As I open the bag of mycelium, a pleasant creamy smell wafts through the air. I break off a piece and feel the smooth pores between my fingers. It’s like grazing the soft hand of a long-lost grandparent.

Around 1.1 billion years ago, the animal and fungi kingdoms split from plants and continued evolving together. Only later did animals and fungi separate on the genealogical tree of life, making fungi more closely related to humans than plants. Fast forward a few hundred million years to me, sitting in my garden-suite kitchen across from a bucket of oyster mushroom mycelium.

Mycelium is the root-like structure of a mushroom, a white thread-like mass made up of tiny branches called hyphae. It lives underground or on surfaces such as rotting trees, spreading metres or even kilometres to transfer nutrients, break down dead plants, and connect with other fungi. Mushrooms—the fruits of healthy mycelial networks—sprout when the conditions are just right.

After seeing the red and white toadstools in front of my apartment last autumn, I was enthralled. What started out as a fascination with mushrooms, quickly turned into a full-blown obsession with mycelium. When I learned about mycoremediation—the use of mycelium to rehabilitate polluted ecosystems—I was in awe. The more I read about its potential, and the science of biomimicry, the more I was certain that fungi had something to teach me.

I stare at the white stringy mass that is my fungal relative, longing to know it. To understand it. In the same way I longed to understand the culture my parents came from, the city I was born in, and the place my cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles still live—a sad derivative of a country that no longer exists.

Yugoslavia was a socialist federation of six republics and two autonomous provinces, made up of various ethnic groups that coexisted in a single state from the end of World War II until its breakup in the nineties. My parents are of different ethnic groups, and while that was not uncommon in Yugoslavia, it became undesirable when the country was falling apart. Ethnonationalism made it so that you had to choose sides. In Serbia, the country where a malignant dictator was waging carnage in neighbouring Bosnia and Croatia at the time, it was suffocating for ethnic Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians, and other minority groups in the country. It’s a big part of why we left.

As previous conflicts in the Balkans have prompted mass emigration, so did this one. In the last decade of the 20th century, over 100,000 people from the former Yugoslavia came to Canada, including my family.

Being from the geographic battleground of empires for centuries has taken a toll on the collective psyche of Balkan people. And our quests for self-determination haven’t always been smooth sailing either—the carving up of nation-states in the breakup of Yugoslavia thirty years ago being only our most recent collective catastrophe. Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon describes the cultural phenomenon of katastrofa or catastrophe, whereby the story of a family is the story of the bad that happened to it. If the epigenetic consequences of trauma are what scientists think they are, Hemon says, “katastrofa is inscribed in our cells.”

Of course, this was the big katastrofa for my family. Or at least what I pieced together from my parents’ stories over the years. Painful ones about the loss and betrayal of longtime friends, some family, and a society they helped build. Getting them to share these stories was like pulling teeth. Silence, fragmented memories, and non-answers were more readily available.

My parents were always adamant that nationalism and deteriorating social conditions were the reasons why we left, carefully making sure not to position themselves as victims. This was also the reason why joining a diaspora community was out of the question. In Canada, each ethnic group formed their own enclaves, based around places of worship usually. Nationalist narratives, especially among immigrant and refugee Serb and Croat groups, were commonplace, and to my parents, virulent.

These often revisionist narratives meant my identity as a first-generation person of mixed Yugoslav background fit nowhere, and was seldom understood.

Lots of people grow up in immigrant families where questions of identity are complicated. But to be from the former Yugoslavia, to be Balkan, is to not have a firm grasp on where to even begin in making sense of who you are. And alienation from the very people that can help you do it. It comes with an inherent fragmentation of identity, with various intersections, complexities, and trauma in the mix.

As I stuff my bucket with a mixture of damp wood chips and mycelium, I imagine it as a sentient being that can hear me: “Have you also inherited the trauma of your ancestors?” I ask. “The trauma of a changing climate? The trauma of fearing being eaten by rodents all the time? What would our common single-cell primogenitor make of our respective destinies?”

I first discovered biomimicry in adrienne maree brown’s writings on mycelium in her book, Emergent Strategy. To become a functional fruiting body, mycelium has to expand and connect with other fungal and root networks. It does this through individual cells called hyphae. brown draws on mycelial hyphae as inspiration for a social-justice framework based on the idea that effecting societal change requires establishing a select few meaningful connections, rather than fostering a critical mass.

I think back to a small gathering a few weeks back, when I met with a group of new friends I’d made, all Balkan diaspora women who were independently working through issues of identity using art, research, and film.

I stop stuffing the bucket for a second. As the mycelium grows, it seeks out compatible hyphae in a process called homing, maintaining nutrient pathways to grow and spread across forests.

It occurs to me that these women and I were forming a kind of human mycelial network. No wonder I had such trouble with working out my own questions of identity—I had been doing it alone. Cultural identity is formed by communities, not by one individual. What if each of us expanding our own understanding, filling in the gaps, and healing wounds, could create something better?

When you grow mushrooms, you have to do it in a sterile environment that mimics the humidity, air flow, and temperature of the ideal outdoor conditions. Some mushrooms like it hot, some like it cold, most like it humid.

