Rebent Sinner, page 4
But from the midst of the misogyny and entitlement and abuse there emerged a vital conversation. Women telling their own stories about unsolicited attention. On buses and streets, at work, in parks, on airplanes and trains and everywhere. It started when they were ten or eleven, some women said. It happens every day, they said. A real and powerful and painful conversation grew by the minute. I was moved and awed and honoured to host it.
I became a kind of accidental moderator. I wanted the conversation to be kept safe enough for women to come and share their stories. I deleted any comment that included the word “pussy” or “bitch” or “cunt” or “faggot” or “feminazi.” I erased anything that included a rape threat or was overtly rude. Hundreds and hundreds a day. I got a repetitive strain injury that still ails me to this day (they call it Millennial Thumb) from swiping and hitting ban and delete so many times on my iPhone. Every morning upon waking, I would delete nasty comments for a couple of hours, and then several times during the day. The misogynists were especially active in Europe and Australia during the Canadian night.
One morning I awoke to an email that read “I Love Dick” in the subject line. I sighed and swiped left to delete it, but luckily, something else caught my eye. “New Amazon television series by creator of Transparent, Jill Soloway.”
Apparently, she had seen me on YouTube or somewhere and she wanted me to audition to play the part of, get this, a butch writer living in an Airstream trailer. Play? I thought. I was perfect for this role. I would be playing Kevin Bacon’s love rival. Story of my life! I thought.
I enlisted the help of an actor friend to coach me for my big audition.
But I never heard back, so I can only assume at this point that I did not get the part.
And that is totally okay, because just a couple of days ago, my original post was picked up again by a huge online feminist news site, and the slew of abusive comments and name-calling has begun anew.
So I know my shot at the Hollywood big time will be coming around again soon. Anytime now I will get the audition call.
Orange Is the New Black and The Handmaid’s Tale, I await your correspondence.
And this time, I am ready. I am changed.
This is what I learned: I look like a man to most people in my tiny profile picture on social media. Men get listened to by default, even when they are talking over women who are speaking about their own lived experiences. If I presented as more feminine, my post never would have gone viral. I was perceived by most to be a man speaking to other men. Most men don’t respond well to this. The consequences are scorn and dismissal and threats and even violence for men who speak up and challenge their sense of entitlement to the time and space and attention of women and girls. The system polices itself and punishes any man who questions it. Men who don’t play along are seen as not real men. I used to wonder why so many men stay silent when witnessing harassment, but I don’t anymore. I do not accept this as an excuse, but I do acknowledge it as an explanation. My own masculine presentation has allowed me to see the insides of the machine. Most of the men who came after me called me queer or accused me of speaking up only to garner favour with women. The possibility that a real man would step up and speak against harassing women on the street simply because it is wrong was not even a plausible option for them. I had to have another, more sinister motive.
The whole experience rattled the ghost of the little girl I once was, and shook loose my own stories, and my own scars. It also made me flip over my own masculine privilege and examine it, take it apart, and study the pieces. I’m putting it back together slowly and, I hope, leaving some of those pieces out. Butches and trans masculine people, especially of my age, have not been afforded many healthy role models when it comes to constructing our own masculinities, and we often assemble ourselves around the remains of our own traumas and still-screaming memories of failed attempts at being feminine. So we stumble and falter and overcompensate and build our identities without any blueprints. The result can be a flawed foundation, and the cracks in it sometimes leak, and bleed with our own complicity.
Being masculine in a female-assigned body is not an escape hatch that lets me avoid male violence and harassment. It is a window, and it allows me to look out, but it also obligates me to look in.
THIS POST IS performing better than eighty percent of everything else you have ever written in your life. Boost it to show more people that you’re not just a hack wasting everybody’s time.
FLAGGING HAS NEVER gone out. Should never, ever be allowed to go out. May all the secret languages of the queers and the bent live on in our pockets forever.
7. SHOW AND TELL
I’M CHANGING MY pronoun to sheimeanhesorrythey just to make things easier for hosts at literary events to introduce me.
A FEW YEARS ago I had the great fortune to be invited to a writers festival. I said yes as soon as I heard that my friend and fellow writer Richard Wagamese was also going to be there. I had met him years ago at another festival and we had recognized each other immediately, as heart-born storytellers always do.
Richard and I walked each day to and from the motel and the venue along the beach and talked. He was the only First Nations writer at the festival, and I was the only trans person there, as a writer, or even as an audience member, as far as I could tell or feel, though you can’t always tell, you can’t always feel. There was no gender-neutral bathroom at the venue, and on the first night, a woman in the bathroom screeched at me, just minutes before I had to step onstage. I sold that same woman a book after the show, and neither of us mentioned the incident in the bathroom.
Anyhow. Richard and I had been programmed together for an event on the closing night, to interview each other and do short readings.
