my spirit more and more. In the lines of others’ scripts and stories, not my own, I was forced to accept a false narrative, one that made sense for others but not for me.
I became so tired of being the Josh that was created for me at birth. It is exhausting to be someone else, an identity that isn’t your own. Saying “Josh,” hearing “Josh,” seeing Josh, and accepting he/him/his pronouns made me feel foreign to my own self. I had to excavate myself out of the foundation of being that was built for me without my say.
two
The Fluidity
The emergence of the word non-binary to describe gender identity and gender expression happened relatively recently. It grew out of a space of reclamation, of carving out a place for our recognition from the shadows of our erasure. We had to actualize our identity within language. Non-binary has now become part of our lexicon.
I found a home in the word non-binary because it welcomed my fluid gender. I feel safe with the meaning of non-binary, a word that signals space to allow for change and growth. Non-binary is, for me, about fluidity. Comfort is important when it comes to our identities. Yet my gender identity and gender expression haven’t always been the same, and they will no doubt change multiple times throughout my life. Non-binary’s promise exists in its potential to be an inclusive term, to offer a safe home for those of us who shift identities throughout our lives. My gender, and the way that I express myself, isn’t static, but my identity as non-binary can be fixed throughout my life. Although, I’m not entirely sure that my identity will remain fixed. This might be confusing. Actually, I’m sure it’s all a bit confusing!
Let me first explain what I mean by feeling certain about being non-binary while still having a fluid gender and a gender expression that shifts with time. I don’t think that I was born with a non-binary identity. You are likely familiar with the “born this way” narrative that’s been used by the LGBTQ community to encourage acceptance and tolerance when it comes to our human rights and equal rights. Well, it’s become an almost immutable narrative to explain how trans identity works. The “born this way” story emphasizes that trans people have always been trans, because we are born with our identities in the first place. For example, according to this concept, most trans women and trans men are born with a gender identity as either a man or a woman, but this gender identity doesn’t always match their sex assigned at birth. And some non-binary people feel that they were born non-binary. This is the truth for much of our community, and it is perfectly valid.
My feeling is different. I wasn’t born with an awareness of my gender identity. You know that I was assigned a “male” sex at birth; however, this was not the sex that I identified with, and the gender identity of “boy” or “man” that goes along with an assigned male sex felt completely false to me. I wasn’t truly born with a gender identity, because gender is self-determined. The “born this way” narrative is necessary to challenge the less acceptable view that we can simply choose our own identities. I know
that it’s helpful to suggest that all trans people are born with our gender identity because then it isn’t a choice, and acceptance should necessarily follow. But does this really work for all of us? If we are all born with a gender identity, then how do some of us change this identity throughout our lifetimes? Acceptance shouldn’t be contingent on our identities remaining static and immutable throughout our lives.
It is in the act of coming out that we declare our identity, one that was there from birth and usually remains the same throughout our lives. But I think we can come out multiple times, because change is a part of what makes us human. In fact, I have to constantly come out so that people won’t use incorrect pronouns to refer to me. I wish that, when I met people, I wouldn’t have to assert my gender identity over and over again to avoid discomfort and embarrassment.
Let’s have that talk about pronouns. They seem to be one of the aspects of trans identity that cisgender people, or non-trans people, struggle with most. People are curious about pronouns. But there is also stress related to using the correct ones, a fear or panic that cis, and even some trans people, have when it comes to referring to us. We all operate under what we like to think is an unchanging and stable language that informs the way we speak about one another. The two available pronouns that we are conditioned to use from a very young age — he and she — represent one of the most powerful and pervasive components of language. And now that gender-neutral pronouns (particularly they/them/their) have become part of our vernacular for people who identify beyond the binary, I want to calm some fears based on my own experience.
Me, Myself, They Page 3