Gender Failure

by Ivan E. Coyote

  And it did. It started out with a cracked copy of Ableton Live software, version four, and my very first computer that I found on Craigslist in Berlin. Alex gave me the program and showed me how all synthesizers were built from oscillating waves. He showed me how to build my own drum sounds from scratch. I began to understand that computers were instruments too, and infinitely more complex than I assumed. They had the capability to hold and manipulate the sounds from other instruments and audio waves. I locked myself in my room with my slow-running computer and tried to use the tools he gave me to write songs.

  The months wore on in Weimar and I started to change to better match my surroundings. After managing to extricate myself from the Canadian prairies, I realized that I did, in fact, continue to exist outside of them. I began replacing my cowboy clothing for tight black jeans and fluorescent t-shirts. In the former East German tower-block housing I lived in, writing about the open sky started to feel a bit disingenuous. My career as a transgender country singer had been full of painful moments, mostly because of my gender. I wasn’t feeling very loyal to the genre I had spent so much time developing. I had thought I was going to be a country singer forever, but my head began to turn toward instruments that used electricity and computer chips. That’s the moment I found electronic music and indie rock. By the time I moved back to Canada two years later, I had all of the blips and bleeps and synth sounds that Germany had to offer.

  I moved to Montreal and released all of my experiments on a new album. I wasn’t sure how to market myself as an ex-cowboy, but I went with glamourizing my departure from country music and my time hiding out in Germany. I started my tour in Kitchener, Ontario, and a friend of mine there who had always come out to my country music shows, at least when he wasn’t off for hunting season, came. In the break between sets, he pulled on my arm and said, “Rae, you got weird in Europe, eh?”

  I paused, and then brought up the last time I was in town. “You think I’m weird? Weren’t you the guy who’d had a dead deer in the back of his truck for two weeks the last time I was here?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but it was winter, so it was frozen. Same thing as stuffing it in my freezer. Anyways, your music got weird, but I still like it.”

  The gender and genre rules of the country music industry had been strict, but luckily by already breaking one set of rules, the audiences who came to my shows seemed ready to let me break others. There was no indie rock equivalent to the song “Stand By Your Man” or “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.” A lot of the time I couldn’t make out what the lyrics to songs by the weird new bands were. They didn’t seem to be singing anything about men or women. Maybe this was going to change everything for me. Maybe it was the part of the music industry that was going to make space for my music and overlook the oddity of my variant gender.

  However, fleeing the construct of genre turned out not to include freedom from the constructs of gender. I started to see the same patterns in the indie rock scene that I saw in country music. There were very few women in bands, very few slots at festivals for bands with women in them, and there was the same lack of space for people of colour in general. There were also the same kinds of practical problems, like the sound guys who assumed I didn’t know how to run my ten guitar pedals, and the all-dude bands playing after me who stepped all over my gear as they set up instead of giving me even a moment to clear off the stage. There was the same worry from promoters that I wasn’t marketable, and there was the same amount of friction and tension I felt being a trans person in the music industry.

  There are many musicians who are affected by these issues. I am certainly not alone. I guess my point is that alternative venues are not automatically the most supportive. The freedom that is part of the rhetoric about indie music has long been commercialized, and that freedom is reserved only for certain people.

  At the pinnacle of the indie rock experience is the hipster festival. I was excited when I started getting invited to play at these events. I like meeting a lot of musicians and seeing a lot of acts. At my first festival, I noticed that the four-star hotel where many musicians were staying was full of clientele who might usually be considered underdressed. Most of them I perceived as cisgender white men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. I saw some amazing bands at that festival and I genuinely enjoyed playing my sets there, but the hotel was like a scene from Lord of the Flies, with a slightly older cast.

  On the second morning of the festival, I was in the elevator and a boy got in with an unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I guess he was headed outside to smoke. I thought he was wearing green shoes, but when I looked closer I realized he was only wearing a pair of holey green socks. For some reason this upset me, but at first I couldn’t figure out why. After that encounter, I couldn’t turn anywhere without noticing the anarchy that being an indie rocker affords young men. They were running around in packs as if social rules didn’t apply to them. They were swimming in the pool in their underwear and bobbing for apples in the whirlpool. I’m all for personal freedom when it’s for everyone, but not when it’s only for musicians staying in a fancy hotel, especially when their rudeness affects the hotel workers working nine-to-five jobs—the very people who supported those musicians in the first place.

  I’m not going to say that I wasn’t one of those boys selected by the hipster festival and staying at the hotel, but I will say that I am done trying to find a genre of commercial music that will accept my gender. Instead, I have been focusing on the spaces that are accepting of me and trying to find ways to extend that as much as possible to others in the same position.

  A Cautionary Tale

  I’ve heard a couple versions of the following story, but the gist of it happens like this: one of my uncles was driving his truck home one night after a couple of after-work beers with the boys in town. It was the dead of a Yukon winter, dark and black ice all around and cold, but not real cold like it can get. Like maybe minus ten or fifteen. This detail will quickly become an important one. If had been colder out that night, this story might have a very different ending.

