I don’t mind being referred to as “he” as much as I do “she.” Maybe because it’s the most recent pronoun to the one I prefer. It’s like a name I chose for myself and then ended up changing. After retiring, I stopped identifying as trans-masculine or anywhere on that spectrum. I loosened up my dress code, which was previously more about blazers, button-down shirts, and ties. I like to throw in a bright blouse here and there, and I tend to paint my nails if I feel like I am going to be particularly expected to behave like a man. It creates a dissonance with expectations that I enjoy. Gender-neutral fashion does not start and end with the masculine for me. I like to borrow from all sides of the spectrum, just as I shop in all parts of a department store for clothing. I shop in the men’s and women’s sections, cobbling together a look that could confound the most attuned gender-assignment identifier from a few feet away.
Being default gendered as a woman over half the time hasn’t diminished in my retired state, although I am finding it easier to brush off. The thing that I can’t brush off is that the most violent attack I ever experienced while on tour was because the attacker, a man who was a friend of the owner of the venue where I played that night, thought I was a woman and was being aggressive sexually. I managed to escape physical harm by calling 911 on my cell phone, but violence against women is not something that I am exempt from because I don’t identify as a woman. Feminism, for the sake of the safety of all gender minorities, is always close to my mind and experience. Not being involved in the binary altogether makes the assignment as a woman feel more arbitrary than wrong. Most of my public interactions involve the immediate assignment as a woman, or the slow reveal of people discovering that they would rather assign me to the category of female. The slow reveal feels like a bit of a time-waster, and I have been known to skip over it if I need to match my assignment to the sex on my ID which reads “F.” I sometimes tell people that the F stands for “Fuck Gender,” but I am quick to let people assign me incorrectly if I need to get on a plane or cash a cheque. In these situations, my Gender Assignment By Convenience rule overrides my internal need to let people know about my retired state.
There is also the space of the in-between, which is the space that trans people live in no matter how they identify. A radio interviewer once asked me, “Do you feel more like a man some days and more like a woman on others?”
“No, I’m not really either,” I said.
“Not one more than the other?”
Questions like this are used to insinuate that there is no way to live outside of the binary, only in-between its opposite poles. The whole point of changing my pronoun to the gender-neutral “they” was to state that I feel like neither. Yet almost every day, I am expected to declare myself as either a man or woman or, at the very least, somewhere in the spectrum in between. To me, gender retirement is very much about refusing to be put on that spectrum.
So far, I would highly recommend retiring from gender to anyone who is feeling like the spectrum or the binary doesn’t fit. Many people look at me strangely when I tell them, but the decreased pressure of having to perform a gender makes up for all of the misunderstandings. I’m optimistic that living outside the binary will gain more recognition in the future, and so I mostly just bide my time when things get difficult. I don’t think that gender retirement need only be available to people who identify as trans. Ideally, some sort of opt-out plan would be implemented for people who want to accept only part of their roles in the binary, but not buy into everything expected of them. There is no retirement home for gender, but I like to think that the less I expect others to conform to the expectations of the binary and the more I refuse to participate in it, the closer my dream of true gender retirement is to reality.
Today an old woman stopped me while I was walking the dog to tell me I looked a lot like her departed husband when she first met him in the fifties. “He had good hair like you. He was a snappy dresser. Liked to take me dancing,” she said. Was he a good husband? I asked her. “Good enough that I’m smiling at you fifty years later,” she told me.
Ivan E. Coyote is a writer, performer, and author of seven books published by Arsenal Pulp Press: the story collections Close to Spider Man, One Man’s Trash, Loose End, The Slow Fix, and Missed Her; the young-adult collection One in Every Crowd; and the ReLit Award-winning novel Bow Grip. Ivan is also the co-editor (with Zena Sharman) of the acclaimed anthology Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme and, as part of the collective Taste This, co-author of Boys like Her. Ivan was a long-time columnist for the LGBT newspaper Xtra! Originally from the Yukon, Ivan is a resident of Vancouver.
Rae Spoon is a transgender musician and author originally from Calgary, Canada. They have been nominated for a Polaris Prize, toured internationally, and released seven solo albums, the most recent being My Prairie Home (2013). Rae is the author of the Lambda Literary Award finalist First Spring Grass Fire, and their essay “Femme Cowboy” was featured in the anthology Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. Rae is the subject of a National Film Board documentary-musical titled My Prairie Home (2013), which screened at film festivals internationally, including the Sundance 2014 Film Festival. They have also composed scores for films that have screened at Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and Vancouver International Film Festival. Rae lives in Montreal with their partner, Kendra Marks.
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