Care of, p.15
Care Of, page 15
I am just recovering from a pretty major surgery that I had about a month ago, so I am just now trying to catch up on the pile of emails that came in while I was on the mend. I really appreciate hearing from you, and reading your story, so I wanted to just drop you a line and let you know that.
Good luck settling back down in London, and I wish you strength and love and patience on your journey to yourself.
sincerely,
Ivan
JULY 8, 2013
Hey Ivan. Thank you for writing back. Your email really made my day. And sorry to hear about your surgery. I hope all is well now, and also that you get back to 110% very soon. You have the good will and prayers of many many women across the world (and maybe some men too).
Warm regards
Ayesha
P.S. Sending you a poem I wrote, along with prayers and positive vibes. I originally wrote this in Urdu, based on the concept of who we are when we’re naked, without clothes to aid in constructing identity. Hope you like it :)
SEPTEMBER 12, 2020
Dear Ayesha:
A little over seven years has passed since our last email, and I find myself wondering how you are doing. Before the pandemic, I would probably have just continued to wonder. Now, it’s nearly midnight on a Thursday in September, and I am sitting down to write you and simply ask you how you are. Are you still in London? Are you still acting? How is your artist’s heart weathering this pandemic? I send you my love wherever you are, and my hopes that you and your family are safe and healthy.
My partner Sarah is a musician, and most of her family is in Sweden and Norway. It has been a long, hard summer for her. Not only has she had to cancel all her tours and gigs, she is unable to travel home and has had to do all the things daughters and sisters do over WhatsApp and FaceTime: worry about her mom, laugh and argue with her sister, watch her niece and nephew start grade one and speak a full sentence for the first time. I have not seen my family in the Yukon since the pandemic began, either, but at least I know that I could get on a plane or get in a car and drive to see them if there was an emergency, and just knowing that is possible has made it easier for me than it is for her, separated from her blood by an ocean of salt water.
Just as you have probably done over the last months, we have spent many hours wondering what the entertainment industry is going to look like for the next few years. She is downstairs in her studio now, working on her new album, and I am at my desk, writing. Both of us doing the only things we have ever known how to do to help sort through and make sense of the swirl and pitch inside of our chests and heads. I write stories and she writes songs.
I just read the poem you sent me, again. Thank you for sharing it with me. I wish I could read it in its original Urdu, but I read it out loud and thought about who we are naked, without clothes to aid in constructing identity.
There is a mirror next to my desk, which is in the bedroom where I sleep. Every morning when I get out of bed I walk past that mirror. Some days naked, some days wearing only boxer shorts, which are kind of an identity statement on their own, now that your song makes me think about it.
I like my body more in the mornings than I do at night, for some reason.
Do you remember in our emails way back, when I wrote that I was recovering from a surgery? On June 3, 2013 I had a radical double mastectomy. Top surgery. After decades of struggling to feel right in this body of mine, I had my breasts removed. Next to quitting smoking cigarettes back in 2008, having top surgery was the single best thing I ever did for my health in my life.
I passed my seven-year anniversary of that surgery this summer, and I did what I am now able to do every morning: get up, put on a tshirt, and go downstairs to make coffee. No bra, no binder. Just my shirt slipping over my skin. I am as happy in my body now as I have ever been since I was ten years old or so, back before I realized that I was not pretty, and that pretty mattered more than just about anything else a girl could be. I have moments now, mostly while in the water, where I forget to hate anything about this body I am in.
I just read your letters again. And then again. I found myself tearing up when I read your words about growing up in a world absent of any words that were not hetero-normative. About feeling masculine in a feminist environment. About the nearly physical pain you experienced having to wear make-up and feminine clothing on stage in front of thousands of people.
I’m not sure how old you are, but I am imagining tiny butch you in Pakistan, and tiny butch me on the other side of the world in the Yukon, you confusing your Muslim mother and me confounding my Catholic one. What comfort we could have brought each other, were I even to have spotted you, trailing along behind your mother and aunt and cousins on the street somewhere. I like to think we would have still recognized each other, even in our straight girl costumes.
I know that being out of the closet is a privilege, and it is one that I do not take for granted. Thank you for reminding me that being able to be visibly butch or non-binary in this world is also a privilege of a sort, too. It is easy to forget this when I am being screeched at in a women’s bathroom, or with my heart pounding in the last stall in a men’s bathroom in an airport on the road somewhere. There are so many kinds of bravery, and not all of them are as easy to spot in a crowd as being a butch is.
