Pronouns are of vital importance to trans people because they are one of the primary agents of autonomy and social recognition that we have. Some trans people, rightfully so, become angry and offended by people who fail to use their pronouns when referring to them. Language for trans people can sometimes be violent — enforced upon us as our reality. The failure to use a person’s pronouns, or repeated misuse of pronouns, is called misgendering. And if the person doing the misgendering is intentionally enacting harm and harassing a trans person by using incorrect pronouns to insist that they adhere to their sex and gender assigned at birth, this could be classified as a form of transphobic violence enacted on trans people.
To be clear, if a person makes an honest mistake, and even continues to make mistakes but unintentionally and with full regret, then I wouldn’t consider this to be violent (though it can amount to laziness and disrespect). However, the deliberate refusal to acknowledge a trans person’s pronouns amounts to an outright rejection of their gender identity, which is their own. No one should be able to control another person’s identity. For me, it can be quite painful to consistently hear he/him/his when my pronouns are they/them/their.
Florian, my husband, took a couple of years to get into the habit of using my correct pronouns. Before I started coming out as non-binary, he habitually referred to me using he/him/his, for more than eight years. When I first came out as non-binary in 2015 and asked for they/them/their pronouns, these were not being used to the extent they are now, and he needed time to adjust to this new paradigm shift in his language. His mistakes were never malicious.
My family members have been a bit slower to adjust to the reality of my identity. It’s taking them much longer to use they/them/their, and when they slip back into old habits and say he/him/his, frankly, it kind of hurts. Cis people might find it difficult to understand the pain that trans people feel when we are misgendered by our family and friends even though we have afforded them time to adapt. This pain could be avoided if cis people would do the work to use pronouns for trans people in all conversations, not just when they’re around us, because then new habits would be formed. I practised patience with my family and friends for the first year or so, but I have made explicit note of my pronouns for almost four years now, so . . . what’s the problem?
I think part of the issue is that some people get too caught up in themselves when they make mistakes with pronouns. They tend to forget the person in front of them who is being invalidated by the language that is used. I’ve experienced it many times. A person’s ego gets wound up in the act of trying to use proper pronouns (or not trying at all), they make a mistake, and feel a sense of guilt. The person who used incorrect pronouns apologizes and feels bad, makes a point of saying how accepting they are, internalizes it, and the focus shifts from the actual trans person to the person who made the mistake. Instead, practising sensitivity about the trans person being spoken of, a consciousness of that person’s identity, should be the focus.
Everyone makes mistakes sometimes when it comes to pronouns. There are even times when I make honest mistakes when referring to other trans people. I genuinely believe, though, that many people who make mistakes do not mean them. It’s important to recode and rethink our language to recognize trans people, but this won’t happen if we push away people who are not meaning to do harm. We have to afford people time to work their way out of the language that has become habitual. We can’t isolate others to make our own isolation feel better.
Consider that we aren’t all born with our identities; some of us continue to evolve, and accept the flow of our lives and what feels truthful to us throughout our diverse experiences. If we accept the notion that gender identity is fluid rather than static, then we can change how we think about one another as infinitely evolving human beings. I have already experienced multiple genders and gender expressions during my life, some of which I express for just a short period of time. I wasn’t ever completely and fully a boy or a man. I was, and am, something else entirely.
I want to play with my identity. I think of it as creative, not controlled — free and floating in a sea of imaginative personas. I want to dislocate myself from the habitual imperative of fixed gender identity. I want to be, and I am, hybrid, multiple — part man, part woman, part something else — beyond what simple language can capture.
I wish that my body could be as fluid as my identity. I would love to change my body daily to connect with my shifting feelings, never transitioning in a permanent way but in ways that allow me to make subtle shifts to a more hybrid embodiment of my genders. Gender dysphoria happens for me when these changes are impossible or cannot happen fast enough.
People try to correct me constantly. “What is Joshua?” “How do I refer to Joshua?” “What is it?” “Is it a he or a she?” Most days, I feel like an alien, like I’m from another world or planet. It would be so much easier for everyone else if I just stuck with a stable gender identity and said that I was born with it. But that isn’t my truth. I prefer to be complex. And sometimes — sometimes — the curiosity or the desire to figure me out is welcome. But not always. I am Joshua the alien for many people. I come across people in my daily professional life — people who are creative, sensitive, and artistic — and they want to understand me. They don’t want to be ignorant. I can see the need to understand in their eyes. They make mistakes and misgender me; they ask intrusive questions designed to make them feel better about who I am. I want to be open and available for them to learn from. I want to be willing to be discovered and to be explored. But sometimes it’s just too much. It can be absolutely exhausting to always be open to people in this way. Most people find security within their identities because they are intelligible, stable, and follow the cultural logic of the gender binary. (The concept of gender intelligibility was coined by the philosopher Judith Butler.) People find commonality in these similarities. Who wants to feel excluded? We all want to feel welcome to some degree. Yet I invoke curiosity and insecurity in others. And I often find that the people who most need to ask questions, but don’t, never arrive at the place of understanding. A reticence to ask questions can also mask transphobic hostility because some people may never want to understand. The people who are mindful about probing, yet want to understand, are the people who I want to have conversations with, because their reticence to ask questions can come from compassion. I want to have conversations about my identity with people who are compassionate. On an empathetic level, I always want to welcome this curiosity if it’s coming from a place of compassion.
