I'm Afraid of Men

by Vivek Shraya

  ALSO BY VIVEK SHRAYA

  The Boy & the Bindi

  even this page is white

  She of the Mountains

  God Loves Hair

  PENGUIN

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Vivek Shraya

  Excerpt from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 commencement address at Bryn Mawr copyright © 1986 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  The excerpt on this page–this page is from Joanne Tompkins and Lisa Male, “‘Twenty-one Native Women on Motorcycles’: An Interview with Tomson Highway,” Australasian Drama Studies 24 (1994): 13–28.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Shraya, Vivek, 1981-, author

  I’m afraid of men / Vivek Shraya.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735235939 (hardcover).—ISBN 9780735235946 (electronic)

  1. Shraya, Vivek, 1981-. 2. Transgender people—Canada—Biography. 3. Gender expression—Canada—Biography. 4. Gender identity—Canada—Biography. 5. Sex differences. 6. Masculinity. I. Title. II. Title: I am afraid of men.

  PS8637.H73Z46 2018   C813’.6   C2018-900618-8

                     C2018-900619-6

  Ebook design adapted from printed book design by Jennifer Griffiths

  Cover design by CS Richardson with Jennifer Griffiths

  v5.3.2

  a

  For Adam.

  “I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women do speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively—they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”

  — URSULA K. LE GUIN

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Vivek Shraya

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I’m Afraid of Men

  Acknowledgments

  I’M AFRAID OF MEN because it was men who taught me fear.

  I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to fear the word girl by turning it into a weapon they used to hurt me. I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to hate and eventually destroy my femininity. I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to fear the extraordinary parts of myself.

  My fear was so acute that it took almost two decades to undo the damage of rejecting my femininity, to salvage and reclaim my girlhood. Even now, after coming out as a trans girl, I am more afraid than ever. This fear governs many of the choices I make, from the beginning of my day to the end.

  In the morning, as I get ready for work, I avoid choosing clothes or accessories that will highlight my femininity and draw unwanted attention. On the hierarchy of harassment, staring is the least violent consequence for my gender nonconformity that I could hope for. And yet the experience of repeatedly being stared at has slowly mutated me into an alien.

  If I decide to wear tight pants, I walk quickly to my bus stop to avoid being seen by the construction workers outside my building, who might shout at me as they have on other mornings.

  When I’m on a packed bus or streetcar, I avoid making eye contact with men, so that no man will think I might be attracted to him and won’t be able to resist the urge to act upon this attraction. I squeeze my shoulders inward if a man sits next to me, so that I don’t accidentally touch him.

  If I open Twitter or Facebook on the way to work, I brace myself for news reports of violence against women and gender-nonconforming people, whether it’s a story about another trans woman of colour who has been murdered, or the missing and murdered Indigenous women, or sexual assault. As important as it is to make these incidents visible by reporting them, sensationalizing and digesting these stories is also a form of social control, a reminder that I need to be afraid and to try to be as invisible as possible.

  Despite the authority I have as a teacher, I’m embarrassed any time a cluster of male students laughs in my classroom, fearing that I might be their joke. As a result, I often deploy self-deprecating humour throughout my lessons—if I make myself the punchline, their laughter will sting less. My hyperawareness of the men in my class, and the fact that male students tend to speak up more in discussions, make me prone to learning their names first. How might this recognition of men, however fear-based, contribute to their overall success? I leave every class repeating the names of my female students (especially the names of my racialized female students) in an effort to combat this ingrained sexism. I also become nervous when a male student asks to meet with me to challenge a grade, fearful he’ll get loud or even hit me when we’re alone in my office. Beyond managing this fear, I must also monitor how it might inadvertently result in preferential treatment.

  When I have to send emails to men, including male colleagues and artists, I carefully compose each message and include several exclamation marks.

  Hi Jim!

  Hope you are well! Just following up on my message from two weeks ago about the broken cupboard in my unit!

  Please let me know when you have time to take a look!

  Thank you!

  VS

  Exclamation marks soften my message, modifying my tone so that my words convey the requisite submissiveness to communicate effectively with a man, to avoid agitating or offending him. I am not allowed to be assertive or direct.

  When I walk to lunch and hear a man walking behind me, I move to the edge of the sidewalk so that he can pass. I used to speed up, but no matter how much I quickened my stride, I couldn’t escape my anxiety. Men tend to drag their feet on the concrete, asserting their presence both spatially and sonically. But when I check over my shoulder, no one is there. I’ve grown fearful of any rustle behind me.

  If I have an errand at a music or camera store, I make sure I’ve done my research beforehand, so that I won’t have to ask one of the shaggy, bearded male staff members chatting among themselves to assist me or weather their condescension if I don’t know the right model number or am unfamiliar with a particular setting. Or I just ask my boyfriend to buy my guitar strings for me. The snobbish, superior attitudes of such men have prevented me from calling myself a musician for years, even though I write songs, record albums, and tour.