To best simulate and control this, DIY mycelium experts recommend drilling holes in a bucket, and stuffing it with mycelium and woodchips. This provides something for the mycelium to eat and makes it easy to harvest the mushrooms once they grow. After I close the lid on the bucket, I shove it into the broom closet, excited at the thought of the pink coral bunches that will soon flourish.

I already had fungi on my mind while sipping homemade brandy on that particularly damp February evening when I met Ljudmila Petrovic and Iva Jankovic at Sara Graorac’s house. We’d all been sitting in her retro living room, flipping through books on traditional woven rug patterns and swapping stories.

Iva is passionate about empowering local communities through co-ops, helping people access economies of scale. She and I share this very specific feeling, a longing to not only connect with the place that shaped us from afar, but also to fix some of its problems.

For a while, she’s been trying to connect her work in Canada with the Balkans, to see if new cooperative models can help change the depressing realities of post-socialist privatization, unemployment, and brain drain in the region. She has also made podcasts, art, and films about Serbian society and diaspora connections. She told me once that she felt the need to piece together the fragments of history. To close the loop.

While Iva enthusiastically tells us about her attempts to connect musically to the Balkans by learning to play the accordion, my gaze falls to the person who introduced all of us in the first place, Ljudmila.

In order for the mycelium to grow, individual hyphae must undergo fusion. Merlin Sheldrake, ecologist and author, defines this process as homing and the connection as “the linking stitch.” It’s the essence of any mycelium. Ljudmila is like our linking stitch. She connected each of us in a homing of her own, inaugurating us into the group chat that now serves as our main site of communion.

I met Ljudmila last fall when I was reporting on nationalism in the Balkans. Her Master’s thesis was a pioneering study on how multigenerational trauma in the Balkan diaspora fragments identity among millennial women and on the power of narrative in healing those wounds. When we first met over beers at a local Vancouver watering hole, I studied her across the table as she spoke with such conviction about things I had, until then, relegated to the realm of internal musings. We bonded over the quirks of our grandparents and how no one got our names right on the first try. And of course, inat, or the Balkan cultural phenomenon loosely translated into English as spite.

Reading her thesis was confronting. It was as though someone was revealing secrets about my life to me. For the first time, I saw data on how trauma affects immigrant parent-child relationships in my cultural context and the role silence plays in fragmenting identity. I then realized that my career motivations as a journalist were prompted by the desire to create better narratives, more honest ones, borne of resilience and with the ultimate goal of something better coming out the other side.

Ljudmila spends her time helping others heal trauma through therapy. It’s easy for me to imagine her as a guide for the wounded: her care is evident and so is her steadfast nature. She has dedicated her life to the mental-health profession despite naysayers in her family and a cultural stigma around the field. That’s inat in action. A similar embodied resilience strengthens mycelium as it battles something that is almost guaranteed as it grows: contamination.

About a week into my DIY mycological adventure, I notice something green forming on the mycelium. I am confronted by the bane of every mushroom cultivator’s existence: mold.

I panic. Google. Inspect the bucket closely. I wrack my brain over what I might have done wrong: was the water not hot enough when I sterilised the wood chips? Was the bucket too damp?

Luckily, after a frantic phone call with the guy who sold me the mycelium, who assured me that oyster mushrooms are resilient and would filter out contaminants, I feel some relief in knowing what has to be done. I scrape off some of the green fuzz and pop the bucket back into the supply closet.

Then I get sick.

I get so sick that I head straight to the urgent-care centre. By then, I feel steel wool in my throat. Tired, feverish, and dead certain I have a fungal throat infection, I wait for the doctor, feeling defeated. I think about how stupid it was to put my face so close to the mold. Wonder why I tolerated contaminated fungi in the first place. Why did I not think to put on a mask? Sitting in the cold examination room wearing nothing but a polyester hospital gown, I wait for a throat swab.

I was already feeling sick before visiting Sara. She had hosted our gathering of minds the previous month, before I embarked on my mycological adventure. As I walked up the front steps of Sara’s house—one of those beautiful old Vancouver houses with wood siding—I was excited.

Some of Sara’s art deals with Balkan plant medicine. As we stood in her kitchen, she showed me small vials filled with the distilled oil of a common Balkan folk remedy, kantarion, or St. John’s Wort. Lining the shelves above us were large Dali-esque glass bottles holding herbs, homemade brandy, and other oils used in traditional healing.

As I sat in her beautifully decorated living room, surrounded by colourful rugs and books on Yugoslav folklore, I expected Sara to tell me, with all the hubris of an artist, about the power of art in reshaping identity.

Instead, I was met with a quiet intimacy. Her practice is very personal and private, she said. It was important for her to rediscover specifically Balkan folk remedies and use them in a process of healing not just herself, but others too.

“I feel called to it,” she’d said simply, when we asked her why.

All of us have experienced this calling in some form. Sometimes it’s a faint whisper, and at other times it’s as clear as day and impossible to ignore. Navigating the complexities of being in the Balkan diaspora can be exhausting. It makes sense that most people would relegate these nuances to the back seat of who they are and simply assimilate into the dominant culture. After all, the road to assimilation for us is shorter than for other immigrants. Most of us are white-skinned, so shedding the Other within us, our peripheral East-meets-West collectivist culture, foreign unpronounceable names, and distinct position in the history of European conquest can seem like a good deal in exchange for privilege. But it isn’t. For the empaths among us, it may seem like the struggles of more marginalized groups should be where we focus our efforts. But the truth is, if we want to help others we must first heal ourselves.

