Me, Myself, They

by Joshua M. Ferguson

I took a deep breath and glanced over at Florian, who had his camera ready to document my return. I felt scared and a bit sick. I walked along the pathway in front of the school with Florian following close behind. I came up to an empty and familiar bench. When I had attended this school in grade nine, and then again four years later, this specific bench was always occupied; the space around it was alive. But the spaces that I inhabited alone in grade nine, and then with friends and champions when I returned later, were no longer alive during my visit. There was an emptiness there, like the one I had faced in Kingston. No one was occupying this space any more.

  I approached the door and, though classes were in session, it was locked. The school had clearly stepped up the protection and security of its students since I had attended. Just as I started to wonder if it would be right for me to go inside, a student suddenly opened the door for me. I viewed the kind gesture as a spiritual welcome back into the space, a sign to venture deeper into my memories and my feelings. I hadn’t been planning on going inside, but this was an opportunity to delve deeper. I looked down the hallway and felt relieved to find people sitting there. They appeared to be finding comfort with each other. The feeling was familiar. At least the space inside hadn’t changed much. It was still alive. That made me feel good. But why was I still feeling a sense of fear like I had in grade nine and in my final year of high school?

  I pressed on and visited the library, close to where I had spent time with the other “outcasts” at the school in my last year. I now had a Ph.D., and I felt a sense of pride stepping into a high school library that held my memories of academic struggle, when I was unable to focus on anything but surviving the bullying and harassment. I took notice of the graduating-class photos decorating the walls. Excited at the prospect of seeing my own face from back then, and the faces of my classmates, I found the graduating class of 2002. Then a voice from behind me shook me out of my reflection.

  “Excuse me, what are you doing here?”

  I turned around and came face to face with one of the librarians. I felt the sting of nerves and fear. Was I in trouble for visiting my old high school? What were they going to do?

  I calmly explained the reason for my visit. “I’m a graduate. I’m just visiting Napanee and decided to see the school again.” I didn’t blame the librarian. The school probably had a strict policy for visitors, but I didn’t want to announce my presence.

  “Oh. You were taking pictures,” the librarian countered.

  “Just for personal reasons,” I explained.

  Though cautious and uncertain, the librarian left me alone. I’m sure they still kept a close eye on me while I took a few minutes to soak up the memories. The library reminded me of how small all of this had become in my present, and how big I had become since then. Did I still belong in the small town where I’d grown up?

  Our next stop was Springside Park in the middle of the town — a metaphorical stop on our way to my old home. The park has a beautiful little waterfall that my brothers and I frequented with my dad. It’s a popular spot for locals and tourists venturing through the area. The sun was at a perfect height to bounce light off the water, warming my heart as I looked up to the sky. I took a deep breath and sat down to write this poem, a reflection on where I came from, and who I had become:

  I am the stuff of roaring rapids

  White wisps of running water here then gone

  Roaring with presence

  Taking shape, creating

  Keeping safe, searching

  I am running, moving, fluid

  Made from an element that is neither

  Something else, possible, open, free

  Limitless power, the stillest peace

  Within me, in everything

  A short drive from the park took us to my old family home. Standing before it, my feelings were undeniable. This was my home, and yet not my home. I felt a growing sense of paranoia mixed with exhilaration as I looked out at the backyard, the field beyond, and the rock on the hill that I used to sit on top of in my own little retreat. The trees we had planted in our yard were massive, almost unrecognizable. To think that I had once played with my Marvel action figures on its branches, and now they were too high to even reach. I had dreamed about this house countless times since we’d left it in 2001, but now my dreams felt less like reality than I had expected. I knelt down to touch the earth — the earth that had once surrounded the walls of my basement bedroom. I took a little rock from the roadside; I wanted a piece of this place to take with me. I put the tiny rock into a bracelet locket. Why did I feel the need to keep something material from that space? I trapped its energy within a cage; the rock was mine to hold in that moment, taken, and then carried away.

  A few weeks later, the rock mysteriously fell out of its little metal cage on my bracelet. To me, that signified that the pain I had experienced in Napanee was no longer a reality. The school in Kingston was no longer there. The bench in Napanee was no longer alive. The elementary school just ten minutes from my home was condemned. It was time to heal by shaping my trauma from within. I don’t believe we ever let go of trauma; rather, we work to transform it. We harness it to do better as human beings. We become alchemists.

  This is what my short trip to these places was telling me, often in clear and unmistaken ways. Letting go, at least for me, is impossible. But letting go is less about the pain and suffering vanishing, and more about all of these feelings changing their shape to suit who I am now. It woke me up. I was there, all along, deep within a shelter built from the ruins of my pain and the hatred that was directed at me.

  It might sound strange, but I am thankful for the night I was attacked. I would never wish that terror upon anyone else, nor would I want to experience something similar ever again, but my spirit emerged victorious. I saved myself from a human being with the face of a violent monster. I didn’t have the help of others. I was alone, and I escaped.