  When I arrive at home after work and the elevator reaches my floor, I wait to get off last so that I won’t be trapped in the hallway with a man behind me, in case he tries to push me. If I have no choice but to get off first, I rush to my apartment, chased by a ghost. I dread every time I see a notice on my door, expecting it to say FAGGOT.

  If I head back out in the evening for a gig, I wait in my apartment, ear to the door, until I’m sure there’s no one in the hallway, to avoid running into my bro neighbours while I’m red-lipped and gold-adorned. Or I ask my boyfriend to walk me to the main entrance of our building. Before Uber, I would ask him to walk me to the street and help me hail a cab. I realized only after I began tra
nsitioning that my lifetime of independence and self-reliance had been largely a result of male privilege. Being a girl has required me to retrain myself to think of depending on others or asking for assistance not as weakness or even as pathetic, but rather as a necessity.

  I pay attention to the app to see which direction the Uber will arrive from and I face the other way, so the driver won’t be able to see me from afar and drive away, as some have done. As I wait, I blur my vision so that I don’t notice strangers gawking at me as they walk by.

  Once inside the car, I try to look preoccupied with my phone to avoid any nasty interaction with the driver that could include degrading comments about women—a recurring and disturbing pattern in my life.

  “How about them oriental chicks?”

  “You can tell it’s summer by all the girls running around in short dresses.”

  “Last week, I had a mother in the back seat and a daughter in the front, and I could smell the daughter’s fresh pussy.”

  This is how drivers attempt to reconcile their discomfort with my gender—by aggressively asserting their masculinity. First, they “man” me, robbing me of my femininity and turning me into one of their bros, and then they share their oversexualized opinions about women and girls. I’ve even had a cab driver hand me a plastic bag of garbage and ask me to take it out. Was this his way of telling me that I, too, am trash?

  When I’m at sound check, I say “testing, testing” a couple of times into the mic, maybe sing a phrase or two, and then finish. I don’t ask for my monitor, my vocal mic, or my audio track to be turned up or down. I wouldn’t dare ask for reverb. I don’t ask for anything for fear that the soundman will start grunting, swearing, or making disparaging comments about how I am playing “laptop music,” code for mock music.

  I carry makeup wipes to all my gigs so that I can quickly “take off my face,” as I say to my friends, before I leave the relative safety of the performance venue. The saddest part of the night is when I peel my bindi off my forehead and let it fly into the wind, a symbolic parting with a piece of myself.

  My fear of men is a fuel that both protects my body, as a survival instinct, and erodes it, from overuse. Since coming out as trans, I have been stricken with numerous freak pains and repetitive strain injuries that practitioners are unable to explain or cure. When they suspiciously ask me, “Are you sure nothing happened? You didn’t fall somewhere?” I want to respond, “I live in fear.”

  The only time I can make choices about how I want to look, act, communicate is when I’m inside my apartment, at the end of the day. Often exhausted, I try my best not to think about how I will have to do it all over again tomorrow.

  The weight of these minute-to-minute compromises is compounded by the fact that because of my fear of violence from men, I seldom dress the way I want to in public and wear makeup only on weekends or when I’m performing. This means I’m often still seen as a man.

  As painful as it is to be seen as the embodiment of my fears, the real agony comes from feeling that I am to blame because I don’t look feminine enough. When I finally accepted that the only way I could stop my male classmates from tormenting me for being too girly was by pretending to be a boy, I knew I couldn’t afford to be just an average boy. In my mind, the better I performed my new role, the safer I would be. In order to survive childhood, I became an exceptional boy. So now, when I’m seen as male, there’s a part of me that worries that it’s my fault—for having striven to be the perfect man, and for having excelled at it.

  Although I’ve paid a high price for that proficiency, I learned a great deal from the years I spent observing men and creating my own version of manhood. I’ve also endured the added challenge of being attracted to men in spite of my fears. These experiences place me, a queer trans girl, in a unique position to address what actually makes a good man, and how we can reimagine forms of masculinity that don’t arouse fear.

  WE ARE WAITING to be swallowed. At any moment, the ominous school doors will open for me, my dad, and dozens of other parent–child units. As I look around, I recognize no one and wish I’d opted to trek the distance to the junior high my elementary school classmates had enrolled in instead of choosing this new one in my neighbourhood.

