Tomboy Survival Guide

by Ivan Coyote

  I haven’t seen this second cousin of mine since he was about thirteen, I think, but he knows more about parts of me than my own father does, and he learned them from reading a book my father will most likely never pick up.

  My family is huge. My family is complicated. I have loved and hated nearly all of them for both good and selfish reasons at some point in my life. I consider myself one of the very lucky ones, my scales always tip towards loving most of them nearly all of the time. I forgive them their trespasses and imperfections and hope that they love me enough to do likewise. It took me over forty years to accept myself. I didn’t fully come to terms with being and calling myself trans until a couple of years ago. So, by that math, I give them another forty-two years of practice before I will start to expect them all to have it down perfect. Fair is fair.

  If I were to meet your son, and he were to ask my advice, which is unlikely, I would tell him this:

  If you are going to be a man, then please, be a good man. Be a kind man. Be a feminist man. Do not try to fit into mainstream male culture by rejecting and reviling the feminine, not in you, not in others, and not in the world.

  This is the same advice I would give all seventeen-year-old men, the only difference being that I will expect more from your son, I cannot help myself. I have been proven wrong on this on multiple occasions, but still, I will continue to expect more from him than I do cisgender boys his age. He already knows that much of what he has been taught about being a woman or a man is not true for him, so it must not be true for others, too. I will expect him to know and remember this.

  I would tell him that the more that I am read as male, the more important it is for me to be conscious of the way I move through the world. I don’t tell women on the street they look beautiful today, even when they really do. I make sure I don’t walk too closely behind them in the park or on the street after dark. I keep my hands and feet and knees and gaze to myself on public transit. I remember that what reads as impatience or frustration from a woman waiting in a bank line-up can feel like anger or aggression coming from a man.

  I would tell him to cry in public as much as he wants, just to make more room for everyone to cry. I would tell him I am crying as I write this right now.

  I would tell him to write poems instead of punching walls.

  I would tell him that being trans is hard, but no matter how difficult it is, all that pain and frustration is never to be used as an excuse to mistreat the people closest to you. I would tell him that this is like screaming at a driver who cut you off on the freeway with all the windows rolled up in both vehicles: the bad driver doesn’t hear you, in fact, he is already ten cars ahead of you, probably oblivious. The only person who can hear you is your girlfriend sitting beside you, or your grandmother, or your son or daughter.

  I would tell him to try to be kinder to his mother, that she is doing the best she can to understand.

  I never really related to the theory that being trans meant my body didn’t match my brain. I feel like this is a handy narrative that puts all of the pressure and responsibility for change onto trans people and off of the rest of society. If we could just grow a beard or not have a penis or an Adam’s apple, if we were shorter or taller or skinnier or hairier or less hairy, if our breasts were bigger or removed, if we could take and somehow pay for and heal from all the steps we would need to go through so that nobody could tell anymore that we were trans, then we could be happy. I did have top surgery nearly four years ago, after binding my breasts down for nineteen years, and that was the right thing for me. It was the healthy, happy thing for me to do, and I will always be grateful that I live in a country and province where this was covered under my medical plan. Not because the government decided this was the right thing, but because many trans people fought for years to make it so. Trans people should absolutely have access to required surgeries and hormone treatment as wanted or necessary. To me, that is a given.

  But my day-to-day struggles are not so much between me and my body. I am not trapped in the wrong body; I am trapped in a world that makes very little space for bodies like mine. I live in a world where public washrooms are a battle ground, where politicians can stand up and be applauded for putting forth an amendment barring me from choosing which gendered bathroom I belong in. I live in a world where my trans sisters are routinely murdered without consequence or justice. I live in a world where trans youth get kicked out onto the street by their parents who think their God is standing behind them as they close their front doors on their own children. Going to the beach is an act of bravery for me. None of this is a battle between me and my own flesh. For me to be free, it is the world that has to change, not trans people.

  I know that your kind and loving and thoughtful child is still there. I know he needs you to love him right now, to help make up for a world that often does not.

  And how about you? What kind of support or community do you have around you? I hope it consists of more than a letter from a storyteller that took three months to arrive. Please reach out to find other parents of trans kids. I am sure you will find some comfort and recognition there.

  There is no one right, monolithic trans narrative, and the more trans youth you meet, the more you will see what I see: that trans youth are resilient and beautiful, and inventive and brave and hilarious, and that many of them are happy.

  My aunt Nora told me a few years ago that all through my teens she could see that I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin, but that she had no words for what seemed to be troubling me, and so had no way to help me.

  It is thirty years later, and we have words for what is troubling your son, and he has found them and is using them, and so are you, and so are his father and brothers. He has a mother who loves him enough to write someone and ask for help. He is already thirty years ahead of me.

  I think that is pretty much all the advice this childless writer dares give you. Please give my best to your son and the rest of your family, and please, keep in touch.

