Part One: On the State of Trans Artists and Art in Saskatchewan
Introduction
The essay you are reading is one of a three-part series about my experience living and working as a trans[1] artist and arts professional in Saskatchewan and across Canada. In part one of the series, which you are now reading, I give a brief overview of the current state of trans art and artists in Saskatchewan and identify some of the challenges faced by these cultural workers as they struggle to make ends meet and be taken seriously by their cisgender colleagues. In part two, I offer what I see as a necessary step towards solving these problems by thinking through some of the trans spaces and methodologies I’ve encountered in my ten-plus years of being out and working/making work. In part three, I reflect on my recent performance, I Don’t Want to See or Be Seen by Cis People, which debuted at Queer City Cinema/Performatorium in Regina. This performance was, in part, a testing ground for my own ideas and methodology around interiority, and it serves as another example of how trans joy and futurity can be fostered through creating a closed space.
This series of essays is, largely, grounded in my own personal experience. If it doesn’t resonate with you, consider how your positionality might differ from mine, and if you’re cisgender (not trans), remember that believing trans people’s experiences is a vital first step in building solidarity with the community. Such solidarity building is revolutionarily necessary as all of our struggles are intertwined. Nobody is truly free until we all are.
What It’s Like to Be a Trans Artist in Saskatchewan
I’ve been trying to write this essay for a few months now, but the overall state of the world for trans people in this current moment feels antithetical to being a productive member of society, let alone getting out of bed. I don’t know if I’d call it depression so much as a profound realisation that not only is gender fake, but so is almost everything else, that the entire capitalist system sets us up to fail. Fight, flight, or freeze, I too often choose to spend my time tethered to the couch, scrolling through my Instagram feed, watching the persistent creep of fascism and feeling its boot upon my chest. So perhaps it makes sense to start here with a quick rundown of where trans people are at as I see it, in terms of both their rights and liberation, in Saskatchewan and across North America.
On October 10th, 2023, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe recalled the legislative assembly early in order to use the notwithstanding clause to bypass the courts and enshrine his highly criticised pronoun policy in law, making it mandatory for teachers to out students to their parents if they choose to go by a different name at school. While this is completely reprehensible, I’m less worried about the kids. They’ll survive like I survived, just like so many queers before me. It’s just a shame that they’ll have to. They’ll learn to tell when it’s safe and who to let in – after all, kids already have an entire world that parents and teachers aren’t privy to – or they’ll get the fuck out of their small towns or out of this backwards province. (Of course, I only say this so flippantly as to remind our government that no amount of legislation will ever eradicate queer and trans people. We have and will always continue to exist. Make no mistake, though, this bill makes mere survival a best-case scenario, and there will be casualties.) What I’m most worried about is what comes next. On this path towards legislating trans people out of existence, children and their names and pronouns are only the first step – a testing ground for gaining public approval. What comes next is banning the provision of lifesaving, gender-affirming healthcare to minors as we’re seeing in Alberta. What comes after that is banning this same lifesaving healthcare for trans adults.
According to the Trans Legislation Tracker, In 2023, 85 pieces of anti-trans legislation were passed in the United States. These range from bills similar to what we have seen here in Saskatchewan to bills banning trans women from public washrooms, changerooms, and women’s sports, to bills criminalising the provision of gender-affirming healthcare to minors, to bills criminalising providing this same care to anyone under 26 years of age. There have also been a handful of attempts at making being visibly queer or trans in public illegal by way of obscenity laws and relegating drag to the realm of “adult performance.” It’s clear that our government is watching our neighbours to the South and taking notes. Bill 137 isn’t an isolated occurrence but the start of this same pattern of anti-trans legislation coming to Saskatchewan.
I name all of this because this is the ambient noise with which we live and we struggle to make work in spite of it. While the arts community considers itself to be more liberal than the rest of the province, at best, I have felt both its ability to shelter me from more overt forms of transphobia while also holding me and my work at arm’s length. At worst, I struggle to think of it in terms of community at all and instead think in terms of industry and social scene.