After a few days of rest, and no call from the laboratory, I recover from what was likely the common cold.

But just to be sure, I exile my mycelium to the back yard, not wanting it in the house out of fear that the mold could become airborne and poison me. As the unpredictable Vancouver spring temperatures hover around zero, I worry that the mycelium might die. The thought of that is too gut wrenchingly sad to ignore.

So, I lug the bucket back into the house, grumbling, wrap it in a plastic bag and put it back in the storage closet. It doesn’t even cross my mind that the mycelium might have a fighting chance. That it could still fruit in the right conditions, if given the time.

One friend who hadn’t made it to the dinner was Dora Cepic. Her work intrigued me the most because her motivations seemed similar to my own. Our media were different, so I went to her studio to get a sense of what creating a new narrative through art entailed.

As Dora sat across from me I couldn’t help but notice the tools poking out of the stacked bins behind her. The aesthetic chaos of an art studio seemed to exist in contrast to the artist herself. Dora, refined and stylish, looked at me inquisitively. Her beige silk blouse illuminated the golden streaks in her hair, giving her a divine glow as the afternoon sun spilled in through the window. She told me about her stop-motion film—a “moving collage” of a female figure wrangling a vessel that keeps escaping her.

In constructing these tiny sculptures and doilies, Dora draws on memories, dreams, and stories rooted in her family’s Balkan background. These micro props form delicate mise-en-scenes that depict the protagonist, half-ghost, half-woman, trying to collect the knowledge that floats away in perpetuity.

“I’m very deliberately trying to construct an identity and sense of space in my own diasporic way,” she said.

Dora likened the process of making this film to searching for a sense of self in a country that feels foreign to her even though she grew up in it. The painful irony, Dora said, is that when she’s in the Balkans, she is very much “the Canadian.” This is the uncomfortable in-between; the hyphenated existence that I imagine most immigrants live. The late Bosnian-Norwegian writer Bekim Sejranovic defined the Balkan version of this existence in one of his books, an epic about fleeing a small town in a country that no longer exists in search of a home that never quite fits; from nowhere to nowhere.

It is that intangible nowhere that formed all five of us, and the place we are all trying to make sense of by making art, forming economic partnerships, doing research, and growing mushrooms.

Fungi have survived all five major extinction events on earth. Despite devastating species loss, they are resilient to calamity and some even flourish in it. In the aftermath of Hiroshima, the first thing reported to grow was a matsutake mushroom and edible morels grow in forests scorched by wildfires in the Pacific Northwest. Fungi are incredibly good at sucking up nutrients where there seemingly are none. Mushrooms can even grow on old diapers and cigarette butts, and now, scientists are using mycelium to clean up oil spills in the Amazon. This type of mycoremediation takes biomimicry to another level: utilizing fungi to clean up the world.

I like to believe our Balkan mycelial network is part of this grand experiment—we can look to the fungal world to solve the modern problems created by humans. In our case, we’re forging honest narratives about what it means to be in the diaspora. Confronting the nationalism and xenophobia that got us here. Filtering out centuries of hate and intolerance through connection. Nourishing one another with ideas. Decontaminating.

I come home from work one afternoon, emotionally spent and questioning if any of my crazy mycelial ideas have any real meaning. Lying on the couch, staring into space, I realize I haven’t checked on the mycelium since I dragged it out of the cold almost a week prior. I saunter over to the kitchen, where the black garbage bag sits, and I begin to untie it. I feel bumps on the sides of the bucket.

My eyes well with tears as I pull off the bag. Bright pink clusters of fused hyphae greet me, poking through almost every hole. Despite the mold, the mycelium had healed itself enough to finally begin fruiting.

The astrologer didn’t look like an astrologer. I hadn’t expected someone so young, wearing a baggy BAPE sweatshirt, sporting Vidal Sassoon bangs cut in a perfect Bézier curve that skimmed her eyebrows. A septum ring glittered at her nose, forming an isosceles triangle with the giant gold hoops that hung from her ears. Wire had been strung across the left hoop spelling out the letter S, and the right, WITCH. The only makeup she wore was a shock of matte fuchsia paint on her lips. She was either queer, or an artist, or both, and likely kinky.

We met at a tea house in Chinatown. Ms. Hedayat, or Mazzy, as she asked to be called, had arrived before me. I found her seated with a teapot and matching cups, writing in a notebook. Like a therapist, I thought, except the girlish cover was decorated with gold foil stars. As we settled in, she offered me a cup of perfectly steeped oolong.

Upon starting my reading, she tore a sheet of paper from her notebook, flattening it hastily against the table before turning it toward me. It was an image of my natal chart. She tapped a symbol that looked like a lower-case h with a cross.

“You’re here because of Saturn.”

“Okay,” I said.

She continued as if what she said would have any meaning for me: “You are ruled by this planet. Your entire life and character, it’s dominated by Saturn.”

I shrugged. Observing my noncommittal response, Mazzy balled her two hands into fists and ground them against each other like millstones.