  Today in the heart-rending world of small-town school shows, I met another trans kid. Grade nine. Struggling. Unstable housing, mother with addiction issues, other kids not respecting his chosen name and pronoun. He says he’s getting a job so he can buy a binder because he can’t handle looking at them. He tells me the first time he told his mom he was trans she was blacked out and didn’t remember the mean things she said to him. But he remembered. He told me that before his people were colonized, two-spirit people were respected, did I know that? We hugged. I told him I would send him some books when I got home, care of the school. He said he had four good friends that he could trust. I said now you have five. He said I know. I told him keep on drawing, that art will help you get through. He said I know.

  WE’VE GOT A SITUATION HERE

  After about fifteen years of doing my anti-bullying show in Canadian public schools, I finally got invited to bring the show into a few high schools in the US. In Eugene, Oregon. I had been to the University of Oregon the previous spring, and had done a gig for a group of teacher candidates at the university, and I think one of those fresh-out-of-the-wrapper young teachers contacted my agent that books all my school gigs, and they put a little high school tour together.

  That same young teacher had originally seen me do a public show for adults in the evening. A show where maybe I swore a little bit and talked about top surgery and queer politics. This well-intentioned young teacher for some reason thought maybe I would trot out some of that same material for her ninth graders at a public school in smallish-town Oregon. The reality is that the show I take into public high schools is pretty tame. I tell a couple of stories, one about the summer that me, my little sister, and my cousins Dan and Christopher spent living with my grandmother in Nanaimo, BC. We were living on the very fixed income of a retired and frugal woman, and one day she bought us all used roller-skates at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. My clumsy and often bullied cousin Christopher wiped out in the first ten minutes of the first day we
had those roller skates and pooped his shorts. This story is designed to engage and entertain up to 1,000 kids aged eleven to seventeen and attempt to keep them from texting each other or falling asleep for approximately fifty-five minutes. I’m also attempting to get them to sympathize, empathize, or at least feel sorry for or protective of my poor little cousin.

  I tell another story right after the roller-skating one about being mistaken for a young man on an airplane by forty fifteen-year-old volleyball players on their way to a tournament. This story flashes back to my own high school experience with mean girls, and how I still carry the marks on my heart to this day.

  Then we do a brief question-and-answer period. Sometimes it takes four or five questions about how did I get into writing and how many tattoos do I have, and what kind of music do I like, but almost every single time a usually young and scrawny for his age boy puts up his hand and asks me where my cousin Christopher is now?

  This is when I take a deep breath and tell the kids that my cousin committed suicide in his very early twenties, and then we have an often very moving discussion about high-school bullying and its consequences.

  I’ve toured this show in small-town schools all over the country, and done it in front of kids as young as grade four, in Catholic schools in Newfoundland, in the bible belt of the Fraser Valley, in both the junior and senior high schools in Whitehorse that I graduated from. I’ve received thank you letters and emails from marginalized kids, bullies, former bullies, future bullies, teachers, counsellors, principals, and even a used-to-be bullied kid who now works as a janitor in an inner-city school in Toronto.

  I don’t say the word queer or trans unless it comes up in a question from one of the students. There is no sexual content in the show whatsoever. The moral of the whole show is basically to be kind to your fellow students. In fifteen years I have never received even a single complaint about any of the show’s content, and I’ve taken it into some very small blue-collar towns in some pretty remote parts of the country.

  But for some reason this young teacher was worried I would trot out some of the stuff she had seen me do at my university reading the previous spring, and so decided it would be a great idea to send one of those consent letters out to the parents of 700 kids, asking permission for their child to attend my presentation about gay issues, and she included links to my website.

  This of course alarmed those parents who were already prone to alarm, and they immediately forwarded the email to the easily alarmable parents in the other schools I was booked to perform in. A group of self-described “concerned parents” then proceeded to scour the internet for the least appropriate YouTube clips of me performing at cabarets in nightclubs at one a.m., and then sent a rash of hysterical emails to each other about all the horribly queer things I was about to say in front of their ninth-grade kids in a public school next week.

  The school board was contacted. Stern letters were composed. The superintendent of the entire school district was alerted. Several parents refused to allow their kids to attend my presentation, and the concerned parents group decided that they were going to attend and disrupt my presentation at the first sign of problematic content. The kids from the Gay/Straight Alliance at the school caught wind of the trouble brewing and became outraged at the injustice of it all. They invited the GSA kids from neighbouring schools to come to my gig and stand in solidarity with them in support of me. They used money they had raised from a fundraiser and had shirts made up with a picture of me on it, complete with an inspiring quote from my young adult book, and broke out all of their rainbow regalia.

  I was not notified about any of this controversy at all. The school counsellor just sent me an email a few days before clarifying that there was no foul language in my presentation, which I assured her there was not.

