“Yep,” I said.
We grinned at each other, and then went silent like we were both listening to something no one else could hear. His parents stood up looking like it was time to leave. He turned to go, and I said, “Hey, Shawn.”
“Yeah?” he asked.
“Next time I play in Prince George, will you be my bodyguard?”
“For sure,” he replied, looking a little bit taller, and then he turned and left with a parent on each arm.
Between the Boat and the Dock
I remember doing a show years ago in Seattle. Like, maybe the year 2000, somewhere around there. I still smoked cigarettes back then, and I was standing around in the drizzle on the sidewalk after the performance was over, having a smoke and talking to some friends. A woman approached me, thanked me for the show, and then leaned in to tell me how much she appreciated hearing herself represented as a proud butch woman in my words.
“It’s getting rare these days, you know, stuff about being a butch.” She shifted her eyes right and then left, and then lowered her voice so no one but her and I could hear it. “You know, as in not a trans man, but a butch woman.”
I smiled and told her thanks, even though I often used the word butch to refer to myself, but didn’t really use the word woman so much. And in my heart I identified with my trans male brothers just as much as I ever did with my butch sisters, and always endeavoured to never draw lines in the sand between us as she just had.
I had already spent years feeling like I was perched with one foot on a trans-shaped rowboat and the other foot resting on a butch dock, balancing myself and my language and words and work in the space between them.
I also knew that as an artist, my job was to create and present the work, and then stand aside and let everyone decide for themselves how to interpret my writing, and how much of it resonated with them, or didn’t. I knew even then that the world is tragically devoid of enough words and work and images that represent butch reality in anything other than the butt of a your-mother-wears-army-boots joke. Butches are so often the punch line, and so rarely the subject, and almost never the hero. Who was I to challenge her interpretation and experience of my stories? She had seen herself in them, and took comfort and strength in that, and that to me was the point. Perhaps she had witnessed something other than what I had intended, but that didn’t matter enough for me to take those rare and good feelings away from her. So I shook her hand firmly, looked her right in the eyes and thanked her, and I meant it.
Not sixty seconds after she had jumped into her Subaru wagon and driven off, a young man stepped up to speak to me. He thanked me for my words that night, and told me how important my work had been for him as he navigated his transition and found his place in his new body and identity.
“Thank you so much for representing trans guys without forgetting about feminism. I’m like you. I am a man now but I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to just transition and become another misogynist dude so I can pass.”
Again, I thanked him and shook his hand. What purpose would be served by telling him I wasn’t a man? That I wasn’t just like him, that I didn’t plan to transition, that I don’t like or use the word “pass,” that I reject the hierarchy that the word pass helps to create, that I resist the binary system and celebrate the lives and bodies of other gender failures like myself?
I knew if I were to find the time for the two of us to sit down and really talk, I might discover that our worldviews weren’t really that different after all, it was just this limited language and the scarcity of shared meanings of words that made it seem like he had misinterpreted me.
So I chose to focus on what we shared, not what made us different, and told him how much I appreciated him coming out to my show. Then he asked me for a hug, so I gave him one, and I meant it.
For years I grappled with this balancing act, “she” stuffed into one front pocket of my jeans, and “he” rolling around in the other. Second-wave feminists raised one eyebrow at my masculine name, but never high enough that it kept them from hiring me for their well-paid women’s day gig at the university, and I continued to write about my trans experience, but as long as I was still okay with being referred to by female pronouns, it never cost me much.
When I first met Rae Spoon, they were a young, queer-identified country singer. They went by the “she” pronoun and wore satin cowboy shirts and crooned about trailers and dirt roads and hoedowns and broken hearts. Rae was talented and funny and had an unmistakable, completely unique and beautiful singing voice. Their star immediately began to rise, and Rae’s name started to make regular appearances on posters for major folk festivals all across the country. I loved Rae’s music, and listened to their first demo CD on repeat in my little apartment for months.
