Gender Failure

Ivan Coyote, Rae Spoon

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781551525365
• eBook ISBN: 9781551525372
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Being a girl was something that never really happened for me." —Rae Spoon

Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon are accomplished, award-winning writers, musicians, and performers; they are also both admitted "gender failures." In their first collaborative book, Ivan and Rae explore and expose their failed attempts at fitting into the gender binary, and how ultimately our expectations and assumptions around traditional gender roles fail us all.

Based on their acclaimed 2012 live show that toured across the United States and in Europe, Gender Failure is a poignant collection of autobiographical essays, lyrics, and images documenting Ivan and Rae's personal journeys from gender failure to gender enlightenment. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, it's a book that will touch LGBTQ readers and others, revealing, with candor and insight, that gender comes in more than two sizes.

Ivan E. Coyote is the author of six story collections and the award-winning novel Bow Grip, and is co-editor of Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. Ivan frequently performs at high schools, universities, and festivals across North America.

Rae Spoon is a transgender indie musician whose most recent CD is My Prairie Home, which is also the title of a new National Film Board of Canada documentary about them. Rae's first book, First Spring Grass Fire, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2013.

This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

Man Failure, Part 1

Micah, a friend of mine, was the supervisor at the gas station I worked at during and after high school. One afternoon I walked in with my too-big blue uniform shirt untucked over my black cargo pants, and he already looked amused. Usually I had to crack a joke or trip over something to see that glow in his eyes.

“A lady came in today,” he said.

“Yeah?” I grunted.

“She said that she came in yesterday and got her oil checked. She needed a quart of oil and we put one in.”

I stayed silent and shifted my weight.

“Anyways, she was pretty pissed off. Said she was served by a young man with a shaved head. Said he put a quart of oil in, but left the cap off her oil tank. Her whole engine was covered in the stuff by the time she got home.”

I kept my hands close to my sides, trying to not run them through my quarter-inch long hair. “That sucks,” I said, not owning up to my mistake.

“Well, the manager gave her a coupon to have her engine shampooed. Pretty expensive stuff. She can’t figure out which member of the staff it was, though. We don’t have any boys working here that match that description.” He struggled to finish without laughing, and our eyes met in acknowledgment. We both knew that I was the boy who messed up that engine, but the manager would have been too embarrassed to acknowledge it or point it out. I don’t know if I’ve ever been as grateful for my legal status as female as at that moment, or for the stigma of pointing out that I was being mistaken for a male.

Micah didn’t rat me out to the manager. I kept my job and went on to make a lot of other mistakes, servicing cars and sometimes being asked if I was old enough to work there when the legal working age in Alberta at the time was fourteen. I was sometimes seen as a boy before I ever felt like I was allowed to say I was one. People just thought I was, and I wouldn’t argue to save time. Or, maybe I liked it as long as it didn’t get too awkward. I was sure I’d find answers when I had the chance to meet more gay people. I couldn’t wait to turn eighteen so I could go to gay and lesbian bars. Maybe I might discover a place where I fit in.

I had found out about the lesbian bar in Calgary from a queer singer-songwriter I’d met at open mic night at a café downtown, and I had scrawled down the information on the back of a handbill, which I saved for when I was old enough to use it. At the end of January, two weeks after turning eighteen, I stood in the line outside of Rooks breathing into my scarf to keep warm and clutching my plastic learner’s license in my hand, hidden from the cold in the sleeve of my coat. I brought Micah and my gay friend Steve because I was scared of going alone. The bouncer eyed my ID a bit longer than the others’, but then she just shrugged and let us in. Inside, the heat of the place hit us and my glasses immediately fogged up. When I wiped them off and put them back on, I saw that it was a well-lit, wood-panelled pub. There were booths along the walls, and half of them were full of women seated or standing in front of them. There were women standing, and some perched on stools along the bar too. Some of them were wearing dresses and some were wearing men’s clothes like me. My heart jumped a bit. We went to the bar, ordered a pitcher of Canadian with three glasses, and settled down in a free booth. “So what do we do now?” asked Micah.

“I don’t know,” I said. I hadn’t really thought about how I was supposed to meet people here, and no one had looked at us since we came in besides the bouncer and the bartender. It slowly dawned on me that I had no plan whatsoever. I had pictured the lesbians at the bar recognizing me for what I was and welcoming us to hang out with them at one of the tables. This was clearly not the way things were done around there, so I settled in and waited.

After twenty minutes of staring at Micah and Steve in silence, I noticed a sign over a descending staircase that read, “Rooks Club.” Our beers were half gone, so I poured the rest of the pitcher to top up our glasses. “Hey, dudes. Let’s go downstairs.”

Steve shrugged so we all stood up and shuffled down the staircase. A thumping beat became more pronounced as we descended. At the bottom of the stairs, there was a door that led into a dark room at the end of a brightly lit hall. As we stepped inside, all of the balled-up lint on our winter sweaters started to glow. Micah smiled when he realized it was due to the black light, and his teeth lit up blue. The music was overpowering techno; with a robotic voice, the Daft Punk song played: “Around the world, around the world. Around the world.” There were only two people there besides us, a woman with glowing plastic eyebrow rings, who was DJing, and her friend with bright pink hair who was leaning across the table shouting in her ear. “I’m not so sure about this room either,” I yelled at Micah.

He leaned over to Steve and asked, “Do you want to go to the washroom together?”

Steve nodded. That’s when I realized that they were the only men in the bar.

“I’m going outside to smoke. It’s too hot in here,” I said to them as they headed to the other side of the dark room where a washroom sign was lit up.

