Gender Failure

by Ivan E. Coyote

  I had decided that my outfits should reflect my music and would give me a fighting chance in small towns. I picked up the wardrobe of a country singer with a cowboy hat, belt buckles, cowboy shirts, and, of course, boots. I cut my hair very short so that there was no chance of being perceived as ambiguously gendered. I practiced my swagger and kicking dust with my boots. I was ready.

  The first parts of the tour were in British Columbia: Vancouver, Nelson, Kelowna, and Cranbrook. Everything went okay: there was a lot of misgendering, but no physical threats. Late on the fifth afternoon, the van roared into Alberta. Red Deer was my first small-town prairie test. I pulled up outside of a bar in the bright spring afternoon and walked in. As my eyes adjusted to the light, my blood pressure rose. The regulars gave me a lazy once-over in my over-the-top cowboy outfit. They probably figured out that I didn’t have a real job, and so they turned back to their drinks. There wasn’t a speck of mud on my get-up. I went up to the bar just as the bartender blew some fire out of his mouth in a showy move. That shook me up even more, but I managed to say, “Hi, I’m playing here tonight. I was wondering who I should talk to.”

  “Who wants to know!” a scraggly-looking guy with long hair shouted at me from the other end of the bar.

  Uh oh, I thought, looking behind me to see that there was still a path to the door.

  “Don’t mind Stan,” the scraggly guy said, gesturing at the bartender, who then grinned. “He’s just training up for a fancier bar with those tricks.” He got up from his stool and walked over to me. “I’m Jerry. I own the place. You must be the band?”

  “Yep,” I said, trying to fake a strong handshake and wishing there was more of me.

  After soundcheck, Jerry generously provided me with a dinner of buffalo wings and fries. At least the food was to my liking. Over the next hour or so, the crowd thickened with people who had just gotten off work and were looking for their Friday night fun. Finally Jerry came over and asked, “Are you ready?” I got up onstage and looked out at the crowd, some of whom turned away from their conversations to look at me. I was worried that they would think there was something off about me. That someone would throw a bottle as soon as I opened my mouth. I took a really long time to tune my guitar and banjo, delaying the inevitable. I played a long intro on the guitar before launching into the yodelling part of “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.” I think I even winced a little, but as soon as I started singing, a hushed calm spread throughout the bar, and at the end of the song there was some clapping and even one muffled hoot. A lot of the people at the bar looked like members of my family who lived around the area, and when I stepped down from the stage for the break, I realized that one of them was, in fact, my cousin.

  He ran a welding shop and was supposed to work that night, but he left his staff on their own so he could come to the show. In between sets, I asked him about fighting at bars in Red Deer. Earlier, I had heard a rumour that someone just down the block had been stabbed the night before. I was supposed to sleep in a room above the bar that night. I asked, “Do people fight here for drugs or mostly for the hell of it?”

  He cocked his head and answered me with a grin. “It doesn’t take a reason, really.”

  A few shows later, I did get into my own irrational fight. It was in Jasper, a mountain town west of Edmonton. I had been playing a festival there that weekend, and afterwards was drinking in the bar with a couple of guys I knew, killing time before having to drive to Edmonton. I had walked out of the washroom and accidentally brushed the arm of a woman who had her back to me. She turned around quickly with narrowed eyes, and said, “Watch where you’re going, dyke bitch!”

  I knew better than to stay within arm’s length of her and walked quickly back to my friends. A couple of minutes later, a few of her friends came over to where we were standing. One of them said to me, “Hey, we saw you play at the festival today. It was awesome.” And then another one chimed in with, “Don’t mind our friend. She’s pregnant, so you shouldn’t fight her. I went crazy when I was pregnant too.”

  I attempted to say something, but nothing came out. I was trying to understand the connection between the pregnancy and the homophobia. They took that as a cue that I wasn’t going to make anything out of it and left.

  As I worked my way across the rest of Canada, I did my best to avoid any situation that might turn into a fight. Canada is big, and it’s made bigger by stopping in almost every town along the way. By the time I got to Toronto, I was elated to be in a big city. I had started to learn how to really get a crowd going in the small-town bars, and I had gained a little confidence. But the show in Toronto was in a queer space, and to my surprise people just stood in front of me as they listened, with their arms crossed. There was no hooting and no boot-stomping. I realized then that it was going to be hard selling country music to queer people, and hard to sell queerness to country people. However, I’d become very attached to my new style of music and decided to do whatever it took to keep playing it. With barriers on both sides, I kept doing a mix of country shows and queer shows. One weekend I’d be at a big city’s Pride celebration performing for crowds of gay men in buttless chaps, and the next weekend I’d be playing on a family’s farm for prairie folk kicking back in lawn chairs. I can’t say that having people refer to me by the right pronoun was more consistent in either of these spaces. People seemed to enjoy my music, but I was feeling that my gender was invisible and disrespected most of the time, even by people I worked with.

