Speaker 1:	Thanks to so many of you for being here. I know it's Pterodactyl Hunt night.
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	It's probably a hard choice for you. I was thinking earlier on, it's my first time every having to compete with a Pterodactyl hunt.
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	The only thing I can think of that's sort of like that is one time I was at the Toronto Book Fair years ago. It's kind of like the Target of literary festivals. It's a gigantic room and there's all these publishers and they're trying to ... giving away free stuff and trying to get people to come and pay attention to their offers and they sort of make you go up. It was like a boxing ring, I think, that they had set up and it was very weird, strange thing. I managed to get some people to stop and listen, and I was halfway through a story and I thought okay, I feel like slitting my wrists a little bit less than I did 10 minutes ago. All of a sudden, my whole crowd turned around and left all at the same time. At first, I thought it was something I said and then I found out later it was because one of the other nature book publishers had just busted out an albino Siberian tiger kitten.
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	I'm going to read for a little while, tell a few stories and then we're going to do a question and answer as this is an institute of higher education. And then I'm going to read a couple of little short, short, things I like to call literary Doritos. Then I'll sign some books, hopefully. I would love to sell those 23 books right there. You're allowed 50 pounds for your suitcase. My suitcase currently weighs, I've been on tour for a month. My suitcase currently weighs 49.4 pounds. So talk to me. There will be some deals on books afterwards. This one I'm going to read was a request last night from one of my lovely hosts.
	I guess all you have to know is that I come from the Yukon. Do you know where that is? It's close to Alaska, the country Canada, it's right above you.
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	It's kind of large. There's a lot of people. Anyway, my family's Irish and Roma. I have 36 first cousins and 14 uncles, 12 aunts, and then my cousins all have kids now and my uncles and aunts, they all have husbands and wives and second wives and mistresses. There's this very strong family resemblance on my father's side of the family. I look like all my uncles and my male cousins, mostly. There's also a guy who pumps gas at the 4th Avenue SO in my town that I grew up in, Whitehorse, who's the spitting image of me. None of my uncles or my father will fess up to having anything to do with this guy but I know he's related to me and sometimes .... I know he is. We look identical. I sometimes see him smoking in his coveralls so I have to shop when I get gas there and I always see him, but we've never said anything to each other. He's about 10 years younger than me. We've never spoken a word, but every time I see him I always think, if I ever need a kidney -
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	My family's all blue collar. Tried ... died in the wool. They don't really get what I do for a living at all. Before my Gran passed away, whenever I came to town she would be like, "Oh great. You're in town for four days. Fantastic. You need to pick me up at bingo, and then you need to go get my prescription, and then you need to do this, and then you need to... it would be really nice if you could clean the gutters." I was like, "Grandma, I'm here for work." She's like, "Work? That's not a job. That's only a job if you hate it."
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	That would be funnier if that hadn't been the biggest truth in her life, yeah, and if that truth hadn't bent her back, and blown out her knees, and curled her arthritic fingertips back into her palms like, permanently. Anyway, last summer I spent ten days at home in the Yukon. My family calls everything I do my little art project. Everything. So I was at home. I was doing some research for my little art project. This particular art project involved going through as many family photographs as I could, scanning them for a visual things that I was doing. My family doesn't actually put photographs into photograph albums. I'm not sure why they do that. My Aunt Roberta had a whole stash, big magic red bag of memorabilia, stashed in her basement. My mom had a gigantic mishmash of memories crammed into a cardboard box in the shelf in the guest room closet. My Grandma Pat's actually the only one who ever puts photographs into a photograph album. Most of my family leave them in the development envelope in the kitchen junk drawer. That seems to be where they all end up. 
	Anyway, I found lots of other things, too, crammed in with all those photographs. Weird stuff, baby teeth, clippings of hair. To me, if it was on your body and then removed from your body, it's medical waste at that point. It's not a keepsake, right? There's tons of weird stuff in there. There was a drunk driving citation I found crammed in from my Uncle Dave. He's a Catholic priest now, but not back in the '70s. I couldn't help but notice that that particular drunk driving citation was issued at 9 a.m. in the morning, which I found impressive, even for a Yukoner, right?