  Even in this disarray of fidgety bodies, it doesn’t take long for my dad to spot one of the only other brown parents. Soon he and your mom are chatting like old pals, inquiring about each other’s occupations and hometowns, displaying their mutual nosiness—a sign of South Asian cordiality. The consequence of their quick rapport is inevitable. They decide that you and I will be friends. As they introduce us, I wait for them to say Okay, now go play, as they would have had we been at either of our homes, but, surprisingly, they restrain themselves.

  You and I study each other. Your skin is darker than most of the brown kids I know, but similar to my brother’s. I wonder if you have the same accent as your mother, which I don’t recognize. I find out later from my dad that your family is from Trinidad.

  You grab my unfolded schedule, crinkle the edges, and after examining it for a moment, grudgingly hand it back to me. It turns out we’re in the same homeroom. “How wonderful!” your mother, hovering over us, interjects. She and my dad smile knowingly at each other, having successfully arranged our friend-marriage.

  When we finally reach our homeroom after the tedious welcome speeches, you wait for me to take a seat before you choose yours—on the other side of the classroom. This decision foreshadows the end of the serendipitous ethnic camaraderie our parents had hoped would blossom. Our friend-divorce is eventually formalized when you join forces with the dozens of white boys who will faggot me for the rest of our three years together in junior high.

  I often think about you, not with anger or resentment but rather with sympathy—and sometimes envy. You had somehow gleaned what was required to succeed in a predominantly white junior high: Don’t stand out. On my own, the tawny skin stretched over my bony body drew further unwanted attention to my other un-masculine differences, including my budding sashay and my soprano laughter. Had you chosen to be my friend—with your edging-on-black skin, your lisp, your small stature, and your purple paisley shirt—we would have been too noticeable, too exposed. Each of us would have only amplified the peculiarity of the other. Instead you farmed a field between us and did what I didn’t do, didn’t know how to do: you assimilated.

  * * *

  —

  AS I’M COMING INTO my teenage exploratory phase of using fashion as a way to assert my individuality, I fall in love—with my mother’s powder blue Jordache jacket. With its oversize fit, metal buttons engraved with the iconic horse logo, and high collar in place of a mane, it’s an ’80s gem that I would wear even today.

  By now my mother has grown accustomed to my interest in her style and accessories. She’s the real-life embodiment of the Bollywood glamour I’ve been enchanted by on our Friday family movie nights, and my awe of her has gradually turned into impersonation. Without question or disapproval, she happily lends me her jacket. This willingness to share is also likely tied to the economic realities of our immigrant home. If I wear my mother’s jacket, my parents have one fewer item of clothing to buy for me and my brother.

  I love the way the shoulder pads round me out, creating the illusion that my body resembles those of my male classmates, and the way the excess fabric drapes over me. This is the first and last time I will ever know the pleasure of wearing oversize fashion as a style, instead of as a cloak to hide me from male scrutiny in my twenties or to conceal my not-feminine-enough (read: not-skinny-enough) body in my thirties. I also love that wearing my mother’s jacket makes me feel closer to her.

  One spring afternoon, I stand on the sidewalk at the bus stop a few blocks from school, enveloped in Jordache and in my book of the week. As I read, I can hear you and your girlfriend murmuring from the patch of yellow grass behind me. At least I assume she’s your girlfriend—or wants to be—because she giggles at everything you say. Be
fore I have a chance to glance at you to see what’s so amusing, something lands on my back. Then I hear a giggle. My body tightens, but instinctively I keep reading instead of turning around. A few minutes later, something else lands on my back. Another giggle. After this pattern repeats a few times, it occurs to me that you might be spitting on me.

  Despite this public humiliation, I refuse to give you the satisfaction of seeing my consternation. I try to find sanctuary in the sentences I’m reading, feigning obliviousness to the grunts you make right before you expectorate and to your girlfriend’s laughter, waiting for a bus that also refuses, stubbornly, to arrive. When it finally does, I’m relieved that you don’t board with me. Inside, I stand instead of sit so that if my back is covered with spit, it won’t rub off on the seats. I also hope that I’ve only imagined the spitting. Why would you spit on me, anyway? We don’t even know each other. Maybe you were aiming at the sidewalk and accidentally missed your mark a few times.

  When I get home, I bolt up the staircase to my bedroom and release myself from the jacket at last. The back is covered in wet blotches. I probably wouldn’t have been so uncertain or naive about what had happened if my neck and the lower part of my head had not been defended by the jacket’s collar. In a way, my mother had been protecting me.

  Even so, I will never wear her jacket again. That garment differentiated the act of being repeatedly spat on by a boy (to impress a girl) from the average schoolyard harassment—because it was a woman’s jacket. It was to blame for what happened. But I am also to blame. Had I, a boy, not worn it, I wouldn’t have been sullied. Your message in saliva is clear and staining.

  To this day, if I hear someone cough or clear their throat behind me, my body tenses up, shoulders raised, expecting to be a target.