[Wamvan] Girl Meets Boy Re: Transgender rights activism in Canada

[Meenakshi Mannoe]

Hi all!!

Just read this article on thetyee.ca


 Girl Meets Boy
I always wondered how my transgender friends Amy and Gavin dealt with
love, sex, surgery -- everything, really. So I invited them for
dinner. First of two.

By: By Ryan Elias, 20 October 2011, TheTyee.ca

View full article and comments:
http://thetyee.ca/Life/2011/10/20/Transgender-Friends/

[Editor's note: Today on the Tyee, sit in on reporter Ryan Elias's
curry dinner with friends Amy and Gavin, two individuals with many
stories to share about being transgender. Tomorrow, hear more from
their conversation in the second half of this two-part series.]

Kadie Somers was a classic tomboy; when she was eight she asked her
mother for a Nick Carter bowl-cut and was horrified to get a Winona
Ryder pixie instead.

Her first inkling that she might be gay came when she was 12 and
discovered that she was far more interested in kissing her best friend
than her boyfriend. For many years thereafter she figured that if the
shoe fit, she might as well run in it, but the "lesbian" label never
felt entirely comfortable.

Shayne had dyed-black hair that flopped over one eye, thick-framed
rectangular glasses and a close-cropped goatee. Kadie met him more
than once before she learned he was transgendered. It got her
thinking. She asked him for some of his time.

It was the fall of 2006. She was 19 years old and studying stagecraft
at New Westminster's Douglas College. She got to school long before
dawn, left well after dark. Weekends were more aspiration than
reality.

She and Shayne ended up sitting knee to knee on a piano bench in a
practice room closet in the college's music wing. He did most of the
talking, about who he was and how he lived, about hormone therapy and
identity. She listened. A light came on.

"All this conflicting stuff in my head, my attempts to turn off my own
gender, the unwanted attention I got as a girl, it all kind of slid
together and I could see that there might be a way through it."

That Halloween, Kadie bound her breasts for the first time, inked on
fake stubble, and felt totally comfortable. When she graduated the
following April, she changed her name so that it would be reflected on
her passport.

"I came to realize that basically, I could be whoever I wanted to be,"
says Gavin.

Wake-up call

Amy Fox remembers when she decided to take the first step away from
the male body she felt trapped in.

Four years ago, on her 26th birthday, she awoke to the everyday
cacophony of trucks clattering down to the port of Vancouver. An
industrial bakery around the corner pumped out a thick doughnut smell
that mostly masked the diesel-stench of the street, but there was
nowhere in the neighbourhood to purchase any sort of pastry.

Home was a narrow room on the second floor with chipped white walls
and an off-grey carpet; bed was a twin mattress on the floor in the
corner. The apartment's water-heater took up most of the closet,
leaving scant room for her bulky and oversized clothing. Sketches
adorned the walls and art projects lay piled around the edges of the
room alongside books borrowed from Simon Fraser University's Out On
Campus.

"There was a hell of a view," Amy says. "At night you could see the
lights of the cranes blinking in the fog."

It was the self-imposed deadline for a decision. But she'd known what
that decision had to be since two in the morning, 59 days earlier. "I
had pretty much figured it out, but I was looking for someone to tell
me I was wrong."

No one had. She called the clinic at SFU and booked an appointment.

Today, her only regret is that she didn't do it sooner.

"People should get to be who they say they are," Amy says -- a
statement remarkably simple in its construction and loaded in its
implications.

He, she, they, zhim

One recent evening, I invited Amy and Gavin over for dinner to delve
into those implications.

"People should get to be who they say they are," Amy was saying. "So I
prefer that people use 'Amy' and feminine pronouns even when they're
talking about things I did before transition."

Deliberate use of a transgendered person's previous name and pronoun
is a common tactic to undermine their gender identities, she adds.

