Gender Failure

by Ivan E. Coyote

  Prairie Gender

  From far away, the ground cover on the prairies looks like a simple repetition of grass or wheat, but up close there are hundreds of plant species coexisting through extreme seasons and constant wind, working to survive. In the white, working-class, Protestant, anglophone prairie community that I grew up in, gender was just as complex as those plants. Of course, gender was dominated by the typical binary in terms of gender presentation and roles, but that was more of an official policy rather than an accurate description. In the messiness of life and sheer survival, there were constant contradictions. The women of my childhood were as tough as those low-lying thistles, and the only perceptible ways in which they were lesser than men was in the resources afforded to them and in how they were treated as inferior. The expectations placed on them were actually much higher than those placed on men. Most of these women survived in spite of their husbands, who often neglected, abused, and abandoned them and their children.

  My grandmother grew up in Saskatchewan. Her father owned the John Deere dealership in the small town where they lived, and she worked there selling farm equipment when she was a teenager. My grandmother would pull me onto her knee and tell me stories about Saskatchewan winters and driving tractors around the store lot. She told me that her father was lax with her about things like that because she had shown interest in running his business. When it came time to marry, she found a young Irish preacher with bright blue eyes and jet black hair. He told her stories about wanting to settle down in a small town in Alberta, about starting a family and spreading God’s word. After their sixth child was born, however, my grandfather’s passions wavered from both Christ and his family, and he ran off with an elementary school teacher from the town. I have never heard anything about what that did to my grandmother, other than that she raised her six children alone from then on. A man abandoning his children at that time was not unusual, while a woman who did the same thing would be considered monstrous. Like a lot of single mothers, my grandmother ended up doing all of the stereotypical work of both men and women, but with very little appreciation. She moved the family to Calgary, got a job at a bank, and continued to care for her children by herself. After her children were grown, she retired to a small house in the northeast of Calgary, where she mowed her own lawn and watched sports on the television.

  My mother was considered a tomboy in school because she was athletic and could run faster than anyone else. As a teenager, she wore cowboy boots, and smoked and drank along with the boys. She was famous for her temper and has stories about throwing rocking chairs at her brothers during arguments. She worked on a farm during high school to pay her room and board, delivering calves and driving tractors. As an adult, my mother withstood seventeen years of living with my abusive father when she thought she had no other choice. After my parents divorced, she followed my grandmother’s example and put herself through college while raising her four children. She got an office job after she graduated.

  Many of my aunts stayed at home while my uncles were away working on the oil rigs for months at a time. The women checked their own oil in their trucks and fed their own horses while doing chores and raising children. Their husbands would work for months at a time in northern Alberta or in Saskatchewan, and when my uncles did come home they would have money burning a hole in their pockets, so they would often go out partying and gambling. The day-to-day business of running a household, including what would be thought of as men’s work, fell to my aunts by default.

  When I was a child, I didn’t know that I would ever identify as a man. I didn’t do that until I saw it as an option, and I had to leave the prairies in order to do so. But I also couldn’t imagine growing up to be a woman. My father would often say to me and my sister, “You’re going to end up barefoot and pregnant before you know it!” He would say this with a sardonic grin. After my mother left him, I helped her raise my two younger brothers. Even as a child, I felt trapped and exhausted by housework and childcare. I knew that I was supposed to be a girl, but I never let my mind rest for long on what seemed like an unwanted yet impending fate. I used my imagination to survive, and I decided that I could be any manner of things, anything but a woman raising children alone in Alberta. How exactly I was going to evade being trapped was not something I could yet fathom.

  Once I identified as a man, I found it as impossible to play the stereotypical male role as it was to play the female one. This was not only because society and individual people were constantly telling me that I wasn’t a “real” man because of the body I inhabited, but also because sexism made me just as uncomfortable when I was on the side with more power. There was a lot of pressure from the queer community, and from outside of it, to earn my identity as a man by acting like one. To cross from one side of the binary to the other, I was expected to prove that I was, in fact, male. So for a time, I shied away from femininity because I thought it would not help my cause. At the same time, I felt hesitant to defend my place in the binary because it inevitably led to putting women down. I knew through experience that men were not stronger or better than women, and that masculinity was not better than femininity. I knew that men did not all behave one way and women another. But that didn’t make things any easier.

