Gender Failure

by Ivan E. Coyote

  “Oh.” He paused. “I’m not allowed there anymore. I used to deliver pop there and you know ... I can’t come to your show. You understand, right?”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said, grateful that he was aware enough of his own homophobia to keep himself away from the gay bar.

  And that was the end of our friendship.

  • • •

  The next time I got on a plane, I was late. My seat was at the very back. I could see the guy I had to sit beside because he was next to the only empty seat left on the plane. He was leaning all the way around his seat to talk to the flight attendant in the back. He didn’t stand up to let me in, but moved his legs into the aisle instead. As I squeezed past he said, “Here you go, lady.”

  I looked at him after I sat down, and said, “Lady? Why don’t I call you lady?”

  He turned his head and ignored me, still fixated on the flight attendant. “So is the diamond on that engagement ring real? You’re just doing this for fun?”

  The meaning of this was clear: Your future husband is rich. So, this is just some sort of last display of freedom before you get married and spend all of your time with the kids, right? The pilot’s preflight announcements came on. I shifted so that my head was completely turned away from him.

  “Oh my God. The pilot is a woman! That’s weird, right? I mean, unusual?” the man asked the flight attendant.

  I couldn’t stay quiet. “What is so weird about a woman flying a plane? You’re acting like you just found out that a giraffe is flying the plane.” I spat the words at the back of his head.

  “But is it unusual?” he answered me, directing it to the flight attendant.

  She replied with the calm grace of someone who had a lot of experience dealing with jerks who wrap themselves around their seats to talk to her. “Sir, maybe you got the idea from television that only men fly planes, but we have a lot of female pilots working for the airline.” She started listing them by name, and I smiled and turned my head back to the window.

  • • •

  I’ve been touring for more than ten years. Travel takes me out of the queer community of Montreal and into a world where I never know how people are going to read my gender. It usually takes me a while during an interaction to determine what people think I am, and sometimes I never quite figure it out. I don’t know how old people think I am, or if they think I am male or female.

  It’s particularly hard for me to predict what gender people assume I am. Usually it’s about half and half where people place me in the gender binary. I have had people address me as “ma’am” at the same airport where earlier I had been sent to the men’s line for a patdown. I usually just try to float through without making a big deal out of it. If airline employees apologize for calling me “sir” after looking at my boarding pass, I often say, “That’s okay. I mean, look at me.” Sometimes this causes them to apologize more because they are upset that I don’t feel bad about it. Gendered washrooms can also be difficult, but I just try to get in and out quickly without looking at anyone. It took me years to realize that a lot of people are just trying to be polite when they call me “ma’am” or “lady.” I still tip them well and try to be kind. After all, I’m the only one who gets hurt when I get angry over the little things. Being called “lady” is not an insult as far as I am concerned. Sexism is what I find hard about being read female in public. I’m not insulted on my own behalf because I am transgender and being read wrong. I am angry about how women are treated. This can often lead to tense situations where I refuse to laugh things off or let men take up more space when they sit next to me on a plane.

  During the course of one hour in an airport, I’ve been treated like I’m fourteen, twenty, and thirty. On a plane, I’ve been asked if I’m doing my homework and been given a children’s meal. I usually shrug off any age discrepancies and go along with them (you better believe I’m going to eat a children’s meal if it’s right in front of me). Many people encourage me and tell me never to give up my dream when they see my guitar. I usually just nod, smiling. Some fellow travellers have become alarmed that I am touring all by myself, which does make me feel cared for even if I am forced to answer that I am unsure of my parents’ whereabouts. This usually causes more alarm. I’m not angry when people think I’m young. Being young is not a bad thing. What I don’t like about it is the way that a lot of people treat young people. I have had flight attendants bark at me as I board a plane calmly, or condescend to me about having overweight luggage or carrying a guitar. Fewer and fewer people think that I am a teenager, but as I move into my twenty-second year of being treated like one, I can see how the only way that youth can respond to hostility is with hostility. There isn’t a lot of room for anything else when people treat you like they don’t have to respect you.

  Throughout the interactions I’ve had over the past ten years, I’ve learned that the gender binary is more of a comedy skit than a fact. People read each other, assign identifiers, and then play out a script accordingly. A lot of the time these interactions are absurd, playing themselves out on the ground and thirty thousand feet in the air in the same ways. Sometimes I want to ask people, “What do you think I am?” as soon as I lock eyes with them, but mostly I just want to get to where I’m going.

  Just gave the butch nod to someone I swore was a twenty-something baby butch or genderqueer person working at the grocery store up the street. Turned out to be a handsome young teenage boy. He probably wonders why all the old dykes seem to like him so much.

