Gender Failure

by Ivan E. Coyote

  I found it hard at first to use “they” as a pronoun for others. I was embarrassed when I would skip from “he” or “she” to “they” in a sentence, watching my tongue struggle awkwardly to shape the right pronoun. It was especially difficult when I felt that the person’s name didn’t contradict their assigned gender, or if they hadn’t changed their name at all. It made me feel like I was back at the beginning of learning a new language. Words volleyed from my brain to my mouth and back as I tried to get it right. Here I was again learning pronouns even though I was trans, and had been trans for a long time, and thought I knew so much about trans people. It was humbling, and it made me start to rethink everything else I thought I knew.

  What would it mean not to be a man or a woman? Over the years I had learned not to think of people’s assigned sexes as their genders, but I had expected others to place themselves at least conceptually on one side of the gender binary. I started to meet a lot more people who went by the “they” pronoun. Most people in the queer community around me didn’t have any difficulty using it. In a space where non-binary pronouns had been largely accepted, I began to see the benefits of using them. It dragged me out of an identity that had been previously cemented because I thought being a man was the only way to move away from my assigned sex. In this community I did not have to be male not to be female.

  I began requesting that people use “they” for me in these spaces. Being called “they” freed me up to think about which parts of my behaviour had been constructed in order to convince people that I was a man. I thought a lot about how sexist the rules of the gender binary really were. Without the pressure to make my body more masculine in order to earn a pronoun, I started to think a lot about bodies. My whole platform about being a man but not modifying my body was that it was identifying as a man that made me male, rather than the sex of my body. That was the difference between sex and gender. In gender neutrality, I decided to refuse the model of body characteristics denoting sex and gender altogether. I wanted to call anyone any pronoun or name they wanted regardless of how I read their body, gender presentation, or behaviour. If only the rejection of the gender binary was more widespread. That was the only thing that would have made my new identity more relaxing. I knew what my first reaction had been, and that I was up against that reaction from others.

  At first I was fearful of going public with my new preferred pronoun. I still felt that making this request anywhere outside of the queer community was going to be like telling people that the robots had landed. I had spent so much time explaining my gender as a trans man to strangers on tour and to the media. Being trans was far more of a topic in interviews I did than the music I made. I wasn’t sure if I was up to coming out all over again with a far less recognized pronoun. I saw the way that coming out as transgendered had affected what spaces I was invited to play in, and I worried that rocking the boat further would end my career for good. So I decided to continue going by “he” professionally. I did that for a few years. I continued to ask for people to call me “he” when they referred to me as “she.” It was the same difficult fight it had always been. Then I played a festival that I had played ten years earlier and the pronoun usage was actually worse than it had been the first time. Had nothing changed? I realized then that I was always going to have to fight for my pronoun, and if I was going to have to do that anyway, I should be fighting for the one that made me the most comfortable, rather than a compromise that I thought would be more accepted.

  I began to see other artists challenging the media to use this gender-neutral pronoun. The boycott, led by Elisha Lim, of a Toronto gay and lesbian newspaper after it refused to use their preferred pronoun, citing grammar considerations, inspired me. I had been invited to be interviewed in the paper that month, but decided that instead I would also boycott them and write a Tumblr post about my disappointment in their decision. In this post, I also came out as preferring the “they” pronoun. The subsequent media reaction to my request surprised me. I released an album a month later and did a nationwide publicity campaign for it. A lot of the journalists I spoke to had read my Tumblr post and didn’t need a lot of convincing. Many of the mainstream papers in Canada were far quicker to respond positively to the use of my pronoun than the Toronto gay and lesbian paper had been.

  Still, since coming out as preferring “they,” a lot of the opposition I expected to encounter has happened. There are many people who cite it as confusing or incorrect grammar. I never bother indulging this argument by pulling out historical examples of its use or its dictionary definitions. Language is a living thing, and I find the attempts to preserve it from the threat of gender-neutral pronouns to be a transphobic reaction. There are many other preferred pronouns that are new to the English language that should also be incorporated as they are requested. I don’t think that anything like grammar should have priority over what makes people comfortable.

  I am optimistic about the future of my gender retirement. Taking the responsibility off myself to earn my pronoun and rejecting the sexist requirements of the gender binary have proved to be more comforting than going by the “they” pronoun is stressful. There are a great number of people working to change how gender is perceived in order to make more room for all gender minorities, and I am proud to be one of them. Whenever I feel challenged, I access the memory of my first reaction to the pronoun I now go by, and I remember that a lot of things can change.

  Yesterday in the women’s change room at the gym where I have been going for decades, I was referred to as a “freak of nature.” The woman who called me this mistakenly thought I had left the room, but really I had just gone into the bathroom. When I walked back around the corner she just stared straight ahead, as if her ignoring me would make it all disappear. Would not meet my eyes. Amazing what nastiness and bigotry can seethe behind a blonde bob and a pair of yoga pants.

