by Ivan Coyote
I wrote this person back and told them I needed a couple of days to think about all of this. Here is my response to them:
I get these letters now. I get these letters from people who are hurting. It’s a terrifying thing, the pain of a stranger. Impossible to bear it all, even on a strong day, even when the sun is shining and my back doesn’t hurt and the dishes are all done.
Mostly I think people just want to know they are not alone, that they are not the only one trying to swallow and breathe around the big empty abandoned town hall their heart is echoing inside of.
Should I tell them the truth, I wonder? Do they really want to know I feel just as lost as they do, some days? Are two lost people any better off when they find each other?
Instead I make a cup of strong black tea with canned milk and one brown sugar and I sit down to find the trail into the truth of these things in the only way I have ever known how. By collecting up words, and then walking around with them in my mouth, words arguing between my ears, words leaving my heart in great lumps and then lining up in single file in my lungs to get said out loud.
Let me write about September 1974, when I first started kindergarten and my mom cut me a deal that I could wear pants to school every other day. Which meant a dress every day that wasn’t a pants day. The night before a wear a dress day I would have bad dreams, I would have these panicked dreams about boys waiting under the backless wooden stairs that led into the portable trailer next to the school where my kindergarten class was held. Sweating fear-stained dreams of laughing boys looking up my skirt, and I couldn’t even kick them properly because have you ever tried to do a high kick in a long dress? The harder you kick the faster your one raised leg pulls your other leg out from under you. Hot tears on my cheek and my bare thigh torn up by the gravel. I am sure I know many people who have perfected a technique to account for the high kick in a long dress phenomena, but I never did. I just dragged myself to school for months, every other day afraid and exhausted, until my mom took pity on me and bought me two more pairs of brown corduroys on sale at the old Bay in the Qwanlin Mall. She sighed and put them into the third drawer of my dresser with a cutting look in my direction because I had disappointed her again.
And so began a lifetime of hating most of my clothes.
I spent much of my early years shirtless in the summers, in most old pictures of me I am smiling and sunburned from the waist up, my pant legs stuffed into black rubber boots with red-brown toes, good for standing in the shallow water catching tadpoles or spin-casting. Until that tourist man from Texas camped two sites down from us called me young man and my mom corrected him because I was seven years old and we were standing in the line-up for the ladies’ showers. Go and put a t-shirt on, she told me, and leave it on this time, I am not going to tell you again.
I used to be mad at her for squeezing me into everything, but I grew out of it. I know now that she was just worried about me. I wish that she had named what I saw in her eyes when she looked at me back then, I wish that she had called it fear. Because all those years I mistook that fear for shame, and that mistake has cost us both so much.
I like to think that I suffered the same as every teenage girl does in her changing body. I don’t think that trans people hold the monopoly or wrote the only book on hating our bodies, and even if we did win at this contest I wouldn’t want the prize anyway. Describe the pain on a scale from one to ten the doctor always says, but no one knows where zero sits. Did I hate my tiny tits any more than the beginnings of these hips? Hard to say, really.
Shouldn’t I feel pretty?
I can count the times on one hand when I did, and even those moments were fleeting, always collapsing as soon as I moved or breathed, my elbows were too sharp, my knees never folded right, my shoulders were too wide, my all of me was lacking a certain kind of grace.
Why didn’t I like what I saw? Probably because I felt like nobody else did.
I kissed my first girl in 1988. She was a jazz singer. She wasn’t queer, she said, she just fell in love with me by accident, and I said I didn’t mind when her parents came to town and she introduced me as her roommate. I told her I understood, because I did.
I was a baby butch who had not ever heard the word and so didn’t know what to call my own self until I first read that word out loud in 1992 in the back stacks of Little Sister’s bookstore. I wore second-hand army boots three sizes too big and cut my own hair with clippers and met what I didn’t know at the time was my first femme lover and bought my first necktie and she called me handsome and that one word handsome made up for two decades of knowing I was never really all that pretty.
