Upon the solid advice of an internet harassment professional, I went silent on all social media accounts, and tightened up and locked down all of my settings on all platforms for over a month, until the storm passed. I arranged to have a close friend monitor my messages, and forward me anything I needed to follow up on for work stuff. That is how I missed what happened on your Facebook page. At first, at least.

  I got an email from a friend about it, along with some screenshots. The sender knew about our friendship, and thought that I should know about the post you had written about trans women. It still makes me cry to think about it, these fifteen months later.

  You are by no means the first friend of mine to reveal that you do not include trans women in your definition of what it means to be a woman. I have had to learn to allow many of my friendships to wither on this particular vine. I have mourned and argued and cajoled and begged friends of all stripes to come around and grow and listen and learn to truly see all of our sisters and siblings standing with us in this struggle for a better world, a better place to live alongside one another. Sometimes it has worked, slowly slowly. Often it has not.

  We have not talked on the phone since that day. Your words, and the conversations and hateful comments that your original post allowed a space for, cracked my heart in half, and it is just now that I am able to put these thoughts in any sort of coherent order and send them to you.

  I think we have spoken about how important both of my grandmothers were to me. The respect and reverence that stills lives in my bones for both of them. I have always felt very blessed by their love and stories and guidance and their company around our collective kitchen tables. They were the sinew and the skeleton and the glue that held my giant family tethered together, and nothing has been the same at home or in my heart since they both left this realm. I was raised and kept closely connected by their blood, blood that bonded us all, a family that recognized both Florence and Patricia as our leaders, our rule makers, our ship’s captains and our moral compasses. To say I was taught to respect my elders growing up is a vast and deep chasm of an understatement.

  As a result, it is very difficult for me to write this letter to you. I’m unsure if you are even still reading it, but I have been drafting it in my head for a year and a half now, nearly, and it needs to be put to the page, not in spite of my great love and admiration for you and your music and mentorship, but because of it.

  Please hear me when I say that I understand that many women who share your opinions with regards to trans women live with and sometimes die from foundational trauma, and deep, harmful and haunting memories of violence visited upon their bodies and their souls by men. Sometimes this trauma and this damage is inherited, and lives in the bone marrow, pacing and lurking and breathing all of the oxygen. I understand this, I really do.

  Also please hear me that trans women, and trans men, too, and non-binary people like myself, have to conjure and create ourselves out of that very same broken and bleeding bone marrow, and have to fight to exist in the very same patriarchal system that would disappear all of us if we let it, without seeing any difference at all between you, and me, and trans people of every variety. I truly believe that we are all equally expendable to those powerful structures we exist in, and around, and outside of. We are all often standing or sitting or kneeling outside of the very same gates of power, asking for many of the same rights over our own battered bodies, and demanding the same or similar dignities from the same uncaring or oblivious ears.

  I know from your lyrics that you are a warrior, a soldier without a country, a deep thinker, and a wounded lover.

  I know from our many talks last year that you are also funny, and eccentric, and heartsick, and sometimes profoundly lonely.

  I want you to know how much I miss our friendship, and our mutual support, and our newly-hatched creative connection. I’m not sure if there is any conversation we can have that you haven’t already had with hundreds of others wiser and more eloquent than I am that could ever convince you to open your heart and make room at your hearth for trans people, especially trans women, who are some of the bravest and most misunderstood women I know.

  I’m writing to tell you that I miss you. I am writing to tell you that I am still here, and I love you, and I am willing to have many and all of the hard conversations with you if it might mean that I could have you back in my life again in some meaningful way. I write this letter to you knowing that we might never agree about this topic, even though I see so much of my own truth in the lines around your eyes, and in your poetry, and in the stories of your life, and I know in my heart that trans women are my sisters, so they must be your sisters too, if you allow yourself to listen and hear where their stories run alongside both of ours, not over, or across, or against them.

  You might be shaking your head right now at me, if you are still reading, but you still have my number, and I promise to bring all of my compassion, and my best ears, and all of my love and respect for you to that kitchen table.

  I’m writing you this letter so I can play your records again, and hear your voice without thinking about how I need to write you this letter.

