Gender Failure

by Ivan E. Coyote

  My Body Is a Spaceship

  Growing up in the nudity-free zone that was Pentecostal shame meant that my first awareness of my own body was in draping flower patterns over it to cover myself. The no-shirts-off-for-girls rule was in full effect as far back as I can remember. I could have been the invisible man underneath my clothes for all I knew, and I never spent a lot of time reflecting on my body in its resting state. It was in movement that I could feel myself in my body. Biking, rollerblading, running, climbing trees, and building forts were what my body felt good for. It was a digging machine, a stick swinger, a lemur, and, when I was going too fast down a hill to hear anything but the hum of my skateboard’s wheels, it was a spaceship in search of aliens on a distant planet.

  I needed all the space armour I could get when I hit puberty. I didn’t want to give too much thought to how the outside of me was changing, or the fact that I felt better huddled inside my body like it contained a secret place that I could control. People started to tell me that I was becoming a woman, but I knew that that was just on the outside; inside, I was going to stay the same: ambivalent to the confusing expectations that surrounded me.

  By the time I was twelve, things in my family had become very unstable. My father had been institutionalized after a breakdown, and I started to use my detached state to shelter myself from that too. I felt like I didn’t have any control over anything, so I decided to try to control the one thing I could: I stopped eating. I liked the euphoric state that I would get into when I threw out my lunch and ran on adrenaline for the rest of the day. After a while I started to see, by weighing myself, that I was having an effect on my body. That only made my resolve grow. It was a way of saying “I don’t want to be here” without using words. Fat became my enemy. Not because I wanted to look like the typical 1990s model, but because it was something about my changing body that I could control, and I had come to hate my body. I thought there was something wrong with it. I wanted to get as far away from what I was as I could. At that point I didn’t know that I had any choice in gender, so I never made the connection that I was evading the inevitable role of being assigned female by trying to keep my body from becoming one, and not giving it the fuel it needed to develop.

  I made the choice to try to stop starving myself after I moved out on my own when I was eighteen. Being queer from a Pentecostal family meant that I didn’t have much of a safety net, and so I resolved to try to change unsustainable patterns of behaviour before they put me in a position as vulnerable as the one I had just fled. I didn’t want my family to have control over me ever again, and I knew that starving myself might put me in the hospital or, worse, back in their care. Slowly I managed to start eating again, and I even banned weighing myself altogether. In time, I did gain weight, although I still had no way of judging the appearance of my own body. There has always been a dysphoria between how I think I look and how I am told I look. I never did entirely lose the compulsion to stop eating, but now it visits periodically instead of ruling over my entire routine.

  When I was twenty and found out that gender was an option, I decided to identify as a man. The narrative seemed to fit me. The recurring discomfort that I had experienced made a lot more sense if I had been a man trapped in a woman’s body. I thought that my body had been the problem all along, but then the urges to change it returned. Instead of looking at the varied bodies of the men around me, I leaned toward the stereotypical body that I thought a man was supposed to have. If only I could change my body to make it look more like what men were supposed to look like: wider shoulders, flat chest, narrower hips, bigger muscles, hairier face. No wonder I had been so uncomfortable without all of that.

  A lot of my trans male friends had started taking testosterone and began exhibiting one or more of these characteristics, becoming read more and more often as male in public. I was anxious to join them even though it was a long process of jumping through bureaucratic hoops and paying for surgeries. But there was a problem: my voice. The testosterone would not only make it lower, but would potentially alter how much control I had over it. My music career had taken off when I turned twenty. I was getting more positive reinforcement about my voice than I had ever gotten about anything else. It made singing too hard to let go of or gamble with. So I chose not to take hormones, though this decision was not an easy one at all.

  During this time, I imagined myself travelling in a better, more improved spaceship, one that would protect me from those who didn’t understand what being transgender meant, and from the long conversations I had to have in order to explain it. I wanted a body that would protect me from those who still referred to me as “she” even after such explanations. I longed to correct the things that made people perceive me as a woman, and to be able to lay low inside of myself.

