Tag: WestCAST

Wow, what a blast! I am so grateful that this month I was able to do a presentation (in drag!!!) at the Western Canadian Association for Student Teaching conference. This would not have happened without lots of support and encouragement from the manager, faculty lead, teachers, and my peers in the EKTEP program and at UVic- thank you so much! Another thank you for the audience who brought insightful questions and connections to create a great discussion afterwards.

My presentation is titled “Drag Queens Were Children Once”. Luckily, most of it is recorded (with a few missing bits) including some of the discussion that occurred afterwards. Below is:

-The recorded portions of the presentation, in order (filmed by Michelle Sartorel)

-The original essay, typed out

-The recorded portions of the discussion after the presentation (filmed by Michelle Sartorel)

Live presentation clips

And that’s (most of) the presentation!

The essay:

Drag Queens Were Children Once

My name is Graham Smith, and I live in ʔa·kisk̓aqǂiʔit, on ʔamakʔis Ktunaxa. I grew up on Lheidli T’enneh homelands in Prince George, around beautiful forests and rivers and wonderful people. Unfortunately, P.G. is also known for racism, a mascot that was once made from a septic tank (not kidding), and homophobia, although I don’t think I’d be much safer in even the most tolerant of cities. Us queer people from conservative regions have unique perspectives like that, ones I don’t think are heard often enough. So here’s one of my hot takes: I don’t think presenting traditional, western research has much power to change people’s minds about beliefs held in their hearts, beliefs like the idea that if students learn about people like me, they will become us and be worse off for it. But I’ve learned that stories can address conflicts like this one, and that sometimes the most undervalued forms of research are the most effective. Knowledge holders Juanita Eugene (Ktunaxa, ʔaq̓am) and Nasuʔkin Joe Pierre (Ktunaxa, ʔaq̓am) shared with me that when we teach through stories, the listener internalizes the morals that resonate with them as they’re prepared to understand each layer of meaning. Elder Alfred Joseph (Ktunaxa, ʔakisq̓nuk) taught me that infusing learning with humour is “like taking medicine with sugar”; it encourages listeners to open their minds and hearts to new ideas. Dr. Christopher Horsetheif (Ktunaxa) taught me that when teaching to bring two separate groups together, the learning must start with the set of commonalities between them. I also want to thank Dr. Shawn Wilson (Opaswayak Cree Nation) for his book Research is Ceremony, which helped me justify this way of sharing when, for reasons I’ll never get, people wanted me to show them bar graphs instead. Here is my story.

When I started kindergarten, I was quite the character. I loved to dance and perform for my parents but was often afraid of going to school. I wore a princess dress every day and cried if I had to wear cotton tights instead of silky ones. I wore only ballet flats, or in grade one, a pair of glitter cowgirl boots that lit up when I stomped. I was deeply offended if anyone called them cowboy boots and was not shy about correcting them: “I’m a cowgirl, not a cowboy!”.  When I was five, my sister Jenny and I would ride a pony named Andy at the P.G. farmer’s market. We fought one day because I told her Andy was a boy, and I knew this was true because he had a penis. She exclaimed in horror, “Andy does NOT have a penis; he is a girl!”. Those are my earliest memories of gender. When I was six, I’d lie awake praying that my chest would stay flat forever, feeling sick with worry about my body changing a decade down the road. I’m not sure who I was praying to because I was raised agnostic, but it didn’t work- which is why I’m still agnostic. I had experienced nothing in life to tell me there was something “wrong” with growing up or being a girl; I loved the incredible women who were my family and friends. I wanted to be strong and smart and joyful like them, but I didn’t want to be one of them.

By grade three I’d exchanged my ballgowns for T-shirts with rhinestones, which I’d pick off and give to my friends. I started to get this funny feeling occasionally, like disgust and embarrassment and one drop of sad mixed and diluted. It would strike when my teacher separated us into girls’ and boy’s teams in gym, or when someone called me “miss”. I felt that strange feeling when I thought too long about why I’d never be allowed in the boys’ bathroom. I preferred to be camping with my family where there were no girl’s and boy’s bathrooms, just bushes. There are still tiny moments when I have more in common with the rednecks I grew up around than other queer people in large urban centers, like when I tell a joke about being trans and the only laugh comes from the right-winger who isn’t worried about offending me. But the more I became myself, the less many of them seemed to love me. And the more some “country folks” started to treat me differently, the harder I found it to love them.

