Gender Failure

by Ivan E. Coyote

  God Failure

  On the day of my dedication, when I was slated to meet Jesus for the first time, I was only a couple of months old. There is a photo of me sitting askew on my uncle Carl’s lap, and he has a huge grin beneath his handlebar moustache. He was holding me until my parents were ready to take me up to the front of the church. Apparently the pink satin dress my mother had put me in turned out to be a hazard, and I was as slippery as a little frog in his hands.

  I would often see that photo of myself when, as a child, I flipped through my baby book with my mother. “Uncle Carl said he almost dropped you ten times,” my mother would add to the story between laughs. “He was scared he would break you. Luckily, we still got you up to the front of the church to give you to Jesus.”

  A dedication is the moment when the parents of a newborn baby pledge to raise it Christian, along with everything that comes with it: in my case, being a girl in a tradition that still separated genders and gender roles along a strict divide. I wonder what would have happened if Uncle Carl had just let me go to where I was sliding? Would I have slithered to gender retirement in the north of Montreal, where I live now? Or chosen the long way through all of the years of trying to be a girl and then a man before retiring from gender completely? Most likely I would have lain on the floor feeling abandoned and crying until he picked me up again. There isn’t a lot of choice when you’re an infant.

  There wasn’t a lot of choice in cleaning a toilet as a nine-year-old, either. After my mother told me it was going to be part of my weekly chore routine, I knew that I could stay in that bathroom for as long as I wanted, but the only way out was to learn how to make the porcelain sink and toilet glisten. I cleaned them as fast as possible so I could go outside and play road hockey with my brother. In our house, it was only the girls who had to clean. At first I thought it was based on age because my sister and I were older, but as both of my brothers’ ninth birthdays came and went, I noticed that they hadn’t been inducted into the world of household chores like we had. It made no sense to me. The boys used the toilet as much as we did and, as I had observed in my weekly cleaning missions, made more of a mess of it. As soon as I could reach into the kitchen sink, washing the dinner dishes was added to my list of chores. I could see where this was going. Soon we would be doing everything for the men around us—just like our mother.

  Instead of thinking too much about my impending womanhood, I often ran to a ravine located on the hill above our house, the only place nearby that was covered in trees. I would run through it at full speed by myself, often picking up a stick to use as a sword so I could battle invisible opponents or take whacks at the underbrush. I would pick through the burnt remains of beer cans and cigarette butts in the cold ashes of the covert fires that teenagers had partied around on the weekend. I craved the unbridled freedom of acting how I wanted. Hot blood would rush through my body. I felt lighter the more I ran. I would go there to throw it off. I knew that it was something I was bad at, that I had to try at. It followed me wherever there were eyes to notice. Soon, though, I was back at the dinner table praying over a meal and being told that someday I would be someone’s wife. Growing up felt like a waterfall that was far off in the distance but unavoidable because I could never pull myself out of the water. The current was too strong. I didn’t want to grow up to be a woman where everyone could see me. I wanted to live in a ravine, in a tree fort by myself.

  Fast forward to a Sunday service at a Pentecostal church in northwest Calgary. I’m thirteen years old. I’m wearing army boots, a white blouse, and a black peasant skirt covered in flowers. It falls just above my ankles when I’m standing, swishing above my feet as I walk into church with my family. Two parents, two girls, two boys. We look like a perfect and planned balance. We sit in no real order in the pew, except for my parents, who are in the middle next to each other with children of various heights and genders on either side of them. The sermon starts and we sit up straight with our hands in our laps, trying to concentrate on staring straight ahead. After fifteen minutes I’m like a cowboy straddling a fence. My legs are spread wide apart because I want to be comfortable for the long wait. There is no real end time to a Pentecostal service. I’ve loaded my patch-work purple and teal leather purse with things to do: tiny notebooks, black pens, mints in wrappers. My mother hears me unwrap a mint surreptitiously, the crinkling paper for a moment eclipsing the sound of the pastor’s excited voice. She looks down the pew toward us. She sees my legs open and I can feel her glare upon me. I’m too old for her to take me to the church washroom for a spanking, so she just motions to me with her head. I look down and correct myself.