  I think we all have this power if we need it. It’s hidden deep, but I had been doing the work of nurturing it for years, unaware of what was to come. My heart still holds the pain, yet it’s not a weakness. It took another decade after my attack to come to terms with myself, to reclaim who I am, but I am here now in these words, and with you in these pages, transformed by my trauma into a loving and empathic human being.

  five

  The Expression

  The practice of assuming gender happens daily for most of us. I’ve tried to minimize the attention I pay to analyzing bodies in front of me to figure out the gender of other people, but it still happens. I find that I need to snap myself out of this ingrained behaviour. It’s just something that happens automatically. I think, why the hell am I still doing this to people, especially considering everything that I know about gender? Did I really need to decide if that person that I just met was a woman, a man, or non-binary? Did I really need to say “woman” while explaining my experience with a person to make my story more clear or understandable?

  There is absolutely no reasonable explanation for the need to analyze the gender of my neighbour, my co-worker, or the stranger who just passed me on the street. But I do it anyway, so there must be something preventing us from seeing the full spectrum that actually exists instead of just “man” and “woman.”

  What happens when you can’t figure out a person’s gender? For some, feelings of deep curiosity, confusion, or frustration arise. We need to know more, so we fix our gaze to find the solution to the “problem” presented by their mixed gender presentation. It’s a problem that dictates the harsh way people judge each other. And, let me tell you, I am definitely a visible problem for some people! Yet I am also invisible. Here’s the thing that might seem odd at first: I am both visible and invisible.

  It’s unlikely that you would miss seeing me when I’m walking down the street. If you saw me, you might look. I visibly disrupt the way you might assume people should look, e
ither as a man or a woman. I look like something else, or at least I like to think that I do, and the gaze of others is often overwhelming. I find it funny, though, that people read me as a woman because they don’t want to think about me in a way that might challenge their own ideas about sex and gender.

  I get a lot of “sir”s and “madam”s interchangeably: someone might refer to me as “madam,” then quickly revert to “sir” when I speak, or vice versa. People are literally mixed up by my presence in person because my gender expression does not register with what my voice or my forms of identification lead them to assume my gender is.

  My grandfather has a cute reaction when it comes to reading my gender on a visual level. My grandfather always saw me as a boy, and then a man, until, in recent years, physical changes initiated by my hormone replacement therapy, and my appearances in the press, shifted his understanding of my gender. Pop now, for the first time, addresses me with words of affection typically reserved for women, like “darling,” “dear,” and “sweetheart.” He uses them constantly in conversation with me, and also when he’s talking to other family members about me. He also uses both he/him/his and she/her/hers pronouns when he speaks about me, but more often he uses she/her/hers, because I think he actually reads me as a woman, or as I am, even if he doesn’t have the correct language to refer to my non-binary identity. His use of she/her/hers pronouns makes it clear that he sees me. My dad finds it funny and cute that Pop calls me “darling” or “dear”; he laughs and smiles because it just seems so natural to my ninety-three-year-old grandfather to say this to me. It’s a loving kindness he shows to me, to see me as I would like to be seen. Recently, when I was sitting nearby and searching through my purse for something, he asked my dad, “What is that beautiful lady doing over there?” It is such a feeling of relief to know that my ninety-three-year-old grandfather recognizes me in the way that he can. He isn’t trying to see me; he is seeing me through a lens of love, and I wish more people could see with love instead of fear.

  Some people see me as a trans woman or a woman because I express my gender on the feminine side of the spectrum. Using feminine in reference to who I am suggests that my gender expression might be affixed to the binary. The language to understand gender expression beyond feminine, masculine, and androgynous isn’t available yet, or I’m not familiar with it. You may have heard “femme” or “masc” as descriptors for trans identity, or gender altogether. I don’t consider myself to be a trans-femme or a non-binary femme. I certainly have an unmistakable femininity, but I prefer to think of my gender expression as being non-binary, not altogether feminine, masculine, or androgynous — a mixture of it all.

  My long hair, makeup, and lack of facial hair immediately suggest to many people that I’m either a trans woman or a woman, but I’m not always feminine, or dressed in a feminine way. I don’t always feel feminine. It might sound funny, but when I sit with my legs spread apart without realizing (a rare occurance, honestly), I panic a bit, and sometimes cross them immediately to avoid unwanted stares that come from presenting a mixture of masculinity and femininity with the way that I look and how I position my body.

  But what do these words, masculine and feminine, even mean? Well, they don’t mean the same thing for every single person around the world. Gender is not determined by things like clothing, hair, and makeup, or by the words, masculine and feminine. Our gender expression can be determined by these things, but not necessarily our gender. However, we still see these gender cues, and they register as signifiers for gender altogether. I can pass (so to speak), if I want to, with my long hair, makeup, and lack of facial hair. That means that some of the time I can be read as a woman, and I can pass in line with the binary, and how our culture codes gender through specific signifiers like makeup versus no makeup, long hair versus short hair, dresses versus pants, and so on. All of it is conventional and based on very simple ideas that divide people into two categories.

