Gender Failure

by Ivan E. Coyote

  And then I will work to never forget my living trans sisters. I will speak their names aloud, too, and then get to work. Work to earn the word “brother.”

  Cowboy

  Every Calgary Stampede, the city is a sea of brand new white cowboy hats and denim worn by office workers who have probably never been on a farm. You can see them in the evening, sauntering around drunk from office parties with little bits of straw stuck to their outfits from the bales of hay that are trucked downtown for the events. I grew up in the suburbs. My father was one of those office workers. I never lived in the country as a child, but my mother’s family is different.

  I could always tell that my uncle Carl was at my grandma’s house by his worn brown cowboy boots at the door. They stood up straight as if his legs were still in them. Uncle Carl lived with his wife and two sons in a mobile home out in the country. Every once in a while they would decide to move and bring their mobile home with them. I remember being amazed that we could pull up to the same house in a completely new location. When we walked inside, everything was just the same. It was like a spaceship that could take off and then land somewhere else.

  Uncle Carl loved horses. He rode them until he was bow-legged. I would watch him amble around and think about how the horses had changed the shape of his legs to fit their bodies. Sometimes he would take his own horse out for us to ride. He would lift my sister and me up onto it and then lead us around slowly. I felt so tall on top and safe with my uncle holding the reins.

  Uncle Carl has worked the oil rigs for as long as I can remember. We would never know if he was going to show up at Christmas or Thanksgiving until that day. It all depended on whether his boss gave the crew the time off or not, and that depended on the price of crude oil. Sometimes he would drive twelve hours straight back from Saskatchewan to be with us. Other times he would be unreachable, working somewhere out on the flat, frozen land. One Christmas when he came home, he hadn’t told anyone that he had lost part of a finger a few months earlier, and he made a practical joke out of it. He came up to me and did the trick where he pretended to pull part of his finger off, which is usually done by tucking the finger back and making part of the thumb on the other hand look like it was the detached part of the finger. This time there was no “just kidding” part at the end, and he laughed for half an hour after I shrieked when I discovered that there was indeed a part of his finger missing. But I loved it when he paid attention to me even if he sometimes shocked me. I didn’t even have any bad feelings for him after he accidentally dislocated my arm when he was trying to put me on his shoulders; I just cried until my relatives gave me candy and then we found out that my arm had popped itself back into its socket on the trip to the emergency room.

  My uncles who work the oil rigs are often away from home for months at a time. They work fourteen-hour days or more through every season that the prairies throw at them. All three of them dropped out of high school as soon as they could, but now they earn more money than a lot of people who went to university. Life on the oil rigs is lonely. When I was a child, it was not unusual to get a drunken call from one of my uncles in the middle of the night, wanting to talk to all four of us kids and tell us that he loved us. We would make jokes about it and warn each other as we passed the receiver, but I felt my uncles’ isolation and identified with it.

  When my brother Jack died, they were his pallbearers. They carried his coffin without crying from the church to the hearse. I looked up at them when they passed by me and hoped to be strong like them. When my schizophrenic father would fly off the handle, at least one of them would always show up to protect us. My father was scared of them and would take off as soon as one showed up in a truck. They made him look like a tiny guy in a white shirt and thick tie because they were real cowboys. I needed to see that there were people who were unafraid of him in order to get over my own fear.

  Sometimes, in daydreams, I pictured myself as one of them, out in the middle of the prairies driving alone in my truck, blowing smoke out the window, and sleeping in hotels and temporary trailers. I would listen to Garth Brooks, Willie Nelson, and Randy Travis. My hands would be dirty with crude oil. I wanted to be a cowboy so that I could hold back my tears and protect my family.

  I used to smoke and drink, but then I quit both. I never learned how to drive, work the oil rigs, or ride a horse, but I did write songs about these things. I was not a cowboy in reality, but my heart always felt lonely enough to sing about it with conviction. When I’m scared, I stand tall and saunter around like my uncles. I make wry jokes out of the side of my mouth to protect myself. I have learned things that they don’t tell you on the prairies, like that crying is a good thing, but I will always fall back on the kind toughness that I learned from my uncles whenever I feel completely alone.

  The Rest of My Chest

  When I was young, they were way littler. In my early twenties, all I had to do really was bench press a bit of weight here and there, and they almost disappeared, I worked them down to muscly little apricots with nipples on them, easily hideable with a tight tank top and a t-shirt over top, then a long-sleeved shirt and a sweater and maybe a jacket. Then for a while I used Saran wrap, if you can believe that, in the good old days, back in the early nineties, Saran wrap but only for special occasions, of course, not for everyday, just for a fancy dinner or dress-up when you didn’t want them messing up the line of your dress shirt like they do.

  Then came the ACE bandages, but lucky for me those didn’t last too too long before I started dating the dancer, and see, dancers mostly dance their breasts right off themselves, but also they have these flat elastic shirt things that the costume designers sew up for them to wear so they all look like androgynous willow trees, and once I got my hands on one of those elastic dancer shirt things, well, I never looked back.