  I focused on the qualities of my body that kept me from appearing to be a man. I was hard on my hips. I thought they were too wide to be a boy’s. I hated that my chest stuck out, but I was really tired of binding with an ACE bandage. No matter how I wrapped it around myself, it always managed to slouch down lower after a short period of time, often achieving the counterproductive function of actually pushing my chest up from below and making it look bigger than it was. My voice, the main asset of my music career, was the subject of so much self-hatred. It allowed me to sing certain notes and even yodel, but at the same time it was high-pitched and gave me away immediately if I was being read as a man at all in a situation. But there was no having it two ways. I could take hormones or I could sing the way I did. I couldn’t have both.

  When I was twenty-one, I had the great luck of discovering amazing fat-positive activists and performers like Nomy Lamm and Beth Ditto in the queer community. Being a person who had struggled with eating issues, it really spoke to me that the negative messages I had been receiving my whole life about fat were wrong. I learned that the myths about health and fat were not true and had never been proven in solid scientific studies. I noticed how fatphobic a lot of the world was, and how fatphobic I was too. I realized that the way fat and fat people were treated by society was oppressive and violent. I tried to change my behaviour around fat and stopped vocalizing negative things about it.

  When it came to my gender and body, though, I had a block. I thought the way my body had arranged itself was not the way a man’s body looked. Even if I could be positive about fat, I thought that my fat was in the wrong spots, and there was little I could do about it. I started lifting weights to try to melt away my chest, lying on my back on an orange vinyl weight bench that I’d found in the basement of the house I lived in. I lifted weights every day. I started running in an attempt to lose weight on my hips, and I often spent a lot of time looking at them in the mirror and wondering if there was some sort of surgery that could make the bones in them smaller. The less support I had as a trans person, the more the urge to change my body would return. I was often reminded by others that they did not see me as a man, which would make me recoil and step back inside my body. Slowly, though, over the course of ten years, I came to accept my decision not to change my voice, and I continued to reap the benefits of being a singer. I tried to be as healthy about my body as I could.

  In 2006, when I was twenty-five, I was in Amsterdam when I attended a panel about the laws concerning sexual reassignment that included a discussion of how different countries in the European Union treat the subject. It became clear to me that governments were the ultimate authorities in deciding the legal distinctions between male and female, and in determining the definitions of where one fit within (or outside) the gender binary, including those self-identified as transgender or intersex. In most places, the requirement for changing one’s legal sex was full-on sexual reassignment surgery, including procedures that cause sterilization of the reproductive organs. I have always had little respect for institutions, and on that day I swore to no longer think of my gender as a natural or innate thing. I was a person who identified as male, and I should not have to alter my body in any w
ay to prove to the government that I was.

  The institutional sterilization of trans people really stood out as a particularly violent act to me, so I decided to research the current laws in Canada. It differed between provinces, but at that time SRSs (sex reassignment surgeries), including sterilizing procedures, were required of people who wanted to legally change their sex. This was news to me. I had ruled out going through the legal process myself because hormone therapies were the first step in the treatment of gender identity disorder, and I didn’t want them. I was not surprised by this new information, but it enraged me.

  My relationship with my body shifted. I no longer believed in the gender or sex binaries as if they were laws of nature. I was not a man trapped in a woman’s body. All I should have had to do to be a man was to say that I was one. The rules of bodies and gender were socialized, not innate. I re-examined my fat politics and tried to take the requirements of the gender binary out of my thinking processes. It all became clearer to me, and, as I started to look more at the men and women I encountered in my everyday life, no one body seemed to be living up to every single one of the stereotypes that gendered bodies were expected to present. It wasn’t true that men couldn’t have larger chests or hips, or that women had to have them. I saw variations on what was thought to be an ideal body in both men and women on a daily basis. Yet society was telling everyone that their bodies were wrong.