I walked up the stairs feeling defeated, not sure that I was ever going to meet new lesbians. I had been having a hard time since my break-up with my first girlfriend the summer after high school. I had found her through what felt like luck, but ever since it seemed like my luck had run out. I zipped up my coat and pushed open the back door to the alley. I fished a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it, exhaling upwards toward the night sky. Suddenly a woman with dyed purple hair came out of the bar. She leaned on the wall near me, and asked, “What’s your name? I think I saw you sing at one of those bars downtown.”

“Rae,” I said. “I’ve been playing a bunch of open stages.”

Then she asked, without telling me her name, “Do you know those guys who were in the bar tonight?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s Micah and Steve. They’re my best friends.”

“I’m a separatist, and I don’t appreciate men being here,” she said coolly.

I squinted quizzically at her. She seemed to be from Alberta, not Québec, Canada’s francophone province whose population often wants to separate from the rest of the country. I had never met a Québecois separatist before, but I remembered the referendum when I was younger. The context didn’t really make a lot of sense to me. Luckily for me, she continued before I asked her any questions.

“You know ... like a separatist from men? I have no use for men in my life and anyone who does isn’t welcome here. It’s not feminist.”

Was that why a lot of the women at Rooks had been so cold to me and my friends? Because they didn’t like men? I liked Micah and Steve a lot, and I couldn’t really see the difference between us or how their being men would be a bad thing, even if I was a lesbian. I started to feel a lot colder than it was outside. “I gotta go,” I said to her, and stomped out my cigarette butt in the snow. I pulled the door open and found Micah and Steve inside, backed into one of the corners by the pool tables, chatting uneasily. They must have gone back upstairs while I was smoking. Quietly, Steve said to me, “I don’t think that Micah and I are very welcome here. I’m gay, but not the right kind of gay, I think.”

“I know,” I said. “I don’t really want to hang out anywhere where we aren’t all welcome. Let’s get out of here.”

Micah drove us back to the suburbs in his old car, and we played pool in the pub a few blocks from where we lived. I felt more at home there than I had at Rooks. We went there all the time. It was pretty much like every other night we had spent together since we had become friends: staving off the boredom with jokes, and drinking until our jokes became funnier. Steve and I talked about how we were unsure if either of us would ever find someone to date again. The gay bars he had gone to had not been much friendlier. “I don’t think they would let you in to some of them,” he said.

I knew that being friends with Micah and Steve was more important than getting a thousand phone numbers on little pieces of paper at Rooks. I had failed at that lesbian bar by bringing men with me, but I felt that my friends knew me as well as I could expect anyone to. I was glad that we had all ended up together in the end.

Thirteen Inches, Uncut

I was so nervous, the secretary at the reception desk looked at me with softening eyes and told me everything was going to be okay. I had barely spoken to her, but it was just that obvious, I guess.

First of all, it didn’t feel like there was any possible way this could really be happening. Nineteen years of binding my breasts, even more years trying not to hate them, a psychologist’s appointment, a psychiatrist’s appointment, a psychological assessment, two doctor’s appointments, several letters back and forth between doctors and shrinks and bureaucrats, phone calls, more phone calls, twenty months since I had actually cranked the whole machine into gear, and here I was. Meeting the surgeon. He was fourteen minutes late. But who was counting?

He was handsome and tanned in January, and his assistant was tall, blonde, and wearing grey leather stiletto boots. Looked pretty much like what I thought a cosmetic surgeon and his assistant would look like, not that I had ever spent much time wondering. I have to fill out forms, of course, no I don’t smoke or have hemophilia, and no, my religion does not forbid me to have a blood transfusion. The letterhead on the forms is for a cosmetic surgery clinic. I am reminded that most people think that is what this is. Elective. Cosmetic. Unnecessary. My period is due today. My tits are at their biggest, and most tender. I can feel the binder pinching under my arms where it does.

Turns out the doctor and I both studied music at a small community college together in the late eighties. I do not remember him, and he would not recognize me. I ask him if he studied jazz piano just in case this whole cosmetic surgeon thing didn’t work out for him, you know, so he had something to fall back on. I make jokes like that sometimes when I am nervous.

He asks me a lot of questions. Why am I not on testosterone? Do I intend to go on testosterone in the future? What do I want my chest to look like when he is done? Do I care more about what my chest looks like, or whether or not I will be able to feel my nipples afterwards? I tell him a little of both. This surprises him. He tells me it is mostly only women who care about nipple sensation after surgery, and that most trans men only care that they have a masculine appearing chest after. He looks at his assistant, is she gettin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Ivan: Introduction
• Rae: Introduction
• Ivan: Girl Failure
• Rae: Girl Failure
• Ivan: Rosie
• Rae: God Failure
• Ivan: Listing My Sisters
• Rae: Cowboy
• Ivan: The Rest of My Chest
• Rae: Prairie Gender
• Ivan: Gender Identity Interview for Adults (FtM)
• Rae: Man Failure, Part 1
• Ivan: Thirteen Inches, Uncut
• Rae: Man Failure, Part 2
• Ivan: Top Surgery
• Rae: My Body Is a Spaceship
• Ivan: Messages to Lynn
• Rae: How to Be a Transgender Country Singer
• Ivan: Invested
• Rae: YouTube Gender
• Ivan: Dear Family
• Rae: How to Be a Transgender Indie Rocker
• Ivan: A Cautionary Tale
• Rae: How to Be Gay When the Gays Won’t Have You
• Ivan: Many Moons
• Rae: Drag Failure
• Ivan: Do I Still Call Myself a Butch?
• Rae: How I Got to “They”
• Ivan: The Facilities
• Rae: What Do You Think I Am?
• Ivan: Their, There
• Rae: Touring Success and Touring Failure
• Ivan: Between the Boat and the Dock
• Rae: Stories I Tell Myself and Others (Gender as Narrative)
• Ivan: Danger
• Rae: Gender Retirement
• About the Authors