Gender Failure Read online

  More Praise for Gender Failure:

  “This book profoundly changed my life; I will step into the word and lexicon of ‘gender’ differently, I will never be in my body in the same way, I am a different reader forever, and I am grateful. Gender Failure will take you apart and put you back together—I laughed my ass off, I cried my heart out, I yelled my head off, and I ended up in the only place that matters: love, compassion, with our whole bodies.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Dora: A Head Case

  “Gender Failure accomplishes the impressive feat of adapting a live multimedia performance into a book. Rae and Ivan create intimacy through their charming, insightful, and sometimes painful storytelling, and I even found myself wanting to sing the haunting handwritten lyrics. Most compelling are the surprising moments of hope that help illustrate how defying gender is not a failure at all—but rather something to celebrate.” —Vivek Shraya, author of God Loves Hair

  GENDER FAILURE

  Copyright © 2014 by Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  Suite 202–211 East Georgia St.

  Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6

  Canada

  arsenalpulp.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund) and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.

  Earlier versions of some stories by Rae Spoon appeared in First Spring Grass Fire (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012).

  Lyrics and chords from “Ghost of Boy,” “Joan,” “Cowboy,” “Gender Failure Theme Song,” “Who Do You Think You’re Fooling?” and “dangerdangerdanger” copyright © Rae Spoon 2014.

  Book design by Gerilee McBride

  Cover illustration by Claude Förster

  Interior illustrations by Clyde Petersen

  Photographs by Adam P.W. Smith

  Editing by Brian Lam

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

  Coyote, Ivan E. (Ivan Elizabeth), 1969–, author

  Gender failure / Ivan E. Coyote, Rae Spoon.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55152-537-2 (epub)

  1. Coyote, Ivan E. (Ivan Elizabeth), 1969–. 2. Spoon, Rae. 3. Transgender people—Identity. 4. Transgender people—Canada—Biography. I. Spoon, Rae, author II. Title.

  HQ77.7.C69 2014 306.76'8092271 C2014-900270-X C2014-900271-8

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  IvanIntroduction

  RaeIntroduction

  IvanGirl Failure

  RaeGirl Failure

  IvanRosie

  RaeGod Failure

  IvanListing My Sisters

  RaeCowboy

  IvanThe Rest of My Chest

  RaePrairie Gender

  IvanGender Identity Interview for Adults (FtM)

  RaeMan Failure, Part 1

  IvanThirteen Inches, Uncut

  RaeMan Failure, Part 2

  IvanTop Surgery

  RaeMy Body Is a Spaceship

  IvanMessages to Lynn

  RaeHow to Be a Transgender Country Singer

  IvanInvested

  RaeYouTube Gender

  IvanDear Family

  RaeHow to Be a Transgender Indie Rocker

  IvanA Cautionary Tale

  RaeHow to Be Gay When the Gays Won’t Have You

  IvanMany Moons

  RaeDrag Failure

  IvanDo I Still Call Myself a Butch?

  RaeHow I Got to “They”

  IvanThe Facilities

  RaeWhat Do You Think I Am?

  IvanTheir, There

  RaeTouring Success and Touring Failure

  IvanBetween the Boat and the Dock

  RaeStories I Tell Myself and Others (Gender as Narrative)

  IvanDanger

  RaeGender Retirement

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Brian Lam and all the staff at Arsenal Pulp Press for their continued support and vision; without you many fine queer and trans and othered voices in this country might go unheard. All my love and respect to Clyde Petersen and Rae Spoon for their talent and sparkle, and for supporting me in my return to my musical self. All my gratitude to Amber Dawn, Lidia Yuknavitch, Billeh Nickerson, Tara Hardy, Richard Van Camp, Anna Camilleri, S. Bear Bergman, and Cooper Lee Bombardier, my writing comrades and heroes both, for your words and salt and backbones and hearts and ears. I learn from you and find my own courage in our friendships. I want to thank Alison Gorman and Connie Buna for being such good brothers, and all the members of my band and butch choir for the harmony and progression.

  I want to save my last and most resounding thanks for Zena Sharman, my partner, my love, my wife, my friend, and my co-conspirator. I hope to make you chicken soup and fall down laughing in our kitchen until my last breath. You make the best cheese toast. You make my life, and everything in it, shine brighter.

  —IVAN E. COYOTE

  Thanks to: Brian Lam, Cynara Geissler, and everyone at Arsenal Pulp Press for bringing this book to life and getting it out into the world; Ivan E. Coyote and Clyde Petersen for all of the stories, images, and performances over the past few years that make up Gender Failure; Claude Förster for the amazing cover image; Joëlle Rouleau, Geoff Berner, and Nolan Pike for reading the earliest versions of my pieces and offering opinions and advice; and Kendra Marks for encouraging me through every phase of writing and rewriting this book.

  —RAE SPOON

  Introduction

  Rae Spoon and I spent the long dark month of January 2007 together in a hundred-year-old house in Dawson City, Yukon, doing an artists’ residency. During our time there, we wrote a show called You Are Here, a ninety-minute live performance that blended Rae’s music with my storytelling against a backdrop of projected visuals and still photographs. You Are Here was my homage to the Yukon, and small-town life in a big family; it was full of my grandmothers’ wisdom, kitchen-table history, northern highways, and the midnight sun. Rae’s bluegrass and country roots were a perfect musical fit for the material.

