Gender Failure

Introduction

I was assigned female at birth and socialized as a girl in a Pentecostal family in Calgary, Alberta. My attempts at being a girl failed epically throughout my teenage years, but I had never considered that it was something that I would be allowed to change. I had no way to talk about gender. I wasn’t allowed to express how uncomfortable it was for me. To resist would have put me in danger, so I kept any subversive thoughts covert. As a person who couldn’t conform to what was expected of me, I thought I was a failure and kept it to myself.

I came out as transgender privately in the summer of 2001, and publicly in 2002. I knew that identifying as a man and asking to be called he would be difficult in relation to the outside world, and I wasn’t wrong. Even more difficult was that, as a male-identified person, I didn’t feel allowed to discuss the parts of that side of the gender binary that were problematic to me. I felt a dysphoria in my new trans-identity and I thought it must be another failure on my part.

When I retired from gender, it was because I came to the realization that the gender binary was what had been failing me all along. It’s hard to imagine that any one person finds that their place in the binary fits them without some measure of discomfort. Since my retirement, I have been striving to stop gendering things for myself and for other people.

Ivan Coyote is a great friend and long-time collaborator of mine. In the past, we worked together on a show about the Yukon, which was more focused on stories about place than our own identities. Through the process of touring that first show, we discovered a lot of similarities between us due to our non-binary genders, so we started bonding organically over small-town gas stations, public washrooms, and the general lack of understanding in the world in which we moved.

In the spring of 2012, a few months after I came out as gender-retired, Ivan and I wrote our first version of the show Gender Failure. We presented it in New York at Dixon Place. The reception we got from that first show alone made it clear that we were on to something. Bringing together the stories inspired by the show in this book is the best way I can think of to include everything that we don’t have time to present during the course of a ninety-minute performance. Visual artist and musician Clyde Petersen was in the audience for that first show and was inspired to collaborate with us and create accompanying animations, which we premiered as part of our performance in March 2013 at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in London, England. The enthusiastic feedback we received confirmed that we had found an irreplaceable artistic partner in Clyde.

I have been failing at the gender binary for as long as I can remember, and that has been difficult at every level of my life. I constantly find myself explaining how this happened on a daily basis, whether to people I meet or to the media. This book is my attempt to trace my journey with gender; it’s a group of life stories and personal essays meant to express how I have felt throughout my life in my various identities. Although I belong to a gender minority, I am a white, able-bodied, gender-neutral (formerly trans-masculine) person, and I recognize that there are many ways that I benefit from privilege, especially in queer spaces. There should be as many books like this as there are people constrained by the gender binary, and I hope in my lifetime to read as many of them as possible.

Girl Failure

Janine Jones and I were best friends from grade two until grade eight. We bonded on the day during crafts time when someone took a straw and blew a tiny glass bead straight into Jennifer McCloud’s ear, and she had to go to emergency. Our teacher, Miss McCarthy, went with her, so the principal came in to supervise the class. He stood at the front of the room and bellowed that the right thing to do was for whoever had blown the bead to be a man, step forward, and admit what he had done. But both Janine and I had seen that it was Carrie Halliday, a girl bigger than most of the boys, who had been the actual bead blower. Carrie Halliday was famous for having had to repeat grade one already, and she was mean, prone to unprovoked snakebites and knuckle punches and shin kicks, so neither one of us said a word, because like all of us, including Miss McCarthy, we were terrified of Carrie Halliday. Janine smiled down at her desk and then her gaze slipped sideways across the aisle and met mine. We both raised our eyebrows in acknowledgment of the truth and nodded. We were complicit in the secret, silent partners in someone else’s crime, and that was all it took.

Three weeks later, behind the baseball diamond, Janine and I stabbed our pinkie fingers with a safety pin we had scorched with a match and declared each other blood brothers forever.

I lived on Hemlock Street, one block away by street and one minute away by footpath through the greenbelt from Janine’s parents’ house on Poplar Street. It turned out that we both liked sports and camping and that book The Chrysalids; neither of us went in for Barbies or playing house or had any interest in doing our hair or stuff like that.

Janine Jones and I were inseparable for those years; I ate dinner at her place two or three nights a week, and we were always sleeping over at each other’s houses. We were like sisters, people said, which always made me snort a little, because my real sister and I could hardly stand to be in the same room together for five minutes without tearing holes in each other, metaphorically or otherwise. And Janine only had two brothers, both of whom were pretty much useless, Gerome being a chronic masturbator at home and a science nerd at school, and little Marcus being a bit of a bed wetter and still needing us to babysit him so he wouldn’t play with matches or the stove or a propane curling iron again, or catch his foreskin in his zipper as he was prone to doing due to his unexplained aversion to wearing underwear. Marcus was our responsibility, not our comrade.

Anyway, we were better than sisters, until the start of grade eight when they finally finished that new junior high school on Hickory Street, and for some reason Janine signed up for home economics class instead of shop like we had planned to, and it turned out it was because home-ec was what Jeanie and Sandra and Wendy and Tracey and Kerri-Anne and tall Rebecca were taking, and she was into hanging out with them more, ever since they all went horseback riding together at the summer barbecue for Janine’s mom’s work. Who knew all their moms worked together at the Department of Motor Vehicles office? What a coincidence.

Next thing I know, Janine is bra shopping with all of them, and I am not invited because I don’t even need or want a training bra yet. So I guess the first things that ever truly came between the two of us were those breasts. They set us apart; how could they not?

