Gender Diary: Blood, Sweat, & Handwraps (Patreon)

And now for something completely different!

Today's writing is about a 10 to 15 minute read.

As part of my ongoing work with the Barbette project, I've been keeping what I've unimaginatively named a Gender Diary. I'm recording and reflecting on the moments that crop up in my life where I'm observing tension, discomfort, uncertainty, joy, or ambiguity in relation to transness and gender identity things. I hope that in reading it you find something that either resonates with your own thoughts or experiences, or offers you insight into things that other folks in your life might think about.

(To be clear once more for those of us here in the neurodivergent pool,  I'm not looking for or wanting an emotional labour in response to this writing – I'm okay! I'm sharing thought processes and emotional states that I'm not necessarily proud of having, want or need advice on, etc etc –  but I think there might be something important in documenting them – if not in in terms of singular pieces of writing so much as what it might add up to, in the long run, when taken altogether)

I've been quietly working through some major moments relevant to this subject (but completely separate from circus) these past few weeks and thought I'd share.

Leave me a lil' heart at the bottom if this if you like, and/or comment & question away!

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A film project I read for back in the spring looks like it’s getting the green light this summer. There’s a tentative start-of-principal-photography (that’s film industry nerd-speak for “start shooting the damn movie”) for mid–July.  

It’s a stunt-actor* role in a small action flick where I’d be doing a fair amount of fight choreography with the lead attached to the movie. (*that category where you have to smash into things or do difficult physical things the average bear can’t do, and ALSO act convincingly at the same tie; these roles come along very infrequently).

PRETTY COOL, right?

Yes. Yes, pretty cool.

What is less cool in this particular regard is that I haven’t done martial arts in years.

The stunt work I was hired to do in my last life chapter was often wire work or smashing into stuff really hard, not fight choreography. It is a not-small irony that despite having won a North American Muay Thai championship as an amateur fighter and going on to win a few semi-pro fights before a brain injury ended all that (and opened a door I wasn’t expecting into circus), I very rarely got to exercise any of that athletic expertise on-camera in my stunt career.

I don’t punch stuff anymore.

I don’t kick stuff anymore.

I’ve been training my ass off in circus for the past five or six years instead: I’ve been bending myself into knots and flinging myself around through the air on my rotator cuff.

Bit of a wrench in the works for a role where the main meal is … well, pretend-punching and pretend-kicking someone.

Yikes.

There's no way around it: to be ready for this role, I need to brush off my martial arts body and get it back in working order. 

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For those of you unfamiliar with this former sport of mine, Muay Thai, it is also  sometimes referred to as Thai kickboxing. You strike your opponents with your fists, knees, elbows, shins, and heels. You can win by knock-out (self-explanatory) or technical knock-out (your opponent cannot continue but is still conscious; e.g. bleeding so much that they cannot see, or has taken so many leg kicks from their opponent they can no longer stand, or has been kneed in the stomach so many times that their nervous system is like, 'Nope, sorry, kneeling is all I'm going to let you do now'). It's considered one of the more brutal striking arts. I loved it.

Muay Thai doesn’t have a ‘belt’ system like jiu jitsu, karate, or taekwondo to denote skill level or experience. You just beat the ever-loving snot out of each other with the hardest points on your body and whoever is left standing, wins.

Conversely, if they handed out black belts in anxiety, I’d be 2nd or 3rd dan at this point purely on the basis of how much white noise has been filling my head as I teeter on the precipice of having to revisit this particular kind of movement, in order to be prepared for this movie contract.

Neurosis #1: CAN MY BODY EVEN DO THIS ANYMORE?

Guess we'll find out.

Neurosis #2: IS THIS GOING TO F*** UP MY CIRCUS WORK?

I’m in Montréal working on the Barbette grant. I’ve made great effort to focus everything in my life around pursuing this project, about chasing the goals I’ve set for myself in aerial straps.

Martial arts is fun, but it’s not a low-risk physical activity. Fingers, thumbs, ankles, wrists regularly get sprained or broken, even when pursuing things recreationally. It’s not exactly wise to take that stuff up again, unless I absolutely needed to. Like in this case. For work. Paid work.