One day in grade four, I was overwhelmed by the strange sad feeling, mixed with anger. A boy I sat beside had been kicking my chair every lunchtime, and he made me scared. My mum came with me to talk to my teacher, who said “Boys just do this to girls when they think they’re cute. I won’t need to move your desk”. I cried angry tears as we walked home. In grade five, I started to dread growing up even more. I felt nauseous when I thought about having a period or getting pregnant one day. School taught me that there are only males and females, and when they are twenty-five or so they marry and have 2.5 kids, though I’m still not sure how that works (where is the other half of the kid?). I wanted this life because it was normal, and I wanted to be normal. At the same time, I didn’t want it at all. Looking back, I understand why I didn’t know who I was in elementary and high school. It’s because sexism punishes you for being a girl and transphobia punishes you harder for failing at being one. Transphobia also makes sure that people like me are a secret, not taught or talked about in schools, because acknowledging us would make us real. I didn’t know these things in my head yet, but I could already sense they were simply the rules.

In grade six, I was working in the hallway while two boys talked beside me. One said something and I responded. He pointed at me and said, “I don’t even know what it is doing here”. It felt like he knew I wasn’t a real girl, and while I was humiliated, it was strangely freeing to be seen. In grade seven, my first real sex-ed ensured I had no clue that anything I learned applied to queer people. My teacher was amazing for the time- she used the proper terms for anatomy and answered every question she could without judgement. She even mentioned that intersex people exist, and it was the first time anyone outside the male-female binary had been mentioned in my eight years of school. Two of my classmates shouted in disgust, and my teacher gave them the look- you know, the teacher look. That day, I learned that there were other possibilities for bodies and genders, and those possibilities were disgusting to my peers. Queer people making safer choices with sex, even having relationships, was entirely absent from that lesson, or any sex education I had until grade ten. Even then, we were never more than an afterthought. In the changerooms for gym in grade eight, I felt like an intruder, like someone would see through my girl disguise and kick me out. But there was no “right” place to get changed. In grade nine, I knew I liked girls, and it felt like everyone must be able to tell. So, I changed alone in the bathroom stalls while everyone chatted by the lockers.

I was struggling academically and with my mental health, so I did most of grades eight and nine in an alternative program. When I returned to high school full time in grade ten, my life started coming back together, and I had the self-confidence to somewhat soothe my fear of not belonging. I came out as bisexual, which was fifty percent wrong, but an honourable attempt for a teen who based their self-worth on the approval of boys. I even found a feminine guy to date, which helped me fit in while still being a bit gay. I had two teachers who made their classrooms a refuge, and an incredibly thoughtful librarian who stocked the shelves with books about people like me. In grade twelve, I had a teacher who shared that he had a nonbinary partner who was a surgeon. It was the first time I had heard about a nonbinary person living within fifty kilometres of me, much less one in a highly respected career. I rode the bus home smiling that day. In his class, I “discovered” that homophobia and transphobia were not a requirement in all cultures, as I’d always assumed. I say “discovered” in the way that Cartier “discovered” Canada- it was always there, and I realized it millennia after Indigenous people did. Despite these teachers, there was much I did not know, and many questions I thought I had nobody to ask. When my first partner began to cross my boundaries, I assumed it was just another mystery of queer relationships that nobody could teach me about, and I accepted it. I’m still dealing with the repercussions today.