  I’m writing you this letter because I can no longer bear the thought that the last thing that rang out in the space between us was my silence.

  with much love and hope,

  Ivan

  NOVEMBER 9, 2020

  Dearest Ferron:

  I’m writing you again, about 48 hours after Joe Biden was declared to be the president-elect of the United States. I believe you’re still in Arizona, am I right about that? I just checked the red and blue map on CNN and the electoral college vote has not yet been declared there, coming up on a week after election day, and some would say that means it doesn’t matter now what happens in Arizona, Biden has won, and that is all that is important.

  I wonder, though, how this feels for you, walking your little dog to and from your local park, or leaning over to pick the right bunch of celery at the grocery store, or lined up with your neighbours outside of the bank—do you glance at the people you live next to and ask yourself inside who they voted for? Can you tell just by looking at them most times? Do you wonder if the man standing behind you in the lineup at the supermarket voted against your right to control your own body, did he vote to keep locking up children in border camps? Does his spiritual advisor also speak in tongues?

  What about the woman in the park with the geriatric Pomeranian, who gave you a jar of peaches she canned herself last fall, and who checked Trump on her ballot but when asked says she doesn’t even tell her husband who she voted for? To me, she’s scarier than any red-hat-wearing camouflage-vested blowhard will ever be.

  I’m glad you have your sweetheart with you, and that you have a little garden, but I have to be honest and tell you that I worry about you still. I worry about all of my friends in the U.S. a tiny bit less this morning than I did last week, but still. My concern for the safety and human rights of all of my American friends has been around for all of my adult life now, and I don’t expect any election will ever change that, not in my lifetime, anyway.

  I want to sincerely thank you for the phone calls and conversations we have had over the last few months. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk it all through with me. Thank you for forgiving me my long silence. I needed the time to think, to put each of my words in the proper and peaceful order, to craft my measured response to you, my very dear friend.

  I understand that your initial reaction and post on social media was one born and carried in the marrow of your own trauma response, and your own reflex-driven protective arm of solidarity with another woman who you saw as being threatened by someone that you did not recognize as another woman.

  Sometimes when offering up yet another argument feels like wheelbarrowing already-dry concrete up a mountain, I find a story is easier to lift up. So I will tell you one of my stories.

  Three summers ago, on a beautiful July day, I left my apartment to walk one and a half blocks up Hastings Street to go to the market for groceries. I had just landed back home from a long stretch of road, again, very late the previous night, and I know I don’t need to tell you about that exhausted and elated but heart-worn feeling I held in my chest as I squinted into the sun and set out to fetch some food to fill my empty fridge and belly with. I didn’t even have any coffee beans left, so I ventured outside, my skin confused by the change from air-conditioned lobby to sweaty streetside.

  I was about ten paces from my front door when it happened. Something big and unseen struck me hard from behind and pushed my body forward and down, my knees, then my elbows striking sidewalk, and the side of my head ringing off of the thick plate-glass window of the travel agency that makes its home in one of the commercial units on the ground floor of my building.

  I heard her voice then, the woman on the bike that had knocked me over, and her face spun and then swam into focus above me. “Are you a fucking dude or a chick? Hard to fucking tell.” One corner of her thin mouth was peeled up in a question mark, her eyes narrow and mean. Then she pedalled away.

  A tornado of rage left a skid mark of circles in my head. I tried to breathe and realized I couldn’t, not yet, that all of my air was still outside of me, waiting for me to be able to inhale again. I was on my hands and knees on the concrete next to my neighbour’s doormat. I felt like jamming my fist into the spokes of that woman’s bike and toppling her off of it, but by the time I could take a full breath and stand up again, she was long gone. A bus stopped on the opposite side of the street, belched out some of its passengers, and then puffed and hissed off. Traffic continued to hum. My ears were ringing. Little black stars glinted behind my eyelids when I blinked. A man walking a pit bull made a wide comma around me, staring at me but saying nothing.

  I guess I could have chased the woman on the bike, maybe even caught up to her while she waited for the light to change up the block, if she was the wait for the light to change type. But what then? I look like a man, most days to most people, and she was a wiry little white woman with dirty long blonde hair. To most eyes I would be a decently dressed dude, yelling at a visibly poor woman on a beat-up ten-speed on a Hastings Street corner in East Vancouver.

  So I picked the gravel out of the heels of my palms and inspected the torn-out knee of my good show jeans that I had just put on, pressed a bloodied flap of my skin sort of back into place, and went to buy myself an already-made coffee at my friend’s shop up the block. I was hoping Marc would be there, so I could get some sympathy, or a joke, or at least a free Americano, but one of his employees told me he was out and wasn’t expected back until late afternoon.

