Rebent Sinner, page 8
She said: “You have not had a good haircut in over one month. That part is not true.”
And everybody cracked up. She then told me, in English, and with some help from the translator, that I was like a Buddhist story she had studied about a sunflower that once grew very tall but did not bloom or flower, or thus make seeds, but in the end was still beautiful, just in a different way from all the other more common but gloriously blooming and seeding sunflowers. Her name was Aelan and I sent her a message via her prof that my nickname for her was now Sunflower Girl, and she responded that she loves this nickname and is keeping it. Or so says the translator.
Anyway. This morning I saw that picture of the dark purple lipstick, and I thought of all the lipstick I have loved, in all of its many ways. On their lips. On his lips. On my sweetheart’s lips. Her lipstick on my cheek on my neck on my chest on her fingertips on the light switch on the door frame—she smoothes it with her fingers and then touches stuff—on the coffee cup on the spoon on the sheets on the pillowcase. Two kinds of lipstick in her Christmas stocking. On a cigarette butt she tucked into the pocket of my jacket she borrowed that night. Lady Danger Pink Pigeon A Dozen Carnations. On her teeth. On my teeth.
I have loved lipstick all my life, but I have never learned to love it on my own lips, except for on Halloween: a zombie; a vampire; and once, when I was thirteen, a fancy lady. Even at thirteen, I knew that pretending to be a woman was going to be a costume for me.
But I’ve been changing. Uncovering. Unwrapping myself lately.
Returning. Undoing. Unbecoming. Shedding. Shed. My new middle name is Shed. I changed it, finally, five years ago, and my legal middle name is now Shed. As in, get rid of, or a place to store or do or build, and inspired by Out-in-the-Shed, the character from Tom Spanbauer’s book The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. Shed for short.
I hated my old surname, the one I shed. Unbecoming.
I fought pretty all my life. I bucked the dresses and ribbons and pink, the ladylike and demure and quiet and polite and graceful. I fought makeup and frills. I fought lipstick. For myself, anyway. I was going to be something else—not better, just different.
But it turns out the gender binary fucks us coming, and going.
There is a different kind of masculinity in Tokyo. I had read about it but never seen it with my own eyes. It’s an urbane one, a stylish one, a matching-shoes-and-belt-and-cheekbones kind of masculinity. A not-so-much-about-chest-hair-and-beards-and-axes-and-plaid-shirts-on-horseback-with-a-ten-gallon-hat-fifties-cigarette-ad kind of masculinity, like we foster in the West. A kind of masculinity easier for me to exist in. I realized it on about day two of my trip to Asia. I felt like I fit in to this kind of masculinity without having to try so hard, if fitting in was even what I wanted.
Sliding through a crowd as a male-appearing individual is sometimes largely about safety for me, still. But safety aside, I just … fit better. I didn’t have to drop my voice as much. The edges of the gender box marked male were somehow closer to my comfortable reach. I cannot describe it any better than that.
Then I flew from Tokyo to Hong Kong.
I was a guest of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and the main venue was an arts centre that used to be a prison. It was a giant square brick place with echoing marble staircases and a cobblestone courtyard in the middle. As I walked through the complex to the gallery where my gig was, I imagined maybe where the exercise yard used to be, or maybe where the gallows once stood. Now it hosts coffee shops and potted shrubs and a poetry slam.
I was to read and answer questions with a trans man from Australia, and our host was a trans woman from the Philippines who now lives in Hong Kong. She is a psychologist and a university professor who was recently arrested by Chinese police for being in a women’s washroom. Her case is well known in Hong Kong.
I had repeatedly asked festival folks and Canadian embassy staff how safe I was, or should feel, in public bathrooms in Hong Kong, and nobody seemed to really be able to answer me fully, so I just made sure to pee in my private hotel room bathroom before I went anywhere, and then waited until I got back to the hotel, thus avoiding having to find out personally. They don’t cover this material much in the Lonely Planet travel guides, and it’s hard to find accurate info online. It’s always harder for trans feminine people, too, because of the transmisogyny and fearmongering that the alt-right and the TERF army team up to proliferate, and I keep this in mind, while still doing whatever possible to suck it up and go to work and put all the what-ifs out of my mind.