The first trans man I ever met in real life was still a lesbian separatist at the time, who cornered me up against the wall at the Lotus Club and chastised me for wearing a mascara moustache out to the bar on women-only night. I see him now sometimes on Commercial Drive sporting his full and luscious beard, but we talk about other things, and I forgive, but I don’t forget how lonely I felt that night.
In 1995 I started to bind my breasts. First with Saran wrap, then Ace bandages, then by wearing a double front compression shirt. Flattening them and hiding them under my clothes didn’t make me hate them any less, but it did make it easier to look in the mirror, and leave my apartment.
In 2008 I was about to turn forty and my body was becoming something I could not even recognize. Every twenty-eight days my tits would swell and ache and get bigger. My hips were doing things I had long admired in others but could not reconcile with my own flesh and frame. I started to seriously lift weights.
Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle, I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense to me. You should do more cardio and lift less weight, my mom told me when I was home for a visit and she saw me bulging in a t-shirt at her kitchen table. Don’t let yourself get any bigger, she said. Don’t get any more tattoos. I took this as a sign, and really buckled down on the bicep curls. Felt more like myself.
I wish I could say that I learned to be truly comfortable in this body of mine before I finally had top surgery in 2013, but that would be a lie. I try every day to not let it break my heart that it took me so long. I was forty-four years old and it breaks my heart that it took me so long.
When did I know, you ask me? Since always, I guess. Probably just like you have always known, somewhere in you, I know you have always known.
I look at pictures of shirtless me at five years old, and I can see the shape of my now flat chest foreshadowed in my tiny frame even back then. I like my body now, from about the bellybutton up, and most days that is almost enough to say I nearly feel comfortable in my own skin. I almost feel close to right. I love the shape of my ass when I am naked, but not so much when I am trying on dark denim skinny jeans in hipster stores that sprung up where greasy spoon diners and glove factories used to be.
I am grateful that I can now afford a well-cut shirt and a real silk tie, and a tailor. A good haircut once a month. A fancy jacket with these cool elbows on it. I know these things make me lucky. These things make me feel more confident, more myself, but they don’t make me. I made me. This world made me. Struggle and fear and sweat and work and words made me. Did any of it come too late? I don’t think so. Here I am, and I think everything happened when it happened nearly exactly how it needed to go down and now I am here, and I feel handsome and strong, and that, well, that is a beautiful thing.
Thank you for writing. I hope you are lucky like me. I hope you get this letter and it helps you somehow, helps you lift your chin and your eyes. I hope you learn to stand up full inside of yourself, I hope you one day wear yourself on your sleeve, on your French cuffs, on your chest like a medal of honour.
You are going to need to find your freak family. Your misfit soldiers and their weirdo army. Keep your eyes open. That little boy at school that the bigger kids are picking on. Ask him if he has a secret name he wants you to call him. Tell him yours. Tell him he is beautiful. Tell him you see all the ways that he is strong like
you and it has nothing to do with throwing a ball. Tell him you will be there at the other end of the string between you, listening into that tin can if he needs you.
The world will be full of messages telling you to be something other than what you are. Telling you that you are too skinny or too fat or too dark or too hairy. Too poor for pretty. Low fat hide your belly quick loss how to love less and find a man maps to time machines that only ever go backward. The magazines are full of this nonsense.
Save those magazines. They can be very useful. You can duct tape them over your jeans to make shin pads for street hockey and quick, cheap armour for fencing or general swordplay. Touché.
Clothespin a playing card to the spokes of your new bike and make some noise. Keep their good little girl cocoon in a mason jar with holes in the lid and let the moths out when they hatch. Leave fist marks and boot prints and lipstick stains all over their glass ceilings. Leave all closet doors open everywhere. Make a habit of this.