"I see what you're getting at, but I don't mind 'Kadie' for when I
really was Kadie," Gavin replies. "It's still a part of who I am and
I'm comfortable with it bubbling up now and then. Back when I was
first experimenting with ambiguity, I didn't even really mind 'she.'
But I found that if I let people get away with that, it was the only
pronoun they'd ever use. So I started enforcing 'they' with my
friends, and I accept 'he' from strangers."

The pronoun this article would use for Gavin ended up being a point of
some contention. I was convinced that the awkward sentence
construction around "they" would muddle readers. Despite having a
marked preference for "they," Gavin was receptive to this line of
thinking. But Amy was adamant and ultimately persuasive: how can one
write an article about a transgendered person's right to
self-identification, while simultaneously ignoring that identity for
the convenience of hypothetical readers? These issues are
intrinsically challenging, she said, why not carry that through in the
writing?

"I also like 'zhim,' but almost nobody ever uses it," Gavin says,
laughing, and stands to get seconds.

I find "they" much easier to parse than "zhim" or any of the many
other recently invented gender-neutral pronouns. We'll run with it.

Introducing two old friends

Gavin is one of those people who's long and lean in a way that makes
them look taller than they are. They've got the smirking, laid-back
geniality of Jim Stark on a good day, only aided by the startling
resemblance they can bear in the right light to James Dean. Amy is a
more contained sort of person, with an inward facing posture and a
habit of looking down when she smiles. It's an obvious comparison, but
she really does look quite a bit like Ellen Degeneres.

She's butch, the sort of woman who can work a tanktop or a welding
torch but looks most at ease in a well-fitted suit. Gavin tends
towards tight T-shirts and relaxed-fit jeans. They have almost
identical haircuts, short and spiky.

I met Gavin, as Kadie, in 2005. Montreal-born, she had moved to
Vancouver the year before. Today, Gavin is a stage technician and
rigger, a profession that carries its own lessons in transience, in
which they construct unlikely cathedrals of iron bars, devising
ingenious mechanisms and theatrical illusions, and tear them all down
weeks later. In the theatre and festival circuits, thankfully, their
gender identity has rarely been an issue. They sing and play guitar at
open-mic nights around the city with a rough collection of like-minded
musicians.

Amy and I met in an improv troupe almost a decade ago. She was
introduced to me as an 'evil genius,' and the label fits. Though
unassuming in demeanour, she's frighteningly intelligent and
aggressively contrary. She always has at least two or three schemes on
the go, any one of which may be an elaborate joke or deadly serious.

Since I've known her, she's acquired a handful of academic
credentials, run twice for office as a protest candidate at SFU and
once as the B.C. Rhinoceros Party's MLA candidate for Burquitlam. When
she ran seriously for SFU's student government in 2006 and 2007 as an
out transsexual, she won both times and played an integral role in the
university's ongoing, unprecedented and hotly contested withdrawal
from the Canadian Federation of Students. Today, she runs a small
metalworking business, and is planning a bid for Vancouver city
council under the League of Tomorrow slate. Next September, she'll
start shooting a trans sitcom called The Switch.

Gavin and Amy knew of each other, but hadn't really spoken before
tonight. So when I brought them together in my apartment in East
Vancouver and sat them down with a vegan chickpea curry, it didn't
take much to get them talking. Amy is perched on a rubberwood stool at
one end of the bar-height table in my kitchen, leaning forward over
her food to punctuate her words with quick, bird-like gestures. Meal
inhaled, Gavin sprawls back, apparently comfortably, across two stools
and a windowsill.

KNOW YOUR TERMINOLOGY
Transgender: A label theoretically applicable to anybody who does not
fit into an orthodox male or female gender box. However, some people
who might broadly be included in this category, including drag queens
and heterosexual transvestites, may not self-identify as such.

Transsexual: A person whose gender identity conflicts with that which
they were assigned at birth. There is currently contention as to how
"transsexual" and "transgender" interrelate, with some assuming that a
"transsexual" is one whose sexual identity and presentation fall
within the "normal" spectrum. This is a semantic push resisted by
those, including the subjects of this article, whose gender
presentation is unconventional but who still feel that essential
estrangement from the gender they were assigned at birth.

