Me, Myself, They Read online

  Copyright © 2019 Joshua M. Ferguson

  Published in Canada in 2019 and the USA in 2019 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Me, myself, they: life beyond the binary / Joshua M. Ferguson.

  Names: Ferguson, Joshua M., 1982– author

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2018904957X, Canadiana (ebook) 20189049588

  ISBN 9781487004774 (softcover), ISBN 9781487004781 (EPUB), ISBN 9781487004798 (Kindle)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ferguson, Joshua M., 1982-, LCSH: Gender nonconformity, LCSH: Gender-nonconforming people

  Classification: LCC HQ77.9 F47 2019, DDC 305.3—dc23[/.;’[];p

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018962108

  Cover and text design: Alysia Shewchuk

  Cover photo: Brendan Meadows

  Typesetting: Laura Brady

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

  For Florian

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Introduction: The Non-Binary Person

  1. The Child

  2. The Fluidity

  3. The Survivor

  4. The Alchemist

  5. The Expression

  6. The Body

  7. The Empath

  8. The Magic

  9. The Geek

  10. The Filmmaker

  11. The Advocate

  12.The Amazon

  13.The Philosopher

  Appendix I: Glossary

  Appendix II: Timeline

  Appendix III: LGBTQ Support Resources

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  This book is made up of my own experiences. I do not speak for the entire trans community, or for all non-binary trans people. Nor do I have all the answers to questions about gender identity and gender expression. These pages contain my opinions. I am not the sole voice, nor am I the sole authority on non-binary gender. There are many powerful and talented trans people out there working to counter our exclusion, erasure, and invisibility. I would not be able to tell the stories in this book without the generations of “transgender warriors” — a naming borrowed from groundbreaking activist and author Leslie Feinberg1 — who have carved visible, physical, and written spaces with their bravery, insight, and talent. We are united under the banner of our identities. But our various perspectives contain many differences; our community is incredibly diverse.

  I acknowledge the limitations and the specificities of my experiences and my perspectives in this book. One such specificity is the automatic privilege afforded to me by being white. Some of the stories told in this book are bound up in this privilege. The specificity of my stories exists, in part, because of this privilege; my voice and many of my stories would not be the same if I were a trans person of colour. So, I give you these stories while also acknowledging the importance of elevating diverse perspectives in our community, especially those of trans people of colour, including non-binary people of colour, Two Spirit people, and Indigenous trans people — voices more marginalized and silenced than my own.

  I look forward to the day when an entire bookshelf of trans memoirs can exist as a testament to our rich and varied stories.

  * * *

  1 Leslie Feinberg (1949–2014) was known for hir novel Stone Butch Blues (1993) and hir non-fiction works Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue (1998) and Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (1996).

  Introduction

  The Non-Binary Person

  Moments after I was born, my mom asked the delivering physician, “What is it?”

  He replied, “It’s a girl!” She named me Kate in that moment before the physician said, in a curious tone, “Oh, wait . . .”

  I like to imagine my parents’ confused faces in that moment. “Oh, wait . . .” what? I don’t blame my parents if they were confused or curious about what the doctor might say next.

  And there I was, as I was supposed to be, without being told who to be, for just a few seconds. But it didn’t last. The confusion passed, and soon the declarations of “It’s a girl!” were replaced with — you guessed it — “It’s actually a boy!”

  “His name is Joshua,” my parents exclaimed proudly.

  And just like that, my sex was assigned, wrapped up neatly and adorned with a blue bow — and all the gender expectations that came with it.

  Looking back, I’m thankful for those few seconds when I existed as the true Joshua — the Joshua that I would return to in my adulthood. The space contained in that ellipsis, those few seconds, is who I am; it was a symbolic moment, a powerful forecast of my future. Thirty years passed before I found that non-binary space again, before I found me again.

  An evolving openness and awareness in discussion of gender and a growing public interest in trans lives is undeniable. The rise of high-profile trans people in the media has helped to elevate trans lives to a mainstream focus. We have become increasingly conscious of the ways in which gender dominates our existence, our identities, and our relationships from birth to death, and even beyond, lingering behind to mark our lives: “What a great man he was”; “What a great woman she was.”

  But what if I’m neither? My life tells a different kind of transition story. I’ve transformed my past to get back to who I was at birth, the person I was meant to be: the child who never felt like a boy or a girl. But this child couldn’t be that person at all. This child grew without voice, presence, or agency; every dehumanizing word, push, punch, spit, threat, assault, and attack forced the essence of me deeper into the margins, and I lost myself for decades until, through trials and strength and self-examination, I was able to reconnect with that essence, beyond the trauma, and bring me back home to myself.