I wish we had more words. I wish there was another word for not-feminine than just the word masculine. I’ve never felt called to the word androgynous, I see this word as meaning ambiguous, and you and I both know that there is nothing ambiguous about being a masculine person in a body the world doesn’t expect this of. I wish there was no line in the sand between the word butch and the words non-binary or trans. I look in that mirror every morning and see something that fits none of these words and all of them simultaneously. But even still, I know that you are my sister.
My younger sister is named Caroline. We call her Carrie for short. Several years ago she was working in a hardware store, in the paint department, alongside a guy named Carl, that I went to school with. Carl is one of a couple of boys I grew up with who came out of the closet after we all graduated. No one came out in high school in the Yukon back then, it just wasn’t safe. Anyway.
Carl and Carrie were chatting away at work one day when it was slow in the store, and she mentioned her sister. Carl got very terse with Carrie, and explained to her that I was trans, didn’t she know, and that she couldn’t call me her sister anymore, that I was her brother now and she needed to get it together and be respectful of my gender identity.
Carrie took her coffee break and escaped to sit in her truck in the parking lot to have a cigarette. She called me in tears. What am I supposed to call you now? She sobbed. You’ve only ever been my sister. You never told me to call you anything else.
I told her that I never asked her to call me anything but her sister because I will never be anything but her sister. I told her that she and I get to decide what we call each other, not Carl, not the world, not anyone.
So. Ayesha, my butch sister. I hope you get up in the morning and greet your naked self with nothing but love, and know that no matter what clothes you wear out the door and in front of that camera, that I can see exactly who you are, and I know that the truth of us both is found in the spaces between words and labels, not inside of the words themselves.
This is why labels peel off in the water.
I am sending you a song that my partner Sarah wrote for her best friend in Sweden, a song meant to travel across the ocean, until Sarah is able to make the trip herself.
I remain your sister,
Ivan
19.
GENTLE MELT
NOVEMBER 4, 2017
Hey,
I’m Connor, an Aussie 18-year-old and I just wanted to thank you. I came out to my parents as trans about three years ago, since then the most acceptance I’ve gotten is a couple of drunken conversations with my mum that either she forgets the next day or chooses to ignore and the purchasing of a binder for my birthday when I finally managed to prove to her just how badly I needed one. My dad has remained silent and I don’t know if that’ll ever change.
The extended portion of my family are half the world away and I haven’t seen them since I was barely old enough to toddle, so a support system from them doesn’t really exist. I’ve got a brother who doesn’t know and a sister who does but lives six hours away. I’m not able to move out and since I’ve just left school I’m finally able to start being myself.
My mum’s never really understood, stuck in that phase where you voice your acceptance but don’t act on it. But I went on holidays for a week and when I came back she was acting different, singing praises about your book Tomboy Survival Guide. I thought it was weird how excited she was, going on about how it had changed her perspective and urging me to read it. I wasn’t expecting much, not with that title, half dreading that it was gonna be some bullshit about some trans man who’d realised he wasn’t a man, just a tomboy or a butch or whatever. But I got why she loved it so much soon enough.
It’s different and it’s new and it’s (for lack of a better word) nitty-gritty, giving an insight into the trans perspective that you don’t really find anywhere else. My mum was especially touched by the mention of your name change and its connection to family, something that’s been a huge contention between us. I guess I was lucky in the same way you were, my sister was named for my dad and my brother for my mum, whilst my name has no such connection.
She’s started to think about things differently, not completely there yet, but closer than she was and your book, coupled with a video from a LGBT friend’s wedding where she said that I looked the happiest I had in a long time (wearing a suit and going by my own name). We’re waiting for Gender Failure to come into our library and I’m currently trying to hunt down a copy of Close to Spider Man, but I can’t find one anywhere locally.
So I know this is disjointed and jumps around a bit (I’m more of an artist than a writer), but I wanted to thank you, not because you performed some miracle and completely changed my mum’s mind, but because you planted that notion for change.