  This was female socialization in our family. I acted how I felt most naturally, and I was corrected, over and over again, until I learned not to act on my impulses, even though I still felt them. The thing about failing as a girl is that I did want to succeed. I wanted to be liked and accepted like anyone, but it wasn’t like learning how to play the guitar or to rollerblade. It was something that was always just out of my reach, something I could never really learn to do well, no matter how much I practiced.

  Being a girl was complicated enough before I started dating, but the other girls in the church youth group had a giddiness when they talked about boys that I didn’t feel, or even really understand. I wanted in on whatever they were feeling, even though I didn’t feel very giddy about anything. I hadn’t had any elementary school boyfriends, or been invited to any parties where I might have gotten one in junior high. Youth group was really my only chance at popularity or a boyfriend, and I wanted to see what dating was all about. When I was fourteen, I met a boy named Chad there who had a diamond stud earring and who pretended he could play the guitar. His mother had been one of the leaders of the Christian girls’ club I had gone to every Wednesday when I was younger. One night at youth group, I sat playing guitar in a small hallway off the main room. He walked up to me, sat down, and wiped his hands on his pants. Then he took my hand into his cold and sweaty palm, looked into my eyes, and asked me if I would be his girlfriend. Completely surprised by the attention, I managed to say yes. We then spent most of our time together jumping to the Kris Kross song “Jump,” making each other guitar pick necklaces, skateboarding, and holding hands during Sunday services. I was starting to feel like I was getting the hang of growing up after all.

  A few weeks after we started dating, the youth pastor gave a sermon about how marriage was supposed to be something that honoured the name of God: one man and one woman. He explained that in the union of a marriage, a woman’s body goes back to the man’s, as Eve was made out of Adam’s rib. He said there was nothing more peaceful or godly than obeying the laws of the Bible in holy matrimony. The whole time he preached, I was stealing looks at Chad. So far we hadn’t kissed because I’d been avoiding it. The idea of it didn’t seem as fun as everything else we were doing, like skateboarding.

  Then the youth pastor began to address the boys. “Men are the spiritual leaders of a household,” he proclaimed. “They rule over all the members of their households. A man is responsible for his wife and children.”

  I shot a direct look at Chad. He was slouching low in his seat, wearing torn jeans and a “No Fear” t-shirt, with his hands in his pockets. If I kept dating Chad and someday we kissed and even got married, he would be the lord over me? It seemed like a bad deal. He was a lot worse at the guitar than I was, and I was already having to pretend he was better at music than he really was. What would I get out of cleaning the house and cooking for him every day? My experiment in dating started to feel dangerous. Soon it cooled off and ended because I refused to kiss him, and he told me that he had kissed someone else. I was fine with it.

  It was for girls that I felt the giddiness that I was supposed to feel for boys. I had crushes on so many girls in junior high and high school, with their hairsprayed bangs and Gap perfume. I would think about those girls as I walked through the mall with my mother. I was supposed to be shopping, but sudden
ly I would be hit by a waft of perfume that I had longed for all day in class. When I finally decided to make a break for it and defy the church and all of its hellfire teachings, I discovered the things that I thought I just didn’t have in me, like the way my heart would take off when I finally held hands with, and then kissed, a girl.

  I came out to my friends slowly. Only a handful of them were uncomfortable about it and ditched me. Once I had a girlfriend, it finally made sense to me that I hadn’t really wanted a boyfriend. I thought I must have just always been gay. Since I had no homosexual role models, I started to covertly read lesbian magazines that I got from a magazine store downtown to discover exactly how being gay was supposed to work. The magazines didn’t contain a lot of clues, just articles about Ellen, Sandra Bernhard, and the Indigo Girls. None of these lesbians seemed very close to who I was, though. Maybe I would understand better when I was old enough to meet other gay people.