  The Facilities

  I can hold my pee for hours. Nearly all day. It’s a skill I developed out of necessity, after years of navigating public washrooms. I hold it for as long as I can, until I can get myself to the theatre or the green room or my hotel room, or home. Using a public washroom is a very last resort for me. I try to use the wheelchair-accessible, gender-neutral facilities whenever possible, always after a thorough search of the area to make sure no one in an actual wheelchair or with mobility issues is en route. I always hold my breath a little on the way out though, hoping there isn’t an angry person leaning on crutches waiting there when I exit. This has never happened yet, but I still worry. Sometimes I rehearse a little speech as I pee quickly and wash my hands, just to be prepared. I would say something like, I apologize for inconveniencing you by using the washroom that is accessible to disabled people, but we live in a world that is not able to make room enough for trans people to pee in safety, and after many years of tribulation in women’s washrooms, I have taken to using the only place provided for people of all genders.

  But I have never had to say any of this. Yet. Once at an airport, I was stopped by a janitor on my way out who reprimanded me for using a bathroom that wasn’t meant for me, and I calmly explained to him that I was a transgender person, and that this was the only place I felt safe in, and then I noted that there were no disabled people lined up outside the washroom door, or parents with small children waiting to use the change table.

  He narrowed his eyes at me. Then he said, “Okay, but next time you should ...”

  I waited for him to finish. Instead, he shook his head and motioned down the empty hallway with his mop handle that I should be off, that this conversation was now over.

  I wondered later in the departure lounge exactly what it was he felt I should do next time? Hold it longer? Not have bodily functions at all? Use the men’s room? The ladies’? Be someone else? Look different? Wear a dress? Not wear a tie? Cease and desist with air travel altogether? Do my part to dismantle the gender binary to make more room for people like myself?

  I could write an entire book
about bathroom incidents I have experienced. It would be a long and boring book where nearly every chapter ends the same, so I won’t. But I could. Forty-four years of bathroom troubles. I try to remind myself of that every time a nice lady in her new pantsuit for travelling screams or stares at me, I try to remember that this is maybe her first encounter with someone who doesn’t appear to be much of a lady in the ladies’ room. That she has no way of knowing this is already the sixth time this week that this has happened to me, and that I have four decades of it already weighing heavy on my back. She doesn’t know I have been verbally harassed in women’s washrooms for years. She doesn’t know I have been hauled out with my pants still undone by security guards and smashed over the head with a giant handbag once. She can’t know that I have five cities and seven more airport bathrooms and eleven shows left to get through before I can safely pee in my own toilet. She can’t know that my tampon gave up the ghost somewhere between the security line and the food court. I try to remember all that she cannot know about my day, and try to find compassion and patience and smile kind when I explain that I have just as much right to be there as she does, and then make a beeline, eyes down, shoulders relaxed in a non-confrontational slant, into the first stall on the left, closest to the door.

  Every time I bring up or write about the hassles trans and genderqueer people receive in public washrooms or change rooms, the first thing out of many women’s mouths is that they have a right to feel safe in a public washroom, and that, no offense, but if they saw someone who “looks like me” in there, well, they would feel afraid, too. I hear this from other queer women. Other feminists. This should sting less than it does, but I can’t help it. What is always implied here is that I am other, somehow, that I don’t also need to feel safe. That somehow their safety trumps mine.

  If there is anything I really do understand, it is being afraid in a public washroom. I am afraid in them all the time, with a lifetime of good reason. I wish that I had some evidence that harassing people in public washrooms really did originate from being afraid. I wish I could believe them that it starts with their own fear. What I suspect is more true is that their behaviour begins with and is fed by a phobia. They are afraid of men in a women’s washroom, because of what might happen. I am afraid of women in a women’s washroom, because of what happens to me all the time.

  I don’t see cisgendered women who want to feel safe in a public washroom as my adversaries, though; what I see is the potential for many built-in comrades in the fight for gender-neutral, single-stall locking washrooms in all public places. Because the space they seek and the safety I dream of can be accomplished with the very same hammer and nails. Because what I do know for sure is that every single trans person I have ever spoken to, every single tomboy or woman who wears coveralls for her job or woman with short hair or recovering from chemo, or effeminate boy, or man who likes wearing dresses, or man with long hair that I have ever met is hassled or confronted or challenged nearly every other time they use a public washroom, anywhere. Always. Often. Every day. All the time. Incessantly. Repeatedly. Without mercy or respite. Every thing from staring to pointing to screaming to physical violence.