I’ve been through hell the last couple of years, therapy, depression, anxiety, self-harm, but I’m finally in a place where I feel relatively safe and comfortable and a portion of that is due to you. I’m looking into HRT at the moment and about to start the process of legally changing my name, I was always going to do both these things and that was never gonna go any differently. But you’ve helped to give me that little bit of hope that when I come out the other side feeling a little bit more like me, that I’ll have my mum by my side.
Thank you,
Connor.
SEPTEMBER 23, 2020
Dear Connor:
I know I wrote you back a couple of days after I first received your email back in 2017, but it was just a short note, and your letter deserved so much better a response than I was able to give you back then, so here I am, writing you the letter I wish I had sent you three years ago.
It is six months pretty much to the day since we “sheltered at home” in the first days of the pandemic. Most of my family still lives in the Yukon, where I was born and raised, and due to travel restrictions and quarantine rules, and my new job here in Ontario, I have not seen my northern family since before the pandemic began, and I truly do not know when I will be able to go home again. This has reframed my feelings about my giant family quite a bit, and I find myself missing them in whole new ways, even the messy and complicated facets of coming from a big family that I never imagined myself longing for, or feeling the lack of.
I miss my mom the most, I think. She had to pack up her place and move this summer. She just turned 71 last month, and it was hard to not be able to come home and help her with everything. I’ve only seen her new condo when my sister FaceTimed once with me and walked her cell phone around from room to room for a virtual tour. I caught flashes of my mom in the background, waving and pointing to her new gas fireplace and showing me the insides of the kitchen cupboards. Her hair is all gone silver now, and she looked smaller than she seemed last winter, somehow.
She was the first person in my family that I came out to as queer, back when I was eighteen, also. It didn’t go very well. She was pro-gay rights in word, and at her work, where she helped to draft a benefits package that included same-sex partners for Yukon territorial government workers, in 1984, one of the first of its kind anywhere in Canada. She had lesbian friends and made every effort to show her support of them and be their ally. But with me, she was silent and distant about it all. She never brought any of it up and quickly squelched any conversation about my girlfriends, or my life. She seemed overly cool and uncomfortable around any of my gay friends. I felt like she was ashamed of who I was, and for many years I practiced matching her silence with my own.
I don’t remember the exact moment when it all began to change. I imagine it now like watching a frozen lake begin to thaw, at first you begin to hear a faint and distant trickle, beneath what remains of the previous winter’s collected snowfalls under all that hard and blue ice. Then one afternoon after a couple of days of sun that trickle becomes a stream, and the ice becomes increasingly fragile, and the snow melts and contributes to the now-insistent rush of water which starts to break bits of the ice off and the next thing you know it’s April in the Yukon and the swans are back and the willow bushes are flashing their soft and furry buds and promising silver-green leaves and it’s finally safe to leave your parka at home.
Maybe none of that last paragraph makes any sense at all to an Australian, now that I read it back to myself.
What I’m trying to say is how glad I am that I didn’t stay frozen on the wrong end of what I once felt was my mother’s shame about who I was.
It took me decades to realize that homophobia was the wrong word for what I saw in my mom’s face and heard in her voice those first few years. She wasn’t as afraid of the queer in me, as she was afraid for her queer baby in the world and in the place she lived in. Inside of the only family she knew. She was terrified of what the world was going to do to her oldest child. It was 1987 and all of her fears were justifiable. Some days I even wonder if her subconscious knew I was trans before I even did, and if that contributed to her wishing I was less visible, less obvious. If she wanted to close those closet doors to keep me safe, not silenced.
My dad was another story, and still is. I can’t tell where his inability to understand who I am ends, and his lack of interest in anyone’s life outside of his own begins. The booze doesn’t help clarify any of it, and I know from your letter that you understand what I mean by that. My father taught me how to drive a stick shift, how to catch a fish, how to drive a forklift, how to weld, how to make a perfect pancake, and the difference between a Robertson, Phillips and flathead screw, but the biggest lesson I learned from him is how practicing and modelling the wrong kind of masculinity gets in the way of so much that should live in the space between us. So much love and tenderness and compassion and forgiveness and nurturing, not just between our fathers and ourselves, but between our fathers and themselves, too. I’m working on learning to forgive him so that one day I can help him to forgive himself. To accept the help and love he needs more than ever. To have mercy upon himself. I’m starting to see that his survival depends on this.