	I found a lot of pictures of me as a kid. Way more pictures of me as a kid than I remember anybody taking at the time. It wasn't like now. Not everybody ... you didn't have a cell phone with a camera in it. You had to have an actual camera and we just never did that. Anyway, I found all these pictures of me as a kid. I don't remember who took half of them. 
	There's one of my dad and my Uncle Rob on either end of a broomstick loaded down with lake trout, and I'm crouching underneath the fish between the two men. I've got my plaid shirt rolled up past my elbows, I'm covered in fish blood and scales. I'm proudly holding up my own little string of rainbow trout. There's another one in a campground somewhere. It's of me exploding out of the willows. I'm carrying a gigantic log of firewood on my back. It's bigger than I am. What I found remarkable with that photo is that someone in my family in their infinite wisdom, I was about six years old in that photograph, they thought it was a great idea to give a six year old kid about a 14 inch filet knife. It's about that long and I remember that night. I remember that it was longer than my thigh, so that if I kneeled down the knife would stick into the ground.
	There's one of me on the first day of Grade 1. There's a line-up. I'm standing off to one side. It's all the other little girls on my block. All the neighbor girls and my little sister are all in these starchy new dresses, their chubby little knees scrubbed and squishing out of the tops of sparkling white knee socks. I, on the other hand, am wearing blue corduroy bell bottoms, black rubber boots with the red-brown toes, and my Davy Crockett fringe buckskin leather jacket. Oh yeah. I'm carrying a briefcase.
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	They have pretty much not changed at all. I remember that buckskin jacket, I do. My mother hated it. She said it smelled like campfire and fish blood and I was like, "I know. It's perfect." I wore it until it was way too small for me. It only came up to here, and the sleeves only came up to there, and I would cram it on. My mom would wait til I was out of the house. She would take it out of my closet and she would throw it in the garbage. I would be out somewhere doing something, building a fort, pummeling the neighbor children, something like that. But I had like a Spidey sense about that jacket and wherever I was, all of a sudden it was doodoodoodoodoo. I'd go racing home, take my jacket out of the garbage, and then to spite my mother I would wear it constantly for about two weeks. But I would keep the bacon grease and the coffee grounds all stuck to it just to teach her a lesson. I loved that jacket.
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	Here's my grade two class photo. It's a front, toothless me again in a plaid shirt, my pearly snaps done right up to my neck, and I'm sporting kind of an Andy Gibb-ish shag-do. I know you call it the Justin Bieber look. Andy Gibb fucking rocked that look in the '70s. Know your history, people. 
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	There was another one of me smiling in full hockey gear, lined up with all my teammates. I was the only girl, the only Ivan, in the boys minor hockey league for 11 years. None of this seemed surprising to me at all. I appeared to be the very same kid that I remember being. But looking back, what I couldn't believe in retrospect was that anyone in my family could actually have been surprised when I came out of the closet at 18. Seriously, people! The evidence was everywhere. All over, right from the start. All over those photographs. How could anyone have missed it.
	I decided to investigate. I called up my Aunt Roberta first because it was almost 8:00 in the evening and I know she goes to bed early. I asked her if she ever suspected that I had caught the gay when I was very little - 
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	- if she ever wondered about the 14 inch filet knives and the hockey and the buckskin leather jackets, and the whatnot. I heard the kitchen chair complain about being dragged across the linoleum, and then she sat down and she said, "I know this sounds silly. I always just thought you were just who you were, an amazing, little, strong personality. See, I always thought you got it from your dad." Then I asked her if my Gran had ever said anything to her about me catching the gay at a very early age. She said, "Your Gran's gone to bed already." What, it's seven, what time is it anyway? She said, "I do remember your Gran saying to me that you were exactly right. All you kids turned out to be exactly who God meant you to be. I mean, you can call her in the morning and ask her yourself if you want to but I know that's what she's going to say." 
