by Ivan Coyote
So we ran. On high heels and patent leather flats and in my good Fleuvog boots, hiking up sequined skirts and holding boobs and wigs and wallet chains in place, carrying silver and wood and bread. Two writers, an installation artist, a gender sciences researcher, a PhD candidate, a librarian, a boxer, and a longshorewoman ran past the bakery and the laundromat, around the corner store and through the smell of alley and dumpster, waved at the ladies working the parking lot outside of the 7-Eleven and laughed with the two drunk guys on the bus stop bench. Me with my gran’s blood in my veins, rushing in warm beats past my eardrums, trying not to puke up the duck confit and shitake mushroom gravy poutine we all had just eaten.
I could feel my grandmother with me, all around us. We all piled into the elevator, breathless and blood-cheeked and leaning on each other we were laughing so hard, and I felt my grandmother whisper into my ear. You want to know what she said, what she whispered across the bridge of ritual and tradition to me from the great beyond?
Whatsa matter with you running around in your good boots like that? You want to ruin them being foolish, do you? Don’t be vain. Next time wear your sneakers. That’s what they’re made for.
“SHOULD” ALL OVER EVERYONE
My aunt called me today. She’s only eleven years older than me. We had a really good chat. She has had a rough couple of years; two Septembers ago her husband died in his sleep of a massive heart attack, and then a couple of weeks later she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“My mom sent me the breast cancer survivor calendar you were in,” I told her. “When I opened it up to January, there you were. You looked so beautiful and strong, it choked me right up.”
She told me how much she hated that picture, that she couldn’t believe it was the one the photographer had picked to use.
“I think that photographer looked right inside of you and caught your strength. The part of you that survived everything,” I told her, and I heard her let out a long breath. Took a drag off of her cigarette. I could see her in my mind, her feet stuffed into her baby blue fuzzy slippers and her fleece jacket pulled over her shoulders, smoking a Player’s Light Regular on her back porch with the sliding door pulled shut behind her. The barbecue covered up since Kevin died, and blanketed now in December snow. The birdfeeder hanging from the big pine tree next to the railing on the deck. The sun gone already and the moon bouncing off of all that quiet white in her back yard. The world behind her silent except for ravens gurgling back and forth on the power line.
“I read your book Gender Failure,” she said, changing the subject. “It took me a while because I could only read a chapter at a time, and then put it down and then go back a couple of days later.”
“Why’s that?” I held the phone between my chin and collarbone so I could unlock the front door of my building.
“It made me feel so guilty.”
“Guilty? I never meant for it to make anyone feel guilty. Why guilty?”
“There are so many things I should have seen, that I could have known, if I had been paying any kind of attention at all. I had no idea, but I should have known.” I heard her exhale, then take another long drag.
“How could you have known? I didn’t even know. I didn’t even figure myself out until just a couple of years ago. I could have told you more. I should have talked to you more. I just didn’t even have the words yet myself. I’m getting in the elevator now,” I tell her. “If I lose you I’ll call you right back, okay?”
“I could have asked. How many thoughtless things have I said? I can’t even think about it now.”
We both went quiet for a minute. I was alone in the elevator. I could feel the tears coming. I blinked them away.
“Promise me if I ever say something stupid or hurtful, you will tell me,” she blurted out. “I’m just learning. You’re still the only trans person that I know.”
“Only if you promise me the same thing,” I told her, dropping my keys on the counter and bending to untie my bootlaces and kick them off. I pushed a kitchen chair away from the table with my knee and sat down. It was cold in my apartment, and the little dog wandered over to say hello, his toenails clicking a rhythm on the hardwood floor.
“That’s a promise,” my aunt said softly into the phone, and I heard her slide the glass door open and then shut it again. “You know I love you so much.”
“I love you too,” I told her. “And Merry Christmas.”
“I’m just so glad it’s over for another year,” she said, and I nodded, even though I knew she couldn’t see me.
“When are you going to quit smoking?” I asked her.
“When hells freezes over.” She laughed. “Actually, if hell freezes over, then I’m going to smoke my face off. No sense quitting for the end of the world.”
MIDDLE SEAT
It’s hard for me to describe to those of you who have always felt comfortable and seen in the gender box you were placed in at birth what it feels like when someone refers to you by the wrong pronoun. It is not enough for me to just ask the men in the room what it would feel like to constantly be called a lady, or for the women in the room to imagine being called sir when you were all dressed up for a day at work. If you have not struggled to fit into and/or escape from your assigned gender box, then you cannot truly know what this feels like. If passing as your chosen gender has never been a matter of safety or danger for you, a matter of being respected or reviled, then you cannot and will not truly understand me, but I will attempt to describe it to you anyway. Imagine a world full of strangers who all have a tiny little razor in their hands and they can randomly, mostly accidentally, shave a tiny piece of your soul off you while they sell you a newspaper or pass you the key to the bathroom at the gas station. Now imagine your classmates and co-workers have an even bigger blade, and can cut deeper. Imagine your friends and family members wield a really big knife. Imagine that all of these cuts can whittle away at the flesh of you, day after day after day, rendering the truth of you into a sliver, almost invisible, unrecognizable. Imagine that these cuts sting for hours afterwards, sometimes days, and that they tend to fester. Imagine that you have to get through every day, bleeding from hundreds of wounds, some little and some deep, all the while pretending that nothing hurts.
