Illustration by Sara Sarhangpour

Picture this: Kurt Cobain, 20-hole Doc Martens, plaid shirts, and Jurassic Park—the first one. Then there was me.

I was the only girl in a 10-person Dungeons & Dragons campaign reeking of pimply closet-nerds. If this picture reminds you of something, it should. Those kids in Stranger Things are adorable, sure, but there’s something hauntingly accurate about the Duffer Brothers’ quartet of Demogorgon-fighting anti-heroes: they’re all hetero cis-males.

What I’m saying, dear Gen Z-er, is that the fantasy role playing, campaign-driven game has come a long way, even before Stranger Things. That’s thanks to you. Playing D&D isn’t pariah-making social suicide, but rather, its popularity has skyrocketed. In 2017, Wizards of the Coast saw their highest sales in history.

Of course, in 1993, representation never occurred to me because I was taught that I had a role to fill—one that was reserved for girls framed in the male hero construct. Add rural town to the mix (cue Satanic scare memes), and this was not a recipe for social success.

Desperately seeking a place as a girl player, teenage me flipped through the glossy pages of my brother’s tattered Player’s Handbook—kind of like the bag of holding for all things D&D—trying to decide what race I wanted to play. What would be good for a girl?
I really wanted to be a kick-ass fighter or a powerful wizard. But all the depictions of those characters were beefed-up hyper-males, and the women looked like something out of Conan the Barbarian, with chainmail armour cut to string-bikini size. Because women need vagina armour, right?

Sadly, I usually settled on the meek healer or a retreating-into-the-shadows thief, the irony of which shouldn’t be lost on you. Claiming space as a girl, after all, would be stealing space from boys.

So, what’s the draw today? You are, young Gen Z-er. GeekGirlCon—the Gen-Z all-women gamer organization—fought for inclusivity, because the decades-old need for a wider net of players who demand a place at that popcorn-strewn table was no longer avoidable.

This group of all-girl Gen Z-ers is you, gamer friends. You’ve taken something that was so patriarchal and heteronormative, and gave it the makeover it desperately needed, glitter bombs and all. And then you gave it a warm, fuzzy hug because toxic masculinity lived between each Dorito-stained page of the 2nd Edition Player’s Handbook. Do you hear that? That’s the tears of hetero cis-males realizing they can actually play healer gnomes.

You didn’t stop there when you introduced the first gender-fluid race. Yeah, you heard me: you can now play a gender-fluid elf. This makes me tingle. In the 5th Edition, players are no longer constrained to binary standards. The once cis-normative game has made substantial gestures to welcome LGBTQ2S+ players, because why wouldn’t they want to play? Woman characters are no longer relegated to sexualized damsels in distress, heaving bosom and all, but can play those kick-ass fighters decked out in full battle armour and horrible helmet-hair.

Teenage me is swooning.

It’s been years since I played D&D. Life took over, as did adulthood and the misperception that D&D was only for kids. But lately I find myself yearning for the days
of 20-sided dice and the excitement of the board. But I can tell you this: I don’t miss feeling out of place. I don’t miss being the weaker one, the character conforming to the male gaze in desperate need of saving. But those parts really aren’t what the game is about, are they? The game is about fun and fantasy, role-playing and comradeship.

And now, thanks to you, we can all play.

Illustrations by Mollie Cronin

With bare midriffs, tattoos, and mermaid tails—or no clothes at all—Mollie Cronin’s unapologetic characters ride alligators, eat pizza, swim, lounge on cheese, and raise their middle fingers. The Halifax cartoonist distills millennial dating woes, the perils and joys of East Coast living, and the complexities of gender and body politics in her honest and funny illustrations.

Cronin challenges preconceptions of beauty, serving up celebratory representations of fat bodies under her pen name, Art Brat Comics. She started sharing her colourful, witty, and diverse characters on Instagram in 2015.
“I was going through a moment where I was embracing fat positivity at a time when I needed it in my life,” she says. “Pop culture was catching up to that also.”

Since then, Cronin has reached nearly 20,000 followers, and more than 30 fans have had her work tattooed on their bodies. The positive reception is clear in the comments section: “There’s nothing like the pleasure of seeing depictions of characters that look just like yourself. Thank you!” and “My six-year-old self thanks you for this image.”

Beyond selling her own prints and merchandise, Cronin recently partnered with Australian clothing brand Cutting Shapes Club—an indie label which makes “Fat Threads 4 Dope Babes”—to create a limited-edition custom dress featuring her fat babe drawings. Cronin’s illustrations have also been featured on the Hulu comedy series Shrill, in the book Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You by Sofie Hagen, and in Halifax’s alternative weekly newspaper The Coast.

Now, she’s planning to take Art Brat Comics even further, with hopes of publishing her own book of semi-autobiographical cartoon strips that bring fat positivity to the fore. “We’re in a really great moment for fat positivity and understanding that body positivity actually has its root in fat acceptance,” Cronin says. She’ll keep doing her part to push that movement forward, one shameless babe at a time.

Jenny Brizard in Angelique by Lorena Gale, directed by Mike Payette. Set & Costume Design by Eo Sharp, Lighting Design by David Perreault Ninacs. Photo by Andrée Lanthier.

Mainstream Canadian theatre, put frankly, is a typically white world. Visions of white performers extending their bodies and amplifying their voices across stages and spaces come to mind; a sea of white faces listening in rapture appears just as easily. The popular theatre world reflects our public comforts: comfortable for performers and audiences who fit seamlessly into typical white places, and uncomfortable for diverse Black performers and audiences who may not.