There were two young and beautiful queer people sitting front row and centre at the gig, and I immediately felt a warm puddle of gratitude for their presence in this very straight space that was painted stark gallery white and made of concrete and echoes. They were like two flowers, stretching impossibly to make space for their tenacious stems between cracks in the crumbling sidewalk.
One was wearing a jean vest over a bright white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up over their biceps, and the other had a nearly shaved head and a paisley button-down under a sensible grey cardigan. My people. We exchanged eye contact and tears, and they both nodded and at one point hugged each other during my reading. We three shared a giant hug after the show. My non-binary family. I felt strangely and suddenly at home inside our embrace, even on the other side of the planet.
Vincy and Rachel. We are friends on social media now, and a little in real life, too, I think. Vincy is a singer and a performer, Rachel a fantastic artist and illustrator.
I felt changed when I got home, inspired by both of them somehow. Vincy and their impeccable eyeshadow. Rachel and their hand-drawn cartoons and carefully lettered poetry. Both of their refusals to be squeezed into any kind of a gender box, shrugging off easy labels and questioning all definitions.
When I first get out of the shower, my bangs now touch my chin. I comb them back with pomade, but by the end of the day, they have escaped and hang into my eyes. I have had to relearn how to flick my hair away from my face, a skill I had forgotten, a skill I left behind me when I was nineteen and cut all my hair off when I first came out.
I’m trying to love my hips.
I’ve been flipping the word “butch” over in my pocket, considering it in new ways I never did before. Deciding whether I still need it like I used to. Pondering hanging it up in my closet next to a jacket I’ve grown out of but still keep because of the memories it holds in its seams, in its threads. The smell of it.
I bought some mascara, but I haven’t used it yet. I’m experimenting with so-called feminine versions of male-coded clothing. I finally found a pink plaid shirt.
I’m considering a manicure. Yeah, I think I need a camo-print manicure.
I’m unbecoming.
TEN: WHEN I WAS TWENTY-THREE
I STILL THOUGHT that if I just sat down with women who were trans-exclusionary radical feminists, and we could just have a really good talk about everything, they would for sure just come around and see that we are all just in this thing together. I thought a little light bulb would flicker on inside of their hurt and battered hearts, and they would suddenly see all of their sisters standing beside them. I thought they could be talked into the truth, and we could then begin to work together to make the world a better place for all women. When I was twenty-three I actually believed that.
When I was twenty-three I never spent a minute of any day hating my own body. Except for my tits, but they were so small back then, I could almost just ignore them.
When I was twenty-three I always trusted that I was going to get the rent together on time for the first of the month. Even when it was already the third of the month. Even when I had to choose between buying ramen noodles and taking the bus.
When I was twenty-three I still thought East Vancouver was an affordable place to live.
When I was twenty-three East Vancouver still was.
When I was twenty-three, and mostly broke most of the time, I considered store-bought tampons kind of a luxury item. A punk rock slam poet from San Francisco taught me how to roll my own tampons from toilet paper pilfered from library and hotel lobby bathrooms. I still think of her whenever I buy a giant box of 100 tampons at Costco. Sometimes I worry that I will forget her when menopause finally sets into this body permanently.
When I was twenty-three I didn’t mind that every pair of footwear I owned and every shirt in my closet were way too big for me. I was used to it.
When I was twenty-three I thought I could just run away from those memories.
When I was twenty-three I thought smoking looked cool, not sad.
When I was twenty-three I would do the math about how old I would be in the year 2000. Thirty-one. We will have found the cure for AIDS by then, I remember thinking.
When I was twenty-three I only had two tattoos. One of those tattoos is now buried under the ink of a newer one, and the other is a blurry smudge on my right shoulder. A pink triangle.