“Don’t you think that’s weird, Richard?” I asked him. “It is no coincidence that they put the only First Nations guy and the only trans person together, right? It’s like one of those diversity panels.”
“No coincidence at all, Coyote,” he said to me. “But who else will tell our stories for us but us? I would rather be interviewed by someone who has at least some mirrored experience of being the other, of always being the only one in the room. I’m glad it will be you asking me questions tonight, fellow misfit, fellow ambassador, fellow teacher. Our job is to see this as an honour, not a chore. That will make us so much better at it.”
TONIGHT AFTER MY show, one of the first people in line to get her book signed leaned in and told me she didn’t want to use the they pronoun for me, because she didn’t, and I quote, “want to lose me.” And then she basically harangued me about going into schools, because if I was not using the she pronoun anymore, then what kind of a role model was I for all those girls now? All of this with a long line behind her of other folks waiting to speak to me or have their books signed. I didn’t even know what to say to her. Other than, of course, the ninety-minute show where I had just poured my heart out about my time in the gender trenches.
The silver lining?
The sixty-something-year-old, very straight, conservative-looking dude who sat in the front row and nodded, smiled, and even rocked out through the whole show. He shook my hand afterward and said, “Good stuff. My wife and I, we just love your work. We hope you never stop.”
OKAY, TO BE honest, I was not thinking this gig in Coquitlam was going to be a fun one for me. The stage was running half an hour late, so there was lots of bleed from the mainstage rock band to fight sound over, an unfocused crowd in and out of the tent, and a giant group of old women who were just in the tent because it was cooler inside in the shade and there were chairs and no infernal rock music.
So. One of those old women (late eighties, I would guess but did not ask) bought a book after. I signed it To Margaret.
What she really wanted was a Tomboy Survival Guide postcard, she told me. “I need one or two of these. I was a tomboy way back in the day. Thank you. I was not as lucky as you. I had it pounded and prayed out of me, just like you said in your story.”
She looked me in the eye and started to cry. So did I. I asked Margaret if I could give her a hug.
“Oh, by all means,” said Bernice, sitting right behind her in a motorized chair. “She loves hugging. We’re together.”
Then Margaret and I gave each other a long, deep soul hug. She was still crying.
“I don’t think they pounded and prayed it right out of you,” I told her.
She shook her head and nodded, kind of at the same time. She was wearing a baby-blue blouse and a butterfly brooch.
So, here is to all the Margarets and Bernices out there. I am grateful that my art sometimes helps us find each other, sometimes in the last places either of us were looking.
ABOUT FORTY KIDS did a circus show to open for my reading tonight. I didn’t take a single picture because I just wanted to be there and witness it. It was beautiful and powerful and mighty. I can now say that I have performed after an act that closed with a team of synchronized Hula Hoopers and kids in tiger suits jumping through said hoops to AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” I can finally say that. No tigers were harmed, the kids assured me. But the tigers did have to leave early because it was past their bedtime.
TONIGHT AFTER MY show, a woman in her seventies gave me a very solid hug, and then patted my cheek and told me I was a tender gentleman.
I’M IN THE parking lot of a park in Coquitlam where they are having an arts festival where I’m about to do my last gig before a month off from performing.
Artist’s liaison says to me on the phone: “I will come and meet you there and take you to the Story Café.”
Me: “I will be the butchy one by the silver truck. I’m wearing a blue shirt. And, uh, blue pants and blue shoes. And, well, blue socks and underwear, too.”
Artist liaison: “I should be able to locate you before we get to the underwear bit.”
DEAR JOURNALIST:
It’s not that I don’t trust you, personally. I am sure you are a kind, compassionate human who got into the field for all the right reasons. I am sure you have at least skimmed the book of mine you were assigned to review. I am sure you will make a decent attempt to understand me and what I am trying to say.
It’s just that I have been burned so very many times before. By journalists who didn’t read the book, who don’t care, who have misquoted or misunderstood me. By editors who changed pronouns, who got it wrong, who called me nonsensical and non-consensual names like gender blender.
That is why I insist on writing my answers to you in an email. That is why I don’t trust you to “jot down some notes” and get it right. We are talking about gender here. It is complicated. It is important. There are so many ways to not get this right, including the ones you are about to invent and excuse yourself for after the fact, when it is too late and cannot be unprinted.
So don’t take it personally if I handle you and your pen like a venomous snake. It’s not about you.
Love, Ivan.
SOMETIMES YOU JUST have to stand up there and tell your queer story in front of mostly cis and straight people. You just gotta do it, or else nothing’s ever going to change as big as we need it to. And sometimes they will laugh in the right places, but you won’t truly know if they are loving you or eating your difference. You just gotta do it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get to say how tired I feel after.
8. CLASS
TODAY WAS THE most physically demanding day of this chunk of school gigs. Three shows in three different towns, plus solo driving.