It’s easier to exist in this writing than it is to stand in front of you. The drive to discover happens without the need for me to be involved in every interaction. I wonder about the realization of my non-binary identity, and how much of my path to discovering how to explain my fluid identity relates to other people’s need to know me. Even if I explain my non-binary identity, there are people who will still try to figure me out. It isn’t enough for them, they want to know it all, or to think that they could know it all. There must be more, or there must be a way to explain it in “rational” terms.
Consider the questions and the contradictions that arise from this discussion. We don’t need to know everything to accept someone who is different from us. This drive to know everything can force us to think of everyone as either one or the other, familiar or unfamiliar, categorizable, instead of accepting that some people might be something altogether different from what we can imagine. The confusion initiates the questions and the quest to know, or to get to know, what non-binary really means for me and what it can mean for you.
I came out to Florian and my family almost four years ago as transgender, and then another coming out happened, about a year later, when I found the language of non-binary during the final stage of the research and writing of my doctoral dissertation. I discovered myself in my academic work and then came out as non-binary. I felt an immediate sense of relief when I w
as able to say “non-binary” out loud. It is odd to say that I “came out” because I know that my fluid gender could make me come out again and again every time it shifts throughout my life. This coming out happens in a language altogether different from what can be articulated on a verbal level. The language of coming out with the body, of coming out without words but with a fluid gender, is a new concept for many because we often rely on the vocal act of coming out to stabilize, and to secure, our identities.
There are multiple layers to coming out for me, which are certainly beyond the “born this way” narrative. I know that coming out as non-binary won’t be the final time that I come out with an identity in my lifetime, but perhaps it will be the last time that such an identity is articulated with words constructed to make sense of me. I think it’s easier to explain to some people in my family that I was born non-binary, but it wouldn’t be truthful. There would be less opposition if I could lean on being “born that way,” but it just doesn’t feel right to me. The idea of being born a specific way or in a static and immutable identity seems more about appeasing the other person than about acknowledging who I am. It feels like an effort to make the other person comfortable instead of myself.
There are no rules about non-binary identity. But it also isn’t about choosing frivolously from one day to the next. My experience with gender matches my feeling and the way that my self exists on and inside my body. So, saying that there are days when I still feel partly like a man or a woman doesn’t disqualify me from my non-binary identity. A non-binary person could still identify as a woman and be non-binary. There are no limits to how we experience our complex self and communicate it to others. Non-binary is about being fluid.
The necessity to maintain a stable gender identity can be illusory. This need to always be the same can be about control and about comfort. It isn’t always the most comfortable feeling to shift back to feeling like a man when the script of male/boy/man was enforced on my life at such an early age, but I would be lying to myself if I said that this identity wasn’t still a part of my life, or wasn’t a part of my life at one point. The false identities constructed for me at birth are still within me, still with me on this journey. The story of my life will always hold space for the time when I accepted the identity of a boy or a man because there was no other way or choice that I could realize at that time. I can still remember who I was when I entered puberty, and I still see that boy in the mirror looking back at me with sadness. I see that boy, growing facial hair, seeing through the reflection as if the mirror didn’t hold the entire truth.
* * *
• • •
We have simplified gender to understand it and to control it in our lives. We want to try to understand it all. Our gender is a predominant part of our life, so stability is security and safety. But why are people transphobic? Why do people get so angry about the thought of gender beyond the two options we’re presented with early on in life and that are reinforced over and over throughout our lives?
I am convinced that we don’t see the whole picture of gender with “men” and “women.” We need to excavate the truth. We need to highlight the complexity of gender and move away from oversimplifications that do damage to ourselves and to our children, who grow up in a world full of possibilities but lack the freedom to be who they want to be. The absence of this freedom can bring about severe consequences, pain, and suffering. I know this well.
three
The Survivor
His fist smashes through the car window. A crimson mist paints the air, delivering his presence closer. I look down at my hands speckled with blood, not my own. My eyes shut. I feel the world closing in on me. I find the strength to glance quickly at the cellphone in my hand, just as a haze overwhelms me and my head hits the back of the seat. I feel the force of yet another blow to my face. The screaming, the shouting, and the pain all directed at me like an arrow meant to pierce my essence. I am inside a horror film. I have become the central character of some sick and twisted plot. I need to get out, or there won’t be anything left of me. I will be no more.