  Creating a false narrative about my own gender would be turning my back on that history. When I was a man, I wasn’t comfortable subscribing to the division of certain activities like changing oil on a car or wearing makeup. I can’t say that I learned to be tough only from my cowboy, oil-rig-working, truck-driving uncles. It was the women who were expected to hold everything together, and that they did. As a transgender person, I don’t have the acceptance of most of my family. I’ve crossed a line that they see as uncrossable. However, when I’m standing up for myself, or laying low in order to survive as a trans person, I use skills that the women in my family taught me. I am not a woman, but I am fighting against the same elements for survival. I am proud to stand next to the women in my family as a survivor. I feel like it’s a sentiment that they would understand. We are like two different kinds of plants bending next to each other in the prairie wind.

  Gender Identity Interview for Adults (FtM)

  For each statement, circle whether this has been true for you Always, Often, Sometimes, Rarely, or Never. Please use the space provided to add any comments should you wish.

  Man Failure, Part 1

  Micah, a friend of mine, was the supervisor at the gas station I worked at during and after high school. One afternoon I walked in with my too-big blue uniform shirt untucked over my black cargo pants, and he already looked amused. Usually I had to crack a joke or trip over something to see that glow in his eyes.

  “A lady came in today,” he said.

  “Yeah?” I grunted.

  “She said that she came in yesterday and got her oil checked. She needed a quart of oil and we put one in.”

  I stayed silent and shifted my weight.

  “Anyways, she was pretty pissed off. Said she was served by a young man with a shaved head. Said he put a quart of oil in, but left the cap off her oil tank. Her whole engine was covered in the stuff by the time she got home.”

  I kept my hands close to my sides, trying to not run them through my quarter-inch long hair. “That sucks,” I said, not owning up to my mistake.

  “Well, the manager gave her a coupon to have her engine shampooed. Pretty expensive stuff. She can’t figure out which member of the staff it was, though. We don’t have any boys working here that match that description.” He struggled to finish without laughing, and our eyes met in acknowledgment. We both knew that I was the boy who messed up that engine, but the manager would have been too embarrassed to acknowledge it or point it out. I don’t know if I’ve ever been as grateful for my legal status as female as at that moment, or for the stigma of pointing out that I was being mistaken for a male.

  Micah didn’t rat me out to the manager. I kept my job and went on to make a lot of other mistakes, servicing cars a
nd sometimes being asked if I was old enough to work there when the legal working age in Alberta at the time was fourteen. I was sometimes seen as a boy before I ever felt like I was allowed to say I was one. People just thought I was, and I wouldn’t argue to save time. Or, maybe I liked it as long as it didn’t get too awkward. I was sure I’d find answers when I had the chance to meet more gay people. I couldn’t wait to turn eighteen so I could go to gay and lesbian bars. Maybe I might discover a place where I fit in.

  I had found out about the lesbian bar in Calgary from a queer singer-songwriter I’d met at open mic night at a café downtown, and I had scrawled down the information on the back of a handbill, which I saved for when I was old enough to use it. At the end of January, two weeks after turning eighteen, I stood in the line outside of Rooks breathing into my scarf to keep warm and clutching my plastic learner’s license in my hand, hidden from the cold in the sleeve of my coat. I brought Micah and my gay friend Steve because I was scared of going alone. The bouncer eyed my ID a bit longer than the others’, but then she just shrugged and let us in. Inside, the heat of the place hit us and my glasses immediately fogged up. When I wiped them off and put them back on, I saw that it was a well-lit, wood-panelled pub. There were booths along the walls, and half of them were full of women seated or standing in front of them. There were women standing, and some perched on stools along the bar too. Some of them were wearing dresses and some were wearing men’s clothes like me. My heart jumped a bit. We went to the bar, ordered a pitcher of Canadian with three glasses, and settled down in a free booth. “So what do we do now?” asked Micah.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I hadn’t really thought about how I was supposed to meet people here, and no one had looked at us since we came in besides the bouncer and the bartender. It slowly dawned on me that I had no plan whatsoever. I had pictured the lesbians at the bar recognizing me for what I was and welcoming us to hang out with them at one of the tables. This was clearly not the way things were done around there, so I settled in and waited.

