Science educator Charlie Cook experiments with coming out to students.

Charlie Cook is a non-binary stand up comedian by night and a non-binary science educator by day. Their favourite topics include queer theory, entomology, and outer space. For more information on their work and to find out where they're performing next, visit them on Instagram @onmygnome

This story originally aired on June 27, 2018 in an episode titled “Pride: Stories about coming out in science.”

Story Transcript

I get misgendered a lot.  People look at me and think that I’m a woman when in fact I am a swarm of bees.  Really, I’m a non-binary trans person but it would honestly be a lot easier if I was a swarm of bees, because then people would be like, “Oh, Charlie’s gender is on the endangered species list.  Aww.”  Or, “Ah, I was stung by Charlie’s gender once so now I give it a lot of space.”  Or, “Their gender is really scary to me but I respect the importance to the ecological systems of our earth that this gender provides so I respect their ability to live freely in the world.” 

It’s pretty exhausting to be a trans person on a daily basis.  When strangers catcall me, it’s because they assume that I am a sexy lady.  When servers are trying to be polite, they'll usually call me ‘Ma’am’ or ‘Miss,’ and if I don’t make a case for it beforehand when I’m performing, the assumption is always that I’m a woman and I lose valuable minutes of my stage time defending my identity. 

For a long time, I pretended that I was just a cis woman and that made me happy.  But it’s 2016 and I’m talking to a friend about acting and about the things that I want to get to do that I don’t feel authentically able to do.  And this friend suggests that they start calling me they/them pronouns.  It’s kind of like a series of things all just kind of fit into place.  All of these ways that I really felt connected to myself, all these ways that I felt uneasy in the world just kind of go away. 

It makes it really important for me to find spaces where I can feel safe.  I start hanging out with a lot more queer people who are less likely to slip up my pronouns.  I start dating people who aren’t going to box me into one gender role or the other.  And I decide to come out at work. 

I’m fairly lucky.  Other than the whole trans people being marginalized and pushed off to the fringes of society thing, I’m lucky because I work in the science and education field and, on average, those people tend to be a little bit more accepting than the daily public.  When you spend your time disproving anti-vaxxers, dispelling Flat Earth Theories or just trying to keep two kids from killing each other, you've got a lot less time to worry about what’s going on between people’s legs.  But this doesn’t mean that I was any less scared to come out to my co-workers and bosses who had known me for too long as a woman. 

So I work with kids at Science World and it’s this really great opportunity to bring a role model to this community who kids probably normally don’t get to interact with.  Because most kids don’t go to dispensaries or tattoo parlors so they’ve never met an employed person with colorful hair and a septum ring. 

I start an email to my co-workers and my bosses.  I title it “The Pronouncement.”  And then I stare at my email box for about an hour trying to find the right way to phrase my small, tiny request that it would be cool, if it’s not too much of an inconvenience to people, to just maybe kind of I'd really like it if people started using my pronouns. 

My hands are shaking.  I’m sweating through my shirt and I send it.  

The response I get back is kind of a more professional equivalent of, “Okay.”  For all of the fear that I had built up it really didn’t give me all that much.  Really, I think that’s because science is all about challenging assumptions and it’s about things that are outside the gender binary.  You can’t study hermaphroditic snails or fish that start their lives as male and transition to become female later in the life and believe that there are two, three, four, any number of finite genders. 

I construct a hypothesis.  How will seven-year-olds react to the presentation of a person who is outside of the gender binary and how will they handle they/them pronouns?  I decide that for eight weeks of summer camps I am going to come out to the children that I’m working with as a non-binary and just see how that goes. 

The other week I met an adult and, in our conversation, I found myself going, “They… they… they” like a broken pronoun record until this person finally clued in that I was saying something to them and went, “I’m sorry.  What is a ‘They’?”

So I didn’t have very high hopes for telling a bunch of seven-year-olds.  Granted, my control group is the men I work with in the stand-up comedy field and they're a little less mature than the seven-year-olds that I teach.  So at least I had that going. 