I remember when Rae changed their pronoun to “he,” and came out as trans. We had started doing shows together here and there, and had become friends. In 2007 we booked a tour together and collaborated on our first full-length project. By this time Rae was experimenting with indie rock and dabbling in electronica. Rae and I toured the You Are Here project quite a bit, singing and telling stories at some pretty big festivals and to sold-out theatres, and I watched as Rae struggled with good-old-boy union stage techs and straight sound guys as they repeatedly referred to Rae as she during load-ins and soundchecks and on stages, even when told multiple times what Rae’s chosen pronoun was. Rae was always gracious and professional, and took it in stride, but I could see their face twitch almost imperceptibly every time it happened, and I knew it wore Rae down, and weighed heavy on their slender shoulders. I felt fiercely, sometimes irrationally protective of Rae, which was often maddening, because there was really no way I could effectively shield them from these multitudes of daily indignities. I worried that they might slowly bleed to death from one thousand tiny wounds.
We never expected much better from the mainstream straight art and music scene, and so neither of us were all that disappointed. They called Rae she and both of us ladies, and we swallowed it and did our jobs, and were grateful for the work.
What was hard was watching how the queer communities and the women’s music scene handled Rae’s trans self. What was hard was watching trans guys who I would have thought should know better misgender Rae during introductions. Watching Rae swallow their rage and slip their guitar strap over those shoulders and get up there and sing with that beautiful voice like their heart hadn’t just been broken by someone who should have taken better care of his family.
I watched as fewer and fewer lesbians showed up for Rae’s shows, but still came out to mine. I watched for a couple of years as transphobia cost Rae in record sales and empty seats. The fact that Rae continued to tour the world, often by bus and mostly solo, and produce increasingly more nuanced and more widely received albums is a testament to not just their talent, but to their bravery and fortitude.
And me? I escaped being called the wrong pronoun by never choosing one, by telling myself over and over again that it didn’t matter what anyone called me when they welcomed me to the stage.
Creating the Gender Failure show and writing this book together with Rae has been like a second chance for me. My second chance to stand shoulder to shoulder, right beside my beloved younger sibling, and offer my apologies that I was standing behind them the first time around.
Stories I Tell Myself and Others (Gender as Narrative)
More and more, I have thought of my gender as a story I tell myself. When I was assigned female, I told myself that I was a girl because it was the only information that I was given. There was no other option, so it was the only way. I struggled with the expectations that were placed on me, but the character I played was female, even if I was very bad at acting.
As a woman, I was attracted to other women. I would be in romantic couples where both partners were assigned female. I subscribed to the story that I was a woman who dated women, and that I was a lesbian. The people I dated believed that we were both women and t
hat the relationship between us was a lesbian one. This was during a period where gays and lesbians were just entering the spotlight in mainstream media. There were newly accessible possibilities that could be incorporated into the stories we told ourselves.
When I came out as transgender, I started to tell myself that I was a man. I had the same body and the same history, but this changed everything. I told myself that I had always been male. It made my difficulty at performing a female role make sense to me, but it also cancelled out the fact that I believed that I was a girl all along. I would say that I had never been a girl.
There was always a vetting period when I wasn’t sure if the person I was romantically involved with really believed the story I told about my gender. For a transgender person, the difference is that we often have to sell our stories to other people, instead of assuming that our bodies, presentation, and gender assignment will do that work for us. I had always dated women, so I assumed I would continue that pattern. When I dated, I had to find partners who believed that I was a man and that they were women. It was a story we agreed upon. I was a man dating a woman. We were heterosexual. There were plenty of available narratives about heterosexual relationships to explore, but very few where the man was transgender. It was often hard to be accepted as male because of being transgender, so the story of my gender and relationships was often compromised by people who wouldn’t respect my request to be accepted as male.