  So I sucked it up. Tried to shake it off. My head still hurt. My teeth didn’t feel quite like they fit together right yet. I found blood on my elbow, too, and my shirttail.

  This is not the first story like this I have lived through, and still carry around with me. The last time I got punched in the face by a woman was long enough ago that it was because I wouldn’t get off of the pay phone she needed to use fast enough, and I did the same thing back then, too. I sucked it up, fists curled but held firmly at my sides. Rage swallowed silently. A deep-seated survival tactic known to almost every trans person I have spoken to about such things. We are not often afforded any opportunity to fight back, not with our angry words, and certainly never with our fists or our deeds. Our responses must always be measured, and spoken softly, and without carrying any whiff of threat, any form of confrontation. Anything else will too easily be weaponized against us. See, how the masculine one is always so aggressive? See, I told you they’re all just men wearing dresses. See, I told you.

  Even when our rights are under direct attack. Even when our children, or children like us, are being denied compassionate care. Even as images of our deaths are being shared online and labelled as allyship, as solidarity. We must take a deep breath, unclench our jaws and knuckles, and be patient, and peaceful, and reconciliatory, or risk being labelled as the violent ones.

  Have you read the recent interview with gender theorist Judith Butler in the New Statesman? I can send you the link if you are interested in reading the full piece. In my reading of the article, Butler is being interviewed by a woman who is barely interested in concealing her bias, hardly pausing to sweep sand over her TERF tracks at all. The interviewer is questioning Butler about definitions of “the category of woman” and who it is exactly that feminism purports to be fighting for.

  Throughout the lengthy grilling, Butler displays their signature level and scalpel-sharp theory. Unshakable and not to be trifled with. There are no less than thirty quotes from Butler in this article that I hope to one day commit to memory, but my favourite exchange is this:

  AF (Alona Ferber, the interviewer): “How much is toxicity on this issue a function of culture wars playing out online?”

  JB: “I think we are living in anti-intellectual times, and that this is evident across the political spectrum. The quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate. We need to cherish the longer forms.”

  We need to cherish the longer forms. I have repeated that sentence in my head a thousand time since I first read it. And then there is the next question:

  AF: “Threats of violence and abuse would seem to take these ‘anti-intellectual times’ to an extreme. What do you have to say about violent or abusive language used online against people like JK Rowling?”

  JB: “I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling’s view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania—or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.”

  I want you to know, Ferron, how much I truly cherish the opportunity to have this long conversation with you. I appreciate your patient ear, and that you are taking the time to consider these issues.

  Another story: when Sarah and I were first really falling in love with each other, I put on your record Shadows on a Dime and when the needle got to that song “Proud Crowd” I started to sing along, like I always do.

  And that is when I heard Sarah singing along on her grandmother’s old plaid pullout couch beside me, word for word for word.

  Hey, I said, you are the only other person I know who knows all of the lyrics to this song.

  Her eyes were shining with tears and she smiled at me. You are the only other person I know who knows all the lyrics to this song, she confessed.

  To this day, I swear on all things holy, whenever we have a fight we quote your lyrics to each other, until forgiveness is found, and conceded:

  I can’t call you from this place

  To hear you say that I’m not your kind

  It’s a thin road before us, we’re the wake left behind

  It’s sad and I fail to see what it had to do with you and me

  But I guess that’s like wondering what’s a point to a line

  There must be something I wanted more than wanting your love

  ’Cause you stood in my doorway and I stood in my glove

  Most afraid to follow, a kingdom my stride

  It’s so telling what won’t live with hunger and pride

  I thought of you often but I never could tell you

  The “you” that I cherished, something hurt me so bad

  A few had come close, I couldn’t take them in either

  I guess the distance between us was my love never had

  And though we live separate I keep two rooms open

  One has you in it, the other does not

  And I move in the middle, unsure and protected

  And I trip on my rope, vaguely sensing I’m caught

  True story. Your lyrics are now our peace offering to each other.

  So. Thank you for reading this, Ferron. Thank you for loving me enough to pick up that phone. Thank you for not standing in your glove.

  I know that the heart that crafted those lyrics is a loving and changeable one.

  It’s a heart that I cherish, and that I will not ever give up on.

  I also promise to always come to the table ready to listen.

  With love and respect,

  Ivan

  8.

  EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED

 

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