How punk made me the trans woman I am

Emerging Queer Voices is a monthly LGBTQ arts and culture column that features different up-and-coming LGBTQ writers. You can read more about the series and find all published editions here.

It's Sept. 4, 2020. I've just moved into residence at Trent University, in one of a number of new townhouse-style buildings satellite to campus proper that are creatively named "the Annexes." My roommate and I, still barely unpacked, have just met our next-door neighbours. In this virus-blanketed, pre-vaccine world, they will be our nearest form of human contact for the next eight months.

In that ever-so-brief period of time, we and the 16 other people who comprise our floor of Annex B will come together and crash apart. None of that matters now, however; in this moment, we have no idea what's yet to come. Instead, in a moment of semi-normalcy amid the warring tensions between youth and quarantine, we are piled into my neighbour's car, driving to Walmart. As we pull out of the parking lot, dead as it will remain for the coming months since parents have abandoned their children to fate, she punches the stereo and slips a disc into the CD player. 

A guitar lick begins to play. It's Morbid Stuff by PUP.

This is the moment that cemented a friendship which has lasted — well, not exactly a lifetime, since I don't speak to any of the people who were in that car today, but which at least burned with all the clamour and vitality that only youth can briefly muster. Fitting for a friendship forged over a hardcore record that it should be short, explosive and involve no small amount of drugs.

Punk is a common language like that. It's something shared, something which — at its best — can be a vessel, and even a sort of catalyst, for these very formative moments in one's life.

Sept. 4, 2020, was also the first time I introduced myself to a stranger as a woman. I'd already come out to some close friends and had scheduled an appointment to get referred for hormones in a matter of weeks, but this moment was perhaps the most crucial for me. It was a clean break from the person I'd been in high school and yet it was also the logical extension of the woman my hometown's hardcore scene had made me.

I spent my youth in Ottawa, a sleepy government town that had a bad rap for being boring among people who grew up there. I went to one of the city's most stratified high schools, which pulled from one of its richest neighbourhoods as well as the single poorest. A school like that is a bad place to be queer at the best of times, and the years of the first Trump presidency weren't that. Sure, we prided ourselves on our tolerance and enlightenment, but there were harsh social reprisals for sexual deviance all the same. The kids whose parents bought them SUVs were never going to slum it with gender trash like me.

So, instead, I found solace in the scene.

Contrary to popular belief, the ByWard Market does not represent the entire spectrum of possibilities within Ottawa's nightlife. On any given day, I'd be forwarded a Facebook invitation to some DIY show at 8 p.m. on a Thursday night. The venues for such gigs were often "normal" spaces by day — bookstores, coffee shops and the like. But by night, they'd shove the furniture to one side, plug some amps into a power bar at the back of the room and have garage bands play 15-minute sets until the noise bylaw kicked in. Crowds of maybe two dozen tops, aged anywhere from 14 to their late forties, would gather in these impromptu concert halls to chat, drink and mosh until they were soaked through with sweat and their ears were ringing.

My friends started dragging me to these shows sometime in the 10th grade. Being a Good Kid™ at heart, I first went under performed duress. However, the more I went, the more I kept coming back. Punk shows, I found, were a space to both figuratively and literally let my hair down — to be myself at a time when I felt I couldn't anywhere else.

Part of it, no doubt, is that the demographic — especially in the younger crowds — skewed exceptionally queer. Stereotypes about blue hair's comorbidity with certain pronouns are easily reinforced at basement shows frequented by angst-ridden 16-year-olds. Adolescence is a period of social experimentation, and a subculture already relatively tolerant of weirdness and diversity is as good a place as any to do it.

Being in the punk scene was the first time I made trans friends — the first time I made queer friends, really, who weren't white bisexual women. Some nights, I'd go and find the person I'd been chatting to the previous week had changed their pronouns twice in the interim. More than to just come as you are, the sense was to come as you wanted to be. 

No one at a punk show cares who you are, what you wear, whether you're not-quite-a-girl or just a guy with long hair. So dark are the interiors of these dives and holes that, really, it'd be remarkable if anyone even noticed. You're just one of a dozen, one particle orbiting the frenzy of the mosh pit, colliding at random with strangers, buzzing the whole time. Nobody's looking at you. No one's even listening to the band. They're just the social adhesive holding this moment together, enabling this collision — enabling you to lose yourself. It's in this moment that you're able to become somebody else.

Doing this as long as I did, I developed something of a split personality. Well, being closeted had already bequeathed me said split personality, but my night life embodied it: Public me wore button-downs and skinny jeans to school. Other me wore friends' makeup and Harley boots to shows. And then we'd sit — my friends and I — on the steps outside these empty warehouses and all-ages clubs, bumming cigarettes off the older punks and fuelling teenage angst into urgent confessionals:

"I think this body of mine is slowly killing me."

"Don't you ever wish you were just born a woman?"

We'd hug, and smoke, and cry, and rest on each other's shoulders on the bus rides home. Every night was the most important night of our lives.

By the end of 2019, I knew I had to transition. I'd give you a date, but I can't remember much before my first hormone consult, just a jumble of self-loathing punctuated by these occasional one-night crescendos.

I'd confessed my intentions to a friend at 2 a.m. one night while listening to Dark Days. She'd told me she was thinking of changing her pronouns. We decided to room together at university.

Flash forward to Sept. 4. She's in the car beside me. See You at Your Funeral is playing over the tinny speakers. In two years, we'll stop speaking. This is one of the last good memories she'll leave me.

The other is a year and change later, at the Bovine Sex Club in Toronto — our first show since the world shut down. Just like old times, but we're older now and both women. I'm wearing the same Harleys I'd worn at my first show. The steel toes poke through in places where they've been battered in the pit. I feel like a different person — in control now, for the first time, of my life. 

Yet under that skin are the same muscles that screamed after basement shows, the same vocal chords that ached from screaming too hard. The marks of the scene are still under my body, in my tastes and mannerisms, and in my ears, which still ring in spite of everything. I'm still the woman that punk made me, and whenever I hear those first notes of Kids, I remember that.