	My Grandma Pat was good for an awesome quote as usual. She said, "I never labeled you as anything. You were just boyish, and you just did boyish things. Keep in mind we just didn't think like that back then, you see. Any knowledge of homosexuality that I might have had would have gone all the way back to Victorian times. All those novels."
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	"You probably skirted under my radar because you weren't wearing hoop skirts and those high button boots." My own mother swore she had no clue about me whatsoever. My mom just never went there. "I just let you be what you wanted to be. I'm not very helpful with your little art project, am I, I guess. I'm sorry honey." My Aunt Cathy just echoed my mother. "I just thought you were a fucking little brat because you refused to wear a dress to our wedding no matter what we said." My Aunt Nora thought me sister and I were just polar opposites, that's all. "Carrie was the prissy little girl and you just weren't. You were just your own little people. I do remember when you were in your teens. I remember thinking, I remember knowing somehow you weren't happy. You just seemed tense inside your own little skin. I knew there was something going on with you but I didn't know what it was. We didn't have to have a label for everything back then." 
	My Uncle John was recently divorced and thus cooking an omelet for dinner in the background when I got him on the phone. "I'm sorry, kid, but I can't identify the exact moment we realized you'd gone to the dark side. I do remember we were just all glad you weren't born stupid. Yeah. There's no cure for stupid. There was that one time, though. You were like six or seven. You gave me supreme shit for not attending to my fishing rod closely enough 'cause I had been drinking but I don't think that had anything to do with your sexuality, did it?"
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	My Uncle Rob was pensive, thinking over his response a bit before speaking, which, if you knew him, you knew how out of character that really is. He said, "Well, you can see why we wouldn't have thought too much about it. I mean there's a lot of heterosexual butch chicks, especially up north. I mean a guy's gotta me careful. This one time I...yeah anyway."
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	"On the other hand," he continued, "maybe a guy should twigged due to your aversion to wearing a dress, but who cares anyway. You know what I've always said about this kind of thing. It's your soap, and it's your dick, and you can wash it as fast as you want."
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	"Oh, thank you", I said, "oh elder one for that gem of wisdom that I may now hold and carry throughout my life." I'd like you to think about this. His blood, my veins, right now. 
Audience:	(laughter)
Speaker 1:	So it appears for all those years, in all those photographs of that little tomboy, there was only one member of my family wondering about me, and that was me. Thank you.
Audience:	(applause)
Speaker 1:	I'm going to read a ... I'm gonna read a piece out of Gender Failure, available for sale after the show. Next month, you probably know, is going to be Trans Day of Remembrance. I just want to be real clear about what that day is. It's where well-meaning people, queers, and trans students usually all across the continent get together and they read off a list of trans people who've died in the previous year. It's almost always trans women of color. Let's just be realistic about that. There are some exceptions, but ... I'm going to read you this story. It's called Rosie.
	I was 19, almost 20, when I first met my friend Rosie. I still had long hair. Actually I was kind of rocking this Dukes of Hazard, the blond guy from Dukes of Hazard inspired kind of, sort of a blond, feathered mullet. THat's how long ago it was, okay? I was living in the West End of Vancouver. Wet behind the ears, I had just arrived from the Yukon in a Volkswagen van as you do. It was only the second apartment I had ever rented. The first time I ever laid my eyes on Rosie it was raining. There she was, skinny, wiry, restless-eyed Rosie, standing right behind me on the sidewalk that led to our building's front door with both of her arms both burdened down with grocery bags. So I held the front door of our building open for her, just like my Gran had taught me to. "Pffeww, chivalry lives?" she snorted as she clunked past me in her skin tight Levis, and low cut blouse, and kitten heels. Of course, I did not know the words for kitten heels, yet, but I do know, don't I? 