Then I started to date men. I had never been attracted to them when I was assigned female, but new attractions turned into reality, and I had to change the story again. I started to date people who believed that I was a man and that they were men. We were homosexual men together, and that was the story that we told ourselves. There were a lot of narratives about homosexual men that we could access to build the story of our relationships. I found it hard to be accepted as a man in the gay male community because I was, and sometimes my partners were, transgender. We were not welcome in male-only spaces, or accepted as a gay couple by other gay male couples. In this way, the story of my gender and relationships were again invalidated a lot of the time.
I became tired of having to work for acceptance of my gender and relationships, especially from those who should know better. I started to think a lot about the barriers that had been imposed on me, and the things that had caused people to invalidate who I believed myself to be. What was it about me that made people read me as female? The way that people read me was often not what I was. Why did people often think that you can read anything about a person by their body? What makes people think that they can determine anyone’s gender without asking them, or continue to misgender a person after a request not to?
All of my questions about being male and female led me to sexism. The general expectation for anyone to perform a gender role in the binary was based on polarized stereotypes for bodies, behaviour, and presentation. When looking at the reality of sex, there are variances from the stereotypes in almost every person assigned female or male. The ideal social expectations of gender are not represented in the general population, but they are enforced nevertheless. It was then that I gave up on changing my own body, presentation, or behaviour to match either side of the gender binary. I took the responsibility of earning acceptance off myself and stopped trying to convince people that I was male or female. I started to identify as gender-neutral and request that people use the “they” pronoun for me.
When I decided to retire from the gender binary, the narrative that I had about being a man stuck in a woman’s body didn’t make sense anymore, unless I was a gender-neutral person who’d been stuck in a man’s body stuck in a woman’s body all along. I started to consider that I was not essentially a gender, and that bodies should not be gendered based on the rigid binary system. I decided that my gender and sexuality had been a fluid narrative that I had constructed based on the options that I was given. I had not been a man or a woman for any reason other than that I had believed that I was one. Now that I had the option of opting out of the binary, the story could expand and evolve to include that identification as part of my history.
In practice, it is actually far more difficult to gain acceptance as a gender-neutral person. It’s not a widely known identity, and gender is usually the most common identifier. With lovers, I still need an agreement on a story. I tend to request that we agree on a relationship that is not gendered at all. In public, I get a varied mix of perceptions. I never know if people think I’m a heterosexual man, a heterosexual woman, a lesbian, or a gay man. In practice, I have been all of these things at one time or another in my life. I don’t find any one of them to be bad. Maybe my gender retirement is more of a “greatest hits”-style experience.
After all that has changed for me, I’m more inclined to leave the narrative open for myself than I have in the past. Now that I define my gender and sexuality as stories I tell and agree upon, I want to leave room for future possibilities that I have not been presented with yet. I am a gender failure. I failed at the gender binary, unable to find a place in being either a man or a woman with which I felt comfortable. But ultimately I believe that it’s the binary that fails to leave room for most people to write their own gender stories.
Danger
A guy strides right up to me and pokes me in the middle of my chest. “Are you a female?” He squints at me. “Kind of,” I tell him. “What kind of an answer is that?” he asks me. “What kind of a question is that?” I ask him back, and then add, “And what kind of a man goes around poking strangers in the chest, anyway?” He nods his head, like he agrees with me on that point. Then he gets into a black and navy blue late seventies El Camino and drives away. I have a choice: to feel pissed off that he touched me like that, talked to me like that, or vaguely triumphant that he seemed to reconsider his behaviour, at least, if not apologize. I pick triumph. It was almost sunny that January morning, and way too early in the day to turn my day the wrong way.
I am a witness to a hit-and-run accident. It is dark and raining. A sports car hits a pedestrian and then screeches away. I call an ambulance, wait with the older woman while it comes. A policeman takes my name and phone number and address and writes them in his book. He narrows his eyes at me under the knife shape of light coming from the streetlight above us. He appears to be considering something. “Do you, uh, have a gender?” he asks me. “Yes, I do,” I tell him. A long couple of seconds of silence hang in the dark between us. “No need to be smart about anything. Are we going to have a problem here?” His words are clipped, severe, like his brushcut. “Hey,” I say, “I’m the witness here. I stuck around. I called you guys. I thought I was the good guy.” “Well, we can change that in a second if you don’t co-operate,” he informs me. “I am female,” I tell him. “You’re sure about that now?” he asks me. I don’t say anything. “That’s better,” he says.