  Until my late thirties, at least, when all of a sudden they got so much bigger, and then it was onwards to the double front compression shirt which sounds really heavy and constricting because it fucking is, right, and it is not made for guys like us, nothing really truly is made for us, it is mostly designed for cisgendered men and their man boobs and not really built to hold these ladies like mine, this pair that I went and grew myself somehow in the last six or seven years or so.

  So. So. Nineteen years, I have been binding. Yes, thank you. I realize some of you are thinking, holy fuck, Saran wrap. That dude is old. And that is okay by me.

  Where was I? Anyways, so all of a sudden a guy wakes up on the verge of forty-something years old and now not only do I have kind of big tits somehow but God being the joker that they are, I also have really nice big tits seriously sweet Jesus I wish it weren’t so. Some days I look in the mirror and I think, whose are those? They are sweet but whoever left these here will hopefully come and take them away now because I need to put a shirt on and go outside.

  That’s the thing, right? I am totally fine with them when I am naked, well, mostly okay, unless you stare or take a side-view picture or touch them like this instead of like this or this, right, and so mostly I am okay with them naked, I suppose, unless you get all weird about them, in which case then I will definitely counter with feeling way weirder, but what I for sure all the time now definitely am not okay with is having these breasts on me unbound with my clothes on. Hard to describe, I guess, for those of you who feel actually attached in some way to all the parts of your body, or okay with every part of your body, because please, I know that it is not just trans people who feel like this about our bodies, but if you in fact feel perfectly okay with all the parts of the body you are travelling in right now then I say good on you, sincerely, I am glad for you, but it is not like that for me, you see, and I have tried and tried and tried for so long now and, well, I am pretty much certain it almost goes without saying at this point that chances are I am most likely not going to wake up one morning and say, okay, turns out it was all just a phase and only today I decided that I am totally fine having tits. In fact, look, look at my tits, I
just love having them around.

  This is probably not going to happen. And now, just lately, these three fingers have started tingling and going numb and the only thing that makes that tingling dead feeling go away is to take off the binder, and I am hoping it is not permanent nerve damage because I can’t leave the house now at all with the ladies not tended to properly, just can’t do it, can’t really say why and don’t need to anymore, so.

  So I finally called my doctor. She referred me to a psychologist for a mental health assessment and diagnosis. I went to talk to that psychologist in her office downtown. I had never done anything like that before. That psychologist, she was way cooler than I thought she would be. I cried a lot more than I thought I was going to, and she asked a lot of questions about depression, general happiness, and my body. I tried to act not suicidal but not way too happy and well-adjusted, either. I am supposed to be here to get fixed, I know this already. So there has to be something wrong enough with me but not too wrong, not so wrong that I need different help from someone else that isn’t her with something more pressing than I hate having these tits. Have to find that balance.

  See, the thing is, I want top surgery, but I am not on hormones. Well, news flash, every single one of us is technically on hormones right now, but I am not taking any hormones, right, and this is not how it is supposed to go. I forget who wrote these rules, who decided the order of things, and why, and who decided hormones first then off come the tits, I don’t know why there seems to be that rule, but I had to make a special case for myself that I was trans enough. In British Columbia, the province in Canada where I live, this surgery is covered by our health care system, provided you qualify. And by qualify, they mean be diagnosed. They, being the government. The government will pay for you to get fixed, but only if they decide you are broken in the right way. The other they being, in this case, the medical establishment. Before the bureaucrats can sign off on the form and send it to the surgeon, a psychologist and a psychiatrist must first decide if they believe me that I am who I say I am. In order to do this, I must fill out a long multiple-choice questionnaire, which the psychologist that my doctor referred me to will read through and assess, and then refer me to a psychiatrist for a proper diagnosis. Because someone who is trained in this stuff has to sign off that I do in fact have a bona fide gender identity disorder, but that someone cannot be me, because I am not qualified. And by gender identity disorder, they all mean that you want to be a man. Or a woman, as the case may be. It is not enough to just feel that you are not a woman or a man. You must want to be not the box that they have all previously put you in. There is no box to check for not wanting a box at all. No one knows how to fix that.

  I had to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, or gender identity disorder, and think about it, how would that feel to be told that just being yourself is a disorder, but if I don’t say the right things and they don’t say those words gender identity disorder, then I pay for everything out of pocket myself and I don’t know about you but nine thousand dollars is a lot of money, and the question I keep on thinking but not asking that shrink is why can my cousin have two breast augmentations and get her lips filled with silicone, and no judgments here from me, because lord knows my poor cousin has received enough of it from our Catholic family, and she has been asked plenty of questions regarding who is paying for it all and why and what it might cost her in the long run, and ask her, just what exactly she feels it has all cost her in the end, but my question is, how come nobody makes her see a shrink first, yeah, but I don’t ask that question because I need to catch more flies with honey or it’s nine thousand bucks for me and I am already the wrong kind of trans guy because I don’t want the hormones, I just want the breasts gone, well, not just gone, but the chest reconstruction too.