  One day I was standing by the side of the highway in B.C., hitchhiking with a guy I used to sing country duets with. I sang all of the parts that Dolly Parton or Tammy Wynette would have sung, without calling it much into question. I wasn’t an insecure guy, and those were great parts for my voice. I thought my friend knew that we were both Kenny Rogers on the inside, that he believed that I was also a man. We had been stumbling from bar to bar together with our guitars together for a couple of years by then. That day, neither of us had slept, and we stood with our thumbs out watching a river of cars pass us by. We were tired and hungry. I can’t remember what I said to him. I’m sure it wasn’t kind, because he reached deep in his pocket for his response and pulled out something I didn’t even know he had in there.

  “You know what your problem is?” he said. “You have penis envy.”

  It was enough to tear him out of my heart. After we failed at hitchhiking that day, we had only enough money for one Greyhound ticket, and when I got on the bus I knew that the days of me being the Dolly Parton to his Kenny Rogers were over. I knew what he really thought of me. And I knew that I had every right to identify as male without having to change my body. This was when I decided to remove people who didn’t allow me this from my life.

  Still, I was stubborn. I chose to keep playing everywhere that country singers who weren’t transgender were playing. I gained some momentum, using my singing voice as best I could to cross barriers that I couldn’t talk my way across. I was even getting known a bit on the country circuit, but the barriers were always apparent. A few of the more famous country singers promised to take me on tour sometime, but never did. I became anxious, wondering if they had heard my music before they knew I was transgender and now would never get around to actually inviting me. I had to play more than two hundred shows a year to keep from having to work a day job, and I could have used their support. There was no way for me to gauge what was just “the music business” and what was actual discrimination.

  After five years of constant touring, a friend asked me about gigs in the prairies and if I could recommend some venues. When I asked her what kind of places she’d like to play, she answered, “Anywhere not too sexist or homophobic.” I racked my brains and could only come up with a handful of suggestions. Then I thought, why would I keep playing places that I would never send a friend? I realized that I had been very unkind to myself. Playing those places had forced me to censor myself in some of the songs I wrote, because any obvious queerness would have outed me in u
nsafe situations. I resented the places I played for that.

  A few weeks later at a festival in northern Alberta, I ran into one of the famous country singers who had reneged on his promise to take me on tour even though he had taken almost every other act I knew. He pretended he didn’t know me and then referred to me as “she.” The following weekend, I played a small-town bar in Twin Butte, Alberta. It was sometime around Valentine’s Day, and they had decorated a glass gun rack with shiny red hearts and my poster. The sight of my face smiling in front a bunch of guns with hearts all around it was too much. I knew that my songs were welcome in the world of country music, but my gender was not and might never be.

  It isn’t that I hate country music now, or that I’m not grateful to any of the kind people who gave me a chance to play it by booking me or showing up at shows. I’m happy that I spent time learning about where my family is from, and I got to meet many people I never would have met if I had holed myself up in Vancouver or flown right over to Toronto. I don’t think that big cities are synonymous with trans acceptance. I still have faith that there are people who relate to my music no matter where they live. I simply no longer confine the lyrics in my music or the way I dress or behave to conform with the gender binary, and I expect the spaces I play to accept that. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.

  For the first couple of weeks, I couldn’t get over my own heart beating. It just seemed so ... right there. For the first month or so after surgery, especially. My heart, right there, under my skin, barely covered, hardly protected. Whenever I sang, or walked up a flight of stairs, anything that raised my heart rate even a little, I could see it thumping, right through my T-shirt. I would watch it pulse, kind of alarmed at how vulnerable my own heart suddenly seemed, without its armour. Without its breastplate. My heart. Barely hidden by this skin.

  Before, to hurt me, you would have had to stab so much deeper than now.

  Invested

  Twenty-four days ago, I had top surgery. Technically speaking, this means I had a full bilateral mastectomy with areolar or nipple grafts.

  I am a storyteller. Have been for over twenty years now, and this story, the story of me and my chest, is for me the scariest story I have ever written down, by far. But I have been taking deep breaths and writing it. I have and continue to write about this whole crazy journey, all of that jumping through all of those hoops held up by the mostly cisgendered people who make most of the decisions and diagnoses that someone decided needed to be made before I could go ahead and do what I needed to do to live in the body I wanted to live in.

  A couple of months before my surgery, I decided that it, and my recovery, were going to be private matters. I decided that I simply did not have it in me to heal and deal at the same time. I did not tell most of my family about it, and I made no mention of my surgery date, the operation itself, or any news of my recovery and adjustment to my new body on Facebook or any other form of social media. As a writer and performer, I live a very public life, but I had no interest at all in my body or my choices becoming a site for public debate. It was important for me to focus on healing. I couldn’t even fathom responding to sympathy from strangers, or the inevitable and inexplicably infuriating, though surely well-meant, hugz from people who purposely misspell “hugs,” not to mention some kinds of second-wave feminist backlash or criticism from readers who have more of an investment in my being female than I currently do. I told only my friends, intimates, collaborators, and my band and choir mates. I planned to write my family a long and carefully crafted letter after the fact, when I was well enough to juggle their and my emotions, and gracefully navigate any questions or fallout.