  My childhood idea that my body was a spaceship came back to me. I was not in the wrong body. I was in the wrong world. I wished so hard that my body was capable of interstellar travel, but sadly, it’s not possible for me to jettison myself outside the world of gender pressure. Even though I still struggle with the pressures of gender and body image issues, I work hard to remember that it’s not my body that’s the problem. Instead, I try to use that energy to turn my efforts outwards. I refuse to accept that the way my body looks should determine my gender. I refuse to accept that fat is gendered in any arrangement on my body or anyone else’s. I refuse to think of fat as unhealthy. It may be a very long time before the way that gender and fat are dealt with changes, but I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my body, and it has been such a relief to realize that I am no longer living inside the problem.

  Messages to Lynn

  Ivan: Hey, pal. Love reading your status updates here. You are a true genius. Sorry to hear about your accident today. The pictures of your poor finger looked nasty. Hope the stitches heal up okay. Speaking of stitches, for some reason I felt the need to tell you that after many years of contemplation and general brain wandering about the whole big picture, I finally took a deep breath and had top surgery seven days ago. Whew. No T, and no intentions that way so far, but had to lose the ladies and so I finally did.

  I saw my chest for the first time today. They changed the bandages and removed the sewn-on nipple cover thingies, and I saw my body how I have dreamt it in nearly every fantasy I ever had in my whole life, waking or asleep. Bruised and puffy still, and my nipples hanging on for dear life, but even so. There it was. There I was.

  Today I was thinking about a conversation we had way back in the day in a park in Seattle on a tour somewhere. I don’t recall what either of us said, not a word, really, but something I remember about it only in my heart or animal brain told me to write you and tell you I did it. And now it feels like the light shone on me there today like it maybe never has and I thought you might want to hear this story for some reason. That’s all. Hope your finger doesn’t hurt too bad and Stay Gold, Ponyboy. I sure do love you from up here in Canada and way down in my belly. My brother.

  xoxo,

  Ivan

  Lynn: Dude stop you made me cry. Always do. Love you. So happy for you. It’s poignant isn’t it? How we tried to accept and finally had to accept that its losing ’em that is what we really want. So good. I love you! Good healing. I remember that day, pal. Yep.

  Oh, P.S. it was an electric hedge trimmer! So we both had some cutting to do this week. Yours is better tho. Do you have drains? Where did you go? I heard the Canadian doc is really great out Toronto way.

  Ivan: Yeah I feel like I worked real hard to make space for me to be okay how I am and I was pretty okay considering some days the whole world seems to want to disappear dudes like us and now I have even more okay inside me plus all that space in the world I carved out for myself too. I have drains. Sheer torture, those. I am a little allergic to them it seems, so now I have blisters, too, and scabs from them. They hurt even more than where the doctor’s hedge trimmers got me. Seriously. I went to a surgeon here in Vancouver, and I am more than happy so far, but who knows in the long run, I literally change so much every day. I remember when Zena and I got this little apartment and it had a dishwasher and when I first saw it I was all I never had one of those before since I lived on my own, and never needed one, I wash my own dishes what kind of a lazy bastard needs a dishwasher anyways your gran would be ashamed of you right now if she was still here to see you all gone soft for the modern conveniences. But then I fell in love hard. Well that is exactly the same love story I am having with my man nipples right now. There they are, clinging on to me for dear life and I can’t even feel the little buggers, like I mean at all, no feeling whatsoever but I never knew how much I would love them looking like this I thought it wouldn’t matter but it does and wouldn’t you know it I can’t raise my arms high enough yet to wash a single fucking plate it hurts to scrub anything and fuck me if I don’t love that goddamn dishwasher even more now like it was an electric angel or something.

