January 24th, 2022
From the North Cascades: I worked here as a Mountain School Instructor. Each day we would have a new group of 5th graders on our campus. They were split into trail groups named after animals, the green banana slugs, purple wolves, orange ravens, red salmon, and blue bears. We picked groups ahead of time in staff meetings.
I was fuming. The kind of anger that you know in your bones is irrational and misdirected, but you simply don’t have time for reason.
We were picking trail groups, and suddenly it was about gender. It was the most trivial thing in the world, but I’d be damned if Matt got the Blue Bears (again). He’d laid some sort of claim to the Bears, and to me it seemed like a glaring metaphor for toxic masculinity.
It was Trans Day of Visibility, and I was done letting cis men take up all the space. I’d gone through life making myself smaller and more polite, taking up as little space as possible. Legs crossed, hand raised, a smile glued on my face to make other people feel comfortable.
Don’t play the trans music, skip over the gender topics, don’t mention that something felt transphobic. They didn’t mean it, they had good intentions, they just don’t know.
I had twisted and filtered and diminished myself down to this version of existing that could be deemed normal. That protected other people’s feelings at the cost of my own. I agreed and went along, didn’t have an opinion.
But not today. I pulled the it’s-my-birthday card and took the Blue Bears.
It felt like a victory for marginalized voices everywhere.
He’d been misgendering me several times a week, unconsciously and by accident without even noticing. He was loud. He made sweeping declarations about pineapple on pizza and breakfast for dinner.
The whole world would fall silent and listen with the utmost respect to even his most trivialized opinions. Or at least, that was how my brain framed it.
I was keenly aware of the tone of his voice compared to mine, how I had to consciously try to make the inflection drop at the end of my sentences. To try not to let my pitch get too high. To change the words I’d been socialized to use in the hopes of avoiding the inevitable “she”.
“She”. The word came out of his mouth again, and I was no longer a part of the conversation. I’d even dressed more masculine that day. Men’s pants. Men’s shirt. My legs weren’t crossed. My hair was short. I stared absentmindedly at the people still talking around me, still talking like nothing had happened.
What else could I do? I tried to push away the feeling – sometimes the “she’s” don’t bother me much, other times it’s like getting punched in the face.
At least I pulled off the backwards baseball cap better than he did.
I typed up the words and stared at them on my phone. The words that said he was misgendering me, that it wasn’t my job to correct him, that it needed to get better.
It was raining outside. I stared out the sliding glass doors onto the blanket of green. Something was tight in my chest and tears caught in my throat. This wasn’t the first time I’d tried asking someone to do better.
Those messages still hung without a response. No explanation, just messages left unanswered and my own head racking my brain to figure out if I did something wrong.
I looked back at my phone. What did I have to lose, really. This was a stranger. Someone I’d work with for the next month and then probably never see again. So what if he blacklisted me for saying he messed up.
I don’t know what I expected to happen. I sat there wondering if I was being too much of a “snowflake”. Maybe I just needed to figure out a way to deal with it. To go back to taking up less space.
Two weeks later.
I sit across from Matt planning a lesson for the day. He is explaining his vision for how a student interaction would go.
“So say a student comes up, and he – ” He stops
“He OR she” There is a brief moment of pride in his face before he stutters, alarmed.
“WAIT he or she OR they” He stares at the ceiling as if to make sure there isn’t some other pronoun up there he’s forgotten about. Then he looks back at me, genuinely crestfallen.
“THEY, they. F*ck. That was such an easy one too”
I laugh so hard I start crying.
After I told him he’d been misgendering me he thanked me and briefly apologized. We had another conversation where I explained why I’d felt so hostile towards him. I admitted I often harbored a hostility towards straight white cisgender men, in general, based on past experiences.
He didn’t get defensive or start avoiding me. He said that made sense.
Then it was my turn to stare in disbelief when he started talking about the Lavender Scare, and nodded in recognition at some queer books I listed off.
He even made the joke
“Oh Cam, but you’re so brave”.
Who was this guy?
He still messes up my pronouns occasionally, but he catches it, corrects it, and moves on. He talks about racism, transphobia, and discrimination in a way I’m not used to hearing a white straight cis dude bring up.
There was something else too, I’ve gotten so many overly nice smiles and endless “we support yous” and “your so braves” the “I’m so sorry that happened” or the “How are you doing?” with that sympathetic gaze that says they have read about how hard it is to be trans.
I know they mean well, I really do, but I also just want to be treated like anyone else. Sometimes it feels like people are reading off a script. Repeating words they’ve been taught they should say in the moment they’ve been told they’re supposed to.
It’s hard for me to tell what is genuine, and if they would still be this nice to me if I wasn’t openly trans.
I never expected the train wreck of pronoun soup coming out of this dude’s mouth to be so refreshing.
Of course it still doesn’t feel great when he messes up, but he just corrects it and moves on. He doesn’t talk to me like I might crack and split into a million pieces at any given moment because, you know, it’s SO hard to be trans.
And sure, it is, but it’s also pretty great. Just like pineapple on pizza. Some people hate it, some people say it doesn’t belong. Others think it’s just there for attention. And sure, maybe it’s a little queer, but who says queer isn’t beautiful. I for one will always stand up for those fruity slices.
*I wrote this in January of 2022, while working as an outdoor educator for the North Cascades Institute. That job has now ended and I’ve moved to St Louis for grad school. Matt is a teacher at a public school in Nevada. We called to catch up as I drove to St. Louis.
After a series of food recommendations and BBQ spots, he told me how much more conscious he is of pronouns in the classroom, and making space for students to introduce them. He said that for what it’s worth, it was because of me.
As I drove through who-knows-where, Ohio I felt the tears in my eyes. It is always those little things. I thought back to how surprised I was that we became such good friends, I’d had to push past my own stereotypes about men-like-him. I did it for the sake of professionalism and working together, but it made me wonder who else I had written off. Perhaps without realizing it.
I don’t have the energy for people who aren’t willing to listen, or who won’t do the self-education work on their own. But for those who will listen, and will do better even if they don’t understand, those are the ones who give me hope.
I think of the trans kids sitting in that classroom in Nevada.
Maybe, we never really know how much of a difference we make.*
