Oct 04 | Dusk Child, Part 3 (Letters from the Coast)

This is the third entry in a series of four on gender identity and my journey toward claiming my pronouns.

Click here for Part 1 or here for Part 2.

 

PART III. TAKING THE FIRST STEP

Later, I begin to feel more comfortable in my body. I hit grade 12 and buy new clothes. I cut my hair again – not too short, not too long. I wear a black spaghetti strap tank top on class picture day.

It feels like a coup.

Over time, I begin to discover my own style. I don’t feel so awkward in dresses and skirts, although I still prefer pants.

In university I go through a punk phase. A few years after graduation I go through a Goth phase. I purge clothes and gather more.

At a certain point I have to buy “work clothes.” Sometimes I am classically feminine, in flowery dresses and elaborate handmade jewelry. Sometimes I’m butch and wear vests and black lace-up boots. Sometimes I wear makeup. Mostly I don’t. My hair changes year to year as I go through a variety of punk and post-punk styles. For two years I have a buzz cut and I love it.

I marry a beautiful man who loves me and my curves and my music and all of my brokenness and all of my wobbly scraped-together strength, who loves me in dresses and jeans.

Eventually I gain weight from stress, hormones, sedentary jobs and my own tendency to get lost in thought while doing nothing in particular. It makes me even curvier.

It’s so difficult to find clothes that fit. Designers assume that a person of my chest and hip size must be big all over, built like a linebacker or one of those exercise balls people sit on. My breasts grow until I have to buy specialty bras, but my shoulders and back stay small. My hips are wide but my waist is still narrow. I am still an hourglass. Plus-size clothes often hang in odd places or are obnoxiously bright and colourful, as though fat women have somehow waived any right to subtlety and minimalism.

Sometimes I have periods of intensely masculine feelings. I tinker with a fantasy story I’m writing and realize that I don’t know if I’m attracted to my male antagonist or if I want to be him. Sometimes I discover I’ve pitched my voice low and adopted a self-consciously courtly tone with young women. In my head, I sound like my father. The ‘g’s come off the end of my gerunds. I chuckle and make dirty jokes. I want to protect these women, want them to feel safe around me, as though they would have any reason to feel otherwise.

 

Waves of emotion crash over me as I stare at the “ze”. I feel confused by the intensity, but can’t resist it. I run into the chapel and cry silently, still holding onto the paper.

I never even knew I held this kind of power over myself until it was unceremoniously handed to me.

 

I go to seminary. I encounter so many new concepts. I discover the term “genderqueer.” In my dark honeycomb of caves, someone takes my lighter and switches it for a flashlight.

I start to use the term. Most of the people around me have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m asked to explain it before I even fully know what it means myself.

A few years later, I discover the term “nonbinary.”

Now I don’t just have a flashlight in the dark.

Now I have a map.