  Me, Myself, They elevates a topic that has only recently begun to receive attention in mainstream discussions of gender: non-binary identity and expression. But the pages in this book aren’t exclusively focused on my non-binary life. My non-binary trans identity is a part of me, a part of me that I lost, but I want to present the wholeness of my identity, my life, and my humanity, beyond the subject of my gender identity and how I express myself. Me, Myself, They is a full-circle story about how I found myself — the lost child within me — and how that made it possible for me to become the person I was meant to be. This book is about the survivor I had to become. It’s about the empathy that emerged from the transformation of my trauma, and the magical alchemy, stretching out across multiple artistic pathways, that I found within myself to harness and reshape my pain and confusion into power.

  Instead of organizing my narrative chronologically, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, I’ve arranged the chapters thematically around different facets of my identity. My stories of the events that made me who I am today — these layers of my identity — are shared willingly, with an open heart. I want to make vital connections, from one human being to another. I believe this connection is what truly matters. I hope an understanding can be reached as you journey through my stories.

  At the very beginning of our lives, we are transformed into human beings: from an “it” to a “boy” or “girl.” For some, this bin
ary sex and gender assignment takes place even before birth on the screen of an ultrasound machine that displays tiny shapes in shadow and light and reveals a girl or boy, to the delight of parents-to-be. And then this discovery is celebrated with family and friends during gender-reveal parties that carve out a baby’s identity before they can even take their first breath. It happens to all of us; all infants are assigned a gender. But this script fails people who do not fit neatly into the binary. Why does gender matter so much at birth?

  Our notions of gender are dependent on both culture and history. Culture makes what we assume about gender seem like an unchanging fact, something we must simply accept. However, the concept of gender is highly variable across many cultures around the world, and our relationship to it has changed over time. This context is key because we come to understand gender, and we express and present gender, from repetitive scripts that are specifically mandated in each culture. These scripts relate to our bodies (usually only two types of bodies) and how we dress them, to our gestures and mannerisms, to our language, our emotions, and our desires. For this reason, we refer to gender as a “socially constructed” concept.

  Sex and gender are generally used interchangeably in our society to mean the same thing. At the same time that a human being is assigned a sex at birth, based almost always and exclusively on their external genitalia, they are also assigned a gender that lines up with that sex. So, for example, many people understand their gender identity (man, woman, non-binary, and so on) to describe both their sex and their gender. And if your assigned sex and gender identity line up according to societal expectations, the term that identifies you is cisgender — that is, if you are assigned male, you are also a man; if you are assigned female, you are also a woman. (You are welcome to visit the glossary on page 243 for a thorough discussion of some of this terminology and other language.) But while the two terms might mean the same thing for many people, sex and gender carry different meanings, highlighting their complexity.

  Sex is determined by a combination of chromosomes, external and internal morphology (genitalia and reproductive organs), and hormones. Yet, physicians assign sex simply based on one part of many sex characteristics. One in every 1,500 people is born intersex — that is, with a variation of chromosomes, hormones, and external and internal morphology that doesn’t match up with the typical definitions of male and female. In Canada, that means roughly twenty-four thousand people, or .6 percent of the population, are born intersex every year. Some intersex people identify as non-binary. Being born with sex characteristics that may not strictly align with male or female chromosomes or external and internal morphology illustrates a diversity of sex that parallels gender diversity.

  In the past, I thought that the distinction between sex and gender was an important one to make — while we are born with a predetermined sex, our expressions of gender were less fixed and more fluid. But transitioning into a body that is marked by non-binary sex characteristics (what could be considered a mix of sex characteristics for my external morphology, and a mixture of hormones) has made me appreciate that sex and gender are really more similar than they are different. Both sex and gender are more fluid than they are fixed. And while conflating sex and gender makes sense for cisgender people, it also makes sense for many of us who don’t neatly fit within a binary notion of bodies and identities. In other words, both sex and gender can be understood as encompassing inclusive, not exclusive, categories.

  Human beings are (supposed to be) the most evolved species on the planet. So, why do we think that we are limited exclusively to a binary? Why have we rejected diversity in favour of simplicity when it comes to gender and sex? Biology in nature is complex. There are species with multiple genders (and sexes, if we accept the conflation). In Evolution’s Rainbow, evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden argues that in nature there are many species that exhibit a wide spectrum of gender diversity, including many species of fish (bluegill sunfish have three sexes), kangaroos, leopard slugs, American brown and black bears, hummingbirds, and tree lizards. And scientists have reported fungi having over thirty-six thousand sexes. (The fungus world definitely sounds welcoming!) Nature is not limited by the human notion of a binary that stems from culture.

  Why do human beings think that the whole picture of gender is complete with only two options? And why is this idea considered normal? Non-binary people prove, simply by existing, that what our society considers to be “normal” may not be what it seems.