You don’t have to look a certain way to be a tomboy. Don’t let anyone tell you that, ever, and please don’t find that here in my words. Tomboy thrums in your heart. It’s in your head. It’s what is holding your spine in place. It can’t be hidden by a haircut. It’s not about nail polish or not. It’s running right now in your veins. If it is in you, you already know. Tomboy blood is so much bigger than the outside of you.
Kid at the grocery store today to his father:
“Why does that man have those big earrings like that?” He is referring to a tattooed dude with those huge plug-type ear hoops.
Dad to his son: “I guess they are his way of expressing himself.”
Kid thinks about this for a second. “Like how Mommy does her karate?”
Dad smiles and says, “Yeah. Sort of exactly like that.”
DEAR PATRICIA
You had me fourteen days before your twentieth birthday. I was your first of two girls. It was a story, that whole spring and summer. You had just been crowned Rendezvous Queen, the belle of the ball of our winter festival, on February 28, and then found out you were pregnant. With me. They took back your tiara and your fur coat and blue satin sash, and you were married on March 5. The sponsors couldn’t have a pregnant princess. I was born in August. Grandpa Al said … you know what? It doesn’t matter what he said about you back then, not anymore.
The pictures contain all the evidence of me, right from the very start. Me standing naked in his work boots. Me in my hockey gear, with a fishing rod. You with your hair in a perfect beehive, even when we were camping. I know I was never the daughter you dreamt of. Did you even dream of daughters? I’ve never asked you. I know you never got to go to fashion school like you wanted. You used to sew our clothes from patterns, you were good at it. You made your own wedding dress. It was rust coloured. I don’t know if you wanted kids, but still you showed up, picked me up after practice, wrote a letter to the school so I could take shop instead of sewing. Band-Aids, birthdays. Santa had your handwriting. Always it was you. The house was always clean. I don’t know how you did it all. He was more like a cool uncle that just dropped in. Your father is still at work, you would say. Thank you for starting supper, you would say. I would fall asleep to the sound of the clothes dryer still spinning, into the night.
I remember when you and he separated. He was gone somewhere, I don’t remember where, and he left you to pack up the house when it sold. I showed up to help you put stuff into boxes. I had just gotten a fresh haircut. You look just like him in this light, you said, and I held both of your hands in mine and felt guilty about the shape of my own cheekbones.
I get my work ethic from you, and you get it from gran. We all get it from gran, you tell me on the phone. Your mother. She weighed almost nothing when she died. Her first job was in a cardboard box-making factory. That was where she crushed all eight fingers in the corrugating machine. She was five-foot-six when she first came to Canada, it said so in her immigration papers, and four-foot-ten at the end. What does a life of hard work cost a woman? Eight inches off of her back, you tell me on the phone. You are talking to me from inside your condo, and I am listening on the other end of the phone line, sitting in mine.
I remember the first time I saw that picture of you in front of the green house on Sixth Avenue and Lambert, I’m ashamed now to admit that I felt a little shame. Those old pictures. Telling all the stories you have left behind you. Black and white dirt road and the humble clothes. Now, I am older and I have replaced that word shame with others, closer to strength, closer to gratitude, and to pride.
I never prayed or confessed anything to the priest because he was your older brother and I knew some of his old stories, too. Uncle Father Dave. Your brother Father Dave. He died on my birthday four years ago. I hope he finally found his salvation. I hope he was forgiven. I don’t remember ever praying to god to make me a boy. I guess I just wanted for things to be different for girls.
You gave my little sister your name as her middle name. I’m glad for this, because it might have hurt you even more when I changed all of my names. I would have hated to have been given your name, and then have had to discard it like I did my surname. You said my birth name came from a book and it meant warrior woman, and you called my sister Caroline. Caroline Patricia.
I’m so glad for the blood of yours that is inside of me. I love hearing your laugh tinkle and flash above all of the noise of all of us in one house together. You have let your hair grow out silver. Your bangs are long and you tuck them behind your ear with one finger before you pour the hot water for tea or bend to pick up your great-niece. I inherited your good teeth and love of a clean kitchen. I think of you whenever I leave perfect vacuum marks in the carpet in the bedroom.