I spent my first year of university at home during COVID, and because I had a healthy family with secure jobs, it wasn’t that bad. I spent hours outside, returning with spruce needles in my sweater and leaving dirt on my bed from climbing in my garden-level window. I adored my biology classes, where I learned that nature was not always straight, not always male and female, the way I had been taught as a kid. In my health sciences and Indigenous studies classes, I learned more about the ways people like me had always been around , and I wondered why so few teachers had told me about us. I learned about this thing called “Drag Queen Story Hour”, and I told my mum that when I was a teacher, I’d wear magical outfits like that to make my students excited to read. I remembered that I had been a drag queen since the first stomp of my light-up cowgirl boots, but in that moment, she had forgotten. Her face pulled back in discomfort, and she walked away. I began to cut my own hair and dress how I wanted, because at home there were no bathroom stalls scribbled with slurs, nobody to cast strange looks or whisper and point as I walked by. I now understood that there would be room for me in this world if I was not man or a woman, even if I would not be welcome everywhere. I finally came out as nonbinary, to which my youngest sister said “yeah, obviously” with a loving smile. I started to feel like myself, and to truly like myself in a way that I hadn’t experienced. For the first time, I was certain my family loved the real me. I could imagine being a parent one day, getting old, and being a good relative. I decided to become an elementary teacher, because I have always loved learning and creating. But changing my role within elementary schools has not fixed my experiences in them.

The year I moved to ʔa·kisk̓aqǂiʔit, I walked down the hallway of my college and looked at graduation pictures of teacher candidates from past decades. Aside from some questionable haircuts during the eighties, I did not see anyone who looked like me, and my confidence crumbled. But two years ago, I looked again and found someone. As I got to know them better, I learned they had to fight to get a picture in that hallway, and they had awful experiences working in a local school after graduating. Parents had called and emailed the principal, even coming into the office to declare their fear and disgust at this new teacher who dared to tell their students what pronouns to call them. Parents said they had exposed their students to “sexually explicit material”, and the harassment continued all year. Even before I heard this, there was not a single time I entered a school without wondering if someone would harass me too.

Every time a student asked me if I was a boy or a girl, I thought of how my words could result in a parent shouting at me, just like people shout at my girlfriend and I for holding hands in public. I thought of the angry mother who followed me out of the public pool to tell me I would “probably commit suicide” because I was trans. I could tell she had read statistics about us removed from the context of our stories. Our stories where our lives are cut short because of transphobia, not because we are trans. Thankfully, my first practicum at a Ktunaxa independent school helped me stand taller. Elders, teachers, and students showed me that I belonged, even if I was as white as a polar bear and queerer than a three-dollar-bill. I think of the Ktunaxa students and teachers who have been told they do not belong, in public schools built on their own homelands, and right in my teaching program. I’m impressed by the graciousness to still welcome people like me, because in my culture, we’ve forgotten how to take care of each other like that. I guess we were too busy running “schools” like Assiniboia, like St. Eugene’s, where we enforced strict gender segregation so that brothers and sisters would not know or love each other.

As I approach my second practicum at a new school, I have the joy of hearing students pass me in the hallway and say, “hey teacher Graham!”, or “sick mullet!”, and I imagine having a long and fulfilling career. A student asked me why my voice sounds different than it did last year, and I told her “It just changed a bit”- without it shaking, without any complaints or questions. When students see me, they gather evidence that we all deserve to be here. But it is not my job to decide when you are ready for evidence that people like me belong in this profession, and that our realities belong in the curriculum and the classroom as much as anybody else’s do. What I can tell you is who I am, and if you become curious, you will find the evidence you need. To anyone in the audience who hopes their kids never have a trans teacher like me, I think that’s just too bad, and I love you anyways. We still use the same “genderless bathroom” when we’re hunting, even if you think I’ll ruin your kids by advocating for bathrooms they feel comfortable in, for changerooms where they don’t hide themselves out of fear. I hope us queer teachers will still be here when you’re ready to love us. It may be hard at first, but both our lives will become easier when you can embrace me. If there is one thing I can leave you with, it’s this undeniable truth: some of the students you teach will grow up to be drag queens, and whether you hate us or love us, all drag queens were children once.

Live discussion clips:

Thank you for listening or watching! I hope my story connected with you.

-Graham