Rebent Sinner, page 9
A couple of days later, the same student society issued a sort of apology for their first apology: “We recognize Lou Reed’s involvement in and contributions to the LGBTQ+ community, and regret that our post was perceived by some to mean otherwise. We appreciate Lou Reed as an artist, and did not speak to his character in our post,” the group said. “Our sole intent was to acknowledge that the lyrics, in current day, are now being consumed in a different societal context.”
For some reason, this non-controversy erupted into an international mainstream media news debacle, with conservative pundits and aging music critics as far away as the UK claiming this was yet another sign of political correctness taken to the extreme, and free speech being rampantly trodden in kids these days’ rabid quest to not offend anyone. Even though the student society claimed to have issued the initial statement of their own accord, and not as a result of anyone, trans or not, complaining about the lyrics to the song.
This is what I see, two years later, combing through the mainstream media accounts of the controversy that never really happened: I see young students questioning pop culture in a way I don’t remember ever doing when I was eighteen years old, and trying to be considerate of others who are more marginalized than they are. I see them not being afraid to step up and apologize if they are concerned that their actions have caused harm, and then apologizing again and clarifying their intentions, and holding themselves accountable for their words and actions.
The only people I saw actually getting offended by any of it were the journalists themselves, complaining about students complaining about things that nobody can provide proof anyone ever complained about. A completely fabricated flap that probably got a lot of clicks from budding incels and angry fans of a certain tenured psychology professor at the University of Toronto.
I wonder now how many of those probably mostly volunteer student society members came back for more of that thankless shit and abuse the following year? “We eat our leaders,” my friend Bet once told me, and she seems to get righter and righter every year I manage to get older.
Of course those lyrics read differently today than they would have in 1972, when Lou Reed first released that song. I can’t even bear to read parts of a book I published in 2010 now, because it is today. Because I am fifty now, not forty-one, and everything is so different. I am trying not to wonder what a sixty-year-old me will have to say about these words one day, too, so that I can even continue to keep typing them.
In ten years there will be another shiny crop of eighteen-year-old queers on a campus somewhere, dissecting today’s pop songs and literary dinosaurs, discarding what doesn’t apply anymore and debating what remains.
As it should be.
10. TO AND FROM
DEAR SIR: THANK you for your letter, and for your feedback. I do feel it is important for me to let you know, though, that I suspect that your son is not gay because he read my gay book. I’m pretty sure your son read a gay book because he was already gay. I will pray for both of you as well.
HELLO IVAN:
I am a teacher in Coquitlam. This September, I am going to use your “Dear Lady in the Women’s Washroom” in my class. I have some questions. Do you mind if I ask you? I am struggling to find resources to back this experience up.
First of all, would you classify this piece as an open letter? Also, do you recommend any charts or evidence-based statistical reports that I can have on hand in case I have some students that bring fear-based rhetoric to the discussion? Or any online videos of your performance work that would support this piece (or “Saturdays and Cowboy Hats,” which I will also be using).
Also, I would like to say thank you for your writing. It is very moving and important work.
Regards,
Ms Endicott
Dear Ms Endicott:
Thank you so much for your email, and thank you for including some of my work in your curriculum. I think discussing important social issues in the classroom is an important tool to teach critical thinking, which is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy. And as a queer and trans person who grew up in the Yukon in the seventies and eighties, I know I suffered as a kid from a complete lack of any kind of positive representation or role models that even vaguely resembled me. I am more than happy that you are using my work as a tool to bring both of these vital elements into your students’ lives.
Let’s begin with the first story of mine, “Dear Lady in the Women’s Washroom.” I am very aware that the issue of trans people accessing public washrooms is a hot-button topic, and I think it is wise to anticipate that some of your students will bring in some of the fear and misinformation that currently circulates in our courtrooms, political arenas, and media. It is, as you suggest, important to counter this with evidence and the real statistics. I have taken some time to gather some numbers for you. Bear with me here, as I am about to get mathematical.
Up to sixty percent of the human adult body is made up of water, and every living cell in the body needs water to keep functioning. Water acts as a lubricant for our joints, regulates our body temperature through sweating and respiration, and helps to flush waste. We lose water when we sweat, go to the bathroom, and even exhale. If that lost water is not replaced, the total volume of body fluid can fall quickly, and most dangerously, blood volume may drop. Serious dehydration is a medical emergency, and if not reversed, will lead to death.
I am a travelling performer and storyteller. This involves a lot of public speaking and airplane rides, both of which are known to contribute to dehydration. It’s a thirsty business, this. I drink a lot of water.
Urinary frequency is vital to health. A healthy person may urinate four to ten times a day. I’m turning fifty this August, so let’s go with ten times a day, shall we?—for the sake of easy math, not including the four times I have to get up during the night now, amirite?