Transsexual man, or FTM man: A person who has changed gender, and now
identifies and presents as male (also: transsexual woman, or MTF
woman).

Cissexual: A person who has conventional male or female sexual
characteristics and has not altered them.

Cisgender: A label applied to those who do fit into the conventional
categories of male or female, and whose gender identities are
relatively static.

Cis man: A "normal" man, who was considered male at birth and
continues to identify as male and present as masculine (also: cis
woman).

Intersexed: A person born with sexual characteristics the medical
systems labels atypical. This includes variant combinations of sex
chromosomes, genitals and internal anatomy that show a mix of orthodox
male and female characteristics. Many intersexed people are
"corrected" at birth to one sex or the other, and it is not uncommon
later in life for them to feel that this early guess as to their adult
gender identity was in error.

Genderfucked: A person whose gender identity or presentation is
complex and unconventional.
What they're up against

Having to get on your loved ones' case about pronoun use sits pretty
low on the list of transgendered difficulties. Because so many live
under the radar and so little research has been done, precise data is
hard to find, but it's clear that trans people, especially those who
change from male to female, are substantially poorer and far more
likely to be the victims of violent crime than the cisgendered.

("Cis," by the way, is the opposite of "trans." So where a transsexual
woman is someone who has transitioned towards a feminine body, a
cissexed woman is someone in a conventionally sexed woman's body who
feels comfortable there. A "normal" woman, if you will. "Cisgendered"
means conventionally gendered, whereas "transgendered" refers to
someone who breaks gender norms, whether or not they've changed their
sex.)

Being transgendered can make you a target for hate crimes. The
best-known example is probably that of Brandon Teena, whose 1993 rape
and murder by acquaintances who found out he was trans was the subject
of the Kimberly Peirce film Boys Don't Cry, but there have been
innumerable others since.

Amy points out that different risk factors intersect: transsexuals are
more likely to be poor, especially those that are disabled or of
colour. Poverty drives people to the sex trade.

"Sex work is the only thing that your trans status makes you more
rather than less qualified for. But if you're a transsexual
streetwalker, society says you're basically a disposable human being,"
she says.

Caucasian children of privilege, both Gavin and Amy have had it easy
compared to other trans people, and they know it. Additionally, both
pass well: Amy is usually perceived as a butch, cissexed woman, Gavin
as a young cissexed man or a teenager of ambiguous gender. Neither has
ever been the victim of a serious hate crime, but both are used to
petty acts of inconsideration. It's often based in uncertainty more
than active hostility; many people simply don't know how to act around
someone whose gender they can't tell.

Tranny bladder blues

Public washrooms are ground zero for this sort of confrontation.

The choice between the men's and the women's presents an opportunity
for strangers to register their unease with your gender, Amy says.
Since she mostly passes as butch, she's had it easier than more
visible transsexuals. But still, she's been glared at and told to
leave, had women step out of the washroom, look pointedly at the sign,
and then re-enter to stand around and wait pointedly for her to finish
up. Once a woman even followed her out of a bathroom and down the
hall, telling her repeatedly that she had to use the men's.

"But I assure you ma'am, I'm a woman," is all she could think to say back.

Gavin says men tend not to make eye contact in the washroom, so they
don't run into as much trouble. But as a person with female genitalia,
they're sometimes made pressingly aware that being noticed as trans in
the wrong situation can carry terrible consequences.

Last year, Gavin was in Mexico at the Coco Bongo club in Cancun. The
washrooms were in the basement, and being in a foreign country, Gavin
decided to play it safe and use the women's. Heading back downstairs
later in the evening, they found bouncers posted in front of both
doors. When Gavin took a step towards the women's they brusquely
directed them through the other door. The men's room, they found, was
a long narrow rectangle, very crowded, and the only facility was a
tiled trough around the edge of the room. Though they had a pee-spoon
with them (a device to help people with female genitalia pee standing
up), in a room full of drunk men they felt suddenly conspicuous and
vulnerable, so hunched briefly in a corner of the room and retreated,
bladder still full.