“Saturn,” she said, drawing out the “urn.” She gave me a pained expression, lips pulled into a grim grin. I felt myself mirror Mazzy’s grimace internally as once again, I recalled the months I’d sunk into organizing the Climate Action Conference. Maybe she was onto something.

I was finally on the brink of sleep at one in the morning when my phone chimed with an alert. Naomi had sent another email with quotes for a different catering package and increased security for the Climate Action Conference. This made costs significantly higher than what the planning committee had agreed to at the last meeting. My left eye started to twitch, as if on cue. In spite of myself, I opened Naomi’s attached budget even though I already knew what I’d find: that she had balanced the books by eliminating the hotly contested quiet room and cutting into travel reimbursements for BIPOC speakers in a transparent bid to undermine the student organizers. According to Naomi and other faculty volunteers, the committee was getting “bogged down with side issues,” like disability and migrant rights, that were “too complicated” and “alienating” for the general public. In Naomi’s mind, the public was solely comprised of people just like her: white middle-class liberals who needed to be encouraged by speakers focusing on net zero, vegan diets, and arguments about protecting private property.

Immediately, my brain sprang into action, gathering words into a compacted mass of arguments against her conduct to catapult into her inbox. I imagined my email being the invitation everyone needed to pelt her with their own admonitions, admonitions I knew no one would ever express because we all had learned from experience that even the most minor criticisms would result in Naomi and her allies positioning themselves anywhere on a spectrum between huffy to blubbering. And no one had the time or energy to deal with that. I lay in bed, exhausted and out of sleeping pills, my mind loosened from any self-discipline, mentally editing and re-editing an email I knew I would never send. At 3:30 a.m., I debated rolling a joint but, aware that I only had a new, higher-THC strain I’d never tried before, I had to weigh the potential gain of relaxing enough to sleep against the risk of paranoia. By the time I committed to lighting up, half an hour had passed. I wondered if I should just start getting ready now, roll into the department at 6:00 a.m., and leave early.

As Mazzy bisected the slice of Osmanthus cheesecake she’d ordered, she asked the question I’d been anticipating: “Tell me more about what brings you here?” I knew the answer, yet I wasn’t sure how to answer. People only consult astrology when they have problems. It’s cheaper and requires less commitment than therapy. I’d had enough of commitment for a while.

Months had passed since the climate conference but people were still expressing concerns for me. My best friend was making comments about self-care with increasing frequency. When I confronted her, she asked me if I realized I had become “deeply unhappy.” Of course I realized. Happy people do not think about climate disasters—not for very long anyway—nor do they persist in volunteering in racist environments. And whoever heard of a happy activist?

As the climate action conference date approached, meetings became mandatory for all volunteers. But at this point, none of the Indigenous students were attending. This was both disheartening and a relief. We’d lost a critical perspective and a chance at deepening solidarity on campus, but I knew that their attendance also meant dealing with such classic responses as, “We need to focus on the hard scientific data instead of trying to cover everything at once,” and creative improvs like, “We are dealing with Indigenous rights, why else would we invite the jingle dancers?” On rare occasions, one of the students, who might have needed to call on these same professors for reference letters or to sit on a dissertation committee, would attempt to call out a faculty member without using words like “racist,” “privilege,” or “white supremacy,” in an absurd real-life version of Taboo. Even before the land acknowledgement for the meetings concluded, I could feel my body tensing in anticipation.

As the debate unfolded, it became clear that faculty would be getting their way. They were in agreement: there was no room for the quiet room which, as we all knew, was not even a legally sanctioned accommodation. In addition, certainly we could recognize that better catering would bring more attendees back the following year. And the Dean was insisting on increased security with all the public attendees; a shame to be sure, but their hands were tied.

After the meeting, I took aside Mita, one of the student leads. I had found myself exchanging a meaningful look with them earlier in the meeting. “Don’t change your plans,” I said, “I will talk to people. We are going to bring in your speakers, okay?” Mita looked skeptical; I was only a fellow grad student after all.

“Well, I’m worried about climate change.”

Mazzy paused for me to elaborate. When I didn’t, she asked, “Okay, can you tell me more about how this is specifically impacting you right now?”

I shrugged, started, and stopped before finally picking up a thread, my voice becoming increasingly agitated: “I guess my problem isn’t actually climate change. I mean it is, obviously, but it’s more like about what’s causing it. I don’t think people really understand the problem. It’s not even about, like, colonialism and capitalism, although it’s that too, but I mean, it’s more fundamental, like an entire way of being and relating to others. Like, when people say this is an existential issue, I don’t think they really get it. There is this moral collapse that’s more than just a kind of empty narcissism, it’s a collapse in the fundamental ability to care, not only for each other, but for ourselves”—I stopped when I realized how I must have sounded. But Mazzy nodded. She was appraising me, but in a kind way.

“Do you care about yourself?”

I hesitated, but Mazzy held my gaze. I realized how tense my muscles had become as I’d been speaking. Then, spontaneously, we exhaled on the same breath. People were always asking me why I cared so much. I wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake them silly: why do you care so little?

I smirked and gestured to passers-by on the street.

“I care enough to not want to die with all these schmucks in the flaming climate hellscape that awaits us, yeah.”