  The story goes like this: he was driving through the dark and fiddling with the satellite radio in his truck, that’s the last thing he remembers. Next thing is he is waking up, and somehow he is stretched out on the hood of his own truck, his head and one arm and shoulder stuck through the windshield, which has been popped right out of its frame. He is wearing his own windshield around his neck like a portable stockade, and there is sticky blood in his hair. He struggles to pull his head and arm out, and a breathtaking shot of pain explodes out of his shoulder. His arm is dislocated. He grits his teeth and rips himself free with his still-good arm, and then forces himself to shrug the shoulder attached to his dangling arm and shock it back into its socket. He passes out from the pain in the snow for an undetermined period of time. When he comes to for the second time, his teeth are chattering and he can’t feel his toes. His truck is fifty feet off the highway, crunched into a sturdy jack pine, stalled right next to a steep cliff that falls away sharp into the frozen river below. Everything is now covered in a light dusting of snow that almost blankets the shattered glass and blood and the spot where he doesn’t remember throwing up the beer and peanuts he ingested at the bar just before he headed home.

  He manages to haul himself up the hill and through the ditch to the edge of the highway, his work boots crunching through the drifting snow that’s melting in his wool socks and soaking the cuffs of his jeans. He hitches a ride home with two ladies in a hatchback, who repeatedly offer to turn the car around and drive him back into town to the hospital to get the gash in his head looked at, which he insists is not necessary. Once home, he passes out on his couch with a bag of frozen peas melting in his good hand.

  First thing the next morning, he calls my dad, because my dad has a big winch bolted onto the front bumper of his Ford F-150 pick-up. My father comes and gets my uncle, a thermos of black tea with canned milk and sugar and an extra tin camping mug
rolling around on the bench seat between them as they drive back to the scene of the accident. My dad pulls his truck over, flicks on the emergency flashers, and surveys the now almost invisible tire tracks that lead off the highway and skirt the sheer drop-off to the now still river. Their breath makes little clouds in the cold blue morning. Everything is white-covered and quiet. A raven squawks through the silence from somewhere. My dad shakes his head, and then crunches back through the snow to hook the winch to the bumper of my uncle’s truck and haul it back up to the highway. He doesn’t ask a lot of questions. The truck suffered a small dent on the front bumper and needed a new windshield, and my uncle suffered from a sore arm and a scabby head for a couple weeks, and the incident was quickly put in the past.

  I hear the story from another one of my uncles, and a slightly different account from my dad. I recount the tale to my sweetheart that evening in bed. My wife is the assistant director of a research institute that focuses on gender and health. She shakes her head at me.

  “You sound proud of him.” She sounds not so proud of me that I sound proud of him.

  I admit that I kind of am. “It’s pretty butch to pop your own dislocated arm back into its socket with no help from anyone,” I explain.

  She harumphs and narrows her eyes at me. “I would highly recommend that you not hold up the men in your family as positive role models when it comes to health care. Remember what I was telling you about hegemonic masculinity and its impact on men’s health behaviour? Not advisable.”

  She is definitely not kidding.

  I should tell you here that my wife grew up in her own frozen northern town, raised by a single mom on welfare. She tells me this not because she doesn’t get where I come from, but because she knows exactly too well; her own Thunder Bay good old boys looming large in her rear-view mirror.

  I think about this story a lot as I heal from top surgery. I come up with my own term for my own version of removing my own windshield from around my own neck with my own one good arm. Cowboying it up, I call it, and every time I consider doing something stubborn and counter to the surgeon’s instructions, I remind myself not to cowboy it up. Don’t climb up on a chair to get the toaster down, all bandaged up and high on Percocet. Don’t play the tenor saxophone ten days after a double mastectomy. Don’t take out your own stitches. Ask for help reaching for the frozen gluten-free bread, even if you do have to make up a lie to the lady who asks what kind of surgery you just had and you end up lying about a torn rotator cuff for ten minutes, which you know nothing about whatsoever and which she herself is actually recovering from in real life. Cowboy it down, cowboy. I run through the list of cautionary post-top-surgery tales in my head: my friend in Portland who popped a stitch because he decided he needed to dig up a yucca plant from his garden. My buddy in Halifax who might need a surgical revision now because he blew a stitch when he broke down and vacuumed the rug on his own because the dog hair was taking over his life.

  At my one-month post-op check-up, the surgeon lets out a low whistle and tells me that I look like I am two months healed up.

  “It’s because I am cowboying it down,” I inform him, and he knits his eyebrows together in confusion.

  “I am no longer looking to the men in my family as role models for my approach to health care,” I explain. I don’t think he gets it. He is a fancy plastic surgeon in his tenth-floor office overlooking the big city. Why would he?

  Later, in the truck, I note the irony that in order to heal properly from having a significant part of my female self removed from the flesh of me, I have to unlearn exactly what all the men in my family would have done.

  How to Be Gay When the Gays Won’t Have You

  Eight years ago, I was standing outside of the Vauxhall Tavern in south London. I had gone to see a queer cabaret, and took a break outside partway through with a couple of friends. A man who was smoking in a group nearby took it upon himself to call out to us: “How are you doing tonight, lezzers?” It’s true that a few people in our the group were lesbian-identified, but I had been trying to stand up for myself more often.