  Exactly one week before I was scheduled for surgery, CBC radio aired a national primetime segment called “The Disappearing Butch?” which debated whether or not butches were being swallowed up by greater access to funded medical transitioning and hormone treatment. One of the interviewees included a shout-out to me as an old-school butch who was not transitioning, and the CBC linked to one of my columns on their web page. My elementary school boyfriend from the Yukon, who I shared a first kiss with halfway up a pine tree in grade four, immediately emailed me to congratulate me on my strength and perseverance. I bit my tongue and counted down the remaining days I had left before I disappeared part of myself.

  Three days post-op, I was flat on my back in bed, surfing Percocet and Facebook simultaneously, when I saw a picture that made my heart jump into my throat like a smooth, hot stone. It was a picture of a young trans guy I had met in passing a couple of times. He was sitting up in a hospital bed, wearing the same post-operative compression vest I currently had on. He had obviously just come out of the OR, having just had his very own bilateral radical mastectomy and areolar grafts. But that is not what moved me. What choked me up was that his father was there with him, pictured bending over his son and kissing the soft top of his recently shorn head.

  I hadn’t even breathed a word of what I was going through to my own father.

  I followed this fellow’s recovery with great interest. His name is Jessie. A couple of days later, Jessie posted a beautifully executed self-portrait; with his compression vest unhooked and unzipped, revealing the blood-soaked bandages underneath, sneaking a peek at his new chest.

  I had snuck the very same peek myself, the night before. I fired off a message to him, telling him I was keeping my news private, but that I had undergone the same surgery with the same surgeon just three days before he had, and that I was really enjoying having a cyber surgery recovery partner, and that I loved his photographs. He wrote me back almost immediately, saying that he had seen my and Rae Spoon’s Gender Failure show last spring, including a piece I do about going to the shrink’s office to get a mental health assessment prior to my surgery being funded, and that he recalled thinking at the time that we both seemed to be pretty close together on The List, waiting for a date for surgery. He asked how I was, then he wrote a bit about his recovery and how he was feeling about it all, and then he added a postscript: P.S. I don’t know if this connection was ever made, but if not, I figure you’d appreciate the backstory.

  He included a link to a column of mine, dated April of 2009, which was a story about a woman I had met when I was taking a bag of clothes out to my truck to donate them. The woman had been unloading a bunch of cleaning supplies and a vacuum out of a small hatchback, and my little dog had bounded over to her and put his head in her lap when she knelt to pet him. She told me how sweet he was, and I bragged that he was a gifted therapy pet, that my dog sitter took him to visit a home for people with Alzheimer’s, and that he was a big hit there.

  “You should take him into the cancer ward,” she told me. “They would love him there. He really is a special guy, I can tell. They could use him there. I should know.” Her eyes met mine. “I’ve just come through my third battle with cancer myself.”

  I knew I had seen that haircut before. My friend Carole from Ottawa, most recently. The short, short hair of a woman who recently had none at all.

  Then she stood up, wiped her hands on her pants, and turned to pick up the vacuum cleaner and a milk crate full of cleaning supplies.

  “You moving in?” I asked her. “You need a hand with that stuff?”

  She shook her head. “I’m the housecleaner. I work for the real estate company.”

  I looked down at the Pine Sol, the Windex, Pledge, ammonia, bleach. All those chemicals, I thought.

  “You back at work already?” I asked, the question sounding stupid before it had even fully left my mouth.

  She smiled soft and patient at me. “Cancer doesn’t care how the rent gets paid.”

  I nodded, and she started to head toward the stairs of the recently renovated and flipped heritage house. I took a few steps toward my truck, and for some reason turned back to her and said: “You wouldn’t happen to know anyone who needs some clothes, would you? They’re all clean and in good condition. Men’s clothes,” I told her. “Shirts and ties an
d stuff. I just thought maybe you might know someone who could use them.”

  Her eyes lit up. “Someone like my eighteen-year-old transgender son?” She reached out a thin arm to take the bag from me.

  I smiled wide. “Yeah, someone just like that. That would be just about perfect.”

  She opened the bag, and closed it again.

  “He just came out to me recently. He will love this. We can’t afford a whole new wardrobe right now.”

  The column ended with her and I giving each other a full-body, random-stranger-on-a- street-corner hug, and then going our separate ways.

  About a year ago someone wrote to me to let me know that the woman in the column had passed away. Everybody called her Blue, on account of the striking cerulean colour of her eyes.

  I re-read the column again, and then read the rest of Jessie’s message, all the pieces clicking in my head like Lego bits.

  “So I was that freshly-out trans kid that got your old clothes,” Jessie wrote. “And the woman you met that day was my mother, who just passed away June 22nd last year. She’d been planning on being the one to take care of me during my surgery recovery, but at least she got to help me lay down the framework of my boyhood for a few years.