We both laughed. It had been a while since I’d laughed like that.

By all official accounts, the Climate Action Conference was a sold-out success. With a Haudenosaunee activist as one of our keynote speakers and a schedule stacked with topics like environmental racism, climate migrants and just transition, the event began to explore the root causes of climate change for the first time. In the end, I was able to convince my department to reimburse two ASL translators through our new Equity Diversity & Inclusion program, which freed up the necessary funding for travel fees.

The conference received favourable coverage in two student newspapers and by a community radio station. A city councillor showed up for a photo-op that circulated widely on social media. My department produced a brief report of the conference that named me as an organizer and sent this out in its monthly newsletter. People congratulated me for about a week and then moved on.

Unofficially, word spread about the racism behind the scenes. Enrolment increased in Naomi’s climate science course, but many of the students on the conference planning committee refused to work with her again. The last I heard, initial planning for next year’s program was taking a hard turn away from the social justice issues raised. Unsurprisingly, conference organizers were struggling to find BIPOC students to volunteer for the following year, but it probably wouldn’t take long for faculty to pull in new people. Meanwhile, the original student organizers stayed in touch and began getting involved with direct actions in the city. As for me? Well, I disappeared right off the map.

“You’re under pressure,” Mazzy explanined. “Transiting Saturn is conjunct your natal sun, and it’s having a total impact. You might not see it now but it’s—” Mazzy raised her hands, slicing out a cube from the air and then pressing the walls in closer. “It’s like a pressure that’s pressing you into being. It’s pressing you into a diamond.”

I didn’t feel like a diamond. I felt like dust. Like Saturn was a dread, heavy palm that had smudged over a charcoal portrait of me, wiping all of my features away. Sensing my skepticism, Mazzy continued, “I know it doesn’t feel like it now. But it’s all part of the process. Saturn is pressing you into a form, it’s binding you into a shape. The ties you make now will stand the test of time whether you like it or not. So it’s really important right now to secure the right bonds because they will last and shape you for years to come.”

It was then I noticed there were tiny glittery crystals on Mazzy’s nails.

“Hey, listen.” Mazzy’s tone snapped my attention back to her face. “You need to think about what kind of shape you want to be. You need to think about the shape of things to come.”

I’m fifteen minutes late for the first climate-related meeting I’ve attended in over a year. This group includes student organizers from the Climate Action Conference, as well as people from other grassroots environmental organizations. Izan, a grad student who spoke out against racism in the conference, is chairing the meeting. The group rotates its meeting chairs every three months. Its first action was a demonstration supporting land defenders at 1492 Landback Lane.

I try my best to be unobtrusive as I find my seat while a queer youth activist I’ve never met before reads a land acknowledgement recounting the history of Treaty 13. I spot Mita sitting at the opposite side of the room. They give me a quick smile; I smile back. Izan shares the meeting agenda. He gives me a small nod of acknowledgement as he speaks.

As we begin to discuss and plan the next action, I am struck at how the room is forming into an imperfect but living circle, how we’re throwing out invisible lines to each other and catching them. I think about carbon in all its shapes, how it is taking different forms in us, in other animals, in the earth’s crust, in the air we breathe.

You need to think about what kind of shape you want to be. The shape I want to be is a weapon. I could have been so many shapes, but in times like these, I choose to be deadly. If Saturn is pressing me into a diamond, that diamond, I think, is a blade. Let everything that comes at me hone its edge.

You need to think about the shape of things to come. The shape of things to come is a fire. These flames will rise again to choke the light from our skies and the air from our lungs. My heart has burnt to cinders, but the wind, I think, can still scatter the ashes. Let it scatter them where I cannot go.

I’m at a party trying to join in a conversation with some men who are older than me, around their mid-thirties to forties. The conversation topics are bachelor parties, home ownership, and sports. I contribute maybe 10 sentences the whole night.

At the end of the evening, I figure this needs to change. I’m two and a half years into transitioning and it’s one of my first times meeting men I didn’t know pretransition. In order to do better going forward, I pick the easiest of topics to understand—sports. To narrow it down further, I go with hockey as it’s in season at the time, and there’s an NHL team in my city.

In the weeks and months that follow, my new obsession with hockey is puzzling to people who’ve known me for a long time. But by this point in my transition, it has become clear to me that weather conversations can only go so far. When I’m trying to befriend men, I worry about not fitting in and not being able to pass—to be seen as the gender I am. I’m afraid that other men will see me as less than or treat me with suspicion. It might seem like I’m leaning into stereotypes when I make the conscious choice to love hockey, but at the core is also anxiety around my safety in unfamiliar environments as I transition and embark on a new life chapter.

While being into hockey, both the live sport and the underlying stats, begins as a pragmatic thing, it quickly changes my life. I feel the need to learn everything immediately, lest someone test me on my knowledge: player history, team history, league history, and the endless, ever-changing stats any true fan would know. But being very, very into something is sort of my natural state, and I am shocked to see how well hockey fits into my brain, almost like it was always supposed to be there. It isn’t long until I find myself staying up too late editing a Wikipedia page for a player who died before I was born. It dawns on me at that point that I am actually a hockey fan.