I spent last Christmas in London, Ontario, with my partner Sarah. Her dad’s partner, Lorie, invited Sarah and I over to her sister’s place for a Sunday afternoon Christmas party. Lorie’s family is even bigger and louder and rougher around the edges than mine is, which is saying a lot, and I felt immediately comfortable around this unruly mob of blue-collar medium-sized town people. Nobody cooked anything, the kitchen table was full of veggie plates from Costco and bowls containing six different kinds of chips and a bucket of KFC and a frozen and thawing strawberry cheesecake.
Someone’s dog peed on the carpet when someone’s uncle stepped on its foot and two nearly identical but not twin brothers teased each other about their receding hairlines and growing bellies. One of Lorie’s nephews shrugged his brand-new Christmas button-down shirt off of his shoulders to show off the new tattoo on his back. I felt about as at home as I ever have at somebody else’s family’s Christmas party.
There was a young kid slouched on the couch in the living room, staring at their phone, not talking much to anyone. Lorie introduced him to me, and I could tell by the way she said his name slowly, Ang-us, in two syllables, that I should for some reason pay attention. That is when I noticed the silhouette of a binder lurking underneath his black tshirt. The shy sloop of his shoulders. He did not look up from under his long eyelashes at me. Kept staring at his phone.
Why don’t you ask Ivan if they will sign your book for you? Lorie’s sister asked. Angus shrugged and slid off the couch and lumbered over to the Christmas tree and retrieved a shiny and unopened copy of my book Tomboy Survival Guide and passed it to me.
All this to say, I don’t think you were the only trans kid out there who wasn’t immediately excited that I called that book what I did. My only defense is, Non-Binary Human Who Also Identifies as Trans but Who Still Resonates With the Word Butch But Knows Not Everybody Does, and Who Grew Up Thinking the Only Word That Sort of Fit Her (Later Them), Was Tomboy, Survival Guide is way too long of a title, even for me.
I’m so glad that my book found its way into your hands, and grateful that you were able to overlook the title and open it and find some comfort and familiarity in its pages. When I have hard writing days I think about the slow melt between you and your mom, and I sit down and open my laptop and make myself put one word in front of the other, drip by drip, and continue.
Please send me your address and I will sign a copy of my book that came out last fall, and put it in the mail for you.
Good luck settling back down in London, and I wish you strength and love and patience on your journey to yourself.
sincerely,
Ivan
JULY 8, 2013
Hey Ivan. Thank you for writing back. Your email really made my day. And sorry to hear about your surgery. I hope all is well now, and also that you get back to 110% very soon. You have the good will and prayers of many many women across the world (and maybe some men too).
Warm regards
Ayesha
P.S. Sending you a poem I wrote, along with prayers and positive vibes. I originally wrote this in Urdu, based on the concept of who we are when we’re naked, without clothes to aid in constructing identity. Hope you like it :)
SEPTEMBER 12, 2020
Dear Ayesha:
A little over seven years has passed since our last email, and I find myself wondering how you are doing. Before the pandemic, I would probably have just continued to wonder. Now, it’s nearly midnight on a Thursday in September, and I am sitting down to write you and simply ask you how you are. Are you still in London? Are you still acting? How is your artist’s heart weathering this pandemic? I send you my love wherever you are, and my hopes that you and your family are safe and healthy.
My partner Sarah is a musician, and most of her family is in Sweden and Norway. It has been a long, hard summer for her. Not only has she had to cancel all her tours and gigs, she is unable to travel home and has had to do all the things daughters and sisters do over WhatsApp and FaceTime: worry about her mom, laugh and argue with her sister, watch her niece and nephew start grade one and speak a full sentence for the first time. I have not seen my family in the Yukon since the pandemic began, either, but at least I know that I could get on a plane or get in a car and drive to see them if there was an emergency, and just knowing that is possible has made it easier for me than it is for her, separated from her blood by an ocean of salt water.
Just as you have probably done over the last months, we have spent many hours wondering what the entertainment industry is going to look like for the next few years. She is downstairs in her studio now, working on her new album, and I am at my desk, writing. Both of us doing the only things we have ever known how to do to help sort through and make sense of the swirl and pitch inside of our chests and heads. I write stories and she writes songs.