I would like to phase out the use of the phrase “prefers the pronoun” she or he or they, (or any other) and replace it with “uses the pronoun.” I prefer chicken to duck. I prefer a window seat. But I use the pronoun they. When someone writes that a person “prefers” a particular pronoun, it implies that there is a choice there for everyone whether to respect that wish or not, and that the person with the pronoun “preference” would be okay with the middle seat or the duck of their identity being respected. Not true. For some (if not most) gender variant and/or trans folks, not having their pronoun respected is hurtful, and constantly correcting people is exhausting and alienating. So I vow to change my language. People don’t prefer their chosen pronoun, they use it. My only choice is to be mindful and respectful of others, or to be thoughtless and even cruel. This is not to say I get it right all the time every time, but that is my aim. Saying things like, “But I find it so hard to remember because we grew up together,” is a cop-out. If you grew up together, then you owe it to the person to do better by them. And if you want to try the “but the they pronoun is so awkward” angle with me, then I would ask you to think about how your struggle compares to the battles trans people have to fight every day.
BABY STRONG
I don’t remember for sure who called me first. I think maybe it was my mom.
“I need to ask you a favour.” She was using her down-low, it’s-a-serious-thing voice. I sat up straighter at my kitchen table. “We’ve got a situation brewing up here. I need you to call Danny and ask him to reconsider his stance on this whole baby shower thing. Don’t tell him I told you to.”
“What baby shower thing?” I asked her, taking a long breath and letting it out slow. My family has weird customs regardin
g the sharing of knowledge, for some reason they seem to prefer that everyone promise not to tell anyone they said anything about anything, ever, all the while knowing that they just told the person least likely or able to keep their mouth shut a secret that half of them already knew from hearing it from someone else who was also supposed to keep it to themselves on a need to know basis. It all quickly gets hard to keep track of, especially once removed from the thick of it, and it can be frustrating. Especially when I do manage to keep my mouth shut about something and then no one else except the original leak mentions anything about it to me again, and so I don’t hear the news updates about important shit because either everybody assumed someone had already told me, or they didn’t want to be the first one to let the cat out of the bag because they think I’m the one who can’t keep a secret.
My mother cleared her throat. I could hear her stirring her mug with her teaspoon. Probably some kind of fancy rooibos. Mocha mint or something.
“Well you know that Robert and Christine are having a baby. So they’re having a baby shower next week. I should probably let Danny tell you the rest.”
“But you’re not going to.” I smiled to myself and waited.
“Well, they decided to have a gender party.”
Now, if this were my queer friends having a gender party in East Vancouver, I might have busted out a mascara moustache or borrowed someone’s high heels and gotten into it. But it was my cousin the brew master in the Yukon and his pregnant girlfriend throwing this particular gender party, so something told me there was more than one kind of gender party out there and the gender party in question might not be what had initially sprung to my mind.
“What’s a gender party exactly, Mom?” I asked, not quite sure I really wanted to know.
She started talking fast like she had just been waiting for me to ask what she had just told me she wasn’t going to talk about. “The expectant parents go to the bakery and get a cake made up. Or I guess they could bake it at home. Whatever. They dye the cake pink inside if the baby is a girl, or they make a blue cake for a boy, and then they cover it with icing, like regular icing, to hide the colour of the cake. Then they throw a party, like a kind of baby shower I guess, and when they cut into the cake, then they reveal to everyone what sex the baby is.”
“So we can start its indoctrination?” I ask.
“Don’t start with that. It’s supposed to be a party,” she says. I can feel her furrowing her brow at me all the way from the Yukon Territory. “Call your cousin, please. Your poor aunt Nora is upset about it all. Her first grandchild. After what happened with Kevin.”
Here is where I explain it all to folks who don’t have thirty-six cousins, fourteen aunts, and twelve uncles. Danny is my cousin. My mom’s nephew. My cousin Dan didn’t want to go to the gender party of the unborn child of my other cousin Robert, and Robert’s mom was my aunt Nora, also known as my mom’s youngest sister. Nora was still reeling from the recent and unexpected death of her husband, my uncle Kevin, whose heart exploded in his sleep just months before he would have should have met his first grandchild, the baby whose gender was about to be announced to the family via the inside colour of a store-bought cake.
I did what I was told and called my cousin Dan.
“It’s ridiculous,” he says over the speakerphone in his car. “I was like, come on, people? A gender party? Has anyone thought about how this would feel for Ivan? It’s the year 2013, why do we even need to know what gender the kid is? Why, so we can all start leaning over Christine’s belly and whispering to it that it isn’t going to be good at math or can’t be a fireman when it grows up? That it shouldn’t cry in public? I’m not going, you know, just on principle.”