I’m sitting in this group, this circle with these children who have never met me before and, for all I know, their parents believe that people like me are out to corrupt them with the homosexual agenda.  I start by asking them if they know what a pronoun is.  A few of them do. 

So I present them with the activity, Respecting My Identity, and the instructions: use they/them pronouns when referring to me. 

We’re in the galleries at Science World.  I’m running around trying to keep track of all these kids making sure nothing gets broken and one of these kids come up to me.  I always get kind of conflicted when kids ask me if I’m a boy or a girl because, partly, why does any stranger, let alone a child, need to know the shape of my genitals?  But on the other hand, if my mere presence somewhere prompts a child to question what they know about the gender binary then I kind of feel like I’m doing something right. 

So this kid asks me if I’m a boy or a girl, and I tell them I’m neither. 

“But everyone is a boy or a girl.”

“No.  Some people are neither.  Some people are boys.  Some people are girls.  Some people are a bit of both.”

“Oh, so someone could start their life as a boy and then become a girl?”

This kid was six years old, and in the span of a few short words they went from believing that gender was a rigid thing, which is prescribed to all of us before we’d even drawn a friggin’ breath, to seeing gender as a personal spectrum. 

I started to feel safer in the group I was in.  I realized that even if this kid didn’t fully understand it, even if they didn’t get my pronouns right half the time, this kid didn’t call me ‘gross’, didn’t tell me that it was just really hard for them to wrap their head around this concept or that, “they/them pronouns just didn’t really make sense in a singular way,” which are all things that adults have told me. 

So I went on.  Every week, I would come out to these kids wondering if this was eventually going to be the time that one of them told me I was going to hell.  To keep my mind off of this impending trans-phobia, I started coming up with variables for my experiment. 

What would happen if, instead of asking kids to use they/them pronouns, I focused on the fact that I’m not a boy or a girl?  What would happen if instead of calling the kids ‘guys’ we referred to them as ‘friends’ or ‘scientists’?  What would happen if I gave a table of boys pink goggles to wear during their experiments?  The answer is if you don’t make a big deal out of it, kids don’t really care. 

But over the course of the summer I still got pretty tired.  Imagine for a moment that you love bees, but for some reason people wherever you go, usually before actually talking to you, look at you and assume that you hate bees.  And no matter how many times you correct them, people keep forgetting this and keep insisting that you must hate bees, that you are a person who hates bees. 

And you can remind people over and over again that, no, you love bees.  You can try and make changes to your appearance and start wearing accessories which might better indicate to people that you love bees and people that you work with on a daily basis might still forget that you're trans, I mean, love bees. 

I got worn down by the cis-tem, if you will.  I wear a chest-compressing binder.  It helps to flatten my chest and create a more androgynous appearance in exchange for squishing the air out of my lungs.  Even with my tits in this fucking jail, parents would still refer to me as ‘she’ and that just doesn’t seem fair. 

Eventually I get tired of fighting for myself, of being the only one saying anything.  So when a kid in an older summer camp points at me and says, “Is that a boy or a girl?”, instead of educating him, I walk away.  I work at a summer camp in order to teach kids about science, to play with them and keep them safe, not to be a Show-and-Tell of another gender. 

And as I’m walking away, I hear a kid go, “Well, Charlie is neither a boy or a girl.  They're a person.” 

I try to treat every kid that I work with equally but that kid may or may not have gotten a bit of special treatment that week. 

I started feeling bolder.  Later that day, we’re building with blocks and creating this big towers and a kid refers to me as “she.”  Normally, I'd let this slide but this time I ask this kid if they could stop calling me that because it doesn’t make me feel good.  And instead of telling me no or that I was wrong, they said, yeah.  “Yeah, you're not that.  You're a person.” 

So the summer was ending and it was time for me to analyze my data from this experiment.  While not every kid walked away from that camp using my correct pronouns or really getting it, maybe, I felt safer coming out to these kids as who I am than I've ever really felt coming out to a roomful of cis adults.  No offense to all of you. 

Ultimately, that’s why letting trans people exist, whether you're a scientist or a friend or anywhere in your life is important because I’m not a swarm of bees.  I’m a person.