When I was twenty-three I kept a journal. I wrote or drew or glued stuff into it nearly every day. The big black, unlined art books that you used to be able to buy at East Side Datagraphics on Commercial Drive. I would splurge on a new one every new year, and scrabble in December to fill the pages of the old one so they didn’t go to waste. I wrote most of my stories that eventually appeared in the book Boys Like Her longhand in those journals. I would drag them around in my backpack and memorize my stuff from them backstage before I did open-mic gigs and cabaret nights in venues that have now all burned down or been torn down: the Glass Slipper, the Mighty Niagara, that place on the Drive right by Venables. I can’t remember its name. I can’t believe I forget the name of that place. Electric something something? That’s the thing about forgetting. I used to think I would only forget the stuff that didn’t really matter. But that is not what happens at all. You just forget. An old man warned me of that one time, when I was about twenty-three. I forget his name now.
When I was twenty-three I thought the number twenty-three held a certain kind of magic. I still do.
When I was twenty-three I experienced my first real heartbreak. The kind that catches and grows in your throat. The kind that leaks out of your eyes on the bus. The kind of broken heart that feels bottomless. The kind that glues your heavy head to your pillow. Makes you forget to eat. We found each other as friends, finally, many years later, at a funeral. Every once in a while she turns her head just so, and it flicks a string inside of me, still wound tight somewhere way inside my chest. Like an echo, like a stain, like an E minor chord sung in a staircase while alone.
When I was twenty-three I still thought that if we could just talk to white supremacists, and people who hate trans people, and misogynists, if we just took the time to love them and have compassion and listen to their pain and tell them a different story about the truth of the rest of us, they would see. They would see us and join us, because isn’t love greater than hate? Deep down doesn’t every heart just want to beat next to another?
Last night I heard a poet say that love is not a blanket but a cloud. Her name is Juliane Okot Bitek, and I heard her say that last night, and I am fifty years old, and it did not bring me comfort, but it did flick a string inside of me. Like an echo, like a broken heart still pumping blood into my fingertips, like an E minor chord sung in the underground parking lot of a condominium they built where I used to gather and tell stories to other twenty-three-year-olds wearing third-hand boots way too big for them.
It’s a full moon tonight. A pink moon, they say. I think I’m getting my period. I’m almost done with bleeding. I don’t even really need a tampon anymore. Every period now threatens to be my last.
I will not miss it.
ELEVEN: 237 WORDS
I’VE BEEN PLANNING this series of essays in my head, in the shower or halfway through walking the dog or peeling the yams for supper, reaching around in the back of my head, into the ether, to find the tendrils of thought that need to be pulled and pushed together somehow.
First, I have to make a coffee and take a shower and clean the house and put on a record. I can still write if I don’t do these things, but if I do them intentionally, it calls the words to me quicker and better, and all I have to do is be ready to catch them.
It’s January 1, 2019, at 2:53 p.m., and I am home in Whitehorse, typing at my mom’s kitchen table. I am meant to be writing about mentorship and role models and forgiveness and call-out culture and how cruel queer and trans people can be to each other, but I just got back from walking around Long Lake in the pink and lavender fading hours of a Yukon deep-winter day with the little dog and my sweetheart and my aunt Roberta, who never has a mean word to say about anyone, like, ever, and big-city capital LGBTQ community politics seem too far away to capture accurately, and it feels a shame to even conjure them up right now, just to get my word count done today.
Two hundred and thirty-seven.
TWELVE: REMEMBER THAT SONG?
I WANT TO talk about “Walk on the Wild Side” by Lou Reed. I want to talk about that song.
My uncle Rob was a car salesman, so he always had a new set of wheels when I was a kid, and the first time I ever heard that song I was in his shiny new truck and we were pulling a boat out to Fox Lake in the Yukon to go fishing and camping for the weekend, and it’s funny how a song can do that, how it can reach right through the speakers in the dusty truck door next to your twitching twelve-year-old thigh, and you just know that listening to the words is going to change you somehow, and the words haven’t even started. It was just that bass line at the beginning, but I already knew.