It seemed to me that those breasts of hers had appeared kind of overnight the summer after grade six, and they were a C cup, easy, by the time we hit the new junior high. Of course there were the grade nine boys there, the older boys, and of course they noticed, and come to think of it, that was the second thing that would eventually split us up: those boys. The third thing was cheerleading. Oh Mickey you’re so fine you’re so fine you blow my mind hey Mickey. Hey Mickey. There was no way I could dance to that or shake any pom-poms; just the thought of moving my hips in front of anyone much less a crowd made me freeze ice cold blood in my ears but Janine was so into it and even liked the skirt that came with it. Who was this new girl, anyway? And what had she done with my friend who only liked blue jeans or brown cords, just like me?

The fourth and final element of our undoing was the slumber party. Every birthday for six years before that one of hers in the fall of grade eight had been the same: our moms would rent us a couple of movies and buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner. But not the fall of 1983. That year Janine decided she was having a slumber party and that all of her new friends from horseback riding and home-ec and cheerleading were coming too. We had Chinese food instead of fried chicken because the cheerleaders wouldn’t eat fried foods, and we watched Pretty in Pink instead of Monty Python, and I fell asleep early because I was tired from playing that day in a boys’ hockey tournament, which everyone also thought was weird.

I was curled up in my Smokey the Bear sleeping bag in one corner of the rec room near the electric piano and woke up some time in the wee hours of the night. I must have heard my name being spoken in my sleep because they were all talking about me. Wendy, Tracy, Sandra, Jeanie, Kerri-Anne, tall Rebecca, and worst thing ever, my best friend Janine too, talking about me, and laughing at my flat and training-braless chest and hairless armpits. I could feel my dinner churn in my stomach and burn in the back of my throat like I had drank battery acid, and the tears welled and fell and rolled, rolled, I could not control them at all. And then it got so much worse.

My best friend’s voice hiccupped, it was all just so hilarious, and hopped over a giggle when she told the rest of the girls that I had no hair down there yet either; bald as an egg, she said. "And you should see her thing. Her, you know. It is huge. As long as half my pointer finger, seriously, and it hangs right down past her lips and looks just like a tiny you-know-what."

How sick! someone said, then another peal of laughter, another voice, it sounded like Wendy, and I pictured her talking through her retainer and headgear; she wasn’t so perfect, either. Then I heard the swish of her, so weak from laughing at me, that she fell backwards into her dad’s down sleeping bag.

The last time I ever took my clothes off in the open space of a women’s change room, I was thirteen years old and had just started grade eight at a new school. To this day, when in strange gyms, I still change in a bathroom stall, and I have a scar on my elbow where I split it open on the rough edge of a toilet paper dispenser to prove it.

Janine and I didn’t hang out much after that night, and we never talked about why. She lives in Manitoba now, and runs a pizza restaurant with her husband and two kids. Still plays the flute and does a little theatre. Every once in a while she will drunk dial me on a Friday night and tell me she is an artist too, you know, that she is writing down some stories about when we were kids. I never ask her if she knows or writes about why our friendship fell apart. It was partly those breasts and partly those boys and partly that home-ec class, but for me it was mostly the way she talked about my little dick that night in the rec room in the half basement of her parents’ house on Poplar Street. I have been carrying that night with me for thirty years, and just now was the first time I ever put it down. Put it down in words.

Girl Failure

For the first nineteen years of my life, my gender was a like an amusement park ride that I couldn’t escape from. My mother often told me that I looked like a tiny doll when I was born. She’d say, You didn’t have any dents on your head like the other babies. You had a full head of hair, and the nurses would fight over who got to hold you. Such a beautiful baby girl! Must have been because I have strong stomach muscles. She would say this while patting herself on the belly.

Being a girl was something that never really happened for me. The first day of junior high gym class, I was horrified when I realized that we were going to have to change our clothes in a locker room. The other girls collected near the rows of beige-coloured lockers and talked about shaving their legs. I dodged into a bathroom stall. I could hear them all singing a song together as I hid, pulling my t-shirt over my head. I think the song was I Will Always Love You. How do they all know the same song? I thought. My Pentecostal parents had only ever let me listen to Christian music.

During gymnastics that day, I was on the parallel bars trying to hold myself up when I felt a hot ripping pain in my chest. My arms gave out. I started crying, crumpled up on the floor. The gym teacher came over and said, You’re okay. You’re not hurt, and pulled me up to my feet. I could feel my face turn red. One of the other girls came up to me with a wide grin and said, Hey, it’s okay. I used to want to be a boy too. I felt the floor giving way beneath me. This was the second time she’d gone out of her way to point out that I was bad at being a girl. She was on to me.

A week later, we moved into the dance aerobics portion of gym class. The boys were outside playing rugby, which looked violent, but not as dangerous as moving around to dance music. I had never been allowed to dance in my life. My parents thought it was sinful. When the pumping beat of Rhythm Is a Dancer came on, the gym teacher started to call out moves and demonstrate them, which we were supposed to follow. I could feel my body resisting as I urged it to move to the music like a limp scarecrow. I knew that if I didn’t dance, I’d be in trouble, but if I did, I might go to hell. I thought I saw the gym teacher raise her eyebrow at me as I shimmied robotically behind all the girls who seemed to be genuinely enjoying the experience. At the end of the class, the gym teacher said, Good job, girls! Tomorrow you’ll break up into groups and come up with your own routines.

That