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bibliogrammaRae Spoon and Ivan E. Coyote are performers, long-time creative partners whose shows are a mix of comedy, music and other media. They are also both trans, and it was inevitable that they would eventually develop - with contributions from a new partner, Clyde Petersen, also trans - a performance that came out of their experiences. The show they developed, called Gender Failure, has now become the basis of a book by the same name.
Gender Failure is not an easy book to describe. Its themes, though, are highly relevant to the current revolution in understanding gender. This is an exploration of growing up assigned female when you are not, about feeling a failure at being a girl because you don’t want to do the same things, about feeling vaguely wrong. It’s about slowly working out who you really are and what you want to do about it. It’s about the way society treats people who are gender non-conforming or non-binary or who don’t fit into the two standard boxes for gender identity and presentation. It’s about gender dysphoria, feeling that parts of your body, the parts we associate with gender, aren’t right, aren’t really a part of you the way your foot or your shoulder is. It’s about realising that human experience transcends the so-called gender binary and that locking ourselves into boxes that prescribe not just a binary of genitals and bodies, but of behaviours and identities, limits us all.
As we learn through a series of interwoven autobiographical essays, alternating between the experiences of the two authors around gender, both Coyote and Spoon have tried out several labels, checked out several gender identity boxes, before separately coming to identify as non-binary. Both have at times chosen a style of gender presentation that tends toward masculine. By the photos included in the book, Coyote in particular reads as butch, and acknowledges that this remains a part of their identity. Neither fits exactly into one of those gendered boxes, however, even the expanded set. But society insists that even if you are gender-non-conforming, you have to do it in the right way to get the body you feel you should be in. As Coyote says, taking about their decision to have top surgery:
“In British Columbia, the province in Canada where I live, this surgery is covered by our health care system, provided you qualify. And by qualify, they mean be diagnosed. They, being the government. The government will pay for you to get fixed, but only if they decide you are broken in the right way. The other they being, in this case, the medical establishment. Before the bureaucrats can sign off on the form and send it to the surgeon, a psychologist and a psychiatrist must first decide if they believe me that I am who I say I am. In order to do this, I must fill out a long multiple-choice questionnaire, which the psychologist that my doctor referred me to will read through and assess, and then refer me to a psychiatrist for a proper diagnosis. Because someone who is trained in this stuff has to sign off that I do in fact have a bona fide gender identity disorder, but that someone cannot be me, because I am not qualified. And by gender identity disorder, they all mean that you want to be a man. Or a woman, as the case may be. It is not enough to just feel that you are not a woman or a man. You must want to be not the box that they have all previously put you in. There is no box to check for not wanting a box at all. No one knows how to fix that.”
Spoon comments on their own first realisation of the possibility of not having to identify as male despite rejecting their assigned sex:
“What would it mean not to be a man or a woman? Over the years I had learned not to think of people’s assigned sexes as their genders, but I had expected others to place themselves at least conceptually on one side of the gender binary. I started to meet a lot more people who went by the “they” pronoun. Most people in the queer community around me didn’t have any difficulty using it. In a space where non-binary pronouns had been largely accepted, I began to see the benefits of using them. It dragged me out of an identity that had been previously cemented because I thought being a man was the only way to move away from my assigned sex. In this community I did not have to be male not to be female.”
By calling the show, and the book, Gender Failure, Coyote and Spoon openup the discussion on gender identity - in discussing their own experiences, initially labeling them as ‘failures’ at being girls, or women, but then also coming to realise that identifying as men is just as inauthentic for them, they call for the question - is it those who do not fit in the boxes who are failures, or is the binary system itself proving to be a failure as more and more people reject its rigidity and limited possibilities. As Spoon comments: “Now that I define my gender and sexuality as stories I tell and agree upon, I want to leave room for future possibilities that I have not been presented with yet. I am a gender failure. I failed at the gender binary, unable to find a place in being either a man or a woman with which I felt comfortable. But ultimately I believe that it’s the binary that fails to leave room for most people to write their own gender stories.”
Gender Failure is not an easy book to describe. Its themes, though, are highly relevant to the current revolution in understanding gender. This is an exploration of growing up assigned female when you are not, about feeling a failure at being a girl because you don’t want to do the same things, about feeling vaguely wrong. It’s about slowly working out who you really are and what you want to do about it. It’s about the way society treats people who are gender non-conforming or non-binary or who don’t fit into the two standard boxes for gender identity and presentation. It’s about gender dysphoria, feeling that parts of your body, the parts we associate with gender, aren’t right, aren’t really a part of you the way your foot or your shoulder is. It’s about realising that human experience transcends the so-called gender binary and that locking ourselves into boxes that prescribe not just a binary of genitals and bodies, but of behaviours and identities, limits us all.
As we learn through a series of interwoven autobiographical essays, alternating between the experiences of the two authors around gender, both Coyote and Spoon have tried out several labels, checked out several gender identity boxes, before separately coming to identify as non-binary. Both have at times chosen a style of gender presentation that tends toward masculine. By the photos included in the book, Coyote in particular reads as butch, and acknowledges that this remains a part of their identity. Neither fits exactly into one of those gendered boxes, however, even the expanded set. But society insists that even if you are gender-non-conforming, you have to do it in the right way to get the body you feel you should be in. As Coyote says, taking about their decision to have top surgery:
“In British Columbia, the province in Canada where I live, this surgery is covered by our health care system, provided you qualify. And by qualify, they mean be diagnosed. They, being the government. The government will pay for you to get fixed, but only if they decide you are broken in the right way. The other they being, in this case, the medical establishment. Before the bureaucrats can sign off on the form and send it to the surgeon, a psychologist and a psychiatrist must first decide if they believe me that I am who I say I am. In order to do this, I must fill out a long multiple-choice questionnaire, which the psychologist that my doctor referred me to will read through and assess, and then refer me to a psychiatrist for a proper diagnosis. Because someone who is trained in this stuff has to sign off that I do in fact have a bona fide gender identity disorder, but that someone cannot be me, because I am not qualified. And by gender identity disorder, they all mean that you want to be a man. Or a woman, as the case may be. It is not enough to just feel that you are not a woman or a man. You must want to be not the box that they have all previously put you in. There is no box to check for not wanting a box at all. No one knows how to fix that.”
Spoon comments on their own first realisation of the possibility of not having to identify as male despite rejecting their assigned sex:
“What would it mean not to be a man or a woman? Over the years I had learned not to think of people’s assigned sexes as their genders, but I had expected others to place themselves at least conceptually on one side of the gender binary. I started to meet a lot more people who went by the “they” pronoun. Most people in the queer community around me didn’t have any difficulty using it. In a space where non-binary pronouns had been largely accepted, I began to see the benefits of using them. It dragged me out of an identity that had been previously cemented because I thought being a man was the only way to move away from my assigned sex. In this community I did not have to be male not to be female.”
By calling the show, and the book, Gender Failure, Coyote and Spoon openup the discussion on gender identity - in discussing their own experiences, initially labeling them as ‘failures’ at being girls, or women, but then also coming to realise that identifying as men is just as inauthentic for them, they call for the question - is it those who do not fit in the boxes who are failures, or is the binary system itself proving to be a failure as more and more people reject its rigidity and limited possibilities. As Spoon comments: “Now that I define my gender and sexuality as stories I tell and agree upon, I want to leave room for future possibilities that I have not been presented with yet. I am a gender failure. I failed at the gender binary, unable to find a place in being either a man or a woman with which I felt comfortable. But ultimately I believe that it’s the binary that fails to leave room for most people to write their own gender stories.”