It’s 2013 and I’m on a greyhound bus on a multi stop journey from Montreal to Victoria reading a hand me down copy of Stone Butch Blues. Leslie tells me about Butchness in a way that touches my soul. Ze talks about queer masculinity in a thousand iterations with empathy I didn’t know I needed. Ze talks about survivor hood and systemic trauma and I cry my heart out on the trans Canada highway between Kamloops and Vancouver. I don’t know where I’m going to live when I get back to my hometown but I am beginning to figure out who I am.

The first time I came home to transness was in the patience and comradery of roommates at my first collective house in Toronto circa’ 2011. They were a gay triad of trans guys who dwelled in the attic of The Mudhouse. Trans people are all around us as they always have been and always will be, but the openness of these men and non binary people in particular was my introduction. One roommate made a ritual of getting a new person to give them their testosterone once a week and making conversation about it through the process. Our house had an open door policy, with people constantly coming and going, so sourcing volunteers was no issue. When it came my turn they showed me how to draw a needle and inject it into their thigh on the couch of our communal kitchen. It was as I remember it their social experiment, performance art and a service of repriocity.

I turned 19 while living in that house and came out as a dyke shortly after, but was yet to realize my transness as well. I was a skid and a punk and the DIY scene made way for finding queer friends. Non-binary identity was getting legs (broader recognition) and people were finding each other through Tumblr. Back then people were using the terminology of “male bodied,” and “female bodied,” which was a precursor to ASAB (assigned sex at birth) language. It felt new and exciting to immerse in trans liberation and gender expansive thinking. It was a natural extension of being newly passionate about anarchism and feminism as well.
More and more trans people came into my life and I became “the least cis, cis friend,” I thought about and challenged my relationship to gender, but assumed that since I didn’t feel like a man I couldn’t be trans. There were some insidious undercurrents of transmedicalism during that time and my own uninvestigated biase that influenced that thinking.

The first time I tried on a binder I was visiting a queer sex shop with a friend on King Street. They had a bin of PWYC used binders and I decided to try one on, you know, just for fun. I spent a really long time in that change room.

—~—

When I was in Kindergarten and beginning to socialize with other kids, I briefly became a trans man. I had been trying to get to know my peers and boys had been telling me we couldn’t due to gender differences. I brought my frustrations about this to my Mother and asked her if she could make me a boy. She asked me what I needed to do this and we decided on a short haircut and some used clothes. Miraculously and without question, the boys accepted me as a brand new kid without recognizing me as their classmate. As the lore goes this went on for about a month, and I became disappointed in how they socialized. Lots of yelling and hitting each other and random objects with sticks. Considering girls as the obviously superior of the two teams, I went back to my mom and asked her to re-enroll me with them. Somewhere, there is a school picture of me from that year with a bowl cut, jagged toothed grin and overalls with no t-shirt underneath.

I have also been told that when I was a child, I spoke frankly and somewhat often about an alternate reality where I was a boy named Sebastien. I don’t remember him and his world or if my awareness of him began that year. But I do remember playing his role in games with and with dolls. Looking back on this I think that Sebastien was a manifestation and expression of my duality. I know, without a doubt, that if the language had been an option in the 90’s that I would have enthusiastically claimed being a Non-Binary child. It makes my soul glow getting to see kids do so now. Trans children are a blessing to this world.

Before all this, my Mother had decided to dress me in red and ladybug themed clothes as an alternative to the homogeneous theme of pink for girls and blue for boys. One year she hand sewed me a red fleece sweater with a big lady bug for the pocket. Sometimes I wonder if this origin story was a subconscious influence in choosing the name Bug for myself decades later.

I came out as Non Binary October 2013. (10 years ago) I was newly housed in Vancouver after a season of homelessness in Victoria and dealing with intense alcoholism and PTSD. I had been experimenting with my presentation and gaining confidence in my sexuality and had begun to understand that the gender I was assigned had no intrinsic home in my being. I identified with and pined after butchness but struggled to be understood as one as an effeminate punk in a patched up miniskirt with a chelsea hawk. (This is a totally real way to be butch for the record) In new adventures in having gay sex and using dildos, I was hit with the overwhelming dysphoria madness of ghost dick/butch cock. It was confusing, depressing and stressful to realize I had the sensation of something that wasn’t visibly there.

