It was 1993 and I had just realized I was queer. At the time, I thought I was a lesbian, and so that’s how I identified. I was in ninth grade at a high school in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. A mid-sized urban area in the middle of the Canadian plains, Saskatoon was not where I wanted to spend my life. I would go to the local bookstore and buy LGBTQ mags like Out, The Advocate, and Diva. I did not have access to the internet, which was still in its infancy at this point. My mom tried to support me by buying me books from the Ottawa Women’s Bookstore about lesbian stuff. I was lonely, and there was not a lot of lesbian teen representation in the media at that point.

By the time I graduated high school in 1996, Saskatoon had its own queer bookstore. I had a group of queer friends I had made at the youth group at what was then known as Gay and Lesbian Health Services (now OUT Saskatoon). I had made my first three videos, one of which was already popular on the Queer film festival circuit internationally. There was more representation and more conversation about my community. Things had shifted for the positive.

I moved to Vancouver after high school. I went to art/film school, which of course was filled with more queers. We had our own queer student art show. Vancouver had a bigger Pride, although I never liked the crowds. There were two queer neighborhoods, Davie Street and Commercial Drive. They also had a queer bookstore. And a ton of clubs, including a lesbian bar called The Lotus. I went to The Lotus so much, getting sauced and acting foolish to Spin Spin Sugar and doing it again the next weekend. I met people in the kink scene. I made friends with other queer filmmakers.

Same-sex marriage was legalized in Canada in 2005. Things were progressing. I was already tiptoeing around the idea of transitioning to male, and also had the nagging suspicion I wasn’t really a lesbian. But it was a good community to hang out in, and I was also attracting trans-masc and trans-men friends, so I was learning a lot about possibilities. A trans friend gave me a shot of testosterone, and I liked it, but since I only did the one shot, I didn’t get a full appreciation of the power it held for me. I’m sure I looked like an obvious egg. I had a girlfriend who asked if I was a boy, and sometimes friends looked like they were just waiting for me to finally get around to being who they could see me as.

I sometimes joked about being a fag (in an affectionate way), but I think it was more true than I was ready to admit. I felt more affinity to gay men’s culture at times, and that was confusing. Also, I still dated women and fell madly in love with them. I started looking for a particular type of femme gender expression that held a kind of toppy masculinity.  I was also identifying as a butch.

Back in high school, I had read Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, so I knew about historical butch/femme cultures. And I also knew something about transitioning. I went to talks by people like Kate Bornstein to learn about transgender stuff. But I wasn’t coming out fully.

Then in 2007, I came out as a trans man while I was experiencing a manic episode. Unfortunately, my family regarded my gender change as part of my mental health issues. So I didn’t feel supported, and finally, a friend I had a crush on talked me out of it altogether. I had a different name for a few months and then went back to my old name. But I kept wearing my packer and did identify as non-binary for a long time.

All this time, I could see the gains queer and trans people were making and was hyper-aware that it was a pendulum. I knew enough about queer history to see that there were ebbs and flows, that backlash came at times and pushed it all backward. I wondered how long we would have to live our lives.

In 2022, at the age of 44, I finally embraced being a trans man and medically transitioned. From the age of 19 until the age of 44, when I came out for good, I was constantly thinking about transitioning. I asked one of my friends who transitioned all the invasive questions I needed answers to before getting on testosterone. One was “Will I still get wet?” (yes, but it varies from person to person), and the other was how much my bodily smells would shift (the result was pleasant). Armed with the answers to my burning questions, I came out as a bisexual trans man.

However, there was a growing sense of urgency to transition. In 2021, I saw a trans person post online that people should transition while it was still legal. And that was honestly what pushed me to finally do a medical transition. I’d tried to make being non-binary work, but I was still a trans man who just wanted to be he/him and do bi-guy things. Like hooking up with randoms on Grindr, falling tragically in love with femmes, and getting crushes on all types of genders. But most importantly, to experience my body as close to male as possible. 

When I was a kid, my boy cousins took me to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I remember Indiana Jones’s heroic masculinity, fighting Nazis and having women fall in love with him, and rescuing (really?) artifacts to put them in museums. Honestly, later on, I could see how it was a colonial dream. But there’s one scene where he’s escaping and manages to get through the narrowing exit of a chamber as it’s closing, and grabs his hat before it closes. And my transition felt like that, rushing through the rapidly closing window of transgender possibilities. I got on hormones, got top surgery, changed my name and gender on my birth certificate and all my IDs, got a passport with my new name and gender, and got on the list for bottom surgery as fast as I could, which still took a couple of years.

I’m in Canada, so right now we’re seriously considering the possibility of being invaded by the U.S. People are working hard to try to keep our Conservatives out of power federally, but even then, if we get invaded, those American laws will be enacted on Canadian soil. And it would be a pretty gory war if it happened. 

Would I leave this area? Where would I go?

There’s this growing tension across the globe as powers shift and fascists make life-ending policy decisions like it’s a joke. It’s not great. And I can see that the growing unjust anger towards transgender scapegoats is getting broadened into an attack on the rest of the queer community. 

I’ve been alive since 1978. I have seen rights come, and I have seen them start to go. As Indigenous people, we had queer rights before we had colonization. We were accepted and loved in most of our communities. We have oral stories going back to pre-contact times. 

I am sure in the future we will have full rights again, to live and love as we please. To have sovereignty over our bodies and gender expressions. To be married to any gender we love. The question is, how long will it take for us to push that pendulum back? How many fights do we have to get through again? What are the best ways to jam the system so it doesn’t harm as many people as it wants to? What is my role as a filmmaker and an artist to create images and stories of my communities so that people can see us in our dignified lives?

I have a rule that I have to give people hope because, without it, revolutions don’t happen. If I tell you it will never get better again, it never will. But we’ve seen this before, and we’ve fought it before, and we can push that pendulum back to a more loving humanity that accepts diversity. I believe that humanity has that potential, and that potential gives me hope for a better tomorrow.