  Their, There

  Just recently I have started using the pronoun they. Asking people to refer to me by the pronoun they, to be more specific. This feels right enough, more right than he or she do, anyway. I wish we could figure out a way to talk to and about each other in this language that didn’t involve constantly using a pronoun, but we haven’t yet, so they it is. I’m not interested in having a conversation anymore about whether or not it is grammatically correct to use they as a singular pronoun, the least important reason for this being that there is published evidence proving it has been used as far back as the sixteenth century, and by the likes of Chaucer. More pressing than archaic grammar is the here and the now: language changes and evolves to reflect the culture of those using it, and some people wish to be referred to by the pronoun they. This is what makes them feel comfortable, and seen. That is really all the reason needed. The more I use they as an option, the easier it seems to get. I like not gendering my friends when I talk about them with others, it somehow lets their gender become a background detail, and allows other, more personal and relevant details about them shine through, shine around and over the sexism and misogyny of our world and skirt around preconceived ideas of who they might be and what they might be capable of.

  The other day, I was talking to my dad about my friend Carrie, the carpenter. I referred to Carrie as they, which allowed me to tell my father what a good carpenter they were (which they definitely are) without him stopping me to ask what? Carrie is a lady carpenter? My friend Carrie is anything but a lady, but she is a fine carpenter, however, in order to keep the conversation being about Carrie the carpenter, instead of whether or not Carrie is a lady, I used the “they” pronoun for her. In my dreams, I imagine a world where we use “they” to refer to everyone, unless for some reason their gender is important or relevant to understanding the conversation, which it almost never is. That Carrie. They are such a good carpenter. I told Jamie that the sweater they knit for me fit perfectly. That Ivan. They always were such a dreamer.

  I still use the pronoun she for my publicity materials, and for mainstream media stuff, for two reasons: the first is that I do a lot of work in public schools, and I want those young women and girls to see every kind of she there can be. I want them to see my biceps and my shorn hair and shirt and tie and for some of them to see me as a possibility. For the ones that need to see other possibilities to see me, and recognize a future for themselves. I want them to see me living outside of the boxes, b
ecause they might be asphyxiating in their own box and need to see there is air out here for them to breathe, that all they have to do is lift the lid a little.

  The second reason is that for the most part I find the media to be lazy. Or maybe overworked, if I reach for the compassion ring. In any case, I find that the majority of reporters don’t really want, or are not provided the space or time or word count, to really understand their subject. That every person or event they write about or review must be reduced to talking points, a headline, and a pull-out quote. All too often this means I am reduced to a woman who looks like a man. Or a gender-blender or some other nonsensical and diminutive term. I am no longer an award-winning author of ten books, or a musician, or a performer who has been touring the world for nearly twenty years, or a storyteller. I am reduced to a sideshow attraction. I once had a reporter ask me if I had had any surgeries. I told her yes. I had an ingrown toenail removed in grade five, and I had to have my wrist re-broken and set properly once when I fell out of a tree, but that I still had my appendix and my tonsils.

  She told me she knew I was going to say something like that. She said, “Come on, you know what I mean.”

  I told her to come right out and ask me what she was asking me.

  So she asked me if I still had my breasts, or if I was planning to have a breast augmentation, or if I wanted to have a penis constructed, or my penis removed.

  It was only then that I realized she didn’t know what sex or gender I had been assigned at birth, so she couldn’t even be sure what I might want removed or added on to me, but still. She had to know. She just had to ask.

  “Beg your pardon,” I told her. “I thought you were interviewing me because my novel about a heterosexual mechanic just won a national literary award.”

  There was a moment of silence. We finished the interview, but gone was her conversational, easy, friendly demeanor. After that, she talked to me like I was the one being difficult. Like I was the one who had asked a rude question.

  So here it is. My friends call me he, or they. The government and most of my family call me she. The media calls me she, because I don’t trust them enough to request that they do anything else. My lovers call me sweetheart. Or baby. Somewhere in all of that I find myself. These are all, after all, only words.

  I am in the dining hall of the university campus where I am teaching. I get up to go and scrape off my plate and put it in the bus pans. There is a kitchen staff guy there sorting the dirty dishes. “Thank you, sir,” he says as I put my dirty plate in the bin. Then he does a double take at me up close, and says, “Oh, I’m sorry. Thank you, miss.” I smile at him. “Actually,” I say, “I prefer sir.” He doesn’t bat an eyelash. “So does my mom,” he tells me, totally deadpan. I am kind of in love with him now.

  Touring Success and Touring Failure

  I had just stepped off the stage at an Edmonton concert after an encore. The days of playing to empty rooms felt over. I was almost ready to admit to myself that I had gotten to a comfortable place with my job. I was heading to get my merchandise from the front of the room when a man grabbed me by the arm. He was a lot taller than me, and I jumped back out of reflex. He cocked his head, leaned down, and said, “You’re gonna think this is hilarious!” I doubted it, but he still had me by the arm. “When I first saw you, I thought you were a dude, but when you started singing, I knew you were a chick!”

  I made my best effort to keep my face blank lest any displeasure on my part be mistaken for aggression. I was too tired for anger and felt like the interaction had run its course. I just wanted to get my records and go to sleep. I pried his grip from my arm and started to walk away. As I left I turned my head and shouted: “Nice to meet you. You were mistaken both times. I’m transgendered.” He stood motionless and then abruptly turned and walked toward the bar without a response.

  Since I publicly changed my pronoun to “he” in 2001, this is how most of my concerts have ended. There are almost always a few interactions that temper the success with a feeling of failure, a feeling that I have failed to be seen.