  I had an illuminating conversation with a laser hair removal technician (while they were zapping the hairs off my legs) about how my expression automatically tells my gender identity. This type of conversation increasingly happens with people who assume when they meet me that I am a trans woman or a woman. The technician expressed curiosity about my non-binary gender identity. It’s likely that they (and, I’m using they/them for this technician because as this chapter suggests, assuming their gender is something I don’t want to do) were also intrigued by my gender expression, and how our contradicted assumption makes us question if we truly know everything when it comes to gender. They told me that they had assumed I was a woman, a cis woman(!), when they saw me for the first time. Until I started to speak. My voice disrupted their comfortable assumption of my feminine gender. I have a moderately deep to low voice, so hearing me speak is usually the point at which people suddenly switch from “It’s a woman” to “Oh, it’s actually a man!” The technician declared, triumphantly, “I had no idea you were trans!” as if to suggest that the contradiction of my aesthetic and my voice confirmed my trans identity for them. I found this experience intriguing and also a bit upsetting. They had switched their thinking about my gender based solely on the contrast between my gender presentation and my voice. I was reminded of how we often think in a very simple way about gender that reduces people to their expression before they can introduce their own identity.

  I’m quite visible as a six-foot-tall non-binary trans person with the signifiers that I’ve shared with you. I’m also invisible as a non-binary person. The truth of my identity is invisible to most people in society. Most people label me as they want to see me just based on my expression, without ever wanting to know how I actually identify. It is impossible for many people to actually see me because some people don’t even know non-binary gender exists, or consider it to exist. The person that automatically read me as a woman couldn’t see me beyond being either a man or a woman. They read me first as a woman and then as a man, even though they came to realize that I was a non-binary trans person when I explained my identity.

  The technician and I ended up having a casual and comfortable conversation together, but when I’m in public, the focused gaze on me is not always as safe as that. There is real danger associated with the gaze when people view me as a monster of sorts that scares or disgusts them. I can make people scared or fearful just based on how I look. Being thought of as a monster doesn’t necessarily upset me. I find it kind of fun — it’s as if my appearance scares the bullshit out of people that we carry around about gender. A lot of it is made-up crap that we’re force-fed from a young age. So, I don’t mind scaring the shit out of the gender binary with my expression.

  Each day, my gender presentation has to be carefully measured depending on who I’m seeing, where I’m going, and how I’m feeling. I wonder how far I can push my presentation and how much I can be myself. I wish that I could be who I am every single day, but it just isn’t possible. Isn’t that a sad thing? Perhaps I’m not so alone here. In fact, I know that I’m not. Perhaps you can’t always be who you are, either. I’m sure that’s the case for many people. As I’ve said, we are all more similar than we are different.

  It isn’t always safe to be who I am, or to let my truth be reflected on the outside of my body. I am simply overwhelmed at times by the forces of the gender binary and the pervasive transphobia that can quickly transform the joy that I achieve with my aesthetic into something painful and even dangerous. The gaze that cis women, trans women, and non-binary people — all people affected by various forms of misogyny — face in public can present unsafe scenarios ranging from mild to deadly. I likely don’t have to tell you that misogyny is real, or that it affords cis men with a powerful privilege. Some cis men can stare without restraint. And cis men, more often than not, exist without being objectified themselves, unless they are queer and present a gender expression outside the norms of masculinity. The staring of cis men sometimes evolves into unsafe behaviour — ga
zing breaches the boundary between looking and unwanted verbal and physical advances. Many other people have made the point that I’m going to make here. Our expression as women (trans or cis), non-binary people, or gender-nonconforming people never warrants the unsafe gaze, verbal harassment, and violent physical behaviour that some cis men practise. We don’t have a responsibility to reduce the risk when the gaze upon us turns sinister by policing what we wear, how we walk and move, even how we dance.

  My awareness of people’s interest in me has increased with my transitioning. The staring in an attempt to figure me out has become more pervasive as I achieve the hybrid body that I want as a non-binary person. The gender-testing that I was subjected to as a young child made me hyper-aware of other people dissecting me in a very inhumane way under their gaze. I became aware of other people looking, whether the looking was harmless or harmful. Both of my parents told me many times to “cool down” the way that I expressed myself. In a letter my mom wrote to me in 1998, shortly after I came out to her and my dad, she said, “We’re not always happy with how you choose to express yourself.”

  I will never forget reading those words in the letter when I was sixteen, or hearing them spoken to me by both of my parents on multiple occasions. I wasn’t choosing to express myself a certain way. I was expressing myself my way, the way that I was comfortable doing, and the way that made me feel good and authentic. My parents thought that I was drawing unnecessary attention to myself. My mom sent this request from the depths of love she has for me, and you can read that in her words. She wanted me to be safe. It was a form of protection. But then, in the same letter, they also acknowledged that my gender expression was an essential part of my identity and that it’s “hard to be you most of the time.”

  Being fifteen in Napanee and expressing myself truthfully in the matrix of my parents’ opinions, the opinions of friends, the bullying, and who I wanted to be all along was painful. It also wasn’t easy being told by my parents that I was trying to prove my difference by dressing a certain way or wearing makeup. This attitude is part of the problem when it comes to accepting non-binary people, especially non-binary youth, because it implies that I would be inviting unsafe attention if I dressed a specific way, and that this unsafe attention, and any consequences that might come as a result, would somehow be my fault.