One way I can mitigate the risk of injury with returning to a martial arts practice is private training with a coach. It’s beginners (the class level I’d be back in) who are most likely to clip you with a wild, overly enthusiastic kick or punch. Doing bag work, pad work, having an expert eye looking over my form, someone I could communicate to and work with to dial in the right intensity and the right technique in order to tune things up as much as I can before July filming – that’s the only way to go.

Neurosis #3:THIS IS NOT "THE PLAN"

Disrupting The Plan for Barbette training and creation by adding a 3-week film shoot in Toronto into the mix, mid-summer? I’m going to have to rework my timeline to extend into the fall and/or winter, and resubmit it to the Canada Council for approval.

Not the end of the world. But not ... THE PLAN.

My friend Demetria McKinney (who plays Anacostia on Motherland: Fort Salem) would tell me that this is a "champagne problem", and I'm working hard to keep re-framing it as such.

Neurosis #4: How do the Montréal fighters and coaches I might get access to feel about trans people? Is it going to be a problem? And, if it is going to be a problem, can I go stealth / hide it so that I can accomplish what I need to accomplish?

My friend, Tanya, has been training at the gym that I’ll be going to for many years now. She was the one who suggested the coach I ended up contacting for training; she also did quite a lot of searching around trying to find coaches who would be … ‘open-minded’ (read: not going to have a problem with a transgender person showing up at their gym).

The coach I’ll be training with told her that he ‘doesn’t care what someone does in their bedroom, or what they have in their pants’ . . . Great (*small, anxious sarcasm*). But he wasn’t actually my main concern. The night before my lesson, a realization lightning-bolted its way through my brain, keeping me up for many hours to come:  I realized that I hadn’t planned on what I’d do about what happens after my training session.

What was I going to do about the change room situation?

What was I going to do about showers?

And before we all get carried away with elaborate suggestions of wet-wipes sink baths in the washroom as an interim measure –  not showering after spending any amount of time working out in a fight gym is a poor choice. Great way to get all kinds of horrifying skin infections.

What was I going to do if those guys think I’m . . . a guy?

Everyone else who doesn't know me seems to think so, these days.

Can I pass as a girl?

Would that be better?

My brain quickly spiralled into a multitude of worst-case scenarios. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, as my mom used to like to tell me. But the worst-case scenarios I was imagining were paralyzing.

I kept trying to drag myself up out of the mental mess I'd created for myself with some pragmatic chiding: Ess, you're blowing this way out of proportion. It's not going to be that bad. No one is really going to care. You'll just go in, do your thing, and get out. Not everybody is out to get you. Just calm down.

But what if . . . whispered the voice in the back of my head.

I couldn't disregard it.

I can't disregard the violent things people feel comfortable saying to me through the anonymity of an online username. I can't disconnect that digital vitriol from the possibility that someone in real life might feel comfortable translating that into action one day. I can't ignore that I don't know any of the people in this training space I'm going into, and I can't forget what I know about what men in fighting gyms are sometimes like, and what they talk about.

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When I was in Vancouver filming the last season of Motherland: Fort Salem and was squeezing in aerial straps conditioning at a CrossFit gym around the corner from my hotel, the staff there fully interpreted me as a guy and showed me to the Mens’ change room. It became very awkward very quickly to try to avoid this change room, and so I went with it. 

Who cares, really–– right?

I kept my head down, hung up my raincoat and outdoor shoes, and hustled out of there. 

At most, there’d be 2 or 3 other guys in that Vancouver change room at any given time. They’d chitchat with one another, familiar with each other from some class where they’d probably spent 45 minutes flipping giant tractor tires across a vast expanse of astroturf together. They were dressed head-to-toe in Lululemon training gear, mixed vegan protein powder into their shaker bottles or drank fancy alkaline water, and generally had the appearance of maintaining at least a 3-step skincare routine.