  The next day, I woke up to my cell phone alarm in the dim light of the hotel room’s blackout curtains that wouldn’t quite close. The familiar sound of my flip phone chiming didn’t give me any clues as to where I was. I picked it up, and the screen said it was two p.m. I rolled onto my back and looked up at the ceiling, and then it came to me. I was in Prince George. I’d taken an overnight Greyhound from Edmonton. Upon my arrival at six that morning, I’d checked into this hotel in hopes of adding some deep sleep to the shallow naps I’d had intermittently all night on the bus. Like all modest hotel rooms I’d been in, this one had a tiny coffee maker, and I drank the hot liquid wondering who would be around to even go to my show that night. It was a Sunday evening on the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend.

  Once I was dressed, I walked out into the sun hoping to find a place to eat. The smell of the pulp mills hit my nose just after the light. Right outside of the hotel there was a newspaper box and my own image caught my eye. It was tucked in the corner with the headline “TRANSGENDER PERFORMER COMES TO TOWN.” I pried four quarters out of my pocket and opened the front of the box as the last one rattled down inside. I remembered doing the interview, but I thought it had been for the entertainment section, not the cover. I leaned on the box and read through the piece. The pronouns all seemed okay, but they had managed to talk about my gender for half of the article. There was nothing inherently transphobic about it, so I felt indifferent to its content. At least I was getting written about.

  I tucked the paper under my arm and started to walk down 3rd Avenue. To my left were train tracks, and to my right everything was closed, including the bookstore I was supposed to play at later. I started to feel very alone. Looking at my face on the front of the paper again, I wondered if I’d used up one of my lives by asking my publicist to try to get me into the small-town papers on this tour. Was I in danger? I told myself to take a deep breath and stop worrying. I began ambling along a little slower in the same direction. It’s not like everyone in the town would recognize me or anything. It was then that I saw the blue and red OPEN sign a little up ahead of me. It was hard to see it until I was right next to it in the bright autumn sun. It was the downtown bowling alley, but they were advertising food and I was hungry enough to give it a try.

  Inside it felt dimmer in the fluorescent lights and it took my eyes a moment to adjust. All of the lanes were empty except for one. Two older couples in matching uniforms were bowling together, and far too absorbed in their game to notice me. I walked over to a line of orange vinyl spinning stools that sat in front of the wood laminate counter. There was a whiteboard with a scrawled menu that listed the daily specials. I stood as I read them and then slowly sat down, putting the paper on the floor near my feet.

  An older guy in a bowling shirt with the name “Mick” embroidered on it walked up behind the counter from a back room. “Hey,” he said. “Are you here to bowl?”

  “Nah.” I replied. “I just want to eat something.”

  “Okay. Do you know what you want?”

  “Coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich, please.” I said. He nodded and walked away.

  I fiddled with a napkin from the dispenser in front of me, debating whether I should start writing my set list so early in the day. Mick came back with a cup of coffee in one hand and a bowl of creamers and sugar packets in the other. He had a different look on his face, a determined look that seemed bit more familiar to me. “So,” he said, as he set the coffee down. “Are you the one in the paper?”

  My blood pressure spiked. The words “Transgendered Performer Comes to Town” ran through my head. “Umm, yes,” I said. I couldn’t think of any other way to respond.

  “Oh,” he grunted. “Where are you from?”

  “I grew up in Calgary,” I mumbled, wondering if I should listen to the gnawing fear that was starting to rise in my stomach. I opened some sugar packets, trying not to spill them with my shaky han
ds, and dumped them into the coffee cup.

  “Oh. I went to the Stampede there one year back in the eighties,” he replied, his voice warmer in tone now.

  “Yep. Every year in Calgary like clockwork,” I said, stirring in some cream.

  He deposited my food in front of me ten minutes later, including ketchup with my grilled cheese so I didn’t have to ask for it, and tucked a handwritten bill under the napkin holder. I ate slowly, wondering how many people were going to recognize me in Prince George that day. I decided to go right back to the hotel after my meal and stay there until my show. I left ten dollars on top of the bill and walked out into the sunlight, heading back to my hotel, walking a little faster now.

  That night there were many people at my show. Of all ages. I played the set list I had written on the hotel room’s notepaper earlier that day as I watched TV. The crowd was subdued, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves. There was uniform applause between all the songs. The lack of alcohol in the venue kept everyone in their seats and quiet while I was playing. At the end of the show, while I was selling albums to fans, I saw a young person with his hands in his pockets, milling behind everyone nervously, and looking at me every so often. When everyone else had left, he walked up to me. “Hi,” he said. “My name’s Shawn. My parents saw you in the paper and brought me to your show.” He gestured to two seated figures watching him from a few meters away. “I’m transgender too. F to M. I’m fourteen. I’m starting hormones next month,” he finished, a little bit red in the face.

  “Cool! Thanks for coming to the show,” I said. “I’m thirty. I came out as trans about ten years ago. I decided that I wouldn’t take hormones at first because of my voice and then later on because I feel okay with my body how it is.”

  “Well, it’s all about what makes you feel comfortable, right?” he responded.