  After twenty minutes of staring at Micah and Steve in silence, I noticed a sign over a descending staircase that read, “Rooks Club.” Our beers were half gone, so I poured the rest of the pitcher to top up our glasses. “Hey, dudes. Let’s go downstairs.”

  Steve shrugged so we all stood up and shuffled down the staircase. A thumping beat became more pronounced as we descended. At the bottom of the stairs, there was a door that led into a dark room at the end of a brightly lit hall. As we stepped inside, all of the balled-up lint on our winter sweaters started to glow. Micah smiled when he realized it was due to the black light, and his teeth lit up blue. The music was overpowering techno; with a robotic voice, the Daft Punk song played: “Around the world, around the world. Around the world.” There were only two people there besides us, a woman with glowing plastic eyebrow rings, who was DJing, and her friend with bright pink hair who was leaning across the table shouting in her ear. “I’m not so sure about this room either,” I yelled at Micah.

  He leaned over to Steve and asked, “Do you want to go to the washroom together?”

  Steve nodded. That’s when I realized that they were the only men in the bar.

  “I’m going outside to smoke. It’s too hot in here,” I said to them as they headed to the other side of the dark room where a washroom sign was lit up.

  I walked up the stairs feeling defeated, not sure that I was ever going to meet new lesbians. I had been having a hard time since my break-up with my first girlfriend the summer after high school. I had found her through what felt like luck, but ever since it seemed like my luck had run out. I zipped up my coat and pushed open the back door to the alley. I fished a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it, exhaling upwards toward the night sky. Suddenly a woman with dyed purple hair came out of the bar. She leaned on the wall near me, and asked, “What’s your name? I think I saw you sing at one of those bars downtown.”

  “Rae,” I said. “I’ve been playing a bunch of open stages.”

  Then she asked, without telling me her name, “Do you know those guys who were in the bar tonight?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s Micah and Steve. They’re my best friends.”

  “I’m a separatist, and I don’t appreciate men being here,” she said coolly.

  I squinted quizzically at her. She seemed to be from Alberta, not Québec, Canada’s francophone province whose population often wants to separate from the rest of the country. I had never met a Québecois separatist before, but I remembered the referendum when I was younger. The context didn’t really make a lot of sense to me. Luckily for me, she continued before I asked her any questions.

  “You know ... like a separatist from men? I have no use for men in my life and anyone who does isn’t welcome here. It’s not feminist.”

  Was that why a lot of the women at Rooks had been so cold to me and my friends? Because they didn’t like men? I liked Micah and Steve a lot, and I couldn’t really see the difference between us or how their being men would be a bad thing, even if I was a lesbian. I started to feel a lot colder than it was outside. “I gotta go,” I said to her, and stomped out my cigarette butt in the snow. I pulled the door open and found Micah and Steve inside, backed into one of the corners by the pool tables, chatting uneasily. They must have gone back upstairs while I was smoking. Quietly, Steve said to me, “I don’t think that Micah and I are very welcome here. I’m gay, but not the right kind of gay, I think.”

  “I know,” I said. “I don’t really want to hang out anywhere where we aren’t all welcome. Let’s get out of here.”

  Micah drove us back to the suburbs in his old car, and we played pool in the pub a few blocks from where we lived. I felt more at home there than I had at Rooks. We went there all the time. It was pretty much like every other night we had spent together since we had become friends: staving off the boredom with jokes, and drinking until our jokes became funnier. Steve and I talked about how we were unsure if either of us would ever find someone to date again. The gay bars he had gone to had not been much friendlier. “I don’t think they would let you in to some of them,” he said.

