Like a Boy but Not a Boy. Andrea Bennett
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Deneige never really saw in her own community, which feels exciting. When Deneige thinks about queerness today, she thinks about negotiating a kind of queer politics between an anti-assimilationist position versus a position of trying to make space within the system. But maybe that’s sort of a false dichotomy. Or too dialectical. There’s been so much work already done for inclusion, and a lot more that needs to be done, but the bit of space that has been opened up has allowed people to survive, to fuck around with things in exciting ways, to play around with gender as an embodiment and a construction. The conversations she sees her students having are radically different from those she used to have.
But then it’s also cultural. She still feels very different in Vancouver than in Alberta. Some of that has to do with her queerness. She goes to see her family once a year, and it’s always bad by the end. Her family are political conservatives. She doesn’t have a sense of family belonging. She was the first person in her family to go to university, let alone complete graduate school, and then teach. There’s a class schism.
Often Deneige is like, “Why hasn’t shit changed?” But last spring, she happened to have a student who was queer and grew up in Lethbridge and went to the same high school. Talking with her felt quite incredible to Deneige. There’s now a Gay–Straight Alliance in the school. Thinking about it, she’s amazed. Nobody was out in her time. There were a couple guys who were pretty flamboyantly gay, and people knew, but it was still never an explicitly spoken thing. Deneige’s student just seemed more comfortable in herself. It’s good to know that exists at the school now.
And Deneige appreciates seeing non-binary identity emerge and flourish. The younger queer people in her life often assume that she is non-binary, but she’s taken up maybe a different sort of mode, where she knows she fails at femininity, but she intentionally wants to fail at it, wants to make possible more ways of being a woman. She knows she’s always done her gender wrong, but she doesn’t not feel like a woman. That’s a different thing. It’s a rich conversation to have, to say, “No, I intentionally identify as a woman, in order to mess with that.” That’s what makes her able to not hate herself for the rest of her life. To embrace the failure.
april
APRIL WAS BORN IN 1989. She usually identifies as queer. If she says “bisexual,” some people think that means trans-exclusive. April grew up in Kanata, Ontario. When she was a young kid, Kanata was its own city. Later, Kanata was one of the small towns that got amalgamated into Ottawa. But it still felt very closed-minded and conservative. There weren’t a lot of resources in Kanata. You had to go to Ottawa, the “big city,” to get stuff if you needed it.
April went to Catholic school. Ninety percent of the students were white, and queer identities were not discussed. She couldn’t get resources outside of school, and she couldn’t get them at school, because Jesus would’ve hated her, or something.
April’s grandparents are Catholic. Her father grew up Catholic, and his sister got pregnant when she was eighteen and kept the kid. Next thing they knew, April’s father was spending his entire life trying to make sure his kids didn’t screw up like that. April didn’t want to make any mistakes in front of her dad. Growing up, she tried to maintain an image of perfection. She graduated with honours, the highest grades in all her classes. She went to Ontario Catholic Youth Leadership camp, which she had to apply to and submit essays for. She went even though she’s not religious at all.
In her house and at school, April felt like she could be a variant of herself but not fully herself. At school, with her friend group, she was open and honest and talkative, but she also planned music for their Masses. She couldn’t talk openly about feeling confused about her sexuality.
April’s mom hates the way sex ed is taught in Catholic school, so when April’s school sent home a letter in grade four informing her parents that the school was going to teach her class sex ed, April’s mom got super hands-on and had what April remembers as an over-the-top, in-depth conversation about sex. April found it haunting and traumatizing. And their relationship was strange, because April experienced really bad mental health throughout her teens. She was a cutter. When her mom found out she was cutting, she said, “What did I do wrong?” April didn’t want her mom to think she’d damaged her.
At school, April took religion every single year. She can tell you now, all the different Catholic components—the beatitudes, the Ten Commandments. She remembers internalizing that once you had sex, you were garbage. You were only supposed to have sex in the context of being married. If you were masculine, you could want sex all the time. It was the woman’s job to stop it. April’s lessons assumed that there were only two genders and that everyone was straight. April’s grateful they taught sex ed at her school, but they didn’t talk about sex outside of heterosexual sex for the purpose of procreation. April was probably the most educated of her friends, because her mom had sat her down and had that horrifying conversation. April’s mom had explained that there were other options for sex and sexuality. She’d talked about masturbation, and that sex provided pleasure.
For April’s entire teen years, she thought she was asexual, which she finds funny now. April didn’t talk about her sexuality with anybody, even though her mom is a social worker on the public school board, and she works with a lot of trans kids and LGBTQ teens and youth. As a kid, April was petrified to tell her mother anything. April’s father ended up realizing that April wasn’t straight after he got into a debate with her on trans identities. April has close friends who are trans, and who transitioned in small towns outside Ottawa where there were no resources. When her father started saying something vaguely negative, April challenged him, and then he was actually speechless. He realized that she dated women. He realized she dated trans people. He hasn’t brought it up with her since.
When April was eighteen, she didn’t want to go to university, but her mother said, “Smart people go to university, so that’s what you’re doing.” April went to school for about two years and hated it. She can’t even remember what degree she was working on. She didn’t want to keep going to school, and she knew it would be an issue for her parents, so she moved out of the house and in with her friends. The first thing her parents said to her was, “If you ever have a guy move in with you, you can’t come back to live with us.” April ended up in a situation where she needed a roommate, and her now-husband ended up moving in. At that moment, she knew: I don’t get to go back now. She was about twenty.
April and her husband got married when she was twenty-four. April’s husband had been the only partner that she’d ever been with until they decided to be polyamorous when April was twenty-six. She’d followed “being perfect” to the point where she’d chilled her ability to have a queer identity; some people around her saw it as “becoming” queer, as opposed to finally allowing herself to be queer.
The moment April and her husband went polyamorous, the world opened up to her. She met her friend Jess, who was transitioning, and April introduced Jess to her friend Mia, and Mia realized she was also trans, because she had somebody to talk to. April went from feeling like there were only straight, white, cis people in Kanata to “Here, meet the world.” Starting sex work was incredibly freeing. For the first time in her entire life, she felt desirable. She got to see something totally different about herself that she hadn’t seen before. It felt like her clients and the people she met in the kink community could see her outside of how her community saw her. Nobody in sex work says to her, “You’re not queer enough, because you’re married to a man.” Nobody cares.
Coming out as polyamorous to her parents was harder than coming out as queer. April’s mom was like, “Oh, okay, so you like more than just him, that’s cool,” and that was fine. But as soon as April was like, “Yeah, well, I’m going to pursue it,” it was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You can think it, you can feel it, but because you’re married, you’re not allowed to try it. You already did your thing. You aren’t allowed to experiment with it, because you had to find one person and marry them.” April’s mom is getting more and more accepting as time goes on, but it’s a learning curve. Whereas her father will never become more accepting. It seemed confusing to him, the prospect that April didn’t care what genitals people had. It was too jarring.