In this landscape, Montreal’s Black Theatre Workshop (BTW) creates a necessary stage for reflecting the varied experiences of Black communities. Established in 1972, the theatre company has shared English-speaking stories written and performed by Black artists for nearly 50 seasons. It’s launched the careers of Canadian theatre heavyweights like theatre director and actor Tyrone Benskin and screen actor Vladimir Alexis.

Quincy Armorer, BTW’s artistic director, joined the company as an actor in the 1990s. He went on to coordinate the company’s former YouthWorks program, training and mentoring youth in the art of theatre performance, eventually taking on the role of associate artistic director. For him, the work of BTW and other Black companies like Toronto’s Black Theatre Canada and Theatre Fountainhead—both of which closed their doors almost 30 years ago—are important in an arts landscape historically and presently devoid of
much colour.

“I can almost say it would be great if there was no need for companies like Black Theatre Workshop because our stories were being included and appreciated.” In the meantime, he says, “We tell stories that many mainstream companies don’t necessarily put on their stages.”

Among those narratives is Omari Newton’s Black & Blue Matters, which will see its full production in 2020 after a staged reading this year. It’s a satirical, interactive hip hop theatre piece about a white-presenting police officer who has been found innocent of shooting and killing a gifted Black youth, a rising DJ. Audience members serve as the case’s jury, deciding the fate of the officer. The production is a complex socio-political piece, deconstructing the bias that exists in our legal systems and absent notions of justice.

In February, BTW will stage Simone, Half and Half, a world premiere of emerging playwright Christine Rodriguez’s story of a biracial teen caught between cultures—her father is Black and her mother is white. The performance follows the young girl as she comes to terms with her identity. In the difficult world of school friendships and loyalties, she navigates where she fits in with her Black and white classmates. The play will run during Black History Month as a school tour, travelling to schools throughout Montreal.

This spring, there’s the highly anticipated performance of August Wilson’s Fences, a co-production with Montreal’s Centaur Theatre. Recently made more widely-famous by Denzel Washington and Viola Davis’ 2016 film portrayal, Fences is the story of an African-American blue collar worker and ex-convict in 1950s America. He once had a promising future in baseball but after time in prison must now fight to be a better husband and father for his family. Armorer will star in the show alongside BTW regular Lucinda Davis.

While some Canadian companies commission performances that tell non-Black stories and feature Black actors and writers in their place, inverting the politics of representation, that simply isn’t BTW’s focus. “Of course there are companies that will do non-Black work and cast Black actors in them. That’s not us. We specifically focus on the Black experience and Black stories,” says Armorer, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that every play produced by BTW is written or performed by Black theatre professionals.

“There are stories that speak to the community and can be about the community that aren’t necessarily written by [a Black playwright],” says Armorer. “It’s about the subject matter of the piece. Even if it’s a play about a Black family and the play isn’t necessarily about their Blackness, you can’t escape the fact that their Blackness is a part of their story.”

The company will continue pushing boundaries and expanding its reach. To celebrate its monumental 50th anniversary in 2020-2021, Armorer reveals French language productions will also be coming to the BTW stage. “It’s a huge milestone,” he says. “We’re hoping it’s going to be one of our largest seasons ever.”

When you are diagnosed with a terminal illness there is a lot of talk about leaving a legacy. Some people write letters to their children. Some record videos. I have a pretty active Instagram account and have blogged for decades and hope my daughters will enjoy looking back on that. Some things older women living with the same disease as me worry about just aren’t on my radar. Some worry that they won’t be around to see their children get married or meet their grandchildren, for example. Those aren’t the sorts of legacies I’m most immediately concerned with.

When I was first diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer, one of my biggest fears—aside from the obvious one of dying—was that there were so many books I would miss out on reading to my three young girls. This was in 2016.

Fast forward to this year and my respite in stability has come to an end. The cancer has spread. It has always been in my ribs and back but now it has spread to my hips, legs, and possibly other places—at this point it is hard to keep up. I break ribs when I sneeze. I walk with a cane and need a wheelchair for any distance further than up the stairs to my bed. There is talk of hip replacement surgery. I am 43 years old. My daughters are 11, nine, and six years old. It is terrifying.

I was already a huge Harry Potter fan when I was diagnosed and so that was on the top of my list. That series got me through a dark time in my 20s and I have a special place in my heart for it. The winter of my diagnosis, while I was going through chemo for the first time, I started my oldest, who was turning eight, on her Harry Potter journey. I kept thinking, “just let me live long enough to read all the books to my girls.” My younger daughters were five and two at the time, so they were too young to start just yet.

From there, I made a list of books I wanted to read to my daughters. Reading together has always been our thing. I was never a mom who wanted to get down and play; I was always more interested in sitting us down and reading. My girls knew that I would usually drop anything if they asked me to read to them. I remember years ago asking my oldest daughter if she would still allow me to read to her even when she was reading chapter books on her own. She is in grade six now. And yes, I still read aloud to her when I get the chance. (However, my headstrong middle daughter has informed me that she is too old for me to read aloud to her.)

Back to these grandchildren I’m barely thinking about—maybe it is being part of a different generation than the older women around me, but I don’t really have the same worries. I had children because I really wanted to be a mom, not because I wanted to be a grandmother. Even if I was to be alive, those sorts of things would be out of my control. I would hate to wrongly pressure my girls into getting married or having children when those might not be things they ever want to do. When I had my first daughter I used to say I wanted to raise children we could enjoy the company of as adults. Now I want them to grow up and be happy despite the fact that they will have lost their mom at an early age.

