Me, Myself, They

by Joshua M. Ferguson

  I honestly don’t know why people are surprised. Of course, some drag queens are trans and non-binary! Their daily lives revolve around poking holes in the system of the gender binary by embodying, identifying with, and expressing new forms of gender. They highlight a growing cultural understanding that accepts gender as more of a fluid concept. These queens are at the forefront of our community. They are important forces who are boldly telling their stories and sharing their truths, stories that are not just welcome in the trans community but that have been a part of it all along.

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  Diana and Carrie were unconventional in their own ways. Diana broke formation on that day to meet us, to meet me. Carrie openly shared a heavily stigmatized mental illness, created brilliant work, and was a powerful and inspirational force, despite some people thinking less of her because of her openness. She helped to deconstruct a societal view on mental health by showing that people with mental illness shouldn’t be treated as less than human, as unstable and weak. They were both liminal forces, operating within and without convention, and that played a part in their ability to make a difference in people’s lives. The princesses, Diana and Carrie Fisher, hold formative power in my life. They were real — stars made into flesh. They were magic.

  Queens. Princesses. Hosts. Groundbreakers all. The magic of Diana, Carrie, Rosie, and Ellen opened up new realms that enabled me to see examples of powerful people breaking free from convention. The representation of drag, and the drag queens who are living authentically as they are, helped me to understand the validity of my own identity and expression, which I couldn’t yet articulate in words. I found power in their magic to realize myself beyond the suffering.

  nine

  The Geek

  I was an avid reader as a child. My love of reading evolved into an enjoyment of Marvel comic books that resulted in a collection of thousands of comics still kept in a special place today. I preferred the stories of female characters: Silver Sable, Scarlet Witch, Invisible Woman, Rogue, and Storm. But first among these empowering superheroes was She-Hulk. She was the character I related to the most. Her strength came close to matching that of her cousin, Bruce Banner (The Hulk), and her day job was working as a lawyer. In some iterations of the title, She-Hulk breaks the fourth wall, acknowledging that she’s a character within a comic book, and communicates directly with the reader. There is an in-betweenness to her place in the comic universe. She is both inside and outside the page. She embodies enormous physical and intellectual power, and she is autonomous, daring to criticize the presumed straight male reader gazing at her muscled green body — which was often hidden by only a small bathing suit — while she did physical battle with any number of foes. My love for She-Hulk opened me up to the power of created worlds to explore self-expression and identity. She-Hulk’s gender expression, with her muscled body and physical prowess, was arguably non-normative for a female comic book character, particularly one created in 1980 — just two years before I was born.

  I am a geek at heart. A non-binary geek — thankfully some parts of the geek culture are increasingly making efforts to be inclusive when it comes to trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people. It surprises some people to know that I have thousands of comic books and that I’m an avid gamer. Those of us born in the early to mid 1980s were able to experience the dawning days of the internet in our adolescence, and growing up in front of the screen and on “the web” opened new worlds for my identity, which I was being forced to repress in reality.

  When I was around eleven or twelve, I was able to connect with a creative part of myself and explore it with others from a safe distance. My parents bought our first family computer earlier than many other families in our neighbourhood, so we were one of the lucky families that used a dial-up connection to get the world’s information at our fingertips. My parents imagined us enriching our education and knowledge by using it as a tool for schoolwork. They had no idea what it would expose me to.

  As you can likely tell, for me and for many other social outcasts the internet in those early days was also a place to find people who seemed familiar and comfortable. It was a mystical place of wonder back then, an opportunity to communicate with other people who were similar by being different, before the emergence of social media. It was a kind of magic to be able to have a conversation with someone thousands of miles from where I was sitting in my basement in Napanee. I used the internet to explore bodies and sexuality (mostly by surreptitiously searching “male studs” and “male hunks,” to the shock of my parents when they stumbled across my browser history), to further my gender exploration, and to ease my suffering by finding other people around the world who were like me.

  My online social life began in chat rooms, where I casually communicated with people who were impossible to categorize based on age, race, gender, sex, or sexuality. Our identities were hidden behind the screen names and basic emojis. The chat rooms welcomed people trying to find connections to lessen their feelings of isolation, loneliness, and social marginalization. The chat communication was simple, nothing extraordinary, but I started yearning for the connection. Logging back into a room to see familiar names in the list on the right-hand side of the screen was exhilarating. This act of “logging in” became habitual, and it gave me a reprieve from my life. Enjoying this anonymous and free form of communication, I wanted to delve deeper into worlds that could, in different ways, take me away from my life in Napanee.