I just read the poem you sent me, again. Thank you for sharing it with me. I wish I could read it in its original Urdu, but I read it out loud and thought about who we are naked, without clothes to aid in constructing identity.
There is a mirror next to my desk, which is in the bedroom where I sleep. Every morning when I get out of bed I walk past that mirror. Some days naked, some days wearing only boxer shorts, which are kind of an identity statement on their own, now that your song makes me think about it.
I like my body more in the mornings than I do at night, for some reason.
Do you remember in our emails way back, when I wrote that I was recovering from a surgery? On June 3, 2013 I had a radical double mastectomy. Top surgery. After decades of struggling to feel right in this body of mine, I had my breasts removed. Next to quitting smoking cigarettes back in 2008, having top surgery was the single best thing I ever did for my health in my life.
I passed my seven-year anniversary of that surgery this summer, and I did what I am now able to do every morning: get up, put on a tshirt, and go downstairs to make coffee. No bra, no binder. Just my shirt slipping over my skin. I am as happy in my body now as I have ever been since I was ten years old or so, back before I realized that I was not pretty, and that pretty mattered more than just about anything else a girl could be. I have moments now, mostly while in the water, where I forget to hate anything about this body I am in.
I just read your letters again. And then again. I found myself tearing up when I read your words about growing up in a world absent of any words that were not hetero-normative. About feeling masculine in a feminist environment. About the nearly physical pain you experienced having to wear make-up and feminine clothing on stage in front of thousands of people.
I’m not sure how old you are, but I am imagining tiny butch you in Pakistan, and tiny butch me on the other side of the world in the Yukon, you confusing your Muslim mother and me confounding my Catholic one. What comfort we could have brought each other, were I even to have spotted you, trailing along behind your mother and aunt and cousins on the street somewhere. I like to think we would have still recognized each other, even in our straight girl costumes.
I know that being out of the closet is a privilege, and it is one that I do not take for granted. Thank you for reminding me that being able to be visibly butch or non-binary in this world is also a privilege of a sort, too. It is easy to forget this when I am being screeched at in a women’s bathroom, or with my heart pounding in the last stall in a men’s bathroom in an airport on the road somewhere. There are so many kinds of bravery, and not all of them are as easy to spot in a crowd as being a butch is.
I wish we had more words. I wish there was another word for not-feminine than just the word masculine. I’ve never felt called to the word androgynous, I see this word as meaning ambiguous, and you and I both know that there is nothing ambiguous about being a masculine person in a body the world doesn’t expect this of. I wish there was no line in the sand between the word butch and the words non-binary or trans. I look in that mirror every morning and see something that fits none of these words and all of them simultaneously. But even still, I know that you are my sister.
My younger sister is named Caroline. We call her Carrie for short. Several years ago she was working in a hardware store, in the paint department, alongside a guy named Carl, that I went to school with. Carl is one of a couple of boys I grew up with who came out of the closet after we all graduated. No one came out in high school in the Yukon back then, it just wasn’t safe. Anyway.
Carl and Carrie were chatting away at work one day when it was slow in the store, and she mentioned her sister. Carl got very terse with Carrie, and explained to her that I was trans, didn’t she know, and that she couldn’t call me her sister anymore, that I was her brother now and she needed to get it together and be respectful of my gender identity.
Carrie took her coffee break and escaped to sit in her truck in the parking lot to have a cigarette. She called me in tears. What am I supposed to call you now? She sobbed. You’ve only ever been my sister. You never told me to call you anything else.
I told her that I never asked her to call me anything but her sister because I will never be anything but her sister. I told her that she and I get to decide what we call each other, not Carl, not the world, not anyone.
So. Ayesha, my butch sister. I hope you get up in the morning and greet your naked self with nothing but love, and know that no matter what clothes you wear out the door and in front of that camera, that I can see exactly who you are, and I know that the truth of us both is found in the spaces between words and labels, not inside of the words themselves.
This is why labels peel off in the water.
I am sending you a song that my partner Sarah wrote for her best friend in Sweden, a song meant to travel across the ocean, until Sarah is able to make the trip herself.
I remain your sister,
Ivan
19.
