TW: discussion, though not explicit, of sex work; descriptions of transphobia.

The possibility of becoming a sex worker has never strayed too far from my life.  If I’m approved for affirmation surgery soon and I have the procedure before I’m about 50 (I’m 43 now), I would strongly consider sex work to supplement my income.

I’ve been a sex worker before, though at the time I never would have called it sex work, for the same reason I never would have considered coming out as transgender: it was the mid-90s and I was scared to death of just being out as non-heterosexual.  There’s a reason I didn’t want to risk extending the acceptance I had to something even more polarizing.

The words we use, and that others use to label us have a far-reaching effect on how we are treated, and how we treat ourselves.  I never thought that, dancing in a cage for money, I would be saying twenty years later that I’m a transgender woman with a living name and authentic identity as Debora.  We had “LGBT” then, but it was mostly LGB and almost no T.  I recently found a book from 1996 that is very supportive of transsexuality, and while I can see that it was possible for me to come out as transsexual in 1994, when I was stripping in a cage, I would not have done so.  I’ll tell you why.

Please don’t get mad at me for saying this, but transsexual people were on the fringes of our community then, where I was living.  The recent, abhorrent “drop the t” petition would have found some backers in some of the fellow activists I worked with.  I used to know activists who told me transgender women were just gay men afraid to put themselves in the “gay” column.

At the time I was not who I am now. The me of now would have told those transphobic men to stuff their prejudice and accept me for who I am. But my status as a cute, beloved, sexy “twink” was too much fun and too valuable for me to change.  I made some money, but my expenses were high. “Someone who looks fabulous all the time usually spends a lot of time and money looking like that” definitely applied to me.

I had already come out as gay to my parents, and they were already worried about my late nights, use of their internet for sex connections*, and frequent trips to gay bars in Calgary, Alberta, the nearest city with a sizeable gay community.  They frequently gave me extra money and my Dad’s cellular phone for my trips (this was 1994-96), knowing I might need an emergency hotel room and roadside phone call.  They did what I would have done if I had a young twentysomething child in my situation: try to protect me to the best of their ability, knowing they couldn’t keep me from living as who I was.  I did not want to fix what wasn’t broken, and at the time, for as much as I think it was a horrid arrangement, coming out as transgender would have pushed me further to the fringes.

I danced in a cage and did other things because I could, I sometimes enjoyed it, and because I got paid. My Mom’s feminist books that I read growing up helped me live with myself, though I told no one I was identifying with the women I had read about, and read the words of.

Looking back, I led an inner life as a woman, but I acknowledged that the world viewed me as a man.  I didn’t like the arrangement, but at the time I was the most comfortable with it that I would be for the next decade and a half.  This life didn’t last very long, and there’s a whole new chapter that begins after I lost one of my battles with anorexia and bipolar disorder and I ended up in the psych ward having my eating and moods frequently monitored.

In the psych ward I met someone who would significantly shape my identity as a woman.  I don’t think she was aware how much I was taking notes about how similar we were, though I tried to hide it with ‘manly’ behaviours, habits and interests.

Probably the most awkward moment we had was when she saw my decorated basement suite. I was very proud of having proven wrong everyone’s assertion that I could never live alone.  She remarked that she thought it looked like someone much younger lived there.

I asked, “how much younger?”

She answered, trying not to laugh, “a teenage girl.”

I tried to repress the moment as far back as I could, and it haunted our relationship for almost the next 5 years. She apologized and explained it was what she loved about me, that I wasn’t “one of the boys” and that I related to her interests much more than anyone else she could be dating. After being a prized “twink” tossed out of the gay community, and spending time in the psych ward and a group home, I was happy someone loved me in spite of my bizarre contradictions.

(There's something missing here, and that thing is drugs and alcohol, but I'm still sorting out how I feel about myself when it comes to that, and I don't want to talk about it here.)

I knew that, in 1997, this was going to be our secret. To the world, we looked like a typical hetero couple.  The word “transgender” never came up. She told me she thought I wasn’t “100% straight” (true, I came out as bi and then as pansexual) and left it at that. I was so confused I didn’t know what to think.

My residence was very brightly colour-coordinated, with plush toys and lots of teeny-bopper and trendy fashion magazines. I had decorated it without her input, and she said she was suspicious there was someone else influencing me. My relationship with her is a long, turbulent story for another day.

*this was 1994 and computers with internet connections, which were controlled by the government and universities, were few, and my parents had one.