I came out and began transitioning just over 11 years ago while working at a local artist-run centre. After being laid off from my position, I found myself searching for a new job in the arts as a particularly complicated kind of trans woman. At the time, I didn’t fully realise that the job I was leaving would be the last time I was fully employed as an arts professional. Twelve years later and I still haven’t found full-time, gainful employment. The best I could do was a part-time, entry-level gallery facilitator position, which I eventually left to pursue my art practice full-time. Since then, I’ve survived by piecing together various under-supported contract positions and grants to work on my artwork. Somehow, this has proved to be more lucrative and, despite the job insecurity, hugely preferable to being harassed by gallery patrons on a regular basis while working the front line.
I’m not the only one with stories like this, and in a lot of ways, I’m one of the lucky ones. For starters, I exist in the current socio-political context as a white settler, which serves to shield me from the most overt forms of transphobic violence. I’ve also found a way to leverage my identity in service of a somewhat sustainable arts practice. This simply isn’t the case for many. In a legal needs assessment published by JusticeTrans in 2023, 32.6% of the just over 700 participants reported having experienced employment problems directly related to their trans identities, ranging from harassment and discrimination while on the job to being denied employment altogether. It’s also extremely common for trans people, if they’re employed at all, to be stuck in low-paying, entry-level, part-time positions. Furthermore, of the 25 Two-Spirit, trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming artists who applied to the CAPACITOR project, only one was being supported by SK Arts and their Independent Artists program. The rest were either entirely unaware of SK Arts and their grant programs or convinced that they were ineligible. This is one of many reasons why CAPACITOR proved to be such a necessary and vital pilot project. We were able to provide four underserved, trans artists living in the province with a $2000/month stipend for a period of six months, along with other benefits like one-on-one mentorship, workshops, and a health spending account.
So What’s Next?
While politicians attempt to legislate trans people out of existence, and trans artists struggle to find support and funding within the provincial and national arts ecologies, what can be done? Where do we as trans artists turn? In the next essay in the series I’ll examine the CAPACITOR project in greater detail from my perspective as the projects Art Auntie in relation to Tender Container’s Peer-Mentorship Platform, Do Trans People Dream of Non-binary Sheep?, another trans-centred project I’m involved in that deeply informed my work with CAPACITOR as well as my own creative practice. Both CAPACITOR and Tender Container seek to support and uplift trans artists and in examining these programs more deeply I hope to gesture towards some answers to the problems that I’ve outlined above. What is clear is that in order to improve these artist’s lives, we, as an artistic community and creative industry, must value the work they are doing in tangible ways. In capitalist terms, hire and pay trans people. Give us a real livelihood.
[1] By trans I mean that, when I was born, everyone said I was a boy. I was never able to live up to the expectations of this particular gender role and I was punished for it from a very young age. In my twenties I began transitioning and was pushed, by doctors and community, to be femme and identify as a woman. Indeed, this was the only way I could access the healthcare I so desperately needed. In my early thirties I began presenting more masculinely. I still describe myself as a woman, largely for political reasons and as a way to push back against rigid gender norms. I don’t really care what people think of me. My pronouns are she/they/or he in the context of being a butch dyke.
Left: Jaye Kovach, Femme (2022), 16” by 22”, digital photograph on Hahnemühle photo rag, made in collaboration with Rose Butch at Do Trans People Dream of Nonbinary Sheep?, Tender Container’s peer mentorship platform.
Right: Jaye Kovach, Butch (2022), 16” by 22”, digital photograph on Hahnemühle photo rag, made in collaboration with Rose Butch at Do Trans People Dream of Nonbinary Sheep?, Tender Container’s peer mentorship platform.
Part Two: Tender Containers and Building Capacity for 2STNBGN Artists in Saskatchewan