GENTLE MELT
NOVEMBER 4, 2017
Hey,
I’m Connor, an Aussie 18-year-old and I just wanted to thank you. I came out to my parents as trans about three years ago, since then the most acceptance I’ve gotten is a couple of drunken conversations with my mum that either she forgets the next day or chooses to ignore and the purchasing of a binder for my birthday when I finally managed to prove to her just how badly I needed one. My dad has remained silent and I don’t know if that’ll ever change.
The extended portion of my family are half the world away and I haven’t seen them since I was barely old enough to toddle, so a support system from them doesn’t really exist. I’ve got a brother who doesn’t know and a sister who does but lives six hours away. I’m not able to move out and since I’ve just left school I’m finally able to start being myself.
My mum’s never really understood, stuck in that phase where you voice your acceptance but don’t act on it. But I went on holidays for a week and when I came back she was acting different, singing praises about your book Tomboy Survival Guide. I thought it was weird how excited she was, going on about how it had changed her perspective and urging me to read it. I wasn’t expecting much, not with that title, half dreading that it was gonna be some bullshit about some trans man who’d realised he wasn’t a man, just a tomboy or a butch or whatever. But I got why she loved it so much soon enough.
It’s different and it’s new and it’s (for lack of a better word) nitty-gritty, giving an insight into the trans perspective that you don’t really find anywhere else. My mum was especially touched by the mention of your name change and its connection to family, something that’s been a huge contention between us. I guess I was lucky in the same way you were, my sister was named for my dad and my brother for my mum, whilst my name has no such connection.
She’s started to think about things differently, not completely there yet, but closer than she was and your book, coupled with a video from a LGBT friend’s wedding where she said that I looked the happiest I had in a long time (wearing a suit and going by my own name). We’re waiting for Gender Failure to come into our library and I’m currently trying to hunt down a copy of Close to Spider Man, but I can’t find one anywhere locally.
So I know this is disjointed and jumps around a bit (I’m more of an artist than a writer), but I wanted to thank you, not because you performed some miracle and completely changed my mum’s mind, but because you planted that notion for change.
I’ve been through hell the last couple of years, therapy, depression, anxiety, self-harm, but I’m finally in a place where I feel relatively safe and comfortable and a portion of that is due to you. I’m looking into HRT at the moment and about to start the process of legally changing my name, I was always going to do both these things and that was never gonna go any differently. But you’ve helped to give me that little bit of hope that when I come out the other side feeling a little bit more like me, that I’ll have my mum by my side.
Thank you,
Connor.
SEPTEMBER 23, 2020
Dear Connor:
I know I wrote you back a couple of days after I first received your email back in 2017, but it was just a short note, and your letter deserved so much better a response than I was able to give you back then, so here I am, writing you the letter I wish I had sent you three years ago.
It is six months pretty much to the day since we “sheltered at home” in the first days of the pandemic. Most of my family still lives in the Yukon, where I was born and raised, and due to travel restrictions and quarantine rules, and my new job here in Ontario, I have not seen my northern family since before the pandemic began, and I truly do not know when I will be able to go home again. This has reframed my feelings about my giant family quite a bit, and I find myself missing them in whole new ways, even the messy and complicated facets of coming from a big family that I never imagined myself longing for, or feeling the lack of.
I miss my mom the most, I think. She had to pack up her place and move this summer. She just turned 71 last month, and it was hard to not be able to come home and help her with everything. I’ve only seen her new condo when my sister FaceTimed once with me and walked her cell phone around from room to room for a virtual tour. I caught flashes of my mom in the background, waving and pointing to her new gas fireplace and showing me the insides of the kitchen cupboards. Her hair is all gone silver now, and she looked smaller than she seemed last winter, somehow.
She was the first person in my family that I came out to as queer, back when I was eighteen, also. It didn’t go very well. She was pro-gay rights in word, and at her work, where she helped to draft a benefits package that included same-sex partners for Yukon territorial government workers, in 1984, one of the first of its kind anywhere in Canada. She had lesbian friends and made every effort to show her support of them and be their ally. But with me, she was silent and distant about it all. She never brought any of it up and quickly squelched any conversation about my girlfriends, or my life. She seemed overly cool and uncomfortable around any of my gay friends. I felt like she was ashamed of who I was, and for many years I practiced matching her silence with my own.