	Except her voice was low like an 18 wheeler gearing down with its engine brakes grinding on a long, steep hill down from the summit and her bare chest above her black, lacy bra was covered in five o'clock shadow, and painted with now bleeding edge and sailor flash faded tattoos.
	I had never met any other woman quite like Rosie before. Still haven't, really. I tried chatting her up in the laundry room a couple of times after that first day. She ignored me like she had not heard me speak at all. She made me think of these she-wolves back home. My dad's best friend was this guy named Danny Nolan and he ran a game farm. He bred endangered animals and re-released them to the wild. It was all a bit dodgy. Later on he got busted for selling Peregrine falcons to oil sheiks in Iraq. But anyway, he had this big enclosure all fenced in with chain-link fence. My dad used to take us out there to see them, but the wolves would never come up to the fence. They would just stay along the tree lines, kind of pace back and forth. You could tell they sort of wanted to come up and take a bone or a bit of moose meat from you, but the wildness still inside them would not let them, would not allow themselves that kind of trust, that kind of closeness to a possible enemy just acting like it was friendly.
	Those wolves, they would go without meat just so not to be disappointed by a stranger's ill intent again. And Rosie, she made me remember those she-wolves. She sure did. It took me months, slowly, slowly to get her to smile and then chat with me in the hallway, and then one day, finally, she accepted my third or fourth invitation to come in for a cup of tea. I called her he, only once, early one. I didn't know. I was still so small town back then. But anyway, I used the word he for her only once and it was barely out of my mouth when she caught it in one, manicured and muscled fist, and threw it back at me. She wasn't mad, just certain. "Don't ever call me he." she said. "Call me, ever, I hate it. I am a she, a her, hers. You got that, kiddo?" 
	You see, it seemed simple to me at the time because it is simple. I loved her already. I wanted to make her happy. So just call her what she wanted. I mean, really how much simpler does it get than that? Call her what made her happy to hear. Somewhere in there so took to calling me Luigi. I do not remember why. She called me Luigi the bricklayer even though I was working as a landscaper at the time. Perhaps it was some kind of comment on my stature, I never asked. We would garbalicize at night after work. Garbalicize, it was a word that she had invented and taught to me. It meant that I would drive my Volkswagen van up and down the alleys behind rich people's houses and she would smoke her hand-rolled cigarettes with the sliding door open, and look for antiques and other quality stuff that the rich people had discarded. It was the late '80s and you would not believe what people would throw out with the trash back then. 
	Rosie had a one-bedroom apartment, the exact same layout as mine, but she slept on a pull-out couch in the living room with her bird and all her plants and her cat Miss Puss so the bedroom could be turned into a carpentry shop. We stripped those antiques down and refinished them with love and sweat and fancy carpenter's wax. Old school ways she had learned in a previous life in the navy. Oak and teak and birds eye maple even. One time we found a birds eye maple radio cabinet, turn of the century, with a phonograph in it. Everything worked perfectly. We couldn't believe our luck. We took that beauty home, shone it up, and then sold it straight back to an antique store, not one single city block away from where we had found it in the first place.
	I mostly bought weed and tee-shirts with my profits. Rosie was saving up for her surgeries and electrolysis, hormones. Nothing was covered back then. It was all expensive. Rosie was on welfare. She wanted to work, but you try being a hairy trans-sexual in 1988 and having a full time job, I dare you. I dare you. She hated the electrolysis the most. She'd come home crying from the pain afterwards. She called it the never ending story. She called me Luigi and he. I never asked her why, didn't need to, made me happy. 
	One day after about a year or so of her and I friends like that, eating dinners together that we would cook for each other and listening to Nina Simone records on vinyl, except for we didn't call it vinyl. We called records, just records back then. We'd listen to Nina Simone and I'd cry at the lyrics and she would laugh at me and punch me in the arm 'cause both of us avoided hugging anyone back then as much as we could. 