  My chat conversations inspired the next stage of my virtual exploration: MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. In the mid-1990s, MMORPGs were limited to a handful of games, certainly nothing like what is available today. MMORPGs are internet-based video games set in designed worlds with geographical boundaries containing multiple towns and cities, forests and mountains, temples and magic, and caves and dungeons for players to explore and become completely immersed in. These games connect players from around the world within a game world. The games enable communication and interaction between players, and they encourage players to join together to form partnerships and groups (often called guilds), which can result in long-term friendships. Sometimes these online relationships can evolve into real-life relationships when people get to know each other beyond the virtual world and their avatars.

  Character creation is one of the most vital and exciting parts of playing an MMORPG. Whenever I started a new game, the character creation stage became therapeutic for me as I was able to create female-identified characters and manipulate their bodies and gender expressions in a way that I wasn’t able to do with my own at the time. The first character I ever created was in a game called Meridian 59. This very early MMORPG was my first experience with virtual worlds, and while the graphics might now seem archaic, they weren’t that far off from currently popular games like Minecraft. Meridian 59 was a significant part of my life for many years. While I suffered in my real life, I found peace, friendship, and even magic in the game.

  My first character was named Wintress. I had always been intrigued by tales of ice-themed sorceresses, isolated and alone in their sub-zero crystalline palaces, casting spells, summoning support, and fighting off intruders. So I created a female-identified ice-sorceress with white hair and a penchant for charming the players around her to protect me. Wintress swiftly developed a reputation as a leader “in-game” (which refers to what exists in the game world). I hid my real-life identity because I didn’t think it would harm the other players not to know who I was behind the screen. Why should it matter anyway? I identified more with being female than male at that time anyway, so Wintress was more like the real me than I was able to be in reality. It was incredibly empowering to step inside this artificial world that felt so welcoming and real to me. Meridian 59 was a place of comfort to settle myself amidst the dehumanization happening in my real life on a daily basis at school.

  After about a year or so playing as Wintre
ss and forming one of the strongest guilds inside the Meridian 59 virtual world on our server, I decided to tell my fellow guild mates and friends that I wasn’t actually female behind the screen. At that time, there were a few members of my guild whose innocuous flirting had turned into requests to know more about the real me. I felt it was time to tell them that I was really a teenage boy — a narrative enforced upon me by my tormentors at school. Obviously I was not an ice-sorceress slaying characters with my dark magic and my guild mates, but I was not a girl, either. Most of my in-game friends took the news about my “real” identity well. I was relieved that they knew who I was behind the screen, although it felt as though Wintress was part of me too, which I believe is an early articulation of my non-binary identity and expression. I was both Josh and Wintress, my identity forged by both realities.

  I started playing another MMORPG named The Realm Online. This game was more community based than Meridian 59. I became involved with a guild in The Realm Online that foregrounded our culture’s absolute fixation with technology. The guild was called MECH. Members of the guild had to shed their fleshly human identities in-game by adopting a cyborg-like character that served the guild’s mandate. The adoption of the MECH title even came with a regimented form of communication. I role-played as MECHNorth for more than a year in-game. The guild’s members were actually quite diverse, even if we all celebrated homogeneity in our behaviour and communication. I started to realize that other players preferred to be absolved of their fleshly life while in-game because, like me, they needed an escape. I developed relationships with some of these players, some of which became romantic and continued outside of the game. Our real-life identities were known to each other. While playing The Realm Online, I was involved in a queer relationship in-game while playing as a cyborg who was supposed to be stripped free of all human emotions — yet there I was engaging, quite deeply and profoundly, in a beautiful and humane experience by role-playing in a way that felt more like playing who I was all along.

  From age fourteen until my early twenties, these virtual worlds — Meridian 59, The Realm Online, and then World of Warcraft — opened up safe spaces for me to explore who I was without the risk of being attacked or assaulted in real life. Playing online and offline role-playing video games (RPGs) was a form of therapy for me throughout my adolescence. The offline RPGs had fantasy-scapes with diverse characters and rich storylines that completely immersed me and helped distance me from the nightmarish reality that greeted me outside their confines.

  I could never have imagined in my adolescence the impact that these video games would come to make on our culture. The effect of these games on players’ lives transcends the screen-spaces. The game worlds found in both BioWare’s Dragon Age and Mass Effect games and Bethesda’s Fallout and Elder Scrolls games contain rich and diverse representations of sex, gender, sexuality, and race. You are able to create an almost lifelike character before you immerse yourself in hundreds of hours of narrative-driven game play. The games contain countless choices that have a wide-ranging impact on the story, and non-player characters (NPCs, controlled by the game’s intelligence and designed by writers and artists, independent from a human player) with whom you can develop both friendly and romantic relationships.