My work schedule the last few years involves me being away from home an average of 220 days out of the calendar year, so, excluding the four times I go in the night, because those happen mostly in private hotel bathrooms, let’s estimate that when travelling for work, I need to access public bathrooms an average of ten times a day, multiplied by 220 days out of the year, which is 2,200 times annually that I will need to pee in a theatre, university, library, airport, ferry, cultural centre, or, most terrifying, public school bathroom. I try to stay hydrated when not travelling as well, and I try to do things like go to the gym and buy groceries and go to the movies, so let’s say I use a public bathroom twice a day on the remaining 145 days I am home, for a combined total of 2,490 public bathroom breaks per calendar year, give or take.
According to a 2013 research paper entitled “Gendered Restrooms and Minority Stress,” fifty-four percent or trans people who responded reported adverse health effects from trying to avoid public washrooms, such as kidney and urinary tract infections, and fifty-eight percent reported that they have at times avoided going out in public because of a lack of safe facilities. As a full-time travelling artist, I don’t have the option of avoiding public places.
One hundred percent of the time I enter a “ladies’” room, I get nervous about being confronted by a woman who feels I do not belong there. I would estimate this happens, to varying degrees, about thirty percent of the time I choose to brave the ladies’ room, which I only do now about twenty percent of my total bathroom visits, because of fifty years of hassles in there. Of this thirty percent when I am confronted or questioned, I would say the vast majority of interactions are relatively harmless: stares, second looks, elbowing of companions, passive-aggressive throat clearing, or emphatic door-sign checking. Only about ten percent of these negative exchanges involve gasping, screaming, or other visual fear responses; running out the door; or calling security on me. Only a very small percentage of these incidents include me being struck by a purse or shopping bag or cardboard poster tube, or, once at the beach, a hot-pink Styrofoam pool noodle (true story), which didn’t hurt physically but felt personally humiliating for reasons I find difficult to document statistically. Only once have I ever been bruised by a particularly heavy handbag, and only three times have I been physically hauled out of the ladies’ room by security guards, and only during one of those three forcible removals did I not have my pants pulled up all the way. Sadly, this was the one time it happened in a major thoroughfare of the Minneapolis airport. One hundred percent of the security guards who have forcibly removed me from women’s bathrooms have been decidedly male.
One hundred percent of the time I decide to go to the men’s room I also feel nervous, though for different reasons, even though I estimate that 99.9 percent of the time no men even make eye contact with me in there, and 100 percent of the time I use a stall. In the interest of solid research, though, I should mention that I can’t actually be assured that 100 percent of the people who use the men’s room are, in fact, men, as, in order to not draw unnecessary attention to myself in there, I also do not make eye contact with anyone. Only three times have I been aware of possibly being cruised by someone who may or may not have been a man—hard to tell, because I wasn’t really looking. Only once has a man spoken to me in the men’s room. I was initially so terrified by this interaction that the elderly gentleman who addressed me was forced to repeat his words, which were, and I quote: “Son, do up your shoelace or you will trip and break your neck.”
I estimate that I can only find and access a gender-neutral public washroom about fifteen percent of the time, and I am questioned about using the wheelchair-accessible washroom while not appearing to require it about two percent of the time I am entering or leaving one.
Seventy-five percent of the times I am invited to speak about trans issues in a public building, there are no gender-neutral facilities on site for me to use. I find this ironic 100 percent of the time. As of very recently, about half the time I am invited to speak about bathrooms in a venue with no bathrooms for me, someone has printed up a new sign on a piece of paper and taped it over the gendered signs on the gendered bathrooms, declaring them both now absolutely welcome to all. Only about five percent of these times have these temporary signs been torn down, by what I can only hope is a very small percentage of the public that simply cannot tolerate a bathroom being temporarily gender neutral for the two hours I am on campus.
All of this tends to make me a little nervous, which, of course, makes me have to pee.
Let’s move on to support materials and evidence-based data for the second story you asked about, “Saturdays and Cowboy Hats.” This story is essentially about me meeting a young tomboy who reminds me of my younger self, or more importantly, her meeting me, someone she could imagine being one day. She is full of questions, such as where did I get my wallet chain, haircut, workboots in my correct size, and that cowboy hat? I like to think this story shines a light on issues of queer and gender-nonconforming representation in an accessible way, using the power of personal narrative to connect the reader to their own memories of childhood loneliness and alienation, and, to use a term popular with the right wing, recruit.
This story I am finding a little harder to quantify. I can find no data to support the need for positive representation and support for queer and/or trans or gender-nonconforming youth that doesn’t lead me directly to statistics on suicide or self-harm.
As I am still alive, and relatively sound in body and mind, I will tell you that my methodology seems to have worked for me so far.
I’m pretty sure I spent the first eighteen years of my life convinced I was the only person like me in the whole world. I am 100 percent certain that having access to any story, song, movie, or sonnet that mentioned the possibility of anything resembling a healthy and happy queer or trans person would have made my childhood easier to navigate, and I come from a very supportive family, especially relatively speaking, no pun intended.