I try to dial 911 on the small Nokia phone, but he notices. He screams: “What do you think you’re doing, faggot?!” The phone is slapped from my hands.
I am alone, trapped in the passenger seat of my mom’s car, a gold Saturn sedan, tilted at a sixty-degree angle and stuck in a ditch. Somewhere between life and death, I am caught and captive for the physical assault from a stranger that won’t stop. He is now in the vehicle with me, this monster painted with his own blood, the flesh ripped off his knuckles after he smashed the driver’s side window to get inside. He hits me again, harder this time, and it almost knocks me unconscious. The doors are locked and I can’t get out. I can’t even control my limbs. The fear overwhelms me and exhaustion sets in. The attacker’s hateful words are partly drowned out by my panic.
Then, inside a moment where I almost lost it, where everything almost slipped away from me, I find something. I find my survivor’s spirit deep within, tucked away inside the chrysalis created by the pain and suffering from my adolescence. I feel a sudden strength. My vision clears and my mind sharpens. I summon an energetic barrier between myself and my attacker, between me and this demonic monster.
I reach out to the passenger door, find the button to unlock it, and push the door open with every bit of force still left within me, summoning everything that I can possibly gather because, I know, this is the decisive moment of my life, for my life. I look around quickly to plan my escape route, glancing at the cold, dark road, over railroad tracks, and into a small shopping centre with a Tim Hortons, less than half a mile away. Time is not on my side right now. I feel frozen in this moment. It’s at least two in the morning: will the coffee shop even be open?
I don’t have time to consider these questions. I must escape now, or get dragged back into the blood, spit, and fear. I scramble out of this car soaked with his rage and climb out of the ditch. I can hear him screaming behind me. I see two other people on the road, likely his friends, and I know right away that they are going to try to stop me. I clutch my heart and for a moment it feels like I’m holding the muscle in my hand. I take a second to summon my last reserves of energy and spirit. And then I run.
I run on the winds of the pain and suffering. I run with the violence that I have faced throughout my life, everything that prepared me for this attack. I run with each utterance of faggot, queer, fairy, freak, trash that was said to me countless times. I run with the feeling of the spit that hit my face, my body, and the many pushes and shoves and punches. I run with each feeling of threat to my life. I run with the sound of this monster’s taunting laughter and ridicule pushing my feet and my arms forward, propelling me. I run with these newfound wings. I am a survivor, and this won’t end me. I run past two other people, down the road, over the train tracks, and into the Tim Hortons. It’s still open — thank the goddess.
But I’m not safe yet. There are two employees behind the counter, and I scream, with every ounce of breath in my body, begging them to lock the doors. I try to get the words out to explain that someone has just attacked me, that I have barely escaped with my life. I immediately realize that this must appear like a nightmarish joke to them.
While the employees lock the doors I dial 911 and collapse against the wall, sinking to the floor in a state of complete exhaustion. In this coffee shop, brightly lit, I look down at my shaking hands. There is so much blood. It’s all over my hands and clothes. Is it all mine? No, it’s also his blood. I can feel it intruding on my soul, yet it is a sign of my triumph. This monster left me with his blood as a reminder of his weakness. He bled and he was human, not some invincible creature trying to end me. He was not invulnerable, and he would not win. His fear would not take me.
The police never caught the man who attacked me that day. The monster eluded the law, and it’s an injustice. He can live his life without ever facing the consequences of almost endi
ng mine. It’s a true horror story, but one in which the marginalized queer and trans person finds safety. The trans person survived.
My attack was classified by the police as a hate crime. I felt the detectives didn’t take the investigation seriously because of my queer identity and my feminine gender expression. Extensive evidence was present at the scene, but the attacker and his friends were never found. The investigation wasn’t handled properly. I had to reach out to the investigative team to receive updates, and they only met with me once after the attack. The attack happened in front of a house in a neighbourhood. People lived just twenty feet from the ditch. Were they watching while it was happening? Were they frozen into apathy? I’ve always hoped that they were fast asleep. It would sicken me to know that they had watched frozen in fear that night, or coldly immune to the inhumanity that they witnessed, and so I tell myself that they were asleep in their beds.
The three people had followed me that night from a gay bar in nearby Kingston, Ontario. I dropped someone off, an acquaintance, on my way home, and I was driving on a back road when their car appeared out of the darkness and started to follow mine, bright lights close enough to blind me. I can still feel the sick twist in my stomach when I realized that they wouldn’t stop following me, that I had become their prey. I knew from that moment that this would be an event that would forever change me.
Me, Myself, They Page 4