Now I have something to chat about with nearly everyone. Co-workers have started getting my goat for how bad the Vancouver Canucks are doing; people on public transportation see my team colours and rib me for how bad the Canucks are doing; my optometrist gently mocks me for… how bad the Canucks are doing. I feel like part of something bigger, and I like it. To some acquaintances I’d previously struggled to connect with, hockey has become that thing they remember about my life. They ask me for updates as a way of continuing a relationship that otherwise would have little footing. And I discover there really is nothing quite like the electricity of a crowd—feeling the same emotions as 18,000 or so of my new closest friends.

One of the most delightful surprises about getting into hockey is it makes me feel like a kid again—the kid I didn’t get to be in my actual childhood. When I was young, every boy I knew played hockey and talked about it non-stop. In my mind, hockey and the gender category of “boy” were one and the same. Getting into hockey now, as I transition, feels like reclaiming the all-Canadian boyhood I never had.

As I immerse myself deeper into the world of hockey, sometimes I fantasize about what it would’ve been like to play the game as a child. I think about growing up a boy on Vancouver Island, going to the Fuller Lake Arena for early morning practices, experiencing the camaraderie of a team.

A big part of being trans can be grappling with the “what ifs.” What if I had been born X? What if I had transitioned earlier? When you’re alone with your thoughts, it can become an all-consuming game, running through simulations where everything was good the whole time, and you didn’t have to suffer this long. But inevitably, when I go down that path, I reach the conclusion it’s not a mental exercise worth doing: it plays into gender stereotypes and disregards my actual personality. When I think harder about it, I realize I would have sucked at hockey. My childhood neighbour used to leave for hockey practice at 5 a.m. and I had never been awake that early in my life. I hate waking up early, I hate long bus rides, and, quite frankly, I have no athletic talent—all things that wouldn’t have been any different had I been a boy my whole life.

Still, I’m glad I get to experience hockey now from a distance, finding camaraderie in viewing rather than participating. Sometimes, my hockey obsession is less about connecting with straight cis men, however, and more about looking at hunky guys. Take that time I’m sitting at a bar with a friend and there’s a Canucks player being interviewed on TV. I find him so handsome I can no longer pay attention to the conversation I’m having. But I digress…

Getting into hockey is not all a smooth path to coming into my own as a trans man. Soon I’m grappling with the toxic masculinity associated with the sport. Sexual assault allegations at both the junior and professional level, acts of racism, and reports of homophobic slurs surround the game. And the sport—in organized leagues and in fandom—supports, sustains, and fosters a culture of homophobia, aggression, and violence against women.

I remember when the Seattle Kraken announced their new mascot, Buoy. Buoy is a troll with long blue hair, bushy eyebrows, and an earring. I had the misfortune of coming across a tweet making fun of Buoy for being… trangender? The long hair (clearly hockey hair) and the earring (clearly an homage to Auston Matthews’s earrings) were being used to make fun of trans people. Personally, I love Buoy. I didn’t tell anyone else about this, I just sat with it and felt bad, nervous to make a retort for fear of being mocked.

Another time, opposing fans are being so obnoxious at a game that we can’t hear what the referee is saying on the ice. They are bragging and taunting while their team is winning the whole time. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to scream in public, like ever. After a game where my team, the Canucks, lose (of course), we all pour out into the concourse to leave. The hall turns into a mosh pit as two fans start yelling and shoving each other. Police officers need to step in to break up the fight. This is a side of masculinity I’ve rarely seen in real life, only on TV or well, on the ice. I wonder that evening if this is the endgame of passing; if this is what it takes—being a terror in public—to show the world you are a man? I also wonder if I even want acceptance by such obnoxious people.
In the months to come, some hockey scandals are unfolding in the media. My roommates and I sit one evening and discuss the latest horrifying updates on Kyle Beach’s allegations of sexual assault at the hands of a coach; of the sexual assault trial of Jake Virtanen; of the Hockey Canada story, which hides so many awful elements including multiple accusations of group-led sexual assault and a secret fund used to pay out sexual-assault survivors. Reading the news, it’s unfathomable to think of how some men can commit violence on that level and get off so lightly, thanks to a system that views their crimes more as an inconvenience than something that needs to be eradicated from hockey culture.

I’m not naive, but it’s frightening to be reminded of how evil some men can be. What men using their power and strength can do. In my quest to be more passable, to make myself more in line with heteronormative ideas of gender for the comfort of others, I’ve been reminded time and time again of the harms of traditional masculinity. Learning to enjoy hockey as an adult means I need to think critically about what I like about the sport and culture and choose only those parts to add to my vision of masculinity.

While my masculinity brings me joy, reckoning with the bad things men get a free pass to do in hockey and in our wider culture actually turns out to be a vital part of transitioning for me. While trying to debate other fans on Reddit on these topics may be a futile task, speaking up on issues that are important to me is something I won’t give up for the sake of passing.

These days, I’m not always having the types of discussions I thought I’d be having around the water cooler with my co-workers when I first got into hockey. But ultimately it feels more fruitful than just trading stats. Transitioning doesn’t mean I need to compromise my long-held values. I love hockey, and I look forward to bringing more people with me into my hockey fandom. The sport will win when everyone is welcome.