  The option to have romantic relationships with non-player characters is a beautiful new feature introduced within the last decades to role-playing video games. You can choose to have heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer romantic relationships in-game with non-player characters. The player develops feelings, attachments, and emotional responses to affecting streams of experience in-game, which change depending on the choices that are made and how the player feels about the beautifully written NPCs that play a vital role in the main and side quests. In particular, Dragon Age Inquisition (the third game in this specific BioWare franchise) introduced a trans male character named Krem who comes with a brief storyline, authentically written, about his experience as a trans person within the game world of Thedas.

  The evolution of these games will hopefully introduce non-binary characters and gender-neutral pronouns so that players can freely explore their gender identity. For the most part, the mainstream RPGs — like the Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, and Mass Effect franchises, and even late 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (venturing into RPG territory) — provide two gender options for characters: male or female. I now feel incredibly conflicted choosing between one or the other, so although it would create work for the teams behind these games, creating a gender-diverse pathway for some players to take would reflect the reality of some of us who have a hard time making a binary choice. Nevertheless, I still feel empowered by instilling in the character, either male or female, my own feelings about their gender expression and identity by modifying their outfits, armour, hair, and makeup to reflect my own identity. The future promises an opportunity for people to be able to play with gender in these safe virtual spaces, both online and offline.

  In my journals as a teenager, I often wrote with concern about my “addiction” to video games. I think that this concern stemmed from my parents’ constant worry that these games would distract me too much from reality, and that I spent an unhealthy amount of time playing rather than living. But I was living my way safely. Thank the goddess for these games. I needed these games to help me survive. I still need them to retreat from the pressures of life. They contain expansive universes beyond my limited world, or the world that we’re supposed to just accept. In my youth, I could barely breathe in my real-life world. I couldn’t exist as I was. I lost touch with myself, but these video games helped me find space away from the trauma of being bullied for years, and they helped me retain a connection to who I truly was, even if it meant that I had to role-play that identity for decades in virtual spaces before I was able to live it.

  ten

  The Filmmaker

  My parents had high hopes for my career. I was a precocious child in their eyes. My early success in elementary school created the expectation that I would pursue a career as a doctor, lawyer, or some other white-collar professional. I was enrolled in “gifted” studies during elementary school and the first year of high school, before the chaos of bullying consumed me and destroyed my ability to focus on schoolwork. I always felt uncomfortable with the alienating effect of studying a year above most of my other classmates, although I could share the experience with my best friend Kristin since she was also placed in the “gifted” program. In addition to being different, I was also “gifted”; it was like a second stamp of the outcast that I had to bear. And my “gifted” status brought with it significant pressure from family members and teachers. Once the bar of expectation is set, it’s difficult to change what people believe you can accomplish. The pressure was overwhelming, especially when my grades started to plummet at the end of grade nine.

  It took time to get myself back to a space of academic concentration. After completing high school, I took two years off before beginning my post-secondary education at Algonquin College in Ottawa. My dad and I discussed my future career options many times when I was in my early twenties. He never gave up on the potential that he saw in me. His high expectations were both a gift and an enormous pressure. Both my parents had undergraduate degrees and they insisted on a higher education for me. With these high expectations, and my own interest in asking questions, I embarked on an academic path that eventually resulted in my doctoral degree.

  One day in particular stands out as the point at which I came to recognize my career path as a filmmaker and writer. I was in my early twenties, living with my dad, sitting in front of a dark television screen in our living room. As I sat there, staring into the space beyond, my dad, behind me in his chair, was boring me with the same old script: “Joshua, you have to figure out your life. You are in your early twenties now. You’re an adult, and you have so much potential. You can’t waste it by just playing video games and working at Le Chateau.”

 
; I blocked out his words and started to disassociate from hearing the same thing a million times. I disassociated often as a form of self-protection against the pressures that descended on me. I could feel my mind drifting into the black space that held my partial reflection as he tried to encourage me. Something within me clicked in that moment. I will always remember what came next.

  All the possibilities from the last decade of soaking up stories in this magical screen suddenly came to light. I knew at that moment what I needed to do with my life. I had connected with my dream — not a dream in a defined sense, but my own reality that I knew would fulfill my life’s purpose. I came back to myself from my trance.

  “I know what I want to do!” I could feel my dad’s growing curiosity behind me, but I continued to stare into the television. “I want to change people’s lives through the media.”

  It felt so good to say it. Perhaps I had been feeling this passion for artistic action since my adolescence, growing up in a household with parents who appreciated film and television and the ways entertainment can alleviate suffering through simultaneous escape and self-exploration.

  “I want to save lives, to make a difference, Dad,” I said excitedly. Nervously I turned to him, unsure how he would respond. Thankfully, he encouraged me to follow my dream wherever it might take me. I think there was a part of him that was simply relieved to finally hear something from me about a career — any career, really — beyond the retail sales work I was doing at the time. At least now I had expressed a clear objective.