  As the show came together, we realized that we were also conducting a bit of a science experiment: what could happen if a trans folk musician and a butch storyteller did a show with no specifically queer content at all? Would it increase our mainstream audience? Could we sell it to big theatres and festivals? Would it be more marketable to hide our giant homo selves and sing about universal things and tell stories about mostly straight people?

  The answer to all the above turned out to be yes.

  We toured You Are Here for five years. During that time, Rae lived for a while in Germany, and their musical interests shifted to indie rock and electronica. We both shed our cowboy shirts for tailored gingham button-downs and ties. My grandmother Florence passed away.

  In the spring of 2012, Rae and I found ourselves in the green room of a big theatre in the suburbs. We had both struggled through the sound check earlier, I was about to perform memorized material told in the present tense about a grandmother whom I was mourning the passing of, Rae was tuning a banjo they hadn’t played in over a year and hadn’t missed, and we both had to choke back tears when the projected image of my beloved gran appeared behind us, twenty feet tall and flickering and so very deeply missed. We both knew this run was
over. It had to be. We were different artists than we had been when we wrote the show, and had different things to say and sing about. We did our very best on stage that night, and received a standing ovation, and then vowed on the drive back to the hotel that that would be our last performance of You Are Here, and it was.

  Rae told me they wanted to write a show for us, a show that gave us a place to talk about everything we kept to ourselves most of the time, a show that directly addressed trans issues and realities, a show that wasn’t meant to make anyone comfortable or nostalgic.

  “Let’s write a real room-clearer of a show,” Rae said in the truck in the hotel parking lot.

  We shook on it.

  Gender Failure was conceived that night, and born in Rae’s apartment in Montreal four months later; it then grew up on stages across Canada, the US, and the UK. Rae and I vowed to push each other’s performance envelopes with the project: I nudged Rae to write text and rest their hands on the fret board for more than a minute or two and tell the audience a story, and in return Rae encouraged me to sing, and to play some guitar and percussion and glockenspiel and melodica. We were both standing with one dress shoe planted firmly outside our respective comfort zones on stage. It was terrifying and at the same time opened up infinite numbers of new possibilities for both of our artistic practices.

  A young and talented animator and musician by the name of Clyde Petersen saw a forty-five-minute, work-in-progress version of the show in New York in the spring of 2012, and wrote Rae a couple of days later. Clyde had been inspired by it and wanted to create some animated clips for the project. We were thrilled to have Clyde’s skills and innovative hi-fi, low-tech visions on board, and our squeesome threesome was forged. Clyde set to work creating hand-drawn animations that featured two-dimensional, articulated cut-out dolls of Rae and me, which we immediately incorporated into the show, and the full shape of Gender Failure live performance hit the road again.

  I had never worked on a project of this scope created only by trans artists before. Not having to explain or convince or defend my ideas or my reality to my fellow collaborators was a first for me. Touring with Rae and Clyde soothed me and took the lonely from the road in a way I had never experienced in quite the same way before. We watched each other’s backs in rest-stop bathrooms and diners without thinking about it; it was a reflex, not a reaction. We innately understood each other because all three of us were so used to being the only one like us in the tour van.

  Each time I have entered myself into the process of envisioning and creating a significant piece of work, whether it be a novel or an album or a film or a live show, the work has changed me while I crafted it. This was even more true of Gender Failure.

  As I finalize the edits and write this introduction, I am thinking and typing in a different body than the one I inhabited that night in the truck in the hotel parking lot.

  In the spring of 2011, I finally made the decision to begin the long process of having top surgery—of having my breasts removed. I had been thinking about it for decades. I had been writing a monthly column for a national queer newspaper for over ten years, and a lot of the creative work I was producing at that time appeared initially online, which came complete with the usual unmoderated and anonymous, free-for-all comments section, full of transphobic trolls and rife with the worst examples of callousness and cruelty. As an artist and a tender heart, I had been struggling for years with the kind of nasty feedback these forums breed, and on the day I called my family doctor to begin the steps toward surgery, I made the decision that I wasn’t going to write anything about this process; that this particular journey was simply too personal and possibly too painful to become fodder for public debate and discussion. The only way I could imagine mustering the bravery to begin was to tell myself that I would have surgery and heal in total privacy.

  In the spring of 2012, one year after that phone call to my doctor, I tendered my resignation at the newspaper, and retired my column after eleven years. I am not convinced it was a coincidence that removing myself and my work from the torturous experience of enduring anonymous online comments as a regular part of my writing practice, and the conception of the Gender Failure project, happened within days of each other.

  That night in my truck, when Rae and I vowed to write a show that would shine light on our true trans selves, we entered into a pact with each other to create a space together to be brave inside of, and we made a promise to place our deeply personal and individual truths on the dashboard as our compass.

  We kept that promise to each other, and then along the way picked up Clyde standing next to a freeway onramp somewhere, and now here we all are.

