Andrea Bennett - Like a Boy but Not a Boy

like a boy but not a boy

like a
boy
but not
a boy

Navigating Life, Mental
Health, and Parenthood
outside the Gender Binary

andrea bennett

LIKE A BOY BUT NOT A BOY

Copyright 2020 by andrea bennett

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any meansgraphic, electronic, or mechanicalwithout the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program), for its publishing activities.

Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the xwmkwm (Musqueam), Swxw7mesh (Squamish), and silwta (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, custodians of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories where our office is located. We pay respect to their histories, traditions, and continuous living cultures and commit to accountability, respectful relations, and friendship.

Like a Boy but Not a Boy was included in the anthology Swelling with Pride, edited by Sara Graefe (Halfmoon Bay, BC: Caitlin Press, 2018); Mom, Dad, Other was published as Im a Non-Binary Parent. There Still Isnt Space for Me, Xtra, May 10, 2019; On Class and Writing was published as The Year in Work, Hazlitt, December 9, 2015; and Tomboy was published as The In-Between Space, Hazlitt, September 18, 2018.

Gwendolyn MacEwens Certain Flowers copyright to the estate of Gwendolyn MacEwen. Permission to reprint lines from this poem provided by David MacKinnon, executor for the estate of Gwendolyn MacEwen.

Cover and text design by Jazmin Welch

Edited by Shirarose Wilensky

Proofread by Alison Strobel

Printed and bound in Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

Title: Like a boy but not a boy : navigating life, mental health, and parenthood outside the gender binary / andrea bennett.

Names: Bennett, Andrea (Andrea Kathleen), author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200211609 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200211692 | ISBN 9781551528212 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528229 (HTML)

Subjects: LCSH: Bennett, Andrea (Andrea Kathleen) | LCSH: Gender-nonconforming people. | LCSH: Gender identity. | LCSH: Gender nonconformity. | LCSH: Gender-nonconforming peopleMental health. | LCSH: Sexual minority parents. | LCSH: Parenthood. | LCGFT: Essays.

Classification: LCC HQ18.55 .B46 2020 | DDC 305.3dc23

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

LIKE A BOY BUT NOT A BOY is a book that I began writing on the bus and SkyTrain between Surrey and Vancouver, British Columbia. My first notes were mostly about the process of returning to work in an office after having a baby, and then leaving that baby at home with my partner. At the time, we were referring to ourselves as the milk parent and the beard parent; my role was to provide the milk, and between working, commuting, and pumping, I was exhausted. My favourite SkyTrain seatone I often managed to snag because I boarded at the terminus stationwas at the very rear of the train, facing backward, with more than enough legroom and space to spread out and write in my notebook or work on my laptop. All the new essays in the book owe their initial pacing to the SkyTrain.

Like a Boy but Not a Boy contains thirteen more or less personal essays, covering a range of topics from queer pregnancy and parenting to nonbinary identity, bike mechanics, mortality, anxiety, class, and mental illness. It also contains a sixteen-part essay titled Everyone Is Sober and No One Can Drive, which is drawn from interviews with queer millennials who grew up in small communities across Canada. My intention with Everyone Is Sober is to give snapshots of what it was like to come of age right around the time that same-sex marriage was legalized in this countrya cultural crux point that may be looked back on as a definitive marker between before and after but that is perhaps better seen as one red push-pin on a transitional arc. The segments resulting from these interviews are listed by the subjects first names (Jane is a pseudonym) in the table of contents and seeded throughout the book.

Like a Boy but Not a Boy is ultimately about the simultaneously banal but engrossing task of living in a body. Although most of the essays are about living in my body, Im very grateful to the sixteen other queer millennials who shared their stories so that we might become a type of chorus.

TOMBOY

IN GRADE FOUR, OUR CLASS WAS IN A PORTABLE about 100 metres beyond the schools back door. A small wooden porch flanked by two railings and a set of stairs led up to the portable; it also provided a multi-level platform useful for playing WWF WrestleMania. One other girl sometimes played with us, but mostly it was just me and a whole bunch of boys. The goal was to hurl ourselves at each other hard enough to pinto push and jostle and launch off the porch onto an unsuspecting crowd of wrestlers. The boys werent my friends, but they let me play with them. (Sports is all about numbers.) I had long hair, but it was unkempt, and this was the era of nineties Jaromr Jgrhis glorious, curly mullet unfurling from his hockey helmet in much the same way my dark waves bunched at my shoulders.

That year, I turned nine and was finally allowed to play hockey. The first time I knocked over a fellow girlnot on my teamI stopped skating and helped her back to her feet as my father hollered from the stands. Afterwards, he and my coaches told me to use my size, the way it was beneficial on the porch behind the portable.

That year, in school, we played a math game called Around the World, based on the times tables, in which the goal was to circle the classroom, defeating your classmates one by one. That year, drunk on wrestling and hockey and matha subject I understood to be best suited to real (read: male) nerdsI requested that my classmates call me Andy. They did not comply.

I grew up in a time and placeborn in 1984, raised in a small town called Dundas, Ontariowhen gender roles were binary. I grew up in a place where my favourite tomboy classmate later ridiculed my unshaven legs. I grew up in a place where, when I was walking to work or the library, people yelled gendered, homophobic slurs out of their cars. I grew up with a mother I thoroughly confused and disappointed, just by virtue of being myself. Its hard to say what kind of a person Id be today if these conditions had been different. Given these conditions, though, I took refuge in the word tomboy.

THE WORD TOMBOY FIRST EMERGED in the mid-sixteenth century to describe rude, forward boys. A couple decades later, it began to apply to womenmore specifically, bold and immodest, impudent and unchaste women. Soon after that, the term found the home were familiar with, referring to girls who behaved like spirited or boisterous boys. (Men got to keep tomcatcreepy if youve ever googled cat sex after hearing alleyway yowling in the middle of the night.)