  When I tell the psychologist that I use the “she” pronoun for work and in media interviews, she furrows her brow and writes faster on her pad of paper. When I tell her I have no intention of going on testosterone, she looks up at me, then down again and writes a bunch more stuff. I am starting to think about what I am not going to be able to do with that nine thousand dollars and how exactly am I gonna come up with it anyways. When the psychologist, who is actually pretty cool, asks me if I pack. As in a dick. As in, in my pants.

  She asks me like she thinks I am going to say no. I can tell she doesn’t think I am trans enough for this. Not to get it funded anyway.

  Yes, I do, I say. I have been packing for over ten years easy, I tell her, maybe closer to fifteen. We used to make our own out of condoms and cheap hair gel and nylons. I told you. Fucking old school, man.

  Well, then. She sits up straighter in her chair, starts writing some more.

  I can’t believe this, I say. Don’t tell me this all comes down to whether or not I carry a dick in my pants.

  She considers the implications of this for a minute.

  I guess I am saying that, she admits.

  I found this shocking at the time, but later, I had to admit it made a lot of sense. Just like the whole fucking world, and all those cocks, those cocks on people who want them on them anyways, and then I got to thinking about big cities all full of skyscrapers and hello, patriarchy, of course it comes down to my dick. Of course, having a dick in my pants and identifying on the masculine end of the spectrum makes all the difference. Especially when it comes to getting what I want.

  The psychologist refers me to a psychiatrist for a formal diagnosis. Acquiring this diagnosis quickly became complicated for me, because there are very few psychiatrists in my province who the bureaucrats have certified to be allowed to make such an important decision about me, for me. On top of this, I have been writing about the gender binary and my place in it, or outside of it, for many years now, and one by one the psychiatrists that the bureaucrats had deemed qualified to decide if I was indeed transgendered enough to proceed with surgery were all forced to recuse themselves from making any decisions about me on ethical grounds, because they had read my work on gender in their how-to-be-nice-to-trans-people sensitivity workshop when they were going through the process of being trained to be certified to be allowed to make such decisions about people like me.

  Make sense? I didn’t think so. To sum it up, most of the psychiatrists who the government looked to so they could decide whether or not I was trans were unable to assess me because I had written about being trans, and they had read some of my work while learning about how to deal with trans people, and so were no longer objective enough to decide fairly if I was trans or not. This resulted in delays, and probably more paperwork. Conflict of whose interest, exactly? Interesting question.

  Finally, the bureaucrats found a psychiatrist in a suburb who hadn’t read any of my work on gender, and was thus naturally better equipped to understand and assess my gender for other professionals. Forms were filed. Letters were written. Decisions were made by those obviously more qualified than I am to understand myself.

  I’m not saying it’s a perfect system, but it’s a health care system, and I am still grateful to reside in a country that possesses one.

  As for this psychiatrist, I wanted to dislike him on principle but I could not seem to muster it up once we met in person. He had an Arthur Eames office chair, which I coveted very much, and we bonded over furniture (mid-century Danish teak modern) for a while before getting down to business. He proceeded to ask me a bunch more questions about my gender history, and my relationship with my father. He asked me how long I had been binding my breasts. I told him nineteen years.

  His eyebrows shot up. Why so long? he asked, incredulous. Most of my patients come to me after about two weeks of that torture.

  I don’t like to rush into things, I told him.

  He laughed so hard at that, a real genuine belly laugh too, and slapped his desk with a flat palm, so that I couldn’t help but like him a little, despite myself. Couldn’t help but wonder, though, just who else had been in my chair, because I knew tons of guys who had been binding for th
is long or even longer, guys who couldn’t afford the cost or the time off, or who didn’t have any health insurance at all, or who didn’t jump through the right hoops or say the right things to the right suits. Turns out this guy mostly worked with adolescent trans kids.

  Anyway, he wrote down stuff about my father issues, noted among other things that I was dapperly dressed and very punctual, which I appreciated, and sent me a copy of everything he wrote about me, which I also appreciated, and recommended me for gender reassignment surgery, without the usual pre-requisite hormone treatments.

  My next question is for you. Am I trans enough now? Or, conversely, do you now feel that I no longer belong in the sisterhood? Did your feelings change at all for me over the course of this story? Do you find me more or less attractive? If so, why?

  Please rate the strength of your feelings from one to five, one meaning you feel not very strongly about it all, to five meaning you have very strong feelings about me getting top surgery. Now, please fold up your answers and put them in your pocket. Please keep them to yourself, as I will try to do with my feelings about your breasts. Thank you so much for participating.

  In Fargo, North Dakota, I prepay $65 for gas. My tank will only take $53. I go back into the gas bar to get my change. “I guess I am used to Canadian gas prices,” I explain. There is a random dude hanging around talking to the clerk. “You’re from Canada?” he says. “We’re, like, neighbours, aren’t we?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “we are right on top of you.”

  He snorts. “Nobody is on top of us, you faggot. This is America.”

  “Technically,” I say, backing out of the door, “we are on top of you. Geographically, not sexually.”

  “He’s right,” the female clerk says to the dude. “And go home now, Eddie, you are starting to get on my last nerve.”