	Anyway, my friend, Archie, came to town for a visit. Archie, the fag, from Lethbridge, Alberta, he was a chef and a fellow tinker and traveler. He slept on my couch for five days or so and put his Camels on filtered cigarettes out in the house plant Rosie had given me for my birthday. He left his smelly, crusty socks all around, and the seat up, and he was generally starting to piss me off and overstaying his welcome, but I still loved him. Archie told great stories. 
	But anyway, what happened was Rosie came down one night with some homemade baked beans for me with the bacon cooked right in 'cause she knew they were one of my favorites. She was hanging around in the doorway. She was all she-wolf in the hallway, too shy to enter with Archie the stranger sprawled out on the couch behind me. She was even whispering. "It's cool.", I told her. "He's my friend. Come on in and I'll make you a tea. I missed you these last couple of days. Archie's cool, he's gay himself." "Gay has nothing at all to do with being cool." She hissed a little, but she came in. She drank a cup of tea. She didn't stay for very long. Archie was cool enough, I guess. He called her Rosie, weird though. Said her name like it was in quotation marks kind of. Hard to describe but I do remember hoping she couldn't hear it in his voice. Since she didn't know him, maybe he just said everybody's name like he didn't quite believe them that they were who they said they were. 
	After Rosie left too soon, Archie lit another smoke in my apartment and then he grinned mean and big. He said, "That was the ugliest, fucking drag queen I ever saw in my life. And I thought I had seen it all. Seriously, girlfriend, give it up already, I mean really. Who does she think she's fooling?" I remember the feeling of hating someone I loved at that moment. You know that feeling? I had felt it before, of course, but only with my blood family. But I remember hating Archie right then. Hating him and his 10% spandex tee-shirts and his Docksider shoes with no socks, and his calloused heart, and how could he talk like that about my friend Rosie, when he should know better. He was gay, from Alberto. For Americans, that's kind of like being gay from Montana. I was the one who said he could be trusted. In that way he made me a liar, you know? By accident. 
	So that three story apartment building that we both lived in, it was sold a couple of months later and torn down to build a high rise and Rosie ended up living in a welfare hotel on Cordova Street in Vancouver's now infamous downtown East Side and she was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer at the end of that summer. Her doctor told her she was going to have to go off of her hormones and take care of her quote, "real medical condition". She told me on the phone she had seen this all coming. She wasn't going to do it, she wasn't going off the hormones, she had been stockpiling them for months she told me just in case. She'd worked too hard, she said. She'd come too far. She asked the neighbor to cat sit Miss Puss for her for the weekend, left that neighbor with every can of cat food she could get her hands on, and then disappeared. It was common knowledge at the time that you could get hormones on the black market south of the border, so that's where we all assumed that she had gone. 
	But just in case, you never know, her friend Rachel and I opened up a missing person's case for her after the hotel guy called us and said we were the only two numbers she had written down and left on the bedside table before she up and bailed out on him and did we want to come and get her stuff then? Some old tools mostly, he said. He must have liked her. He didn't have to do that. Most guys like that wouldn't have. I still have some of Rosie's old tools to this day. They were even in my garage when my house burnt down in 2005 so they have survived, just like I sometimes dream Rosie did, too, although I do the math. 
	Stage four stomach cancer, 1988, south of the border, no health care. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of the shape of her, or see a step looks like the way she walked and someone else on the sidewalk's some days, and my heart skips. But always stills quickly, I know Rosie is dead. She wasn't for a while when she was first gone, but she is now. I can feel it. I still remember everything I learned from Rosie. She taught me how to take something most people might just throw out and sweat, and work, and love it back to beautiful. Thank you.
Audience:	(Applause)
Speaker 1:	I'm working on this new project. Hopefully, I can bring it back in a couple of years. It's called the Tomboy's Survival Guide. It's a book, it's a live show project that goes with it, too. I have an all tomboy band. Sally Zori, an Iraqi drummer, she's amazing. Pebbles, the six foot, her name's Pebbles, that's actually her name, the six foot three inch tall Dutch base player. And Allison Gorman on the trumpet. It's a really fun project. It's going to premier in February. I'm going to read you the rarely heard selection from it tonight. It's called, Shouldn't I Feel Pretty.