The only legacy that feels right to leave them is a literary legacy. A shared love of books that we have read together. I like to think this would have happened even without a terminal diagnosis but with it the pressure is on to make every moment -—even moments spent reading—count.

Second on my list, after Harry Potter, was Anne of Green Gables (like a good Canadian). I tend to gravitate towards the classics and reading the entire Anne series is such an enjoyable way to learn about growing up as a smart, determined girl.

The Little House [on the Prairie] series came next, even though I hadn’t read it as a kid. I have since read the entire series through at least five times, and while there are definitely problematic parts to it, like the attitude towards Indigenous peoples, I like the discussions it creates in our family. For a while there a lot of conversations would start with: “What would Ma or Pa Ingles do?” (The answer is usually that they would just shut up and get their work done. It’s a little odd to compare our modern plant-based family to a pioneering family that existed 200 years ago but if Laura and Mary just ate what was put in front of them and cleaned the table afterwards without complaint then I’m going to use that as an example to get my kids to do the same.)

A Little Princess, A Wrinkle in Time, The Secret Garden, the The Dark is Rising series, the Green Knowe series, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre… Most of these I have read to at least one of my daughters. Many more new-to-me and modern books have been added to the list, too: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, The Swallow: A Ghost Story by Charis Cotter, which have sparked discussions about ghosts and death. The All-of-a-Kind Family series which has taught us about the Jewish faith. One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia, about the Civil Rights Movement in 1968 Oakland, California. There is a lot more representation in modern books about people who are not white middle-class Canadians, so even though I like to give my daughters a thorough education in the classics it’s good to not limit myself to them. We are all learning together.

My 11-year-old and I are currently reading through a number of historical mystery series: the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear and the Lane Winslow mystery series by Iona Whishaw. It is really fun having someone in the family enjoying these more mature books and I’m so glad I have lived long enough to move away from children’s books and am still here to expand our literary experiences.

As the girls get older the things I want to share with them has changed. It isn’t limited to books anymore, but also music and movies. Each child is so different that what they want me to share and what makes sense to share with them is different too. For example, I started watching Downton Abbey with my 11-year-old earlier this year. I’m not a huge fan of TV but it’s been fun to watch it together and talk about class structure and the amazing costumes.

My nine-year-old daughter has a love for superheroes (after watching Wonder Woman she decided she wants to be an Amazon warrior when she grows up) and we spent the past couple of seasons watching the entire Marvel Avengers movie series.

My youngest is the one who would not have remembered me had I died when first diagnosed. She’s now six-and-a-half. To her I have passed down my love of musicals. She can spend the day complaining that the kids in her class are too loud—even with her noise-cancelling headphones—then come home and turn Hamilton: An American Musical on at full volume in her bedroom.

I’m grateful that they all share my love of Harry Potter. “Mom, when you are a grandma will you teach my kids about Harry Potter?” my middle girl recently asked me. I didn’t really answer. I said I would like to, but I think even she understands on some level that the chances of me being around then are pretty slim and I refuse to lie. I wish I could say yes and know that I will meet these mythical grandchildren someday but I can’t. It’s hard.

You think when you have children you have all this time with them, but it isn’t necessarily true. My fear is that all they are going to remember about me is how my illness coloured their childhood with the looming threat of death. They are terrified when I sneeze that I am going to break a bone and they have all but resigned themselves to the fact that I’m not much fun. Some days all I can do is get out of bed and feed them lunch, while other mothers are out attending Terry Fox runs and volunteering at the school. But books are something I know, and reading is something we can do together; even on my worst days we can snuggle up and read something. As Sirius Black says in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, “The ones who love us never really leave us. You can always find them, in here.” Sirius points to his heart when he is saying this but I believe that the ones who love us can also be found in the pages of a book long after they are gone. At least that is what I hope for my girls.

Mixie and The Halfbreeds · created and performed by Julie Tamiko Manning and Adrienne Wong · Image courtesy of fu-GEN Theatre Company

Kenneth Tynan’s natural hair colour is a warm auburn, the kind that changes with the seasons and reveals copper undertones when it catches the light. He gets it from his mother, an Irish immigrant. He says he’s always liked his hair, but when he dyed it jet black, he tried not to get emotional about it.

“I tried to view it as a business transaction,” Tynan says. As a young actor in Vancouver, image has a major impact on the opportunities that he can access. With red hair and a pale complexion, he’s predominantly called in for Caucasian roles; roles that he’ll take on but that aren’t always fulfilling. Tynan is mixed-race. His father is second-generation Chinese-Canadian and Tynan identifies with both sides of his heritage. However, this isn’t easily communicated through a headshot. Tired of being overlooked for culturally relevant roles, he resolved to dye his hair in the hopes of appearing “more Asian.”

Tynan has grown accustomed to people assuming that he is white, forcing him to disclose and defend his Asian heritage. Now, these negotiations of belonging and identity inform his career too. Although the conversation around representation is ongoing, casting can still be an arbitrary process concerned with categories of colour, leaving mixed-race actors in an in-between space that they are all too familiar with.

Following the widespread success of movies like Crazy Rich Asians and Black Panther, demands for more representation in casting have grown. But authenticity still remains a low priority in the casting process, says Leanne Adachi. Adachi is the vice president of Breakdown Services, a company working out of Toronto, Vancouver, New York, and Los Angeles that helps streamline the casting process.

“Agents fill out their rosters like football coaches fill out a team,” Adachi explains. Talent agents want to ensure that they have a person who can play every ethnicity, or at least look “close enough.” In this sense, racialized actors are judged on the basis of whether or not they look the part, rather than their ability to play the part. This is where mixed-race actors in particular can run into problems: while they may have the lived experience for the roles they want to pursue, this becomes irrelevant if they don’t obviously present as the ethnicity being called for.