  Creating this book has changed me. Working on it with Rae and Clyde helped me to become the person I needed to be, and inhabit the body I needed to be in, and for that immense and profound gift, I will forever be grateful to both of them.

  As I am also thankful for you, the reader, for picking this book up and turning its pages.

  Introduction

  I was assigned female at birth and socialized as a girl in a Pentecostal family in Calgary, Alberta. My attempts at being a girl failed epically throughout my teenage years, but I had never considered that it was something that I would be allowed to change. I had no way to talk about gender. I wasn’t allowed to express how uncomfortable it was for me. To resist would have put me in danger, so I kept any subversive thoughts covert. As a person who couldn’t conform to what was expected of me, I thought I was a failure and kept it to myself.

  I came out as transgender privately in the summer of 2001, and publicly in 2002. I knew that identifying as a man and asking to be called “he” would be difficult in relation to the outside world, and I wasn’t wrong. Even more difficult was that, as a male-identified person, I didn’t feel allowed to discuss the parts of that side of the gender binary that were problematic to me. I felt a dysphoria in my new trans-identity and I thought it must be another failure on my part.

  When I retired from gender, it was because I came to the realization that the gender binary was what had been failing me all along. It’s hard to imagine that any one person finds that their place in the binary fits them without some measure of discomfort. Since my “retirement,” I have been striving to stop gendering things for myself and for other people.

  Ivan Coyote is a great friend and long-time collaborator of mine. In the past, we worked together on a show about the Yukon, which was more focused on stories about place than our own identities. Through the process of touring that first show, we discovered a lot of similarities between us due to our non-binary genders, so we started bonding organically over small-town gas stations, public washrooms, and the general lack of understanding in the world in which we moved.

  In the spring of 2012, a few months after I came out as gender-retired, Ivan and I wrote our first version of the show Gender Failure. We presented it in New York at Dixon Place. The reception we got from that first show alone made it clear that we were on to something. Bringing together the stories inspired by the show in this book is the best way I can think of to include everything that we don’t have time to present during the course of a ninety-minute performance. Visual artist and musician Clyde Petersen was in the audience for that first show and was inspired to collaborate with us and create accompanying animations, which we premiered as part of our performance in March 2013 at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in London, England. The enthusiastic feedback we received confirmed that we had found an irreplaceable artistic partner in Clyde.

  I have been failing at the gender binary for as long as I can remember, and that has been difficult at every level of my life. I constantly find myself explaining how this happened on a daily basis, whether to people I meet or to the media. This book is my attempt to trace my journey with gender; it’s a group of life stories and personal essays meant to express how I have felt throughout my life in my various identities. Although I belong to a gender minority, I am a white, able-bodied, g
ender-neutral (formerly trans-masculine) person, and I recognize that there are many ways that I benefit from privilege, especially in queer spaces. There should be as many books like this as there are people constrained by the gender binary, and I hope in my lifetime to read as many of them as possible.

  Girl Failure

  Janine Jones and I were best friends from grade two until grade eight. We bonded on the day during crafts time when someone took a straw and blew a tiny glass bead straight into Jennifer McCloud’s ear, and she had to go to emergency. Our teacher, Miss McCarthy, went with her, so the principal came in to supervise the class. He stood at the front of the room and bellowed that the right thing to do was for whoever had blown the bead to be a man, step forward, and admit what he had done. But both Janine and I had seen that it was Carrie Halliday, a girl bigger than most of the boys, who had been the actual bead blower. Carrie Halliday was famous for having had to repeat grade one already, and she was mean, prone to unprovoked snakebites and knuckle punches and shin kicks, so neither one of us said a word, because like all of us, including Miss McCarthy, we were terrified of Carrie Halliday. Janine smiled down at her desk and then her gaze slipped sideways across the aisle and met mine. We both raised our eyebrows in acknowledgment of the truth and nodded. We were complicit in the secret, silent partners in someone else’s crime, and that was all it took.

  Three weeks later, behind the baseball diamond, Janine and I stabbed our pinkie fingers with a safety pin we had scorched with a match and declared each other blood brothers forever.

  I lived on Hemlock Street, one block away by street and one minute away by footpath through the greenbelt from Janine’s parents’ house on Poplar Street. It turned out that we both liked sports and camping and that book The Chrysalids; neither of us went in for Barbies or playing house or had any interest in doing our hair or stuff like that.

  Janine Jones and I were inseparable for those years; I ate dinner at her place two or three nights a week, and we were always sleeping over at each other’s houses. We were like sisters, people said, which always made me snort a little, because my real sister and I could hardly stand to be in the same room together for five minutes without tearing holes in each other, metaphorically or otherwise. And Janine only had two brothers, both of whom were pretty much useless, Gerome being a chronic masturbator at home and a science nerd at school, and little Marcus being a bit of a bed wetter and still needing us to babysit him so he wouldn’t play with matches or the stove or a propane curling iron again, or catch his foreskin in his zipper as he was prone to doing due to his unexplained aversion to wearing underwear. Marcus was our responsibility, not our comrade.