	On June 25th I received the following email. Dear Ivan, I was just wondering if you always knew. When did you become comfortable in your skin? See, I always felt not quite right. I'd put on dresses, or high heels and make-up and look in the mirror, and I just didn't feel right. Shouldn't I feel pretty? Why didn't I like what I saw? I'm forty-four years old and I think I've just realized that maybe girls' and women's clothes weren't right for me. I feel stupid that it took me so long to realize what I am. It breaks my heart that it took me so long. I don't even know where to begin to feel right, good, beautiful. Any tips? 
	I wrote this person back. I told them I needed a couple of day to think about all this. So here is my response to them. Shouldn't I feel pretty? I get these letters now. I get these letters from all over from people who are hurting. It's a terrifying thing, you know? The pain of a stranger. It's impossible to bear it all even on a strong day, even when the sun is shining and my back doesn't hurt and the dishes are all done. Mostly what I think is that people just want to know they're not alone. They want to know they're not the only one trying to swallow and breathe around the big, empty, abandoned town hall their heart is echoing inside of. Should I tell them the truth, I wonder? Do they really want to know? Sometimes I feel just as lost as they do, and are two lost people any better off when they find each other?
	So instead I make a cup of strong, black tea with canned milk and one brown sugar and I sit down to find the trail into the truth of these things in the only way I've ever known how. By collecting enough words and then walking around with them in my mouth. Words arguing between by ears, words leaving my heart in lumps and then lining up in single file in my lungs to get said out loud. 
	Let me write about September, 1974 when I first started kindergarten and my mom cut me a deal that I could wear pants to school every other day, which meant a dress every day that wasn't a pants day. The night before a wear a dress day I would have bad dreams. I'd have these panicked dreams about boys waiting under the backless wooden stairs. Who's the fuck the sadist that invented the backless wooden stair, anyway, that led into the portable tailor next to the school where my kindergarten class was held. I'd have these sweating, fear-stained dreams of laughing boys hiding under there, looking up my skirt, and I couldn't even kick them properly because have you ever tried to do a high kick while wearing a dress? The harder you kick, the faster your one raised leg pulls your other leg out from under you. Hot, humiliating tears on my check and my bare thigh all torn up by the gravel. I'm sure I know many people who have perfected a technique to account for high kicks in a short dress, but I never did. 
	I just dragged myself to school for months, every other day afraid and exhausted, until my mom finally took pity on me and bought me two more pairs of brown corduroys on sale at the Old Bay in the Qualicum Mall downtown. She sighed and put them into the third drawer of my dresser with a cutting look in my direction because I had disappointed her, again. And so began a lifetime of hating most of my clothes. 
	I spent much of my early years shirtless in the summers. In most old picture of me I'm smiling and sunburned from the waist up, my pant legs stuffed into black rubber boots with red-brown toes, good for standing in the shallow water or for spin-casting, until that tourist man from Texas camped two sites down from us called me young man, and my mom corrected him because I was seven years old already and we were standing in the lineup for the ladies showers. Go and put a tee-shirt on and leave it on this time. I am not going to tell you again. I used to be mad at her for squeezing me into everything, but I grew out of it. I know now that she was worried about me. I wished that she had named what I saw in her eyes when I looked at me back then. I wish that she had called it fear because all those years I mistook it for shame and that mistake has cost us both so much. 
	I like to think that I suffered the same as every teenage girl does in her changing body. I don't think that trans people hold the monopoly or wrote the only book on hating our bodies. And even if we did win at this contest, I wouldn't want the prize anyway. Describe the pain on a scale from one to ten the doctor always asks but no one knows where zero sits. Did I hate my tiny tits any more than the beginnings of these hips? It's hard to say,   I feel pretty? I can count the times on one hand when I did and even those moments were fleeting, always collapsing as soon as I moved or breathed. My elbows were too sharp, my knees never folded quite right, my shoulders were too wide, my all of me lacking a certain kind of grace. Why didn't I like what I saw? Well, probably because I felt like nobody else did.