The other issue with casting is that the ethnic roles that are available are monolithic and grounded in stereotypes of a particular race, Adachi says. Typecasting is a pervasive issue that still runs deep in the industry. It’s also the reason that Julie Tamiko Manning, an actress from Montreal, quit auditioning for movies early in her career.

After graduating from theatre school in 1991, Manning struggled to find work. She says she was “too ethnic” for an industry that was accustomed to seeing white faces in lead roles, but also didn’t present as Asian enough for the few Asian roles available. Manning hit her breaking point when she was asked to do a stereotypical, pan-Asian accent for the role of a Korean prostitute.

“It was too traumatic,” she says. “I didn’t want to continue a career playing the cliché.”

Years later, with more acting experience on stage but a longing for creative fulfillment, Manning decided to produce the mixed-race representation she didn’t see in the industry. After combining forces with Adrienne Wong, another mixed-race actress, the two wrote Mixie and the Half-Breeds, a play exploring two women’s struggles to negotiate their Asian-Canadian heritage. It premiered in Vancouver in 2009 and most recently ran in Toronto in April 2018. Although writing the play was a vulnerable process, Manning says that she felt she had a responsibility to show other mixed-race people that they aren’t alone in their experiences.

The availability of mixed-race narratives in film and theatre has been scarce, but improving. Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga are set to star in Passing, a film based on the 1929 novel of the same name. The story focuses on two biracial women: while both can pass for white, only one of them chooses to move through life as a white person. Netflix is working on a sequel for To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, which features a mixed-race Korean and American family. In September, ABC premiered Mixed-ish, a prequel to its show Black-ish that explores Rainbow Johnson’s (Tracee Ellis Ross) experience growing up biracial.

Early on in his career, Ryan Singh, an Indo-Afro-Guyanese (“with a splash of other ethnicities”) actor, used to go into what he calls “advocate mode” at auditions. He found himself having to defend the authenticity of his ethnic background because his surname set an expectation with casting directors that he could not meet.

“Because my name’s Singh they hoped that they were seeing a South Asian person coming in, but I’m a mixed South Asian Black person,” he says. “If you’re white, that’s acceptable.  If you’re Indian, that’s acceptable. But if you’re mixed with Black, you’re Black. A person like myself isn’t accepted as South Asian.”

Tired of being asked how he got his last name, Singh worked under the stage name of Nigel Ryan for several years. While he still did behind-the-scenes work under Ryan Singh, the moniker allowed him to enter auditions without his surname preceding his experience. Eventually, though, he found it too difficult to continue “living as two people,” and returned to his birth name.

Singh also has firsthand experience with colourism in casting: a kind of prejudice that privileges Black people with lighter complexions over those with darker complexions. He’s been to auditions that call for people of colour but still end up casting what he calls the “comfortable” choice—someone who is mixed but more white-passing—because people aren’t as used to seeing Black people on screen outside of stereotypical roles.“As a person of colour, you’re constantly being filtered into roles,” he says. “We are one black dot on a white palette.”

Taylor Love, a Toronto-based actress whose background is European and Jamaican, is also frustrated by a narrow notion of representation in the industry. Growing up, she loved sci-fi and fantasy films like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Jurassic Park. Now in her 20s, though, she’s taken issue with the casting of these franchises.

“I look at those movies now and I’m like, there’s not a single person in this movie that looks like me, and if there is, there’s only one of them, and they die,” she says. She finds it ironic, though, that in fantasy worlds where dragons roam the skies and dinosaurs come back to life, it’s impossible to imagine that a Black person exists. To challenge this, Love will specifically go out for roles that are typically occupied by white people or have even called for white actors to audition; the kinds of leading roles she imagined herself in as a child.

She will also go out for auditions calling for Black actors, provided the role isn’t stereotypical. Recently, she acted in a short film called Tangle, which focuses on seven Black women spending an afternoon in a salon, connecting, gossiping, and discussing the challenges they face as racialized women. In the film, Love plays Beth Andrews—a woman who is fully Black, but often gets mistaken for biracial.

At first, Love felt uncomfortable in the role. On the one hand, she moves through life as a Black person. She compares it to the one-drop rule, a notion developed during segregation in the United States dictating that one drop of Black blood categorizes a person as Black, regardless of physical appearance. Since she presents as Black, she is treated as a Black person, regardless of her heritage. Nonetheless, she feared that her casting was taking an opportunity away from another actor that is fully Black. She questioned whether or not she “deserved” the role, even asking the director of Tangle whether or not she was comfortable casting a mixed-race person in her role.

Love’s concerns arise from an acknowledgement that by Hollywood’s standards of colourism, she would have easier access to parts than other Black actresses. Previously the industry has been criticized for exclusively casting actresses with lighter complexions in roles calling for Black girls. Amandla Stenberg, for example, faced criticism for their casting in the film adaptation of The Hate U Give. Debra Cartwright, who illustrated the cover of the book, told Vulture that she was hoping “it would be a very brown-skinned actress, because there’s so little opportunities in these big movies for darker-skinned actresses.”

In the same year, Stenberg revealed in an interview with CBC that they stepped down from Black Panther, noting that in a cast of dark-skinned actors playing Africans, the casting of a biracial American wouldn’t have made sense and that they “recognize 100 percent that there are spaces that [they] should not take up.”Euphoria actress Zendaya addressed the issue at a Beautycon Festival panel in 2018, saying “I am Hollywood’s, I guess you could say, acceptable version of a Black girl and that has to change.”