I was riveted by the time the chorus of doo, doo-doos came. There I was, a twelve-year-old trans kid with no words for who I was and no picture in my head that looked anything at all like who I ever thought I was going to be, until Lou Reed sang those words about Jackie thinking she was James Dean right to me that day. I felt those words enter my ears and slip into my blood, and that blood found its way into my heart to make it pound and drink in oxygen, and all of a sudden someone else like me existed in the world. In that moment, a lonely kid split and became the possibility that there were at least two of us, plus Candy and Holly and Little Joe and the Sugar Plum Fairy, and, hey, now there was a gang of us, I thought. I just had to one day get to New York City.
Or maybe Edmonton or Toronto. Someplace a bit more believable. I had a great-grandmother in Saskatoon.
Wikipedia says: “‘Walk on the Wild Side’ is a song by Lou Reed from his second solo album, Transformer (1972). It was produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, and released as a double A-side with ‘Perfect Day.’ The song received wide radio coverage, despite its touching on taboo topics such as transsexual people, drugs, male prostitution, and oral sex.”
Even Johnny Cash growling out “A Boy Named Sue” made me feel like I was possible, like I could maybe grow up and still exist. But Jackie was so much closer to the truth of me.
Then came that song “Lola” by the Kinks. I think I first heard it while stoned on hash in Stacey Henley’s weird little cabin out behind his parents’ house, sitting at the kitchen table with my snow boots still on and my parka hanging on the back of the chair. It was grade ten and I was trapped inside a bad perm and blue eyeshadow, like so many of us were back then.
High school was a rough time for me. In retrospect, I was desperately trying on womanhood, and failing most days. When applying makeup and getting dressed, I was very conscious that I was a fraud, and certain inside that everyone around me knew it.
“Listen to this next bit. Shhhhh.” Ted Whitney was standing next to the record player, one hand held up in front of him, head tilted toward the speakers. “Listen to the words. This song rules.”
We listened to that song probably about ten times in a row, figuring out the lyrics, what it all meant. I don’t remember anyone uttering the word “fag.” I have no recollection of that at all. What I do remember is all of us agreeing that the Kinks did, in fact, rock.
We all went to see the midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, too, and threw rice and held newspapers over our heads and sang along. Nobody in the car ride home after said a word about Frankenfurter, or the fishnets, not even the boys, which seems strange to me now, as they were all so quick to claim that any perceived slight against anything but simple, starkly defined masculinity was gay, and gay was only ever a very, very bad thing to be.
Then came Purple Rain. The song, the album, the movie. Prince and his outfits. A bunch of working-class kids in the Yukon wearing nothing more adventurous than white Reeboks and painters’ pants and jean vests never batted an eye at Prince’s wardrobe.
And then there was Bowie. And Boy George.
The gendered rules between us were fixed and fast and unquestioned. Unless you were a male rock star. Twisted Sister could wear spandex pants. Everyone had that Bowie poster taped up on the back of their bedroom door. Everyone dressed up like KISS for Halloween. It was all okay if you sang or played electric guitar.
Unless you were k.d. lang. Now that was some weird dykey shit coming out of Alberta.
I graduated from high school wearing a sea-foam satin dress and nylons with a little sparkle in them. I had long curly hair with baby’s breath flowers in it. My mom kept telling me I looked lovely. I look okay in the photos, but not so much in the video. In the video I walk across the stage to get my diploma like I’m wearing work boots, not dyed-to-match pumps.
My grandmother Pat confessed to me a few years later that I looked like a dog at the park with a cone on its head in my graduation dress. “You walked like a trucker. You still do,” she told me.
A couple of years ago, I watched a drama unfold on Facebook, and then in the media, about a campus event at a university in Ontario. The student society had issued a public apology for including the song “Walk on the Wild Side” on a playlist.
“It’s come to our attention that the playlist we had on during bus pass distribution on Thursday contained a song with transphobic lyrics,” said a portion of the post. “We now know the lyrics to this song are hurtful to our friends in the trans community and we’d like to unreservedly apologize for this error in judgment.”