  I knew that being friends with Micah and Steve was more important than getting a thousand phone numbers on little pieces of paper at Rooks. I had failed at that lesbian bar by bringing men with me, but I felt that my friends knew me as well as I could expect anyone to. I was glad that we had all ended up together in the end.

  Thirteen Inches, Uncut

  I was so nervous, the secretary at the reception desk looked at me with softening eyes and told me everything was going to be okay. I had barely spoken to her, but it was just that obvious, I guess.

  First of all, it didn’t feel like there was any possible way this could really be happening. Nineteen years of binding my breasts, even more years trying not to hate them, a psychologist’s appointment, a psychiatrist’s appointment, a psychological assessment, two doctor’s appointments, several letters back and forth between doctors and shrinks and bureaucrats, phone calls, more phone calls, twenty months since I had actually cranked the whole machine into gear, and here I was. Meeting the surgeon. He was fourteen minutes late. But who was counting?

  He was handsome and tanned in January, and his assistant was tall, blonde, and wearing grey leather stiletto boots. Looked pretty much like what I thought a cosmetic surgeon and his assistant would look like, not that I had ever spent much time wondering. I have to fill out forms, of course, no I don’t smoke or have hemophilia, and no, my religion does not forbid me to have a blood transfusion. The letterhead on the forms is for a cosmetic surgery clinic. I am reminded that most people think that is what this is. Elective. Cosmetic. Unnecessary. My period is due today. My tits are at their biggest, and most tender. I can feel the binder pinching under my arms where it does.

  Turns out the doctor and I both studied music at a small community college together in the late eighties. I do not remember him, and he would not recognize me. I ask him if he stud
ied jazz piano just in case this whole cosmetic surgeon thing didn’t work out for him, you know, so he had something to fall back on. I make jokes like that sometimes when I am nervous.

  He asks me a lot of questions. Why am I not on testosterone? Do I intend to go on testosterone in the future? What do I want my chest to look like when he is done? Do I care more about what my chest looks like, or whether or not I will be able to feel my nipples afterwards? I tell him a little of both. This surprises him. He tells me it is mostly only women who care about nipple sensation after surgery, and that most trans men only care that they have a masculine appearing chest after. He looks at his assistant, is she getting all of this down? And she nods back just a little, yes, she is.

  Throughout this entire bureaucratic maze, I have wanted to not like the doctors, the psychiatrist, the surgeon. The gatekeepers. I have been waiting for one of them to be callous, or say something phobic or use the wrong pronoun, or write the wrong thing down on the wrong form. But everyone has been so ... nice. Even though I still care about whether or not I can feel my nipples afterwards. I never quite feel like they truly understand me, but that doesn’t seem to get in the way of them completing the task at hand.

  I have to strip my upper body and put on a blue gown. The surgeon measures my chest extensively. I haven’t worn a typical woman’s bra in my entire life, and I don’t mean there is any such thing as a typical woman, let me be clear, what I mean is a bra-type article of clothing typically worn by a woman, anyway, I have never owned or worn one, ever since I was nineteen or so and they finally appeared on the scene uninvited, I have always tried to mash them down, disappear them, never lift and separate, so I actually have no idea how big they really are. Turns out I have a forty-two-inch chest, a number that seems surreal to me, nearly impossible. I explain to the surgeon that they didn’t used to be this big, just since I hit my forties, my body is changing, and if he performed double hipectomies I would be signing up for that, too. He is calling out measurements and observations to his assistant. My breast tissue is dense and firm, he states. She scribbles on her notepad. My nipples are big and will have to be removed completely from my body and resized and grafted back onto me. He remarks that my breasts exhibit very little ptosis, which is a medical term for sagging. This makes me feel oddly proud, considering I am here to have them removed. Kind of like waxing up your car so you can take it to the wrecker, or petting a puppy before you leave it out in the cold. Which, for the record, I would never do. I love puppies. But even talking aloud about it all felt kind of like that for me, like I was closing a door on a room I really loved, only because it was the one way I knew to keep going.