In playing Beth Andrews, Love experienced the sort of internal struggle that confronts mixed-race people every day: the question of whether she was “Black enough” or “too white.” It can be difficult to negotiate a sense of identity between two immovable categories. Her frustration is only exacerbated by the fact that the industry bends rules for white actors playing ethnic roles, but not the other way around. She uses Scarlett Johansson’s role in Ghost in the Shell as an example.

“Scarlett can clearly play anything that she wants; she can play a tree,” Love says, referencing an interview where Johansson said that as an actor she should be “allowed to play any person, or any tree, or any animal because that is [her] job.” (The actress has since claimed this quote was edited for clickbait.) “But Japanese women can only go out for Japanese roles to be taken seriously,” Love says.

Adachi explains that the role of ethnicity in the casting process needs to change in a way that makes parts more accessible to a broader range of people, while still protecting the authenticity and integrity of the stories where ethnicity is fundamental. “I always want actors being seen as actors first because that’s what we’re putting ourselves out as,” she says. “I’m not putting myself out there as an Asian woman, I’m putting myself out there as an actor. But I also feel that if you’re telling an authentic story, you should be specifically looking for actors of those backgrounds.”

There is value in sharing personal stories that we don’t hear enough, but this doesn’t have to be the only way for racialized actors to appear on screen or on stage. Reimagining who can be a superhero, a mermaid, a princess, or a doctor could make the casting process a more even playing field for everyone.

Months after Kenneth Tynan dyed his hair black, he can’t say that the change resulted in him booking any Asian roles. His agent chalked it up to a slow summer for the industry, but Tynan isn’t so sure. He’s still hoping for more opportunities to play someone closer to himself, an experience he had last summer that he refers to as “grounding.” The short film was called Two Lonely Kids and Tynan played a mixed-race boy named Todd who, like him, is Chinese and Irish. In the film, two mixed-race people discuss the loneliness that comes with feeling disconnected from their families.

“It felt like I wasn’t necessarily playing a character, but I was kind of playing a different part of me that needed to get out,” he says. For now, Tynan is happy to let his natural hair grow back. He’s still learning how to live with his roots.

Photo: Paul Hillier

After reaching my late-40s, becoming more visibly trans, having a child, and losing most of my employment prospects, I finally became comfortable with myself. A lot of that comfort and acceptance came from a new love affair—with, oddly enough, trapeze.

In grad school, my girlfriend went to the gym.  I followed suit, because everything a new girlfriend does seems totally perfect. Of course, change rooms—or any single-sex space—are dangerous places for trans people…  Would the gym’s policies protect me?  Did I look pretty enough that day to avoid raising eyebrows?  It took me over a decade to truly internalize the fact that change rooms don’t have a dress code.

When you transition, the usual expectation is that you begin to pass as your preferred gender.  But most don’t, fully. And I didn’t, fully. I finished grad school with a PhD, a wife, a son, and a bundle of optimism.  But being visibly trans in a competitive field meant zero job offers for any positions that would have utilized my credentials.  So, I had a future to invent, and no more patience for the conventional.

At first, transitioning made me feel like I should stay in the shadows, keep a low profile.  I felt as though transitioning placed a huge demand on others that I should repay by accepting any old kind of gender expression.  I compensated for my distinct appearance by dressing down. The simpler and humbler my outfit, the more supplicant my request for acceptance felt.

So, it was years before I replaced my funky old gym clothes with anything new, anything that could signal self-respect and put me on even footing with others.  Even today, I still worry that I’ll be accused of vanity when I dare to dress up my appearance. Or deign to present my trapeze work in front of an audience. (Yes, trapeze.  More about that in a moment.)

The self-conscious makes sense, of course.  Trans bodies have been a spectacle from the days of Barnum & Bailey Circuses, through 20th century medical research, and on through reality TV shows.  So, I expect my body to be perceived as more provocative and salacious than cis bodies. “Be careful not to show any cleavage. Any midriff. Keep the inseams long, and the fit loose,” goes the voice in my head, translating the furtive glances that I try to ignore.  I often wonder what it would be like to have a body that didn’t command attention.

What do you give a fidgety and quirky girl for Christmas?  Circus classes, of course. After a year of nervous avoidance, I signed up for the eight classes my partner had bought for me.  And promptly fell in love with static trapeze. (Static trapeze is not the swinging kind many people associate with circus. Static trapeze is exactly that—it’s static; it’s not meant to move much.)

For the first few months, really years, every muscle in my body ached.  But the endorphins were intoxicating, somehow soothing.  It’s no wonder that there’s a growing “social circus” movement that aims to boost individuals in marginalized communities through circus training.  Circus just feels good.  One tiny success at a time, one new friendly face at a time, life gets better.

My coaches quickly became role models.  The women I met were stronger and more graceful than any I had met before.  Suddenly, my earlier modest efforts at the gym seemed puny. Almost cute in their tiny proportions.  In circus class, I saw how much more was physically and mentally possible. The powerful women in circus shattered any stereotypes of what women should look like and be capable of.  My first coach was the strongest woman I had ever interacted with at that point, and she showed me a new way that women could be.

By my mid-forties, the joys of new tricks, new routines, and new friends took over, and I upped my circus training from once to twice a week.  My decade of academic cognitive gymnastics was being followed up by new physical challenges. Training more often was making me stronger and getting stronger allowed me to do more and more exciting things.

That’s when my progress started to change my everyday appearance and my gender expression.

