Gender Failure

by Ivan E. Coyote

  He pulls out a blue Sharpie and makes several marks on my chest, then stands back and surveys them. Like you would if you were trying to hang a picture level on a wall. Then he takes a camera out, snaps several pictures of me from the neck down, and then puts it away.

  He explains to me that I will need a double incision/bi-lateral mastectomy, and that my nipples will be rendered insensate. He delivers this news deadpan, like he’s has had a lot of practice saying these words without any affectation or emotion whatsoever. Insensate. I looked it up after, later, when I got home. It has two meanings: 1: lacking physical sensation. And 2: lacking sympathy or compassion, unfeeling.

  The surgeon narrows his eyes at my copious chest hair. “You have never taken testosterone?” he asks me again. I shake my head, no. “Well, there is something going on for you here, then,” he tells me.

  “Positive thinking,” I tell him, and he smiles, like this can’t be true, even though I am pretty sure it is.

  He measures my nipples from tip to tip, lets out a low whistle. “Wow,” he says, sounding impressed. “Thirteen inches.” His assistant raises her head, looks over at us, writes it down. I have no idea what this means, whether this number is impressive because it is so small, or so big.

  “Yep,” I state. “That’s right. Thirteen inches, uncut.” We all crack up. My nipples are standing on their tiptoes now, maybe from the cool air in the examination room, maybe from brushing up against the measuring tape, maybe from fear. Hard to say.

  I did and still do wonder why he wasn’t using the metric system of measurement. Thirty-three point zero two centimeters sounds way more accurate somehow, even though the metric system is decidedly less sexy. Maybe that is why the United States stubbornly holds on to the standard system of measurement. Its undeniable erotic potential. Thirteen inches seems impressive, especially when it is a body part of any sort. And ninety miles an hour sounds so much hotter and faster than one hundred and forty-four point eight four kilometers ever could.

  The next morning, I looked long at myself in the mirror. Tried to imagine my new chest. Touched my exquisitely sensitive nipples. Imagined them small, and dull to touch, and stitched back on. I have done this a million times before. But this time there were two blue marks, in the soft crease there, dead centre below my nipples. I had scrubbed and scrubbed at them in the shower, but they wouldn’t come off, they had hardly even faded. The ink the surgeon had used had been very, very permanent.

  Man Failure, Part 2

  When I was nineteen, I moved to Vancouver because it felt a lot more open there compared to the prairies, except, of course, for the landscape. It wasn’t as hard to find queer people to hang out with, and I even found a girlfriend after a while. I started feeling more optimistic about being part of an accepting community.

  One night I was out drinking at the downtown Legion on East Pender with my new girlfriend Cora. It was crowded and there weren’t a lot of places to sit. We ended up next to some people, two girls and a guy, who looked familiar but whom neither of us had met before. I couldn’t make out their names as they shouted them over the Friday night din. Later on, I found myself debating loudly with one of the girls, whose name turned out to be Kelly, about something that felt urgent at the time in my drunken state. Kelly nodded toward the other girl and said, “Jeremiah thinks the same thing. He’s always going on about it, so don’t try to convince me. I made up my mind a long time ago.”

  I paused. “Her name is Jeremiah?”

  “His name is Jeremiah,” she responded tersely. I pushed forward, wanting to understand, and looked closely at Jeremiah again. He had a boyish face and smallish tattooed arms, and I noticed that his chest was flat. But his voice was high when he spoke, and earlier I had heard him squeal with laughter.

  “Jeremiah is a guy?” I asked, with confusion in my voice.

  “Yes. He’s trans,” she said, flustered.

  What does that mean? I thought to myself. I think Kelly saw the look on my face, realized I didn’t know what it meant, and took pity on me.

  “He was assigned female at birth, but has chosen to identify as a man. So he wants to be called ‘he’ and treated like a guy.”

  “You mean like a sex change?” I asked.

  “Sort of, but you’re not supposed to call it that,” she said.

  I curled inward a bit. I felt like I’d said a lot of things wrong without meaning to. I leaned over to Cora and said, “You see that person, Jeremiah? He’s trans and he wants to be treated like a guy.” She looked like she couldn’t hear me, but I knew she could.

  I continued my conversation with Kelly, stumbling on hes where I would have moments before used shes. It turned out that the other guy with them, Anton, was also trans but was taking testosterone he’d bought on the black market, which had helped him to grow a beard and big muscles. I felt mesmerized as I studied his hairy face and the flat chests on both him and Jeremiah. Suddenly choice came crashing in like a great wave. It was right in front of me, embodied by my new friends.

  The next morning, I woke up next to Cora in my bedroom, hung over. My head was pounding, but there was something more important than a headache inside it. I rolled away from her and asked, “I wonder how Jeremiah gets his chest so flat?”

  There was a long pause and I wondered if she was still asleep.

  “Why would you want to know that?” she finally asked.

  “I don’t know. I think it would be cool if I could do it too. I mean, I didn’t know that I could until I saw it,” I replied.

  “That would be pretty weird,” she said coolly. “I mean, it would be kind of disgusting if we made out and you were like that. Besides, you’re not a boy, are you?”