My quality of life improved by 100 percent immediately after I came out and met other queer people, whether they resembled me in any tangible way outside of their sexuality or not. Things got significantly better after I first picked up a book called Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg. Even though the story was set in the fifties on the blue-collar side of a very urban American city, I found echoes of myself and much comfort there. I remain convinced that book saved my life. I went on to scour libraries and movie theatres and the streets for positive depictions of butch and trans people and their stories. I then began to write my own. Many of the stories I have encountered that truly represented people I could identify with that weren’t built on stereotypes or depict two-dimensional butches aping toxic masculinity appeared in books that I found necessary to write myself. And some of my books need a good solid update to remain with the times. I continue to write myself down to find myself, and so that others like me may find themselves a little, too, and be followed.
I never struggled with math in school. It has always come easily to me. I always got pretty much straight As. Schoolwork was never the problem. School was.
I am 100 percent grateful that you will be bringing my voice and some of my life into your classroom this September. Ninety-five percent of me is honoured that out of the now-blossoming and ever-increasing body of works by queer and trans artists and performers out there these days, you have chosen to include two of my stories. The other five percent of me allows myself to feel frustrated that my life and experience are not considered enough evidence of my right to thrive and be welcome in public places, and that the very fact of my existence is still considered a topic open to debate. But I know that it is 100 percent true that my frustration and anger are not the perfect tools for teaching, and my patience and humour are. I have always found the heart to be more powerful than any pie chart.
I remain 100 percent convinced that the ten percent of your students who are now or will one day identify in some way as queer or trans or Two-Spirit need both of us to bring our best selves to this discussion, because all of those kids really need to leave this world’s fear-based rhetoric at the door and truly listen.
I hope these statistics are of some assistance, and I hope my stories help even more. I remain always grateful for good teachers and the work you do to change the world, every day. Well, except those glorious days in July and August, which you totally deserve off.
Thank you for writing.
Note: I wrote this piece in 2017, jet-lagged in a king-sized hotel room bed in Auckland, New Zealand, and delivered it at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in Australia a couple of days later. I had just found out from my itinerary that I was expected to deliver a forty-minute lecture “on diversity” to what turned out to be about 600 mostly straight, white festivalgoers. The first question from the audience after I was finished was “When did you have your penis removed?”
I WAS BORN and raised in the Yukon, in northern Canada. I’m pretty much as far away from home as I can get right now. If I travelled any farther away from home at this point, the scales would tip and I would actually be moving closer to where I belong. I was conceived under the northern lights—it’s a long story involving a work camp and a conjugal trailer, and my eighteen- and nineteen-year-old parents-to-be—but anyway, I was conceived under the northern lights, the aurora borealis, and where I come from, this is considered by many to mean that I will live an extremely lucky life. So far, I believe that to be true.
One of the hardest things for me about living in a city is that I hardly ever get to chop wood anymore. I am very tidy and I like to cook. I play the baritone saxophone, and I like little dogs and cross-stitching and weightlifting. My favourite colour is robin’s egg blue. I own over 100 neckties. I have inherited from my dad’s side of the family a nearly eerie skill for math and numbers, which I rarely use. I chose to be an artist, a writer, and a storyteller. My eleventh book was released last October. I travel for work a lot. Strangers on airplanes unfortunately find me very easy to talk to.
I am a trans person. I have been scheduled to come here today and speak to you about diversity because I am a trans person, but it is important to me that you know those other things about me, too.
I’m not an academic. I was eleven years old the first time I remember dreaming of being a writer, and when I was nineteen, my heart confirmed that writing was what I was meant to do, so needless to say, I immediately enrolled in trade school to study to be an electrician. My giant Irish Catholic and Roma family is full of great storytellers and writers, and voracious readers and thinkers, mostly disguised as plumbers and telephone operators and car salesmen. Paying tuition for years to become a writer was simply just not on my radar at that time. I was not connected in any way to anyone who had ever done such a thing.
I was one of two female-assigned humans in a sea of 650 men in the electrical trades department at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. This was not unusual for me. I was the only girl playing in the boys’ minor hockey league for eleven years as a youngster, too. I was used to being the only one, or almost the only one.
I’m not sure if I am the only trans person speaking at this festival. These kinds of statistics are rarely kept, and if they are kept, they are not shared with me. It’s usually safe for me to assume that I will be the only trans person at the festival, on the panel, in the lineup. I’ve said it over and over again, and I will say it again right now, I do not and cannot speak for all trans people—I can only ever speak for myself—but some days it is difficult not to feel like that is what is being asked of me.
Being trans is a part of me, and of course it informs how I view my place in the world, and I’m well aware of the fact that it is THE thing about me for some people, but for me it’s just one of the things that I am. I’m a Yukoner. I’m a fan of Scandinavian crime novels. I can only eat bananas if they are still a little bit green. I’m ambidextrous. Is that a metaphor, or maybe foreshadowing? I’m also a storyteller.
