If you must know what is between someone’s legs, then you are the one with the problem.
I am generally a calming presence, or so I’m told. I know how to steady a room, how to sit with grief, how to speak softly so others can breathe again. On the surface, I am unshaken. But beneath the surface, the mantle is active, and the lava is hot. Some days, the headlines I read cause tremors in me. The Supreme Court. The GOP. The Conservatives in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The endless cycle of “protecting children” that somehow always means coming after people like me. The slogans engineered to ignite panic. The campaigns that treat our existence as if it were a cautionary tale. I see it. I feel it. I hold it. But I do not explode. Not yet. I have lived in Canada since 1973, and I was almost twenty-four. But I was already sixty-three when the DSM was revised in 2013, and being trans was finally removed from the category of mental disorders. Forty years earlier, in 1973, the year I arrived in Canada, Sexual Orientation had been removed. It took four ...