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled.

  Cora and I broke up soon after that conversation. I did find out how I could flatten my chest from Jeremiah the next time we hung out. I also told him that I wanted to be treated like a guy and referred to as “he” too. It felt so great when we parted and he said to me, “See you later, man.”

  I went to a drugstore and bought an ACE bandage like he told me, binding my chest flat by wrapping it around me. It would ride up while I was at work washing dishes in a kitchen, causing me to take numerous adjustment breaks, but it made me feel lighter. My roommate caught me putting it on in our bathroom and told me that she would call me “he” if I wanted, but that she would never see me as a man.

  I told a few people at work that I was friends with that I wanted them to refer to me as “he,” but one of the servers kept referring to me as “she.” After I’d cleaned out the dish pit one night, we all went to the bar, where she called me a lady and used “she” a couple more times. At the end of the night outside the bar, when we were all drunk, I asked her, “Why can’t you call me ‘he’?” I was shaking with anger.

  “Well, you have hips,” she said. “I guess I just see you as a girl because of it.”

  Within a week of changing my pronoun of choice to “he,” I realized what an uphill battle it was going to be, but I didn’t want to stop flattening my chest and being a guy. It felt a lot better than how I had been before, even if I had to convince a lot of people that I was a man. I decided to stay true to my choice. If I showed that I really meant it, everyone would have to refer to me as “he” eventually, I thought.

  Ten years later, I was visiting Vancouver to facilitate some workshops for a feminist music camp. I didn’t identify as a woman, but the life I live on the outside of my body was far from being steeped in male privilege. I had been both a girl and a musician as a teenager, so I wanted to help build the confidence of the girls in the workshop. I had seen so few women in the music industry, and I wanted to do everything I could to make sure that there were more. I was standing outside that same Legion on East Pender with a group of queer people I knew. I had long since quit smoking and drinking, but I was always willing to hang out with old friends at bars. There was a trans guy named Mark standing with us, and he asked me what I was doing in tow
n. I’d known him since he was a teenager in Nelson, because he had come to one of my shows there and later I’d mailed him a copy of a book that Ivan had written with the collective Taste This, entitled Boys Like Her. I wanted to help him wait out the last couple years of his time as a queer kid in a small town with some company, even if they were words in a book.

  “I’m doing workshops at the feminist music camp,” I told him. “It’s going to be awesome!”

  “Oh,” he replied. “I’m volunteering there too, but it’s going to be weird being the only guy there.”

  My blood went cold. I was used to being misgendered by strangers, but I’d always gone by “he” as long as this guy had known me.

  “Yeah, except me, right?” I said, hoping he’d correct himself.

  “Yeah, I know, but I’m on hormones, so they just think I’m a man and you’re not. They think you’re a girl. It’s a lot harder for me to be in women’s spaces.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but then shut it. I didn’t know where to begin to express how invisible I felt.

  • • •

  If being a man is something that required a person to tick off a bunch of boxes, not many people would make it through. Many cisgendered men (people assigned male at birth who are comfortable with that assignment) are unable to grow a beard, have a high voice, or have larger chests and hips. If the gender binary was enforced based only on body characteristics, very few people would be read as a man or a woman. Being subject to criticism on how I had failed to have enough body characteristics to be read as male by most people changed my mind about the system of gender designation itself. I decided that breaking apart people’s bodies to classify them as a specific gender is wrong because it hurt me so many times when people did it to me. Now I resist the urge within myself to use people’s bodies to drop them into easily categorized boxes. It’s not something I do perfectly, but it’s a way of thinking that makes me feel like I am making space in the world for gender variance. I hope in the future that asking to be regarded as any gender will be enough, even if I know it’s probably a distant future.

  My failure to be accepted as a man by many people was rooted mainly in my failure to strive toward the physical traits stereotypically associated with masculinity as if they were the highest points on a hill. I was not willing to lose other parts of myself to attain all of the body characteristics that would be required to be read as male in public. My body is something that I have grown not to hate just because it isn’t stereotypically male. I don’t think there is a way to define a male body, and I no longer believe in the system of classification that never fit me.

  Top Surgery

  Somewhere between lying in bed convinced that I won’t sleep at all, and waking up just before the alarm goes off, all the nervous and the worry slips away, leaving me in a strange state of calm and readiness. I take a deep breath. Surgery day.

  I shower and carefully wash my breasts and chest and underarms with the antiseptic cleanser, just as instructed in the handout from the surgeon’s office. The handout was a strange hybrid of materials, some generic information culled together for plastic surgery patients of all varieties, some that seemed to address women who were having breast reductions or augmentations, and some specifically directed towards trans-masculine people having “top surgery,” written for some reason in quotations. I always question the use of quotations around things that are not actually quotes. Did the author mean for us to read the words with one eyebrow raised, as in “top surgery, question mark, question mark?” What are we being asked to double check? Is this an invitation to question the honesty of the speaker, or the subject matter? Is this an alias? Who is suspect here, and why? Quotation marks around words that are not actually quotes are the literary equivalent of being told to report all suspicious behaviour and not to leave your bag unattended and not to accept any packages from strangers. The orange alert of sentence structure.