We practiced saying no in class. If a boy wants to have sex with you before you are married, you must be ready to steer the ship away from troubled waters.

If you loved me, you’d have sex with me. If you loved me, you’d know I was waiting. Why? We’re just having fun. I really like you. I like you too, enough to have respect for myself and my boundaries. This feels too good to stop. Well, we must.

Leave room for Jesus. I practiced in the mirror until my room went dark.

I grew up attending private evangelical Christian school, in Calgary, from Grades 1 through 12, on the basis that my education there would be more well-rounded. When your kid has ADHD and profound anxiety at an early age, sending them to the Christians just makes sense. My parents came from that early aughts holistic spirituality point of view—the Oprah way—and their faith was utterly distinct to themselves and certainly not in alignment with the militaristic and authoritative evangelical teachings of my youth. As the years passed, they struggled with me being in the school they’d once deemed the best fit, but once I had drunk the Kool-Aid, I couldn’t bring myself to leave, even though I was struggling too.

At evangelical Christian school, questions are not tolerated. Why would God allow suffering? Because. Why can’t science and faith coexist? Because. Why would God create gay people if it’s a sin? Because. Stop asking. By the time I graduated in 2014, I felt like my faith was radically different from that of the people around me, and I could not call myself a Christian anymore. But I couldn’t say I was agnostic or an atheist either. So what was I?

All that felt certain was the shame that had been drilled into me throughout my school years, right into my marrow. You are not worthy. You are disgusting. You are unholy. You are sinful. You are disruptive. You are disappointing. You are not your own.

They taught us that sex is for marriage, to have children. No exceptions. I didn’t even know what a condom looked like until I was well into adulthood. Pregnancy loomed its swelled shadow on my psyche from the time I learned what a period was: the body purging the unused eggs, each cell a soul. Tick, tick. Another egg wasted. Another soul wasted. Time is running out. Have a baby to experience what God designed you to do. This is your purpose on this earth.

They taught us women are cursed with pain because of Eve’s trespass. A shiny red apple, a ripe, plump, juicy pomegranate. All the blessings of God and man and she threw it away to know? For some fruit? Thus, pain in childbirth. Thus, pain from lack of child to birth. Thus, pain. She deserved it. You deserve it.

From the time I first felt that pain that defies all language in my abdomen, pain was with me wherever I went. Each month, I would keel over, stopping whatever I was doing to grit my teeth and wait until the stabbing—or radiating, or sharp, or throbbing—pain was over. I learned to accommodate this pain, let it dictate how much or how little I did. This was a practice well established at school, at church—the rare times I would go—to become one with your pain. The burden, the cross, to bear as a woman. Eve’s sin, your fall.

When I was older, I realized that outside my evangelical bubble, people didn’t respond to pain like it was a tool to sharpen belief. They didn’t use their pain as a badge of honour, or as a form of sacrament as I was taught to do. Pain was just a puzzle to solve—something that could be fixed, cured with a couple pills or a visit to a doctor. University exposed me to the reality of my pain, a chronic illness wrapped in the cloak of women’s penance, and gave me absolution. I take little white pills now, and my pain is manageable. It was the first time I realized that I had a body I could control. It was the first time I realized I had a body at all; not just a collection of parts that made me ashamed, lesser, worse. It was mine, and I should never have been taught that it wasn’t.

There is a concept in Christianity, born in the early 1990s—although some would argue that it gets its structure from the Bible itself—which has shaped contemporary evangelical Christian doctrine since. “Purity culture” refers to an ideology that “attempts to promote a biblical view of purity [following the example in] (1 Thess. 4:3-8) by discouraging dating and promoting virginity before marriage,” states Joe Carter, an associate pastor who writes about modern faith. According to Linda Kay Klein, an author and self-proclaimed “purity culture recovery coach,” central to this ideology is a belief in rigid gender roles, heteronormativity, nationalism and white supremacy, and the inherent sinfulness of women.

In 1992, the slogan “True Love Waits” was coined by Richard Ross, a youth minister consultant at LifeWay Christian Resources, a publishing conglomerate that prints Christian educational content. “True Love Waits” refers to the concept that waiting until marriage for sexual activity of any kind is the best choice for both parties, male and female, and is God’s design for sex.

“Waiting” can take on a variety of meanings, including abstinence from sex, but also kissing, hugging, and dating. The extremity of purity culture is exemplified in the television show 19 Kids and Counting in which the Quiverfull Duggar family didn’t allow their children to date without being accompanied by a parental chaperone. As a result, most of the kids married their first crush very young and all had their first kiss on their wedding day.

A few notes on the Duggars and how their commitment to purity culture played out: one, Quiverfull refers to the theological position of viewing large families as blessings from God and therefore actively denying and abstaining from all forms of birth control and instead encouraging procreation. Your family stops growing when God decides it stops growing. Two, while the Duggars are known for their religiosity, they became more famous still when it got out that their pedophile son, Josh Duggar, not only molested his younger siblings but also has been found guilty on charges of possession of child pornography. Furthermore, he was involved in the Ashley Madison infidelity dating website scandal of 2015, the same year the show went off the air after these allegations surfaced.