This is very much not what I expect the men to be like at this particular, well-known MMA gym in Montréal. We’re talking about a group of young men who are all singularly focused on their MMA careers. Men who spend every day, all day, smashing each others’ heads into the floor, choking each other out, and generally giving each other many, many, many low-grade to mid-grade (or more?) traumatic brain injuries and oxygen deprivation. It’s a quiet, not-so-secret-but-still-hush-hush thing within Muay Thai and MMA and other striking sports that guys have memory problems; have speech problems; have rage problems; have violence problems (towards themselves, or towards others). In other words, this is a very different demographic of young men than the other male-dominated spaces that I am now occasionally included in, or assumed to belong in. A demographic of young men whose reactions I’m not particularly interested in finding out about, should they react negatively to perceiving that a “girl” is in their change room.

I have no idea what the change room layout at Tristar MMA gym is: if the showers are just open, or if they’re private, or if there are useless, tattered shower curtains that hint at privacy.  My chest might look masculine now to a lot of people; my silhouette might look masculine now because of all the aerial straps training to a lot of people; but I’m missing a fairly key piece of anatomy in the context of “naked mens’ shower room” that there is absolutely nothing I can do about.

You're catastrophizing, Ess, scolds the part of me that is trying to keep things grounded in the present.

Am I? replies the part of me that remembers what it was like back in the day at my old fighting gym, close to a decade ago.

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I remember fight-gym culture well, from my past life.  The gym I trained at was friendly and welcoming. The fight team was professional, focused, dedicated.

There were still ‘tough guys’. Weird attitudes. Unspoken social nuances to navigate (which, as we all know, autistic people really excel at).

I carved out a home for myself at my old Muay Thai gym the way everyone does: through repetition, through being present, through being consistent, through putting in the hard work.

I learned the people, and their quirks, and the unspoken social "do’s and don’ts" by spending hours and hours there, every day.

I had the ‘benefit’ of not being out or having pursued any medical transition yet: I had the ‘benefit’ (of the doubt) of being a ‘girl’ who wanted to fight.

I still heard veiled and not-veiled homophobia. It was present in everything. 

The only footprint that transgender people, as a point of conversation, had in the world of fighting at the time that I was involved in it was the horrific ways that people discussed long-retired amateur MMA fighter Fallon Fox, a trans woman. (Thanks, Joe Rogan).  This is still most people's "point of contact" with trans folks in the world of fighting: a theoretical conversation filled with pseudoscience and aggressive rhetoric. If you've waded into, or brushed up against, any of the conversation around transgender athletes, I promise you that some of the worst versions of that conversation happens in the MMA and other fight communities.

I don’t have the option of assimilating into a community, in this case. I don't have the time (and it's not my only focus) to dedicate to being a regular face at this gym and having people get to know me and like me for who I am.

I don’t live in Montréal.

I’ve only got a few weeks until I might have to travel back to Toronto for rehearsals.

What are my options? I asked myself.

Play dress-up and be a girl tomorrow, so that it’s not perceived as intrusive or inappropriate if I use that change room/showers or . . . ?

Or what? 

Try to pass? Try to pass until what point in the social interaction?

Pray that no one else is in the change room or showering while you are?

Pray that the conversation has moved on from 'Fallon Fox controversy' sometime in the last decade? (I'm sure it hasn't).

I sleep maybe 4 hours the night before my first lesson.

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05:42 am.

I punch in the keypad code that I was given to unlock the heavy red door at the top of the stairs.  I feel a mechanical whirring buzz lightly under my fingertips as the tumbler turns over inside the lock, drawing the bolt back out of the frame and into the body of the door. I swing the door open.

The first thing that hits you is the smell.

The second thing that hits you is the sound.

No matter how much mopping, sanitizing, laundering you do, a fighting gym always smells like a fighting gym. It’s sweat – sweat in a hundred variations: infused into old leather gloves and punching mitts; ground into the canvas of the ring; dripped across the vinyl flooring and flung onto the walls by rapidly twisting, rising, falling bodies.  

There’s other, subtler smells beneath the overwhelming scent of work, too. A trace of the sharp smell of liniment oil from a Thai boxer warming up in a far corner.  A bit of cold greasy iron oozing into the air from the weights and other conditioning equipment off to the side in one corner. A hint of that peppery smell that old books at libraries have: this one from the yellowing boxing, savate, and MMA posters as far back as 1991 stretch around the walls, edges curling against their glass panes.