  This violence and harassment is justified by people claiming that they were afraid. But very rarely does it feel to me like the person harassing me is actually afraid. Startled, maybe, for a second or two. But when I explain that I was assigned female at birth, just like they were, they usually don’t back down. Their fear doesn’t disappear, or dissipate. This is right about the time their friend will shake their head at me as if to say, what do you expect? They will pat their friend on the back to comfort them. They both feel entitled to be in a public washroom, entitled enough that they get to decide whether or not I am welcome there. This feels to me like I am being policed, and punished for what I look like. This doesn’t smell like fear to me. It reeks of transphobia.

  It starts very early. I know a little girl, the daughter of a friend, who is a self-identified tomboy. Cowboy boots and caterpillar yellow toy trucks. One time I asked her what her favourite colour was and she told me camouflage. She came home last October in tears from her half-day at preschool with soggy pants because the other kids were harassing her when she used the girls’ room at school and the teacher had instructed her to stay out of the boys’ room. She had drunk two glasses of juice at the Halloween party and couldn’t hold her pee any longer. She and her peers were four years old, they knew she was a girl, yet already they felt empowered enough in their own bigotries to police her use of the so-called public washrooms. I find it extremely hard to believe that these children were motivated by fear of another little girl. She was four years old and had already learned the brutal lesson that there was no bathroom door with a sign on it that welcomed people who looked like her. She had already been taught that bathrooms were a problem, and that problem started with her, and was hers alone.

  My friend asked me to talk to her, and I did. I wanted to tell her that her mom and I were going to talk to the school and that it would all stop, but I knew this wasn’t true. I wanted to say that it would be better when she got older, but I couldn’t. I asked her to tell me the story of what happened. Asked her how it made her feel. Mad and sad she told me. I told her she wasn’t alone. She asked me if I had ever peed in my own pants. I told her yes, I had, but not for a long time. When you get bigger, your bladder grows bigger too, I told her. When you get old like me, you will be able to hold your pee for a lot longer, I promised her. Until you get home? she asked me. I said yes, until you can get home. She seemed to take some comfort in that.

  So I get a little tired of having to swallow my lived experience to be force-fed someone else’s what-ifs. I get tired of my safety coming second. I get tired of the realities of trans and gender non-conforming people’s lives being overshadowed and ignored in favour of a boogey-man that might be lurking in the ladies room. I get really tired of being mistaken for a monster. I get tired of swallowing all these bathroom stories and smiling politely. But the last thing I can do is allow myself to get angry. Because if I get angry, then I am seen as even more of a threat. Then it’s all my fault, isn’t it?

  Because then there is a man in the ladies’ room, and for some reason, he’s angry.

  Just for the record, glaring at me in disgust in the women’s change room will not magically make me more feminine. Believe me, the stats are in on this. If dirty looks could make me conform, it would have happened long ago. Does it make you feel better? It sure doesn’t add any charm to my gym experience, just so you know.

  P.S. I probably should have told you that you had a period stain on the ass of your yoga pants, but you didn’t seem all that approachable.

  What Do You Think I Am?

  I was sitting in the middle seat on the plane when I saw him coming down the aisle. His face was red and he had the look of a guy who had been sitting in the bar of the airport for quite a while. He stopped in front of me, and said, “Hey dude. I’m sitting in the window.”

  I stood to let him in and then sat back down, pulling my computer onto my lap. He looked at it, whistled to himself, and said, “Kids these days, eh? Fancy toys.”

  I looked at him. “I bet I’m older than you,” I replied.

  “No way. How old are you?” he asked.

  “Thirty-one,” I said, hoping I was right that he was younger.

  “Whoa! I’m twenty-eight. Oh, man! You look so young.”

  And then I was certain he thought I was a man. I hadn’t lowered my voice. I was wearing a pink button-down shirt. My legs were crossed in front of me. I wasn’t trying to be read as male at all, but still I felt that I had somehow brought it upon myself. I decided to go along with it.

  The flight continued and I gave him change so he could buy a beer. “Oh, man. They don’t have any Molson Canadian. Which one do you think I should get? Is this one good?”

  “I think you should get a Grasshopper.” I was more than familiar with Alberta beers.

  �
�Cool. Do you want one?”

  “Nah, I don’t drink.”

  “I should be more like you and then I would look as young.”

  During the course of the flight, we continued to bond as he showed me pictures of big trucks on his phone, and had me hold his beer as he searched for a tin of chewing tobacco that he was certain he’d dropped on the floor. He never did find it. The whole time I was enjoying myself. It felt like I had travelled back in time and was hanging out with one of my uncles when he was in his late twenties. As the flight landed, my seat-mate told me he’d been working on the oil rigs and was finally going home to Winnipeg after many months away. I told him I was going there to play a show. “Oh yeah? Where are you playing?” he asked.

  I thought about it and decided to tell the truth. I was so tired of bothering to hide things.

  “I’m playing at Gio’s,” I said. Gio’s was the gay bar downtown.