  I am on my way to having my “top surgery.” Zena, my partner, and I go about our morning rituals quietly and sweetly, touching each other gently by the sink, smiling in the mirror together. I am not permitted to eat or drink anything, so my morning ritual is short. I am dressed early and sit on the couch and watch the blue sky burn through the last of the morning mist, trying not to make her feel rushed out the door. She takes my ID and health care card and tucks them into her purse, and places my paperwork and post-operative compression vest on the counter by the door so we don’t forget them. As if we could forget anything on this morning, having prepared and thought about it all for months as we both have.

  We talk softly a little in the cab, and arrive early on purpose. The clinic is clean and quiet, the front desk empty, and I can smell coffee brewing from somewhere behind the door that leads into the hallway on the other side of the newly styled waiting room. This is no public hospital or clinic, the evidence of that is everywhere. This is a private surgical clinic, American-style, right here in the West End of Vancouver. We crack jokes that we don’t really mean about maybe re-thinking this whole two-tiered medical system after all, and survey the view of Davie Street and the skyscrapers lined up along the shores of English Bay. The receptionist returns to her desk and greets us efficiently. The phone rings and she answers it, and I hear her subdued tone as she explains to the person on the other end, obviously another staff member of some sort, that this morning there is an ankle, an amputated toe, and a double mastectomy on the roster. The staff start to trickle in, a handsome male nurse with still-wet-from-the-shower brown curls, a kind-eyed man who will turn out to be my anesthesiologist.

  We are ushered into a small room. I strip and place my clothes into a large plastic bag that says “PATIENT’S BELONGINGS” on it, and put on the blue gown and thin robe, booties, and hair net that have been laid out for me. The nurse comes in and checks my blood pressure and heart rate. He tells me I show absolutely no physical signs of being nervous, and he is right. Zena seems more restless than I do. She has little purple bags showing under her worried eyes. I calmly swallow some pills, an anti-nausea one and some Tylenol, I think it was. He places a plastic band around my wrist.

  The anesthesiologist comes in and explains the procedure to me. I can hear the nurse outside the door now, talking about weekend barbecues and hockey and the weather. This is a normal day at work for them. This life-changing day for me, this before-and-forever-after day, is another Monday morning for everybody else.

  The surgeon has arrived and comes into the room. He calls me by my legal birthname, and I correct him. This is not really his fault. I have never changed my name legally, so that is what it says on my file, and it has been five months since the one and only time we ever met in person. He asks me to pull down my robe and gown and tie them around my waist. He whips out a Sharpie and marks my breasts and chest, sketching arcs and making marks like a painter or a carpenter or a sculptor. He stands back, holds up a thumb, closes one eye, adjusts the marks. The entire process takes only a few minutes, and I am shocked at how arbitrary and casual it all seems. I think about the saying my dad used to repeat over and over when we were building things or doing stuff in the shop together: “Measure twice, cut once.” I think this over and over but don’t say it. It also seems outrageous to me that I am being marked up with a Sharpie, like a Tupperware container or a cardboard moving box. Aren’t there surgical-grade felt pens for this kind of thing? Steripen? Surgimark? No. Medium point plain black Sharpie, it is.

  (As I write these words right now, it is exactly one week later, Monday morning, June 10, 8:19 a.m. To the minute, seven days have passed since I hugged my wife and walked down the hallway and into the operating room. There is still black ink on my chest, a fading line of it trailing down to a blurred streak under the clear adhesive bandage that is covering the bandages that hide my new chest from me. The black ink has turned dark purple, like a bleeding and faded tattoo on your uncle’s freckled forearm. I haven’t been able to wash it off because I am not allowed to shower or bathe unt
il the drains come out.)

  The anesthesiologist is now wearing a mask and gown, but I recognize his eyes. One of the nurses has a Scottish accent. The other nurse, not the Scottish one, calls me “she” as she reads out some information to the doctor, then pauses and corrects herself. I pretend not to notice. I climb up onto the operating table. I had somehow imagined being wheeled in already on a gurney, but that is not how it is. The nurses place surgical stockings on my legs and a thin blanket on the lower half of my body. I feel a tiny prick on the top of my left hand, and the anesthesiologist asks me to tell him about the books I write. “Well,” I told him, “I have seven collections of short stories, one novel, and my wife and I edited an anthology, mostly non-fiction, about butch and femme ...”

  Then I heard my name being called and a different woman’s voice, in a thick Eastern European accent, telling me it is all over, that I had done really well. There is a clock on the wall on the other side of the paper curtain half-drawn around my hospital bed, but I cannot make my eyes focus enough to read what time it is. I am unbelievably cold, my teeth chattering, and thirstier than I ever remember feeling. I have to pee, and my stomach is rumbling empty. I force my eyes to focus slowly on the clock again. I look down. Tears of relief flood my eyes and run down my cheeks. Nearly four hours have somehow disappeared. So have my breasts.