On Binding and Final Rehearsals ~ France's Got Talent (Patreon)

My head is throbbing with pain still. There are so many points of origin now that it just feels like my entire upper back, neck, and back of my skull are one big sheet of hurt. I walk up to Roberto, our choreographer, at my local coffee shop and he notes that I’m white as a sheet and apparently not opening my eyes more than halfway. Feeling great ...

We drive in to the rehearsal space and I sip at a cup of coffee, rolling the dice on whether the caffeine will alleviate some of my headache or just make me sick to my stomach. 

We spend an hour working through alternatives to the initial silks entry I’d devised that simply resisted any smooth transition from the air to the ground for Troy, and another hour finding a transition from our first main ‘trick’ to the second movement which both Troy and I are more familiar with from previous work. By the end of the final hour, we’ve finished piecing together all the disparate components into something that gives us more than the vague hope that we might have more to present on stage in France this Tuesday than uncoordinated flopping around in the centre of a very large stage. 

I pop a muscle relaxant on the way from The Redwood down to Fit 2 Fly’s studios on Carlaw Avenue. It’s only 4:45pm and the sky is darkening in Toronto, a deep cold grey that feels like it’s sinking lower and lower over our heads. 

I’ve got Troy and my own costumes in hand. I also have some beige tape with a line of grippy silicone running through the middle that I picked up downtown on Queen West in the fabric district two days ago; I’m hoping that Zel and Jen can tack it into the inside hems of our legs to keep them from rolling up so much as we move around.

It’s not the shortness of the shorts that bothers me (though it absolutely bothers Troy)(HA), but rather that when they roll up it obscures the carefully sewn panels that Zel created. It would be nice not to lose that vaguely insect/armadillo/mechanical aesthetic...

We also both need the waists taken in a little; the fabric warms up and loosens a bit, but I’m also suspicious that our Chinese dinner diets of one banana and a protein bar here and there contributed to a slightly looser fit than we intended.   

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I’m back home, standing in front of my mirror, moving my flesh around with fabric and adhesives. 

The France’s Got Talent production team wants me to wear beige KT tape (physio tape) on my chest – rather than the skin-coloured bra that I wore in China. I get what they’re going for – they want me to look even ‘closer’ to Troy in terms of gender ambiguity and toplessness. That’s cool. That’s fine. But it’s something that is easily made to look messy, and so I’ve been trying to find a version that works well on my body, lets me move still, and achieves the look that France wants. 

I’ve spent a few hours watching different YouTube binding tutorials from transguys and enby folks, and it’s all pretty much what I know already. I feel like I skipped over this part in my initial grapplings with gender dysphoria. At first, I had a fabric binder, which helped a lot, but the nature of its construction means that the slow, crushing re-molding of my torso into the structure of the binder was wreaking havoc on my ribs and spine. It wasn’t a regular, realistic option for me. So, really, I mean – I just skipped straight to surgery. 

It’s worth a longer story of its own, but the short version is that, at the time, my surgeon recommended that I do an aggressive reduction rather than a complete removal. The scars are a little different between the two techniques, and the collective main concern between him and myself was that the resulting scar tissue wouldn’t inhibit my ability to bend backwards (since doing so was a huge aspect of my life already). 

Great. Cool. Fine. Aggressive reduction it was. And life is so, so much better since I did it (and I wish I hadn’t waited so long to do it). The scar tissue has also ended up being a non-issue, which makes me want to go in for a revision and take out the very small amount of breast tissue that I have left. 

These thoughts come back to me as I try different taping techniques at the request of the production, because … honestly … there’s hardly anything to tape anymore. Binding my chest with the physio tape doesn’t create a radically different chest profile, because I have enough pectoral muscle that there’s always going to be some shape there. If anything, no matter how I tape and re-tape myself, it’s just creating weird, unnatural lumps and bumps where there normally wouldn’t be. 

Sigh.

France seemed very definitive on not wanting me to wear the nude-coloured top I wore in China (and in the initial round on their show, where it looked great, honestly…) but I’m leaning more and more towards not doing this tape thing. It just doesn’t look … good ... when I'm moving. 

With the stage lights and the smoke and our movement (which keeps my chest on the ground almost the entire time anyways), I feel like it’s not going to matter too much if I throw my weight around when I get to Paris and insist that the original costume is really the best option.

I finally achieve a version that looks the best of any versions I’ve done so far, and it’s time to go to our final rehearsal. Today, we’re at the Flying Arts Collective, where two of the artists in Illuminair Entertainment have graciously offered to be our hired muscle – AKA, haul our heavy asses up and down in the air on the 4-to-1 pulley so that we can get as close an idea as possible to what it might be like in Paris, when we’re on the motor.

I battle my way through the endless construction on Dupont St (it's winter, Toronto! COME ON. Summer is construction season...) from my apartment on the east end. I'm late.

I trot up the three flights of stairs, bags of fabric cutting down into my shoulders, and hurriedly kick off my boots in the entryway.

"Hey Mary-Margaret!" I say. "Sorry..."

"It's okay," she says. "There's nothing in the space until 4pm."

We move through one run of the act, two runs of our act, three runs of our act. It's a good thing we came in to practice on this thing, I think. There are certain realities to the end 'trick' Troy and I are doing that simply wouldn't have worked if we were trying it for the very first time in Paris. We make our minor adjustments, and call it a day. 

And my physio tape experiment has held up ... mostly. Just a couple edges are starting to roll up and peel away, where the silks were rubbing against them or I dragged myself along the floor. Blah ... looks messy.

We end our rehearsal.
Coats are done, boots are put on, bags are packed. We all move towards the door, ready to shift into gear for the next event each of our days hold. I stand in the bathroom, the air extra chilled in that small room from this old building's lack of insulation, and pull my sweater off over my head.

I slowly peel the tape off my chest, carefully, trying not to pull at my skin more than I need to. One strip comes off after another, scrunched up into a squiggly mess and tossed into the sink. My skin is red, raw, and tender, and stays that way long into the night.