Aerial acrobatics involve a lot of unusual positions: hanging upside down, spinning around…  My snazzy mid-length hair was getting in the way. So, I cut it shorter. And shorter. Tucking, to keep genitals out of the way, became routine. When you’re sweaty and out of breath, say goodbye to a lot of makeup and careful voice modulation.

Being more active was also making my breasts smaller and my muscles and veins more visible. My subcutaneous fat levels decreased, which read as more masculine. My increasing muscle mass raised my testosterone levels.

My body was becoming more masculine in most people’s eyes.  More obviously “different.”

My earlier attempts to keep up feminine appearances were faltering. I became an even more visible pastiche of masculine and feminine signifiers. Trapeze made me an increasingly confusing—yet confident—subject of gender incongruities. That’s exactly the kind of ambiguity I had been conditioned to resist. How do you express who you are when your body is shouting some opposite message, taking on the “wrong” shapes?  My increasingly conspicuous appearance forced me to focus on my positive aerial work, and not worry about how others might see me. I had my eyes on cross-back handstands and single arm inversions. I was having a blast. So, I kept going.

It was always easy to rationalize why I should avoid talking openly about being trans.  Sure, passing means not advertising the fact that you transitioned, and it’s pretty hard to blend in when you’re broadcasting your unique medical history.
But the truth is that I avoided talk about being trans because I still expected to face all the rejection and stigma that I was met with when I first came out.  The anxiety and judgement that others showed me was planted deep in me. But as I became less and less passable, my transition became an elephant in the room. No amount of makeup could cover up that elephant. I decided to let the air out of my lungs.

The more openly I commented, joked, and complained about trans issues, the happier and more relaxed we all felt.  Maybe it’s because the circus community has a long and beloved history of embracing its freaks and geeks. Maybe it’s because intense athletic work is a whole lot easier when we can talk about, see, and feel our bodies as they really are: #nofilter. Did I ever feel a bit sidelined or left out?  Definitely. Were there differences that separated cis from trans people? Sure. But being more “out” created more closeness among my circus peers than it did awkwardness or ostracism. We could all remonstrate together about the appalling anti-trans legislation being passed in the wake of the 2016 U.S. election, for example.

“Happier and more relaxed” is not at all how I would have described my years of academia and job hunting.  Those years, when I was passing, I had a closet I could take refuge in.

Now, being visibly trans, I don’t have access to a closet.  There’s no coming out to do when you’re always already identifiable. No option of not disclosing your difference. But I’m becoming myself, accepting myself, in a way that I never foresaw.  My lats push against my clothes (especially any from before my circus days) and my breasts don’t fill the cups I used to wear. Many of the circus women around me raise the same “complaints” (probably a little proudly) at times. Pursuing our own rarefied kind of happiness has drawn all of us away from mainstream ideals of femininity.  It’s in that flight from normalcy that I started to feel free. By moving me away from the kind of woman I thought I was, or should be, circus helped me become a person who actually accepted and liked herself.

The #unshopped and unedited person I was on the trapeze filtered through to my everyday presentation.  My scholarly-chic cardigans were replaced by tank tops and sneakers. Instead of adhering to the protocols of professionalism and toxic femininity, I expressed a more happy and outgoing personality.  Being more open felt good to me. It just didn’t feel good to everyone.

The unspoken rule that trans people are expected to try to pass as their preferred gender still exists. No amount of personal enlightenment changes the fact that trans people are expected to want to look cisgendered.  To pass. To keep cisgender as the pinnacle of physical attractiveness and propriety. To keep social power structures intact.  So, the corollary is that not looking cis, not passing, is to be experienced with shame and embarrassment. As though trans women should be ashamed of any signs of our transition and downplay our medical interventions and “masculine” characteristics.  That we shouldn’t be happy with our appearances or voices. I was done with that.

It was time to learn a reverse meathook.  This trick involves holding your entire body weight with one hand, wrapping that hand behind your back, and keeping your body balanced horizontally under the trapeze while holding this shape.  It looks hard. It feels impossible. I thought the trick might take me a month or two to learn. Working on it, I fainted more than once under the strain of exerting as much muscular force as I could.  But at age 47, after about 10 months of working on it, I finally succeeded in executing a reverse meathook. It’s something I’m honestly a little surprised I became capable of.

The gracefulness of “aerial dance” is not something that anybody ever taught me as a boy. I didn’t learn to move fluidly or as a whole. Now, honing my aerial performance skills, it’s like I’m learning to move for the first time. As though my adolescent enculturation was deferred until after my transition.

I wish I could say it didn’t take the enormous efforts of aerial training to eliminate my body shame.  But doing trapeze certainly helped. Not only was I finished with deferring to others’ standards of how to look, I was also done with feeling that my body was “wrong” in any way.  That I should disguise myself or make excuses for my body. I was done with letting anxiety about everyone else’s gender expectations determine my wardrobe. Trans people have no less of a right to self-acceptance and self-expression than do cis people.  It’s one thing to build acceptance of gender transitions; it’s a whole other step to start changing our ideas of who gets to be out, open, exemplary. Because quite often, trans bodies (maybe especially trans women’s bodies) are regarded as lewd just for their very existence.  I finally had the psychological might to fight back against that.

Of course, no amount of self-awareness and confidence can change the actions of people around you.  In fact, sometimes being yourself just gets you pushed even faster into the weirdo corner of the room, while the popular cis kids keep their party going.  It happens all the time.  (Change rooms may have no dress codes, but people’s reactions sure are dependent on how you look that day…) And when that happens, best to own your corner of the room.