	I kissed my first girl in 1988. She was 32, I was 19. She was a jazz singer. She wasn't queer, she said she just fell in love with me by accident. I said I didn't mind when her parents came to town and she introduced me as her roommate. I told her I understood, because I did. I was a baby butch who'd never heard the word and so I didn't know what to call my own self until I first read that word out loud in 1992 in The Persistent Desire in the back stacks of Little Sisters Book Store. I wore second hand army boots three sizes too big and I cut my own hair with clippers, not a good idea. I met, what I didn't know at the time, was my very first fam lover. I bought my first necktie and she called me handsome and that one word made up for two decades of knowing that I was never really all that pretty. 
	The first trans man I ever met in real life was still a lesbian separatist at the time. He cornered me up against the wall at the Lotus Club in Vancouver and chastised me for wearing a mascara mustache out to the bar on women only night. I see him now, sometimes, on Commercial Drive, with his full lush beard, but we talk about other things and I forgive, but I don't forget -
Audience:	[inaudible 00:40:08]
Speaker 1:	- how lonely I felt that night. In 1995, I started to bind me breasts down, first with saran wrap, fucking old school, man. Then ace bandages, ahhh dark times. Then be wearing one of those double front compression shirts. Flattening them and hiding them under my shirt did not make me hate them any less, but it did make it easier to look in the mirror and leave my apartment.
	In 2008, I was about to turn 40 years old and my body was becoming something I could not even recognize. Every 28 days my tits would swell and ache and get bigger. My hips were doing things I had long admired in others, but could not reconcile with my own flesh and frame. I started to seriously lift weights. Somewhere in the sweat, and ache, and muscle of it all I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense. "You should do more cardio and lift less weight" my mother told me when I was home for a visit. She saw me bulging in my tee-shirt at the kitchen table. "And don't let yourself get any bigger.", she said. "And don't get any more tattoos either." So, of course, I took this as a sign, didn't I?
Audience:	(Laughter)
Speaker 1:	I really buckled down on the bicep curls. I got bigger. I got more ink. I felt more like myself. I wish I could say that I learned to be truly comfortable in this body of mine before I finally had top surgery in 2013, but that would be a lie. I try every day to not let it break my heart that it took me so long. I'm 45 years old and it breaks me heart that it took me so long. When did I know, you ask me? Since always, I guess. Probably just like you have always known somewhere in you. I know, you have always known. 
	I look at pictures of shirtless me at five years old now and I can see the shape of my now flat chest foreshadowed in my tiny frame even back then. I like my body now from about the belly button up. Most days that is almost enough to say I nearly feel comfortable in my own skin. Close to right. I love the shape of my ass when I'm naked, but not so much when I'm trying on dark, denim skinny jeans in hipster stores that sprung up where greasy spoon diners and glove factories used to be. 
	I'm grateful that I can now afford a well-cut shirt and a real silk tie and a tailor, a good haircut once a month, a fancy jacket with these cool elbows in it, so soft. I know these things make me lucky and I'm grateful. These things make me feel more confident, more myself, but they don't make me. I made me. This world made me. The struggle and fear and sweat and work and words made me. Did any of it come too late? I don't think so. Here I am. I think everything happened, when it happened, nearly exactly how it needed to go down and so now I'm here and I feel handsome, and I'm really strong, and that is a beautiful thing. So I hope you're lucky like me. I hope you get this letter and it helps you somehow, helps you lift your chin and your eyes. I hope you learn to stand up full inside of yourself. I hope you, one day, wear yourself on your sleeve, on your french cuffs, on your chest, like a medal of honor. Thank you.
Audience:	(applause)