But somewhere Dan must have changed his mind, because he did end up going to the gender party, which is how the following happened:
I think they had the party at my Aunt Nora’s place, because she has the biggest living room. So all my cousins from my mom’s side are there, and a couple from my dad’s side too, and a couple of my aunts and uncles, and Ed and Elaine, Kevin’s parents, the great-grandparents to be. Someone probably put out some chips in a bowl with ranch or dill pickle dip, and a veggie tray and some cold cuts. There were cigarettes smoked and extinguished in the over-full ashtray on the back deck, and then someone turned the sound down on the flat screen but left the picture on in the living room, and everyone gathered around the big table in the dining room. Christine complained about her sore lower back and then leaned over and cut the cake. Laid the serrated knife on its side and used the blade to lift a wedge of pink cake with white icing onto a dessert plate, and everyone cheered.
“It’s a girl!” my Aunt Nora exclaimed, tears brimming in her blue eyes. Someone passed her a square of paper towel and she folded it in half and dabbed at her running mascara.
“For now!” my cousin Dan said loudly, and the room went silent.
Amelia Pearl Kevin was born at the end of January, nearly three weeks overdue. She bears the names of her great grandmothers and the grandfather who already loved her but never got to hold her. Legend has it she was born already able to hold her head up, and one of the first times she was placed on her belly she did a half push-up in protest.
Robert, her father, was one of the younger kids born to our generation, and he didn’t change a lot of diapers and watch a lot of toddlers grow up, so he wasn't as familiar with the development of babies as some of us are.
When the new parents took their newborn in to the health nurse to be weighed and have her check-up, Robert mentioned that he thought the baby was pretty strong for her age.
The nurse let out a snort and smiled at the young couple. “Pretty strong?” she laughed and shook her head. “Your baby has oblique muscles.”
I met her for the first time when she was ten months old, still bald as an apple, threatening to stand straight up from a seated position, and nearly walking. Terrifying everyone by tirelessly climbing long flights of stairs as fast as she could, looking over her shoulder to make certain someone was watching and that they were suitably impressed with her.
I chatted with my aunt Nora as she changed her diaper one afternoon. Amelia wouldn’t even lie flat on her back, instead she sat half-upright in a kind of Pilates V, her little muscles all flexed like she was multi-tasking, getting a quick ab workout in until such time as she could change her own diaper. Staring intently at her grandmother, like she was timing the whole operation, or going to write up a full report on the experience later.
I didn’t say it, but I held it there on the tip of my tongue. That’s what you get for having a gender party, I thought to myself, and said nothing.
“Everybody calls her Baby Strong,” Nora confessed, and we both laughed.
My new shirt. Plaid on the outside, but with flowers on the inside. Just like me.
VUL-NER-A-BLE
I get off the airplane and come down the airport escalator, looking for a person who looks like they are looking for me.
I had received an email the day before from the writer’s festival saying someone would be at the airport to pick me up, but they didn’t give me a name, or tell me what this person looked like.
But I see her, she has long curly brown hair and I see her step forward, raising a gloved hand to wave at me. She offers to take my suitcase, but I tell her it’s cool, I’ve got it. We head out through the automatic doors, through a cloud of cigarette smoke coming from a gaggle of baggage handlers next to the taxi stand, and head for the parking garage.
It is cold here, much colder than it is in Vancouver, and I am glad I wore the down parka and packed my mitts and scarf.
She apologizes that the heater is not working very well in her car, and proceeds to scrape the frost off the inside of her windshield. The back seat of her aging Honda Civic hatchback is a mishmash of festival programs, a hairy dog blanket, a kid’s booster seat, someone’s mittens, a duffle bag, empty coffee mugs, and a Thighmaster. An actual Thighmaster. I wonder for a minut
e how it ended up in the back seat of her car, but don’t ask.
She works for the festival. Probably on contract, and she probably has two or three other jobs to make it all work. Today is the second day of a seven-day festival. She most likely has eleven other tasks to take care of before she picks up her kid at daycare at five. It’s 3:50 p.m. but the clock on the dash of her car reads 4:50 p.m. because she hasn’t set it back since daylight savings time happened six weeks ago. She has received four texts already since we got in the car; we haven’t even hit the freeway yet. She tries not to look at her phone because she is driving, but glances at it at stoplights.
We leave the freeway and pull over into the parking lot of an Esso station. She gets out and puts some air into the rear passenger tire, climbs back in, and programs the hotel address into her cell phone’s GPS.
“Four years here but I still can’t figure out the one-way streets downtown,” she tells me. Then takes a big breath.
“I want you to know how much your books have meant to me. I read them in college when I was coming out. I gave them to my folks. I made my little brother read them. And it wasn’t just the queer content thing. It was the small town stuff. Your family. So much queer writing is all big-city-estranged-from-your-family-punk-rock stuff. Your books were the first queer stories I read where I could actually see myself in them.”
We were pulling into the little loop of a driveway in front of the hotel. There was a small bench there, and an ashtray full of white sand and a frozen tree in a large pot. A worn red all-season carpet.
“Anyways. I wanted to thank you for making yourself so vulnerable. That’s what I always wonder when I read your work, what must it be like, to be so honest, so … wide open?”