I am out to dinner with my sweetheart. She is wearing a little black dress and a rhinestone bracelet, and I am in a shirt and tie and dress pants. The waiter keeps mercilessly referring to both of us as ladies. Can I get you ladies some more coffee? Are you ladies going to have dessert? Can I bring you ladies the bill? I am obviously anything but a lady. I realize that the English language is sadly devoid of names for people like me. I try to cut the world some slack for this every day. All day. And the day after that, too. But the truth is that every time I am misgendered, a tiny little sliver of me disappears. A tiny little sliver of me is reminded that I do not fit, I am not this, I am not that, I am not seen, I can’t be recognized, I have no name. I remember that the truth of me is invisible, and a tiny little sliver of me disappears. Just a sliver, razored from the surface of my very thick skin most days, but other times right from my soul, sometimes felt so deep and other days simply shrugged off, but still. All those slivers add up to something much harder to pretend around.
Any gendered public washroom, men’s or women’s, anywhere, anytime at all, every day of my life. Possible danger. I tell myself sometimes that
if I did fit in a box, if there was always a bathroom for me, I would get bored, I would get soft, I would lose my spidey senses, my cat-like reflexes, that the eyes in the back of my head would close forever and I would miss them. I tell myself this some days, but mostly I don’t believe me.
Sometimes it exhausts me, all the head shaking and stumbling around to navigate and negotiate the two-ring circus that is this gender binary, walking pronoun tightropes and balancing between my safety and someone else’s comfort. You are free to call me trans and I am proud to lift this name up and hold it, right there in the sun, and you would not be wrong, but this still feels like I am borrowing a word from someone else, that it is not all the way mine, really, and my friend who lent it to me might need it back, or they might need it more than me, and really, these are just words, and words are always imperfect, words are just sounds we make with our mouths that point our minds to think of things that cannot be fully described in words anyway. I am a writer, so I know where words fail us. A name is not a person, it is just what we have agreed to call them.
The thing about rarely been seen, the thing about always being called words that bounce off me or fall flat at my feet, is what a heart balm it is when she looks right at me like she does. How she heals me with that sideways flicker-in-her-eyes look. That you-just-wait-until-I get-you-home look. How her hands on me helped me own all of this body again. Her hands on me how she takes me takes what she wants and then gives it back to me when she is finished, gives it back to me better somehow. And I mean all of me. More whole. All the sweeter because it took so long for me to find myself, to truly live inside all of me.
Gender Retirement
To me, gender retirement is the refusal to identify myself within the gender binary. It’s been a couple of years since I announced that I was changing my pronoun to “they” and renouncing my status as a man. It’s not exactly how I pictured it turning out. I thought I might end up in some sort of Florida of gender with other retirees. Maybe I could spend my time sitting on a La-Z-Boy with a bubble pipe and a smoking jacket, watching the weather channel. I don’t yet own a reclining chair like I had pictured, but I do spend a good portion of the day napping when I get the chance. I try to gather my strength for the periods of time when I meet people out in the world where my pronoun is rarely respected. I have thought of wearing a large button that says, “Hi. Please call me ‘they,’” but I’m sure that would only result in being called ‘Mrs. They’ most of the time. My retirement from the gender binary seems to have left the rest of the world largely unaffected. Like a large, impersonal company that one’s retired from, it seems to have moved on without providing me some sort of pension or even a certificate for the time invested. It feels more like being a sought-after secret agent. I can be minding my own business and then out of nowhere I am solicited to start participating again. The gender binary needs me! It’s true that I can’t escape it as long as I keep leaving my house, so perhaps resisting it is more like a full-time job, and a second career.
Gender Failure Page 14