  One thing I was certain of was that I had strayed far from where my parents had wanted their god to take me when they dedicated my life to him. My inability to act like a girl without intense effort, combined with my attraction to other girls, was subject to condemnation, but for me there wasn’t a choice. I have been to many churches and met many Christians who accept people like me and still believe in God, but the resistance I experienced as I fled burned all the bridges between me and him. For me, Jesus is now more like my ex-boyfriend Chad: someone I knew well, but don’t think about a lot anymore.

  Listing My Sisters

  November 19, 2012

  As I write this, I am sitting in my nearly vacant office on campus at a university where I am the writer-in-residence for this semester. Nothing but a desk, a corkboard empty except for a handful of the previous tenant’s thumbtacks, and me. A woman just left my office after a brief meeting, and right after she was gone I let out a deep breath, and started to type.

  Tomorrow is the Trans Day of Remembrance. That young woman had come to ask me if I had any names of fallen trans people I wished to be included during the vigil tomorrow night.

  Where would I start? Do I start with the artist I once knew back in the day, how she played the violin, too, and how she took her own life after years of struggling with depression? What I remember is that the final straw for her was auditioning to play a dead body in a dumpster on one of those police procedural television shows that was being shot in town. She had been asked to audition for the part of a dead trans woman, but it had been given to a cisgendered female actor. The director thought the cisgendered actor would be “more believable.”

  The Trans Day of Remembrance will be the only day set aside in this school year on this campus to specifically honour or recognize trans people. It is not a celebration, rather, it is a solemn affair during which participants will gather to read a list of our fallen. Our murdered. Those of us who died from suicide or AIDS-related illness, or overdose or poverty or hatred and ignorance and racism. Or all of the above.

  Someone will wheel a couple of speakers into a common area on campus somewhere, and a microphone will be set up. This is Canada, and the students here are generally a fairly well-heeled lot, so what I am expecting will happen is that a few activist students, probably white and mostly middle-class, some queer and some genderqueer and some trans, though most probably trans masculine, will read out a list of names to remember. Most names will belong to trans women, many women of colour, some of whom were sex workers, and many of whom were either born poor or died poor. There will be little or no analysis presented as to who these trans people were, or why the dead are mostly trans women and the living people reading their names aloud are often not.

  What will be missing are these women’s stories. Their triumphs and talents and tribulations. We will be reminded only of their names. Most of the queer students will resume classes afterwards, and go to pride dances and Coming Out Day celebrations, and not think much about this list of names again until next year, because, really, trans women’s issues and realities don’t affect them all that much. The trans masculine folks will still be allowed, even welcomed, into women’s spaces, radical queer sex parties, women’s music festivals, and women’s studies programs at exclusive colleges and universities. And living trans women or trans-feminine people will continue to be excluded from some transition homes and shelters, some music festivals, some women’s spaces, a lot of lesbian feminist bedrooms, most dyke erotica and pornography, and nearly all of the good parties. What will also be missing is a discussion about the difference between excluding someone and actively including them, and intentionally making space. And the day after we are supposed to remember, most of this will be forgotten.

  Tomorrow I will remember my friend Rosie. All of her. How, if she were here, she would have stood at the back of the crowd, smoking and making wisecracks. How someone would have probably turned around and shushed her for talking too loud during her own candlelight vigil.

  Rosie disappeared, never to be seen from again, over twenty years ago now, shortly after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. She had been told by her doctor that he could no longer ethically prescribe hormones to her, as he suspected that long-term heavy estrogen use while she saved up money for the many surgeries that at that time were not covered by our province’s health care plan had been a contributing factor to the tumours growing in her stomach and intestines. He had recommended that she cease her use of female hormones and concentrate on her, and I quote, “real and more pressing medical concerns.”