I also began to understand that boyhood was something I embodied, but entirely separate from my butchness/queer masculinity! My boyness felt intensely gender non-conforming and feminine. It was this soft, creative, emotional and intuitive fire burning in my stomach and dying to be seen. The dysphoria I felt in this part of myself was social and based in my desire to be truly seen and understood. As I came to understand it, the influence and presence felt obvious and constant throughout my life story. I wanted so badly to be beautiful and gay with other men, while also feeling inherently separate from the ways of men. I embroidered the phrase ‘girly boy,’ onto my clothes, stuffed hanky’s in my pockets, wore pink and florals and experimented with makeup. In current language I think this can be understood as demi-boy and femme.

These two ways of being have often felt like oil and water, incompatible and somewhat at odds with each other. All the same there have been times I’ve embodied both. Throughout all my years of being out as trans this experience has been consistent, (Although consistency has nothing to do with the validity of gender at all) and I understand it as fitting under the term Bigender.

Bi-gen·der
adjective

of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity is a combination of more than one gender or is sometimes one gender and sometimes another gender : gender-fluid, genderqueer.

Physically transitioning for me has been something I’ve had to do with considerations to both aspects of myself. Luckily finding the balance that best suits both has not been hard! (Presentation is another can of worms) Top surgery was well aligned for me as both a butch and as a feminine guy. And long term low dose HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) has supported physical androgyny that does the same. While there are things I didn’t get that I did want, and things I got that I didn’t, overall Testosterone has improved my quality of life more than words could ever describe!

If I could give advice to myself early in medical transitioning I would strongly advocate for following up on hormone levels and regular appointments over the years. I have a lot of medical trauma and life struggles that made seeking out regular care really hard.
If I had pursued taking full advantage of the options for healthcare that were available to me, I could have been better able to navigate the effects of getting on and off often and having low hormones in general. This is a key aspect of why advocating for low barrier, accessible, gender affirming care is so important. So many transgender people experience medical neglect at great loss and impact because of that; and are never, ever to blame for accepting the risks of what they need to stay alive/live. Taking full advantage of the best health care you can access is essential, whatever that may look like.

DIY (Do It Yourself) ethic with transitioning is something born out of necessity and to be wholly celebrated. There’s something so powerful about taking agency of our bodies in that way, and in an era of intensified oppression the demand to do so is rising. Notes are to be taken from generations of transgender women, men and nonconformists before us. I think about our elders and ancestors who took HRT when less was known and much was lost about it and both the victories and consequences on their health in the process. I wonder about undercurrents of the past and the cultures and medicine of the ancient worlds and how those relate to the whisper networks and mutual aid of now. I think those before us kiss us on the forehead when we crowdfund each other’s surgeries, share shots during shortages and supplement second, third and forth puberties with meticulously formulated folk medicine. I know they are with us when ignorance cuts our appointments short and the bad faith of others sets us back.

If medically transitioning is something you’re considering and access is an issue, there are incredibly rich, knowledgeable, wise and well resourced communities of trans people all over the internet. In my experience trans people are incredibly open to sharing resources and lift eachother up. As marginalized people many of us understand just how interconnected our survival is.

—~—

I have a friend who is my gender twin and came out as non-binary around the same time. Walking down the street the average person might not recognize this and the ways we look and present are different! It is a universal truth that gender and presentation are not the same thing and you cannot know how someone aligns without them telling you. My friend has not medically transitioned and the ways we relate to gender are more parallel than anyone else I’ve met. They are a bad ass bigender dyke fag and as trans as I am! Our experiences and the transphobia we experience may at times differ and I understand that as a point of kinship rather than conflict.

I can picture a future where gender affirming care is socially understood as an option for all people, cis and trans. Not an indicator of trans validity as transmedicalists suggest or dangerous in the way transphobic bigots insist. Certainly gender affirming care is common among cis people, and can look like all sorts of things! Similar and not limited to modifying appearance, hormone supplementation and access to self expression. I also believe that if given the option, and made broadly socially acceptable, most people would opt out of choosing a definite gender and fall under the umbrella of Agender! Most people cis people I know feel neutral or indifferent about their assigned gender.