  It was raining that late January morning. My first clue that something was up was the group of rainbow-clad kids shivering under shared umbrellas outside the front doors of their school. There was even a giant rainbow flag borne by a long-eyelashed pretty boy with half of his hair shaved off and the other half dyed crimson and turquoise. He had borrowed one of those belts that hold the base of a flagpole and strapped it around his slender waist and shoved the giant flagpole into it. He weighed about eighty-five pounds soaking wet, which he was, and every time the wind picked up he was forced to take several wobbly dance-like steps in a row, first one way, and then the other, to avoid being tipped over or blown away altogether by the gusts catching the rainbow flag he valiantly clung onto, which was in danger of being turned into a giant gay mainsail.

  The kids cheered as I stepped out of my truck. This had never happened to me before, and I felt my cheeks flush and my ears burn red.

  This is right about when the concerned parents began to arrive. In a long train of black SUVs. These parents were so concerned by what I was about to say to their fourteen-year-olds that they had brought their toddlers with them too, and as each SUV pulled up and opened its doors, clusters of blonde women with long dresses that covered their wrists, ankles, and necks got out of the black vehicles, clutching their toddlers while their husbands unfolded strollers and opened umbrellas.

  The principal met me just inside the glass doors and ushered me into her office and shut the door. She looked nervous and was clutching a walkie-talkie.

  “We’ve got a situation here,” she informed me, her mouth written in a grim line in the middle of her strong jawline. She was wearing Fleuvogs and a chocolate brown leather pencil skirt, which for some reason I took as sign that everything was going to be okay.

  The principal told me what was going on with the concerned parents and the superintendent and the school board and the angry queer kids and the nervous counsellors and the extra security she had to hire and the walkie-talkies, and then told me not to worry about any of it and just go ahead and do my show like nothing was going on. She said this like she actually thought this was possible.

  I asked her for directions to the staff washroom, and locked the door behind me. I peed, splashed some water on my face, drank a little tap water, buttoned up the top button of my denim shirt, unbuttoned it, then buttoned it back up again. I straightened the pocket square in the left pocket of my jacket, and told my reflection to just go out there and do what I do. Told myself to be brave, just like the tattoo on the inside of my left wrist said to be.

  The concerned parents were all lined up along the right side of the gym next to the double doors that led out into the hallway. About thirty of them, mostly women, almost all blonde, nearly all of them with small even blonder children squirming in their laps.

  The superintendent of the school district approached me and shook my hand, introduced himself and a couple of his colleagues. We all just acted like this was a normal day at the office. Like there was not a row of blonde evangelicals lined up waiting for something, anything to happen that they could find fault with.

  The kids were filing in, about 500 of them, from the seventh to the tenth grades. The kid with the rainbow flag was now sitting in the last row of bleachers, his flagpole still raised high, but propped against the concrete wall behind him, the flag now limp and still damp. The rest of the rainbow kids had already claimed their seats in the first couple of rows of bleachers, directly in front of the solo microphone on a stand that stood just a few feet in front of the face-off circle. This meant that when I stood in front of the microphone I would be looking directly into a block of oversized black t-shirts with an image of my own face on them. The wood floor of the gym was old but well-loved and polished to a high shine.

  The principal stepped up to the microphone and reminded the kids that there was a bake sale on Friday, and to please turn off their cell phones and put them away. A nervous pair of androgynous kids from the Gay/Straight Alliance stepped up in tandem and read a mumbly introduction of me not quite into the microphone, so that almost none of the other kids could hear a word of what either of them was saying.

  I stepped up to the m
icrophone amidst a smattering of vaguely confused and half-hearted applause.

  I took a deep breath and reached right down into the bottom of me and did the very best show I could muster up. I gave those kids 200 percent that morning, and a couple of minutes in I had them laughing and leaning forward to listen. I didn’t even look sideways at the moral majority seated sternly in their folding chairs, I kept my eyes locked on the kids who looked like they were having most of the fun and pretended it was just us in the gymnasium together. They had a good time, and five minutes in I felt my adrenaline cease circling around in my chest and begin to flow down my arms and legs, and I used every bit of it to inhabit those stories and tell the living shit out of them.

  The kids had fun, I could tell.

  All I had to do was make it unscathed through the question-and-answer session, and I was out of there.

  Several arms shot up when I asked if they had any questions for me. One of the very first questions was where was my cousin Christopher now. I told the kid that they had a choice of two options. Option A was I would make up a happy Disney ending for him, where my clumsy awkward bullied cousin grew up to be a tall and handsome man who lived happily ever after, or I could tell them all the truth.

  The truth. Tell us the truth, the kids called out, and so I did. I told them my cousin died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head just before Christmas the year he should have turned twenty-three years old, and that I believed that this had happened largely because of how he had been treated by other kids all throughout his years in public school. I told them that was why I was there, to talk about school culture, and how to make schools safer for all of us. The room got quieter and the kids sat up straight, their faces sober and somber.

  A slender young guy slouched on one of the middle bleachers raised his hand and held it there.