Maybe hanging off a trapeze was my way of ducking out of the race to nab a respectable and intellectually challenging academic job.  Maybe it was me thumbing my nose at the whole prospect of fitting into institutional labour structures. Both are true to an extent. But more than anything, aerial was less a rejection of broader social and economic structures than it was a freeing of myself.  A way to be less apprehensive, to feel supported, to make my body my own, to occupy a complex and beautifully confusing set of gender signifiers. Maybe to escape gender altogether.

illustration by Chantal Bennett

Monday evenings at FreshCo always carry an air of anxiety, but one particular evening was accented by a white couple with Apple watches. They were behind my mother and I in the checkout line, leaning against the conveyor belt and communicating through grimaces. Every time the woman sighed, my stomach tensed. The tension was three-fold, consisting of my social anxiety, my assumption that we look like fools, and the whiteness of the couple. They looked like the kind of couple that drive a Honda Civic and live in a studio apartment downtown. They looked nice enough, like the Game of Thrones smiling-Daenerys meme.

My mother grouped items by store. Most were to be price-matched from No Frills, some from Food Basics, and one from Walmart. The vegetable oil was the best deal from No Frills, almost half-off. Other things like a pineapple, onions, black beans, and lettuce were a difference of a dollar or a few cents. But it made a difference; I get that now more than ever. A couple dollars can be the difference between paying rent and not paying rent. Having something small to save, and having nothing. When I was younger I’d be frustrated hopping from store to store just to save a couple dollars because I didn’t understand the cumulative effects of it. I also figured there was no point expending that extra labour. I haven’t quite cancelled that argument yet, but I’m willing to concede for the time being.

It was work for my mother, going through all of the flyers and comparing prices across the board. It’s work to stand in the line and point to each item. It takes energy to wait and be waited on. My social anxiety always frames my identity in terms of other people. I figure we must look like a poor single mother with her 13-year-old daughter (I look a lot younger than I am), trying to scrape by as best we can with a batch of flyers and time on our hands. Some of that is true, but thinking about it uses energy too. The tension comes when I feel like my mother and I have to prove ourselves. If I wanted to, I could explain our entire life story to the woman’s impatient partner.

I even imagine what I would say. I would explain that we can’t store hop because we don’t own a vehicle. I would explain we don’t own a vehicle because we can’t afford one. I would explain why my mother is so picky with prices, because she can’t afford not to be, because she grew up with a resourceful Indo-Guyanese immigrant father who was impoverished long enough to know he never wanted to end up like that again, nor burden my illiterate grandmother and his own children with financial issues.

I would stick some stats in there for the sake of science. According to research by the Canadian Women’s Foundation, South Asian women make less than half the amount of what South Asian men make. Racialized single mothers in Canada are more at risk of poverty than single dads and nuclear families.

But survival is not about knowing those stats. My mom kept the anxiety of falling into poverty in the back of her mind when she became single over 18 years ago, but she pushed through. It was even harder because, due to her financial dependence on my father, she held little of her own monetary agency. We moved from place to place, trying to find something that fit our needs and that wasn’t over budget. South Asian communities like ours make up 19 percent of the population of low-income neighbourhoods in Toronto.
We moved to Parkdale over 10 years ago, when South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities visibly populated apartment complexes. Though there are still many of these people left, there are also a lot more white middle-class families inhabiting houses and renovated apartments. We were lucky to move into the neighbourhood when we did, locking into a cheaper rental unit before gentrification jacked up the housing prices and overpriced vegan stores created the exclusive culture of “Vegandale.”

I’m the people-watching type, especially when shopping. When I watch certain people grocery shop, I can see how little attention most pay to choosing the perfect vegetables and fruits. I see it when I grocery shop with my middle-class friends. From what I’ve observed, middle-aged women of colour almost always spend more time picking out grocery items. My mom is always extra focused, because she is so keen on getting the most for her dollar. She often gets me to check for spots of mould on fruits, read ingredient labels, and double-check expiry dates.

Most single dads (and, of course, men in general) work and earn more than single moms. This is true for my father as well, who provided me with a different perspective on finance. He also possesses that Indo-Guyanese vigilance with his money, but it’s because he works a well-paying job and has an abundance of funds to invest. He’s never price-matched. Once, we went to No Frills together and the woman in front of us at the checkout was price-matching a few items. My dad grew impatient, shifting from foot to foot, like a bull before it charges. It was then I realized he’d never had to think about price-matching. If he really needs something it doesn’t matter if it’s on sale. He values quickness over a few dollars in savings, and that quickness is something many can’t afford when budgets are tight.

Living in Doug Ford’s Ontario is becoming increasingly precarious for the lower-middle class. OSAP’s tuition grants were the only way I could afford to go to university in the first place, and now, for many, those grants are halved. Ford’s wage freezes for public sector workers deeply impact communities like mine and families who are already struggling to support themselves. On top of this, grocery prices are climbing, with an up to 3.5 percent total increase in food prices expected in 2019, according to Canada’s Food Report, put together by Dalhousie University and the University of Guelph. The rising cost of vegetables is particularly concerning for me and many families that want to eat healthily. Many provinces, like Ontario, are also facing a projection of above-average food price increases this year, with Ontario seeing the highest increase so far at 2.7 percent. With significant cuts and freezes, it’s going to be even more important for my mom and I to save where we can.

The older I get, the more anxiety I face when shopping. I become exhausted in a matter of minutes. It’s not that I’m always actively thinking about not being able to afford things, it’s that the idea of it is always lurking in the back of my mind, inconveniently piggybacking on my tendency to feel overwhelmed in crowded spaces. I feel like life’s biggest amateur, a burden to an otherwise easy-to-navigate system. But I know it’s not true, and that the system is designed in such a way that I’m going to feel left behind even if I work hard. I know that the extra time we take comparing prices, holding off on expensive purchases, and checking our bank accounts is valid, necessary, and not our struggle alone.