  Rosie had disagreed. She packed up one suitcase, socked away all the remaining hormones she had been stockpiling, and vanished. None of us ever saw her again. She never was much for long goodbyes. It was common knowledge at the time that you could buy hormones on the black market south of the border, and we all assumed that was where she had gone. And now, given that it is twenty-three years after her then terminal diagnosis, and given that I never heard a single word from her or about her since, I am forced to assume that she is dead.

  But I refuse to reduce her life to nothing more than a name on a list of the deceased. I want all of who she was to be remembered, to be honoured. I want it to be known that Rosie’s life also contained joy, and laughter and friendship and love, in addition to despair and poverty and cancer and death.

  Because you cannot fight despair armed only with more despair.

  So. I will remember so much more about Rosie than just her absence from my life. I can tell you that Rosie loved to build little dollhouses, those fancy ones with real wood floors and fireplaces made from tiny bricks and roofs of miniature shingles that she glued into place one by one with tweezers, squinting over her bifocals. She had a cat named Miss Puss and a parakeet who couldn’t sing that she nicknamed Madonna but whose actual name was Lynda Carter, the actress who played Wonder Woman, and she owned over one hundred houseplants, which she watered at the crack of dawn every morning wearing her infamous high-heeled shoes. I know for sure about this part because I was her downstairs neighbour, and some days it sounded like she was learning to tap dance upstairs on top of my head.

  One time, a guy tried to assault her in an alley when she was walking home in those very same heels after getting us bagels at the bakery around the corner. He tried to grab her black leather purse, but Rosie, she used to box when she was in the navy, and she ended up kicking his ass. Finished him off with a knee to the face and knocked out two of his teeth. She arrived at my door still breathless, but recounted the incident like she was describing a fight in a hockey game that she had just seen the highlights of on the six o’clock news, not like something that had happened to her in real life just minutes earlier.

  When I brought her a glass of water and asked her if she was okay, she just shrugged. “Okay enough,” she growled, “except that fucker owes me a new pair of tights. Must have been his teeth that tore a hole right through the knee, here, look.” She pulled up her denim skirt to show me. “Brand new pair, too. Like money grows on trees, right? He won’t be trying
that manoeuvre again any time soon.”

  Rosie made the best baked beans ever, right from scratch, and taught me how to refinish furniture. That was how she saved money for electrolysis and her many surgeries; she salvaged pieces of discarded furniture from alleys and curbs all around the city and brought them back to high-gloss life. She collected bone china teacups with matching saucers from yard sales and thrift stores and kept them in a bird’s eye maple cabinet and only brought them out for special occasions or Really Bad Days. She hated being hugged, but every once in a while she would touch my hair or my cheek soft as could be with one of her gnarly ex-sailor’s hands, then pull away as soon as I acknowledged the fact she was touching me, like my head was a burner on the stove she had forgotten she had left on.

  What else? She was a foster kid originally from Quebec, but not even I could get her to talk about her childhood much, ever. She was Métis, but she didn’t speak much about that, either. She once shook hands with Pierre Elliott Trudeau. She could talk with a lit cigarette dangling from her pursed lips while she fixed her hair or fried eggs or sanded a teak sideboard better than anyone I have ever met, including my father. The smoke would curl up in swirling blue fingers and into her eyes and long bangs, but she never blinked. She rolled her own, with those little tubes and the machine and the tobacco that came in a tin. She wore too-loose false teeth that clicked sometimes when she laughed too deep and she would knuckle-punch you hard in the upper arm if you even brought it up. She never missed an episode of “The Young and the Restless,” but she would kill me dead if she knew I told anyone that.

  I will remember all of what she showed me of her life, and how she lived it. Her death is almost surely a fact, an unsubstantiated but statistically unavoidable probability. I will mourn her death, of course, but it seems more important to me that I celebrate her life, and cherish what she brought into mine. I will never forget her. I will remember all I can of my friend Rosie.