  “I’m actually a man,” I replied. “Making it difficult to be a lesbian.”

  “You’re a man?” he scoffed. “Well, you probably don’t have what I like in a man.”

  I just shrugged. I didn’t think it mattered, since I had no plans on hitting on him.

  • • •

  Later on, after I did start dating men, I was in Denver walking through a mall with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. This friend was also trans. The fluorescent lights gave all of the beige tiles on the floor a surreal glow and made a cardboard cutout of Justin Bieber look like an angel. We clicked our heels past him, chatting away. It had been a while since I had been around any other trans people, and my shoulders felt a bit lower than they had been before. My friend was explaining to me that one of her gay male friends who lived there was single and that he kept complaining that there were no hot men around to date.

  “Why don’t you set me up with him?” I asked. “I’m here all weekend.”

  She looked at me with wide eyes, like she felt a bit wounded on my behalf, and said, “Oh honey, I don’t think he dates men like you.”

  I tried not to look as hurt as I was.

  • • •

  When I got back home to Montreal, I downloaded Grindr, the gay men’s cruising app. I had seen a friend use it and he was talking endlessly about all the dates he had gone on since he had joined. I thought it might provide me with a window into the world of gay male cruising without the immediate dismissal I had experienced from friends and at men-only gay clubs because of my appearance and voice. The first time I used the app, I was in my room in the St. Henri share house I lived in. I watched as the pictures and descriptions of men popped up inside the little orange squares on my phone. A lot of images were of bare-chested torsos, or barely-above-the-crotch shots. I tapped on one of the profiles closest in vicinity to me and almost jumped when I saw that he was currently only twenty-five meters away. He could have been as close as two floors above me. The possibilities of online cruising hit me like a wave. I uploaded a photo of myself and wrote “29. Montreal” as my description, then went to sleep. When I opened Grindr again in the morning, I saw that I had a message from a guy whose handle was “Buffalo.” All it said was: “U R Cute. I am 5'10 250lbs 7 inches. Do U have more pics?”

  I hadn’t thought about the fact that I might be asked for some more revealing photos. I couldn’t help but write a reply in my head: “5'3", 120lbs, dickless.”

  The next day I got another message: “29. Wow U look so young!”

  I chuckled to myself. The guy in the photo looked really sweet and only had “NSA” (no strings attached) as his description. I decided I could handle replying to this one and typed: “Thanks.”

  After I pressed send, though, I got a bit anxious wondering if there was some sort of abbreviation for the word thanks that I didn’t know about. Maybe I had already given away my status as a newbie to Grindr.

  Then I got another response from him: “What are you up to tonight?”

  This was the longest interaction that I had with a gay guy I hadn’t met before. I decided to act casual and replied: “Not much.”

  “You’re cute. We should meet up?” I felt myself blush. I looked at his photo again. He was cute. An earnest-looking young bear in a red and black plaid shirt with a septum piercing. Probably thirty-five-ish. Probably rode a fixed gear bike. I replied,” Sure. I could meet you for a drink downtown?”

  After I sent the message, my skin started to prickle and my hands went a bit numb. I thought about my hairless face and high voice. He was going to notice those things right away. Moreover, the particular alignment of my body parts might come up as unexpected to him if we did get along. I thought it might be good to give him a heads up. So I typed: “Just so you know, I am trans. Still a man, though, and gay.”

  I pressed send and left Grindr open on my phone for a while. Afte
r fifteen minutes when there was no response, I closed it and tried to forget about the conversation. After twenty-four hours and still no response, I started to understand that the clear rejection was based on my being trans. I then changed my profile to read: “29, Montreal, Trans man.” I thought it was a good idea to get that out there before we got to chatting. I was not ashamed of being trans, and I was sure that some men wouldn’t mind, or might even be trans themselves. That’s when my Grindr comments started to look more like the comments to my YouTube videos, things like “Have U had UR sex change operations yet?”

  A few days later, I was feeling defeated, but then I remembered that there were a lot of trans people like me who were interested in gay relationships and were probably on Grindr. I changed my profile description again, this time to read: “Trans 4 Trans. Queer 4 Queer.” My new description solicited just as many ignorant questions about my body, gender, and legal sex as did my old description, but at least the other trans men would know that I was looking for them.

  I did eventually date men, though I met them through friends in the queer community. Being trans is often designated as both my gender and my sexuality. Allowing me to choose what gender I identify as and fully respecting my choices would logically mean allowing me to also express my sexuality whether it be straight, gay, lesbian, bi, asexual, or queer, but it doesn’t always happen that way. There are many people who are respectful and don’t assume my sexuality or gender based on my presentation, and there were gays along the way who certainly allowed me to be a gay man in every sense. It was the ignorance that I encountered from many members of my own community that reminded me that I would not be accepted by every single gay person in the world. There are so many rules placed on physical bodies in the gay community, and being trans is certainly not the only barrier to acceptance. I prefer now to find the acceptance I need in the communities that are addressing discrimination.