  I hear the surgeon in Toronto somehow does this surgery without having the drains in and well that just seems too good to really be true like some kind of sleight-of-hand from where I sit right now propped up and leaking and sore and itchy eight days in and two more to go and maybe more for the right side of my chest, that tit always was the problem one what with the cysts from binding and that turned-out-not-to-be-cancer scare a couple years back but I also know a real nice fella who had it done last month in Toronto and he looks great. I could put you in touch if you want.

  That is all here live from flat and happy chest city. Don’t be a stranger and hope that finger heals up nicely. Your comment about don’t worry ladies it’s the left hand cracked me up dude. You should write a book hey wait you already did and man I can’t wait for your next one.

  always your brother,

  Ivan notits Coyote

  Lynn: You’re one funny guy. And always with the sweet angle. Brother from another mother. Why don’t we spend any time together, are you way out in the woods still? Yeah, hook a brother up with the tit taker from Toronto. No drains. That would be good.

  How to Be a Transgender Country Singer

  How do you become a transgender country singer? For some, it’s easier to be transgender from the start and then work towards becoming a singer. For others, it’s better to play music first, and then come out as transgender. About ten years ago, I managed to do both in the space of a few months. Half a year after moving to Vancouver from Alberta, country music started to swirl in my head. I had put all of myself into escaping from Calgary to the more liberal west coast. I had changed my last name a few days before I moved, and I was keen on reinventing myself. I was queer, and that had been hard in Alberta. I thought that I would put those difficulties behind me and wake up a new person in Vancouver, but the temperate climate and easygoing people there had reaffirmed the sense that I was still quite Albertan on the inside. It’s not like the moment I put my foot down in British Columbia, I was wholly inspired to start making surfer music. The music that had surrounded me my entire life started to creep into my own. As a kid, I had mostly hated being trapped in the world of Garth Brooks circa the 1990s. My uncles would often break into shorthand versions of “Friends in Low Places” just to annoy me, and so I had never tried to seek out country music on purpose. In Calgary, it was all around me, but in Vancouver I felt a void I hadn’t predicted. The twangy voices and toe-tapping cowboy boots began t
o call to me from across the Rocky Mountains.

  One day I was wandering around on Commercial Drive in Vancouver during one of my periods of unemployment, and I walked into a used record store because I saw a glockenspiel in the window. I was thinking that buying one might turn my mood around. The glock ended up being too pricy, but as I started to walk out of the store feeling rather low, a used CD in the racks caught my eye. The fellow on the cover looked about as lonely and defeated as I felt. It was Hank Williams. I bought it and rushed home to my third-floor apartment, putting it in my CD player as soon as I walked through the door. As the sun was sinking gold over the Vancouver skyline, the lonesome howl of Hank Williams and the high-pitched replies of a lap steel guitar called me home. He was almost too twangy for my taste, but he sounded as misplaced as I felt. His music pulled me back to the rural places where my family once lived, and to the city where I grew up. I started to listen to Hank on repeat. After a few months, I started to write more like him. I would sit down with my guitar, imagining the endless roads in the flat expanses of my youth, and I ended up writing songs about the prairies, songs about the dust bowl, songs about trains. Before I knew it, I had written twelve of them. Overnight, and quite accidentally, I had become a country singer.

  At the same time as I was writing songs for my first album, I came out as transgender. I had decided that I wanted to live my life as a man. These events happened side by side, but they didn’t happen because of each other. They just happened to be two parts of my identity that ended up transforming simultaneously. It was not a great business plan. It was also a bit terrifying when I started planning the promotion of my first album. I was poised to tour across Canada with my new songs. The way that bands from Vancouver toured Canada was to drive from one coast to the other and then back, playing anywhere that would have them. The parts of Canada that had been unfriendly to me as a queer person were now stretched out before me, awaiting my return, this time as a transgender person. I didn’t have a lot of expectations of being welcomed. There was no room for people like me where I was from, but still, I was from there. Somehow I would have to manage singing my way back.