  Non-binary means any identity and expression that doesn’t fit within the two gender and sex options presented to us at birth — that one must be a male/boy or a female/girl. Non-binary gender identity and expression creates space for people to be who they are instead of being told who to be from the moment they are born. Identity is how we conceive of who we are in our mind. Expression, or presentation, is often linked to our identity but not always, and relates to our behaviour, mannerisms, and style of dress. Both our identity and expression are often tied to a dominant cultural script, repeated actions that are habituated as “normal.”

  And non-binary isn’t the only identity that people use to reject the binary notion of gender. Beyond man and woman, many identities and expressions exist, such as, but not limited to, the following Western terms: agender (meaning people who identify without gender), bigender (identifying with two or more genders at the same time), demigender (identifying partially with more than one gender), enby (short form of non-binary), genderfluid (similar to non-binary but implying a fluidity in relation to a person’s gender and sex identification), genderqueer (a term that is similar to but predates non-binary), genderless (similar to agender), neutrois (no gender at all), and gender-nonconforming (short form: gnc).

  People who are neither male nor female have mobilized around non-binary — a word that seems to have emerged in North American and British vernacular around 2014 — to describe gender beyond the binary. But people who identify and express themselves beyond the binary have always existed, and our existence has been marked by many terms in many languages. A multiplicity of genders beyond man and woman exist today, as they have throughout history, in cultures around the world. In Japan today, ekkusu-jendā (x-gender) people identify as an intermediate gender. So-called third genders in China (yinyang ren), Samoa (fa’afafine), the Philippines (bakla), Thailand (kathoey), and Tonga (fakaleiti) have been documented. In North America, historical Indigenous cultures, particularly prior to colonization, included many genders and had specific language to acknowledge gender beyond man and woman. Two Spirit is an identity used today by some Indigenous people who may not identify with binary gender; not all Two Spirit people identify beyond the binary, and people can identify as Two Spirit in relation to their gender or sexuality or both. In South Asia, hijra commonly describes people who identify as a third gender; the existence of hijra has been acknowledged for thousands of years, and, in India, their community received legal recognition in 2014.

  But how does non-binary relate to the term transgender? Is a non-binary person also transgender? Transgender — and the terms trans and trans people — generally designates people whose sex assigned at birth (male or female) does not match up with their gender identity as a man or woman. Some non-binary and gender-nonconforming people identify as trans or transgender while others don’t.

  But what does that mean? How do I understand my identity? What challenges do I face? What does my daily life look like as a non-binary person? How do I engage with my body and my sexuality? What inspires me, and what has enabled me to find myself? And why can’t I just identify with one gender, male or female? Why can’t I just be “normal”? Am I “normal”? Are any of us “normal”? So many questions, I know . . . but I found myself while trying to answer these questions.

  Non-binary: a gender identity and gender expression that isn’t exclusively female/woman or male/man. Some non-binary people identify as multiple genders (for example, man and non-binary or a non-b
inary woman), one gender, or no gender at all. It’s an identity that is open to anyone who feels included by its meaning, which may shift with time to continue to be inclusive.

  The “born in the wrong body” narrative about trans people that is often reported in the media does not encapsulate my story. I was not born in the wrong body. I was born into a culture that has a narrow understanding of how bodies determine sex and gender for life.

  I am neither a man nor a woman. My body and my sex are constantly shifting. As such, my transition story might be new to you. For me, transition is not a linear, one-way direction with a beginning, middle, and end. I will likely never arrive at the end of my transition. There hasn’t been a death and rebirth during transition. Rather, my gender is fluid. My sexed body shifts with my gender identity and expression. So, instead of transition, implying an end, I prefer the term transitioning. I am always going to be transitioning, never fully transitioned, because being non-binary for me is about allowing myself to be free to be who I am.

  You might be reading this book because you have questions about my gender, your identity, or the identity of people you know. You might be confused, curious, or even a little afraid. But fear not, you hold power while you read this book. I will always be here in these pages, in these words. I ask only one thing of you: meet me with empathy. We are all growing, learning, and trying to be who we are in the face of pervasive fear and division. We can come together through our shared humanity — our uniqueness can also be our sameness, and it can unite us.

  I want to paint a horizon of hope with my story. I want us to begin to understand that human diversity is neither a weakness, a threat, nor a fiction. Our diversity is a gift, and it is an undeniable reality.

  The act of storytelling is a powerful practice in many cultures around the world. It is in the act of my storytelling, both with my own stories and the stories of others, that I have come to know more about myself. Now in my thirties, after decades of confusion and fear, I have reclaimed, from my early childhood, my gender-creative self. The connections between who I am and the person I’ve always been are now clear to me, and I want to share this feeling of freedom with you, now situated fully in my reality.