"That's called 'tranny-bladder,'" Amy interjects.

Increasingly desperate, when the bouncers tried to turn them away
later, they lifted their shirt and pulled down their breast-binder.
The bouncers let them past.

"They didn't care about my ID, so I figured it was lift my shirt or
drop my pants," Gavin says.

"That was the best pee of my life."

Getting a vagina

Of course, it's not just washrooms. Even outwardly, welcoming
communities can carry hidden snags.

"I was volunteering for this queer women's event," Amy says, "And I
remember being told that 'we support our transgendered brothers and
sisters, but this is a women's event.' By which they meant they
reserved the right to eject transsexual women."

There's a breed of second-wave feminism, she says, which is
particularly hostile to trans people, the intersexed, kink, and
sex-trade workers.

"One I hear a lot from that sort of crowd is that 'real women bleed.'
Well, I bled for a year and a half," she says with a sharp wave of her
fork.

We laugh, but she's not exaggerating.

Amy underwent a facial bone shave in Boston in 2008, and a
vaginoplasty in Montreal in 2009. Her mother, Eleanor Fox, went with
her on both trips.

"I did it to be there and look after her and care for her and support
her, but I think I learned a great deal in the process," Eleanor, a
retired nurse-therapist, told me over the phone from Kelowna. "I had a
chance to meet several other transgendered people then, and the
recovery house in Montreal was fantastic for me."

The facial bone shave, one type of facial feminization surgery,
reduced the jaw and brow bone deposits left by male puberty while
lowering her hairline. It came with a battery of other minor, related
procedures, and was relatively trouble-free.

The same can't be said for her genital surgery. As you might imagine,
it's a pretty invasive procedure, where "skin is cut up and
reconfigured. Some is turned into a mucous membrane, some is thrown
out." Even when everything goes well, recovery is long and painful.

"It's fucking vile," Amy says, grinning. "You're so swollen up, it's
like you’re wearing a gigantic soggy diaper made out of your own
tissue. There's lots of mucus and blood-clots the size of flattened
pinecones."

Gavin, who's squeamish, puts down their fork. I've got a more
resilient stomach, but in any case am busily taking notes.

The doctors left a stent in her at first, to prevent her new vagina
from prolapsing or collapsing, along with a catheter. Once the stent
came out, she had to start dilating with a "hard plastic dildo-looking
thing" to keep herself from shrinking or sealing up.

"That sounds kind of exciting, but it's actually really boring," Amy says.

For the first two weeks after the operation, she had to dilate five
times a day for a total of two hours. For the month after that, four
times a day, three times a day for the month after that, and so on.
Today she dilates about once a week for half an hour, a routine she'll
keep for the rest of her life.

For Amy, the process started to go awry as she was healing.

"I call it my mutant healing factor," she says. She's always healed
quickly. But in this case she was also improperly stitched back
together. "My upper labia sealed shut over my clit."

She scheduled a follow-up surgery at UBC Hospital, but due to lack of
funding for trans medicine, she says, she ended up waiting almost a
year. The surgery took place in an operating room without stirrups, so
she was forced to hold a "yoga position, feet together and knees off
the side of the table" for two hours. Even worse, it turned out that
the wait between identifying the problem and correcting it had been
too long; her clitoris had died.

There's a further surgery that might help repair the damage, but it
would require another trip to Montreal and probably won't accomplish
much, she says.

Before she started hormone therapy, Amy had sperm frozen. She's open
to being a biological parent if her partner is willing. Or she might
donate the sperm to a friend.

"When you think about it, you're actually more usefully fertile than
you were before," Gavin says. "You can impregnate someone whenever you
want, but never by accident."

Hormones and windsor ties

Modern medicine has yet to come up with a really satisfying way to
build a penis; trans men can be penetrative or orgasmic, but usually
not both. Gavin's decision to forgo genital surgery entirely is common
even for those who live entirely as men.