This olfactory kaleidoscope is punctuated by the sharp BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!s of the ring timer, chiming off every 3 minutes to signal the start or end of a round; the heavy THUD of some unseen shin connecting with a heavy bag; the high-pitched squeak!s of a boxer’s feet as he pivots and dances in a shadowboxing warm-up; the pap-pap-pap-pap! of gloves meeting striking pads.  

All of this meets my nose and my ears as I cross the threshold of Tristar MMA gym at 6:45 in the morning on a bright June morning.

I take a deep steadying breath (through my mouth).

A huge Reebok branded poster of Georges St Pierre himself looms over the wall to my left. The front desk sits empty in the 7am gloom of the gym, and the rest of the gym stretches out beyond that. Wide open stretches of blue vinyl mats take up the front half of the gym, ideal for wrestling and jiu jitsu. The elevated boards of a boxing ring sits to the left. Beyond that are rows and rows of heavy bags and speed bags, the cage of the Octagon, mirrors for shadow boxing.

Even at this early hour there are fighters there, getting in their training for the day. No one’s really noticing me coming in. I keep my bag with me as I slowly edge out onto the training area, looking for the coach I’m scheduled to meet with. A small group of men are locked in grappling positions on the ground. Someone’s shadow-boxing in the octagon. A couple pairs of guys are already thumping around the ring, exchanging flurries of Muay Thai technique.

A tall, lanky man with a shaved head and worn-out old Thai shorts comes out from behind the ring. “Ess?” he calls out.

“Yes! Conrad?” I reply. He waves me over.  As I get closer to him I can see that he’s wearing small rectangular glasses. This random detail makes me feel calmer.

“Ready to get started?”

“Yup.”

“Great.” He smiles warmly and his eyes crinkle up behind the glasses. I feel my chest un-knot a bit. “Let’s head over to the mirrors, I always like to start with shadowboxing. Tell me a bit about your training background; Tanya said you used to do some fighting?”

It turns out that waking up at the crack of dawn to go punch things with a very kind, very knowledgeable ex-fighter serves the dual-benefit of both being so early that the gym barely has anyone in it yet, and the people who are there see you with someone who holds a position of authority in that space and therefore don’t really look at you twice.

The coach “he/him’”s me. So do the other men who briefly acknowledge my existence as we pass by each other  in the yawning early morning light on our way to different corners of the gym.

I forgot that, in general, men are often found wearing hilariously short shorts in fighting gyms and nobody thinks anything of it. (Gotta free up that leg movement!)

It also turns out that men’s change rooms/showers in fighting gyms are universally disgusting–– so much so that it is not irregular (per my friend Tanya) for the men at this gym to occasionally ask someone to guard the empty women’s changeroom door so they can dash into the infinitely cleaner and less scudgy showers following their training. Nobody notices when I head to the womens’ change room following my lesson.

Conrad’s cues light up dusty old memories in my brain, and I work to drag them up to the level of physical activation.

Eyes up.

Chin down.

Fists up.

Turn the knuckles over on the punch.

Pivot the back foot.

Sink your weight down on the hook.

Watch the angle of that front foot.

Rotate the shoulder to the ear on the cross.

Rotate the body more.

Rotate the body more.

Move forward on the jab.

Keep the head moving.

My body is stronger than it used to be, in different ways.  It turns out that 5 years of circus training, several years of Jen Crane’s MyFlex training shoring up the hypermobile gooiness of my joints and limbs, and the extra conditioning that William, my straps coach, assigned to me this summer has added a significant amount of stability to the body parts that used to regularly betray me, back during my active fight career.

More surprisingly, my body is stiffer than it used to be, in different ways: my spine and all the muscles around it –used to extension and flexion– let their displeasure be known at dynamic rotational work. Once I get home, a screaming headache sets in: my neck muscles and upper back muscles aren’t used to stabilizing my skull in this way, I figure.

Ice, Advil, rest. Repeat.

It’s better the second session.

By the third session, my body’s started to adapt.

Things don’t hurt quite so much.

And I’m not consumed with anxiety.

Onwards and upwards.