Coming Out.. as Canadian

On January 20, 2017, I took a momentous step in my life.

I publicly came out.. as Canadian.

To be clear, I was born Canadian. From the day of my birth I was as Canadian as anyone born in Toronto or Montreal or Yellowknife.

Yet I was born in Chicago, in the USA.

From the youngest age, I knew I was different from the other kids. I was quiet and studious instead of loud and rambunctious. That wasn’t the best situation, since those loud and rambunctious kids were very much American, and I.. just didn’t fit in.

When I was nine, on one of the trips to Montreal to see family, my parents asked me and my siblings to at least pretend to be asleep as we crossed the border to give use fewer problems. But I couldn’t sleep on a long car ride. I faked it, though.

I heard the border guard, a woman in her mid 40s, asking my parents, “Where are their Canadian passports?”

Baffled, my mom asked, “What do you mean?”

“They’re your kids. You’re Canadian. So are they.”

Suddenly a lot of things made sense.

I’m.. Canadian? I’m.. Canadian.

I always felt more at ease north of the border. It felt calmer and more like home than where I grew up. Even the quirks like the money and loonies and toonies felt more natural.

When I got home, I started hitting up libraries to find what I could about Canadianness. But, as one might expect, that’s a challenge for a ten year old to find in libraries or a twelve year old to find on the nascent Internet.

It took me a long time to get my documents that showed I was Canadian, another 20 years to be exact, where I both knew about myself but lacked much ability to do anything about it. After six months of finding official papers and a year of processing, I got a small card that proved I was a Canadian.

But to most people, that didn’t really register. “You’re an American. What the hell does that mean to say you’re Canadian?”

In 2013, I finally got my first Canadian passport after correcting a few critical documents. I brought a lifelong friend of mine across the border, as she never had left the USA before. (Plus, long drives with friends are way better.) In Windsor, just on the other side of the river, right after I went to the Passport Office to submit my documents and application, she said, “I know that right across the river is Detroit, is the US but.. I just feel better here.”

I got my passport with that nice F in it and now I had this internationally recognized document that showed that, yes, I’m a Canadian. I travelled overseas with it a few weeks later to an event in the Netherlands, again a place where I was fully myself and embraced as a Canadian even by my American friends who hopped the pond to go to this festival.

Now I had this credential, but again.. what did that mean? What did it mean for me to be Canadian?

It’s something that I struggle with. There’s a lot of stuff I can’t fully relate to that my native-born Canadians know about. Every day I learn about some other cultural thing that is Canadian that most people just grew up with. I definitely have a larger body than most and I have some unique complications from living stateside for so long. Bunch of chronic health issues that I didn’t get treated until I came up here too. And the cost of living is a challenge.

But I’m now living proudly and openly as myself in this beautful country.

Now you’re wondering, where’s the trans stuff?

The beats of my learning about my Canadianness parallel the beats of my figuring out that I am trans.

I started as a kid that knew herself. Knew I was different, but couldn’t say why. My classmates figured out that I was unacceptably wrong. Around age 10, I first got a word to describe how I felt. It was freeing in having that word, but I was unable to do much about it in the 1990s in an area where queer folks were being regularly vilified for the HIV crisis and where trans people were the regular fuel of trashy daytime TV. There were so many days I killed in libraries finding what little I could, toxic though it was, and there were so many nights I killed on the nascent Internet of 32 years ago. Twenty years later, I could finally start transition, and that process of being openly and happily myself.

So many parallels. So many matching beats in those stories.

Life has been a lot of coming outs for me. Coming out as trans, coming out as bi, coming out as Canadian, coming out as disabled, coming out as autistic. As I’ve learned about myself, I’ve come out over and over again, with the hardest person to come out to being, at times, myself.

But I’m happy to be here. I’m happy to be alive. I’m happy to help our siblings in need. And life is getting better and more interesting.