"Even if there was a way to get a fully functional penis, I don't
think I'd be considering it. I just don't feel like I'd get enough out
of it to be worth all that trouble, pain and risks."

Similarly, though they bind their breasts full-time, they haven't
decided yet if they'll have them removed.

I ask them what they have to say to people who question their gender
identity because they haven't done much medically to change their sex,
or those who question their decision to try and settle somewhere in
the middle.

"My gender identity is what I say it is, nobody can argue with that,"
they say. "It's got nothing to do with hormones or surgery. All those
can do is help me find a body that feels right."

Gavin's family doctor "has trouble even saying vagina," so they've
been going to the Trans Health unit at Ravensong Community Health
Centre in Vancouver. The staff is good but wait-times can be long.

Because Gavin has been living masculine for years already, they had
little difficulty getting the centre to approve them for a light
course of testosterone, or "T." They're still on the fence as to
whether they'll go ahead with it, though.

If they do, the T will most likely stop the hips that have lately
begun to develop on their, let's say it, boyish frame. It will also
reduce their breasts.

"I like my breasts," Gavin says. "But they'd be nicer on someone else.
And I'd like to be able to go topless at the beach without being
stared at."

"I'm really not into the idea of breasts with chest hair," they add, grimacing.

It may also render them infertile, though trans men who don't have
genital reassignment surgery are sometimes still able to bear
children. Though Gavin would like to have children some day, they're
willing to leave it to fate whether they will bear their own or adopt.

It's not the risk of hairy breasts or loss of fertility that's
worrying them, though. When they start taking T their body will begin
to undergo changes similar to male puberty, and there's a real risk to
their singing voice.

"Puberty hits the vocal chords hard at any age," they say. "But at 23
with my vocal chords already formed it's not going to be easy. That
scares me sometimes... Right now I'm focusing on being the person I
want to be without medical assistance."

But they would like a pair of sideburns and a real version of the
stubbly beard they've been known to painstakingly apply with mascara.
Even neckbeard and the prospect of a receding hairline appeal.

"It didn't used to bother me at all, but as I get older I'm less and
less interested in being mistaken for a teenage boy," they say.

Amy laughs, she gets the same thing all the time. Memorably, she was
once mistaken for her date's teenage son.

"I was five months younger than her," she says.

"People are just looking for a box to put you in," Gavin says. "I get
almost everything, from butch lesbian to underage boyfriend. A lot of
it depends on who I'm with and where I am."

Amy has similar experiences: "In queer circles, I'm often asked if
I've started T yet," she says. "They think I'm a female-to-male early
in transition."

Amy could, of course, grow her hair long and wear only frilly pink
dresses to avoid a lot of this confusion. But though she's a girl,
she's not interested in being hyper-feminine. She'd rather be butch or
androgynous. Communicating this used to require a constant balancing
act, as she couldn't just throw on an oversized pair of men's jeans
without looking male. Today she has more leeway, and prefers clothing
in men's styles made and cut for women.

"I didn't learn how to tie a windsor until about a year into
transition," she says.

"I think I learned in high-school," Gavin replies.

They walk a similar line with clothing, aspiring to be "androgynous,
but from a male perspective." Of course, society in any case really
doesn't have a male equivalent to the frilly pink dress. But they find
that if they wear baggy or ill-fitted clothing it ends up making them
look like a teenage boy or worse, a woman in men’s clothing.

So it's obvious then that gender is about much more than genitals.
Clothing has far more bearing on how a person is perceived day-to-day.
Voice and speech patterns are also key, and many trans people get
vocal coaching to help change their speech habits. Body language can
be especially difficult to change. But gender leaves its mark on a
great many less obvious activities as well.

Tomorrow: Amy and Gavin talk sex, families, and facing criticism.

Ryan Elias is a freelance writer in Vancouver. He wishes to express
his thanks: "As well as agreeing to be one of its subjects, Amy Fox
was extremely generous with her time during the composition of this
article, acting as first reader and technical editor through its many
drafts. Thanks, Amy, this would have been incomparably more difficult
without your help."