The receipt told us that price-matching saved my mom and I 20 dollars. My mom exclaimed this to me as we loaded the groceries, the woman’s partner side-eyeing us. “That’s really good,” I exclaimed in return, and I didn’t even look at the couple before we left.

There were four of us that met accidentally—like when you mindlessly stub your toe, and after a while the throbbing subsides, but doesn’t really, rather the endorphins kick in, masking the pain—and while there was some initial friction, we found each other interesting enough to travel Senegal and Mali together. We were an odd mix: there was Piet, a Dutchman who generally was cheerful during the trip except when he had to cram his frame into pint-sized cars and Leo, equally blond and a farm boy from the American Midwest who seemed to be performing all the time. Thandeka was a South African who continually reminded us of her roots via Miriam Makeba,
by singing her song, “The Click Song (Qongqothwane).” And, finally, there was me.

I was Canadian. But more than that, I was African by birth and heritage. I say this not because that part of my identity was more significant, but because I felt it legitimized my claim to that place even though it was my first time visiting. Simply through my connection and entitled belonging—no, perhaps because of it—I saw those people as my people, similar to the way that Black people in Canada—strangers on the street—acknowledge each other through direct eye contact and nods. These visual cues were a recognition of each other—a way of saying, “I see you. I see you through me.” It was particularly prevalent in small town Canada, like Brantford, Ontario—where perhaps the need for solidarity was more poignant in a place where there was a lack of racial diversity, a place where, at times, one felt invisible (and hyper-visible simultaneously) as people on the street walked past you silently.

For me, that acknowledgement is exemplified in the Zulu greeting: sawubona. The simple translation of this word is “I see you.” But there’s much more to it. I love the simplicity and depth of this word, for contained within it is the message, “I see your personality. I see your humanity. I see your dignity and respect.” Imagine the power of acknowledgement in that phrase, and it was this connection and understanding that I was looking for as I tried to blend in while in Africa.

The adults were equally as friendly as the children. Whenever we were in the market place, sellers would approach me and Thandeka, greeting us with choruses of “mes soeurs,” (“my sisters” in French), yet when they talked to Leo and Piet, they would refer to them as “mes amis”—my friends. They were distanced in a way that Thandeka and I were not. Ironically, since my male friends both spoke fluent French, they immersed themselves more into the culture and interacted with the locals more than we could ever do with our limited linguistic abilities and integration into the male-dominated street culture—for these reasons alone, it makes sense if they would have been welcomed more than us. But I didn’t question this. Very quickly, I accepted this warm behaviour from the market vendors and, in time, actually started to believe I deserved it.

Toward the final leg of our journey, we passed through Saint Louis, in northwestern Senegal, in part for the colonial architecture. One day, late in the afternoon, we were in the courtyard of the Hotel La Residence, with its colonial posters of the French Aéropostale mail planes and its overflowing greenery, to escape the earlier heat when we decided to go to the beach to watch the sunset. On our way, we were accosted by youngsters yet again. These giggling children called out the typical refrain and I assumed from previous experience they must have been referring not to me or Thandeka, but to our lighter skinned friends. (Unofficial sources like Urban Dictionary suggest the word means “white person”; I definitely heard it as “not from here.”)

I looked over at Piet to see his reaction, expecting a look of resignation, but to my surprise, he was smiling. I followed his gaze to the kid who spoke. She was looking at me.

“Toubab, toubab,” she said to me.

“Toubab? Moi?”

I held my arm next to hers as if this nine-year-old child could not see the similarities of hues between mine and hers.

She shook her head, still smiling. In that moment, she denied my claim to Africanness. I was a foreigner. Like my white European friend. There was a cognitive dissonance that undermined my self-conception and the adaptive ways of being and belonging that I participated in.

Of course, I was aware and acknowledged that I was Canadian, but what did that mean really? What mattered was the context. In Canada, I was definitely not part of the majority. In Africa, I was. I was surrounded by people who physically looked similar to me. But in this moment, through this interaction, the relationship—flimsy and superficial—between this girl and me was severed as that narrative was disrupted.

Of course, I was different: my economic status was clear. It was evident in my dress, physical manner, in my stride. It was what allowed me to get a passport and travel in the first place. Without a visa. And if a visa on rare occasion was needed, I could procure it with relative ease. How could I not see this? But as privilege does, it blinds us to the point of selectively seeing what we want to see. We have confirmation bias. And our subjective reality reinforces our belief system.

Adults could see my difference, but if I were a cynical person, I could conceive of the idea that they used this knowledge to their advantage—that the use of kinship terms creates a false sense of relationality, similar to the way, we colloquially use “bro” as a term of endearment with strangers. It reduces the meaning and worth of the word, but at the same time, because we are so clumsily grasping at straws for any kind of connection, we accept it willingly. In her book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman highlights this elusive thread between language and intimacy, how using the words of kinship, even a fictive relationship was necessary for social inclusion and affiliation for the group that was looking
for belonging, and was an economic payoff for the other.

The benevolent part of me would say that the adults were just being polite in not pointing out my difference. But the children refused to play my game. I can recall them dancing, encircling me with their bashful laughter. As the sun slowly descended past the concrete half-wall that protected the town from the unpredictable ocean, the children pushed me out of my comfort zone. And forced me to confront the things that were clear to everyone except me.