I don’t remember the exact moment when it all began to change. I imagine it now like watching a frozen lake begin to thaw, at first you begin to hear a faint and distant trickle, beneath what remains of the previous winter’s collected snowfalls under all that hard and blue ice. Then one afternoon after a couple of days of sun that trickle becomes a stream, and the ice becomes increasingly fragile, and the snow melts and contributes to the now-insistent rush of water which starts to break bits of the ice off and the next thing you know it’s April in the Yukon and the swans are back and the willow bushes are flashing their soft and furry buds and promising silver-green leaves and it’s finally safe to leave your parka at home.
Maybe none of that last paragraph makes any sense at all to an Australian, now that I read it back to myself.
What I’m trying to say is how glad I am that I didn’t stay frozen on the wrong end of what I once felt was my mother’s shame about who I was.
It took me decades to realize that homophobia was the wrong word for what I saw in my mom’s face and heard in her voice those first few years. She wasn’t as afraid of the queer in me, as she was afraid for her queer baby in the world and in the place she lived in. Inside of the only family she knew. She was terrified of what the world was going to do to her oldest child. It was 1987 and all of her fears were justifiable. Some days I even wonder if her subconscious knew I was trans before I even did, and if that contributed to her wishing I was less visible, less obvious. If she wanted to close those closet doors to keep me safe, not silenced.
My dad was another story, and still is. I can’t tell where his inability to understand who I am ends, and his lack of interest in anyone’s life outside of his own begins. The booze doesn’t help clarify any of it, and I know from your letter that you understand what I mean by that. My father taught me how to drive a stick shift, how to catch a fish, how to drive a forklift, how to weld, how to make a perfect pancake, and the difference between a Robertson, Phillips and flathead screw, but the biggest lesson I learned from him is how practicing and modelling the wrong kind of masculinity gets in the way of so much that should live in the space between us. So much love and tenderness and compassion and forgiveness and nurturing, not just between our fathers and ourselves, but between our fathers and themselves, too. I’m working on learning to forgive him so that one day I can help him to forgive himself. To accept the help and love he needs more than ever. To have mercy upon himself. I’m starting to see that his survival depends on this.
I spent last Christmas in London, Ontario, with my partner Sarah. Her dad’s partner, Lorie, invited Sarah and I over to her sister’s place for a Sunday afternoon Christmas party. Lorie’s family is even bigger and louder and rougher around the edges than mine is, which is saying a lot, and I felt immediately comfortable around this unruly mob of blue-collar medium-sized town people. Nobody cooked anything, the kitchen table was full of veggie plates from Costco and bowls containing six different kinds of chips and a bucket of KFC and a frozen and thawing strawberry cheesecake.
Someone’s dog peed on the carpet when someone’s uncle stepped on its foot and two nearly identical but not twin brothers teased each other about their receding hairlines and growing bellies. One of Lorie’s nephews shrugged his brand-new Christmas button-down shirt off of his shoulders to show off the new tattoo on his back. I felt about as at home as I ever have at somebody else’s family’s Christmas party.
There was a young kid slouched on the couch in the living room, staring at their phone, not talking much to anyone. Lorie introduced him to me, and I could tell by the way she said his name slowly, Ang-us, in two syllables, that I should for some reason pay attention. That is when I noticed the silhouette of a binder lurking underneath his black tshirt. The shy sloop of his shoulders. He did not look up from under his long eyelashes at me. Kept staring at his phone.
Why don’t you ask Ivan if they will sign your book for you? Lorie’s sister asked. Angus shrugged and slid off the couch and lumbered over to the Christmas tree and retrieved a shiny and unopened copy of my book Tomboy Survival Guide and passed it to me.
All this to say, I don’t think you were the only trans kid out there who wasn’t immediately excited that I called that book what I did. My only defense is, Non-Binary Human Who Also Identifies as Trans but Who Still Resonates With the Word Butch But Knows Not Everybody Does, and Who Grew Up Thinking the Only Word That Sort of Fit Her (Later Them), Was Tomboy, Survival Guide is way too long of a title, even for me.
I’m so glad that my book found its way into your hands, and grateful that you were able to overlook the title and open it and find some comfort and familiarity in its pages. When I have hard writing days I think about the slow melt between you and your mom, and I sit down and open my laptop and make myself put one word in front of the other, drip by drip, and continue.
Please send me your address and I will sign a copy of my book that came out last fall, and put it in the mail for you.