First thing this morning a teacher whispered to me, just before I performed for 400 kids, that one of his grade tens’ dads had just called the school and pulled his son out of my show because “it might promote a message I don’t agree with.”
My show is tame. The message is pretty much to get the kids to think about the consequences of cruelty and bullying. Sometimes parents google me, though, and make assumptions about my school material, I think because I am trans.
The principal was a good guy, it seemed, and he walked me out to my truck after the show. He said he wanted to follow up with that parent and tell him what a valuable opportunity his kid had missed, and how if his son had been allowed to attend and ask questions, it might have spurred valuable conversation about important issues.
I told the principal I sure hoped the kid wasn’t queer or trans, because then they might really be struggling, with no support at home.
His eyes filled with tears. “God,” he said. “I didn’t even think about that. I couldn’t even let myself go there.”
I said, “Next time I come, if anything like that happens again, invite the parent and the kid to come together, and tell them they are free to leave at any time without judgment from me if the parent disagrees with my message.”
“Let’s do that,” he said, and hugged me really hard. He made me a really good coffee, too, for the road.
TODAY AFTER MY school gig, I had a special meeting arranged by the vice-principal with a trans kid in grade eight. A healthy, happy, articulate, smart, and handsome trans kid. He said his mom was supportive, and his stepdad treated him like his own son. He said the school was doing a good job of supporting him. He said grade seven was the worst year of his life, but things were better now. We took some pictures together: he is cute as hell, and smiling.
TODAY AT MY school show, I met a tall and handsome, very gentle and sweet young man who told me he had just come out to his mom a couple of days ago and it went okay, but he did not feel he could come out to his father, maybe ever. He said he was the oldest male in his generation of his conservative Indian family, and there was a lot of pressure on him to get married and have kids.
“That could still happen,” he told his mother. “It might just look different than you thought it would.”
He said he had been in his school’s gay-straight alliance club for several years and it had made his school life much better. “I just told my mom it was an anti-bullying club.” He laughed.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just here for my anti-bullying show.”
We both cracked up.
After the show, he gave me three hugs. Three.
“Keep in touch,” I told him, and I meant it. I hope he does. He was a beautiful gem, and I could see the heart in him sparkle from a mile away. I can still feel his heart, out there in the margins of Toronto somewhere, beating right alongside mine.
HIGH-SCHOOL GIG, FIRST thing in in the morning. Kid comes up to me at the break. Tells me the other kids get a cheap laugh from kicking her crutches out from under her. Tells me this is her first year in public school, that she was home-schooled before this. Because her parents didn’t like the teachers. Because her parents didn’t want the teachers and social services asking all those stupid questions.
“Like what questions?” I ask her.
“Oh, you know,” she tells me. “All the usual questions.”
I AM TEACHING a writing workshop to thirty grade twelve kids. We are doing a character-building exercise. They have created a character together: a twenty-nine-year-old virgin. I ask the kids to imagine what his secrets are and call them out, and I will write them on the board.
One kid yells out that our character is secretly a porn star.
“Okay,” I say. “Except I thought we had already decided he was a virgin?”
The kid smiles a little, then answers me back totally deadpan: “Yeah,” she says. “He’s a soloist.”
I nearly fell down laughing. Smart kids.
TODAY THE KID that broke my heart was sixteen. He waited to talk to me after the show and immediately started telling me about his physically abusive father, how he would hit him and spit in his face. There were other kids standing behind him, and they could hear him. I asked him to please pause so I could speak to the other kids first and make time after to speak to him alone.
After the other students left, he told me he was grateful for the privacy. “I don’t talk about my life to anyone here,” he said.
We sat and talked for about thirty minutes. He didn’t want advice, he said. He didn’t need to cry to a stranger, he said. I asked him if he thought tears were a sign of weakness. He admitted that he did.
“Who taught you that?” I asked him.
“My father,” he said.
“Your father who you have already told me is not a good man? He forced you to control your tears as a little boy, yet he cannot control his own violence as a man? Is violence not a sign of weakness then, too? An inability to control oneself?”
I asked him if he had heard the term “toxic masculinity.” He said no, but he could guess what it was and would look it up. He told me he felt angry nearly all the time but had learned to control it. He told me that he was okay with what his father did to him, that it made him strong. I told him I had a feeling that he was strong already.
“Do we really have to suffer to be strong?” I asked him.
He looked at his watch and apologized because he was late for class and had to go. “I hope you’re not into hugging me now,” he said, smiling a little.
I told him I felt like hugging him, but I could control it.
“Me too,” he said, and put his backpack on and left.
I don’t know what he wanted, and I don’t know if I delivered. I don’t know if I said any of the right things. Maybe it wasn’t about what I said. Maybe it was more important for him to just tell someone. Just to talk and have somebody listen.