If I had to hold only one memory of us all together when we were young, because you really were young with us, it would be Saturday mornings in the new house on Grove Street, after we had finished the housework and you would put a record on and me and Carrie would take turns standing on the tops of your feet and you would dance us around in circles on the freshly vacuumed carpet. Supertramp’s Crime of the Century and America’s “A Horse With No Name” and Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman and always the Beatles. The sun cutting through the room in a yellow stripe behind you, and you would say it is time to do these windows again, lookit the fingerprints I’ll do it in a minute.
You knew the boogie and the hand jive and the box step and that one dance where you hold your nose and pretend you are going underwater, what’s it called? I knew this meant there was a time before us and this house and that job and the lawn and the laundry when you were freer and could play records in the living room and learn dances that had real moves and names. Dad would never dance, if he was home he would sit on the couch and smoke. That look on his face.
It didn’t matter. We had you.
HOW TO BUILD YOUR VERY OWN UNICORN TRAP
My uncle Rob tells this story about me, about the first time he ever met me. He was young, in his twenties, and had been living and surfing and romancing New Zealand and Australia for some time and had just returned home to the Yukon. He walked up the unpaved street on the just-punched-into-the-pine-trees cul-de-sac my dad had built our first house on. He knocked on our front door and I answered. I was almost four years old. He stuck out his hand and said, “You must be my niece. I’m your Uncle Rob.” I nodded perfunctorily and shook his hand with my right hand. I was hiding my left hand behind my back, as he tells it. “Do you want to see a dead gopher?” I asked him. Always game, he replied, “Why yes, I would love to see a dead gopher.” So I pulled my left hand out from behind my back and triumphantly held up a road-killed and flattened and sundried dead gopher for him to peruse. Of course, I was extremely proud of myself.
I was one of the lucky ones. One of the lucky tomboys who, for the most part, was loved and allowed to pretty much be myself. At home, at least, if not at school or on the streets. Some of us are not so lucky. Some of us have that difference squeezed or pounded or pray
ed out of us. But still here we are, scraped up and sometimes more than a little scarred, but still. We survive. We have survived. When I look back, I know what helped me through. Skills. Knowing, asking, learning, practicing, and dreaming about how to do stuff. Even if girls weren’t supposed to be able to. Even though I sometimes had to fight to pick up that hammer or hatchet or helmet or handsaw. Even if it was unbecoming and no boy or man would ever want me. Even when I did manage to be good at something, I was reminded that yeah, I was pretty good at that, for a girl. Even if it was all so unlady-like.
I also had to believe in magic. I had to believe in the northern lights, I had to believe in the smell of dry Yukon dirt just before the first raindrops fell, I had to believe that I could jump into the deep end and ski down that hill and that one day I could make even my dad proud of having a daughter like me. I had to believe that everything would get easier.
So in the interest of promoting this skills-based approach to magic, I’m now about to teach you a little trick I learned back home when I was a kid.
These are directions for building your very own cruelty-free, non-leg-hold unicorn trap. Results may vary, and of course there is no way to guarantee that there are still any unicorns living in or visiting your area. But if you are patient, and lucky, and follow equal parts directions and your heart, it just might work for you. You might just trap a unicorn.
STEP ONE: THE CIRCLE
You have to find a quiet place in the forest. It is a well-known fact that unicorns do not like the smell of automobile exhaust, so you should look for a spot that is far away from roads or highways.
Once you have found your spot in the forest, you must make sure it is free of litter and debris, especially cigarette butts. Unicorns are allergic to smoke. Next, you need to collect between thirty and forty stones, all about the size of an apple. Place the stones in a large circle. Stand in the centre of the circle and feel good about what you have built. My witchy friends tell me this is called “casting the circle.”