By 1997, the seminal text on purity culture was released, Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Harris proposed that dating should not be pursued by Christian teenagers. Instead, Harris proposes “courting,” which in his view, means utilizing group settings for getting to know someone. There is no room for experimentation or dating a variety of people or seeing what you like. You develop feelings for someone, and you get to know them in group settings until you decide to get married. You are not alone until your wedding night.

The success of I Kissed Dating Goodbye allowed purity culture to enter the mainstream. Now, thousands of teens were taking pledges to remain pure and going to purity balls and buying purity rings. They signed documents, conducted rituals, cried as they made a promise to God—and crucially, their earthly fathers—to remain “pure” until marriage. When Disney became privy to the growing purity industry, the network’s teen stars started wearing purity rings too. Stories about how cool the Jonas Brothers were for wearing their rings, or how Selena Gomez was also totally down to be celibate, permeated the culture. If Selena could do it, why couldn’t I? Why wouldn’t I?

Of course, pledging purity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The message’s central conceit, that it will lead to less sexual activity in teenagers and lower the rate of STIs in young people, turned out to be a fallacy.

In a national study conducted between 1995 and 2002—twenty years ago—in the U.S., 20,000 young people were asked to share details regarding their sexual health. The study found that 20 percent of those surveyed had taken a virginity pledge; some of those were consistent in their pledge, and others were labelled inconsistent due to their changing answers over the years. Crucially, 61 percent of consistent pledgers reported having sex before marriage or before their final interview in 2002. For the inconsistent pledgers, that number was 79 percent. When it came to STIs, almost 7 percent who didn’t make a pledge got diagnosed with one. For the inconsistent pledgers, the figure was 6.4 percent. For the consistent plegers, it was 4.6 percent. The authors of the study found the difference in those numbers to be statistically insignificant, and so do I.

The religious fervour in which an entire generation of young people vowed to remain celibate had virtually no real world benefits. In the U.S., this fervour was well-documented, with countless TV specials, balls, televangelist support, and mainstream media coverage. Here in Canada, however, it was more interior, private. We don’t have nearly the same pull the evangelicals have on mainstream American life, with their bombastic television personalities and church celebrities. Instead, Canadian evangelicals are more guarded, exclusive. Vague.

The trend in reframing purity culture as “pro-women” is almost unique to Canada. Take the Harper government’s handling of sex work, following the so-called “Nordic model,” which targets buyers over sellers under the guise of “protecting women”—even though the law still stigmatizes the sex worker. Or, how some Canadian evangelicals are reframing the abortion debate as one of sex-selective discrimination against girls. This frames anti-choice rhetoric as guarding women’s rights while reinforcing evangelical purity culture, through the lens of political engagement.

This engagement is in reality no more than political dog-whistles designed to strip away rights from women and queer Canadians, by presenting the former as vulnerable and in need of male protection and the latter as sinners making poor “lifestyle choices.” With the recent overturning of a supposed mainstay of American politics, Roe v. Wade, Canadians should do well to be reminded how tenuous our own rights are. As these evangelicals continue to spread their message under the guise of support for women, while peddling the very ideology that devalues women over men, the threat of puritanical politics becomes more accepted and expected in Canadian politics.

Purity culture relies on the understanding that to engage in sexual activity makes you less than. Sex takes something away from you, every time, that you cannot get back. I’ll explain it to you like it was explained to me: a glass of clean water has spoonfuls of dirt added to it; who wants to drink muddy water over a cold glass of pure, undiluted water? A piece of blue paper is glued to a piece of red paper. The papers are then ripped apart, leaving the residue of red on blue, blue on the red. Who the hell will want you when you are leaving traces of yourself on another person? A rose is passed around, crinkled, crunched, crumpled. When it makes its way back to the front of the classroom the teacher holds it out, proud to be making a point so clearly. Who wants this rose now?

This rose is worthless.

Purity culture creates a sense of specialness that isn’t there. A girl needs to be harnessed, possessed, dominated. She is dangerous. Should she know what she wants or come into her sexual power, she would be fearsome indeed. So, instead, make it clear to her: you have no value outside of what you can offer to a man. You are not your own. You do not belong to yourself. You belong to three men, and three men only. God, your father, and your husband, in that order.

The onus is placed on the girls to put the brakes on any and all potential sexual activity. And that’s the key right there—potential. Sexual activity doesn’t even need to be happening, just a chance that it might and therefore you need to be ready. When I was in the sixth grade, I had to sign a covenant with God and my school. Firstly, I committed to being covered up at all times; modesty is important. No leggings, no tank tops, no spaghetti straps, no low cut t-shirts, no skirts shorter than one inch above the knee, no bare legs, no dyed hair, no visible underwear lines, no visible bra lines, no jewellery, no tattoos, no heeled shoes. Although not strictly enforced, there was an understanding about cosmetics too: no lipstick, no eyeshadow, no foundation, no glitter, no eyeliner, no, no, no, no. Secondly, never be alone with a boy. Never sit next to a boy on a bus, never be alone in a room talking, never walk alone, never eat alone, never, never, never.

The result is a total and complete fetishization of yourself, your friendships, your relationships. The result is a total and complete disregard for same-sex attraction, for those who live outside the gender binary, for those who are attracted to all genders. The result, ironically, is creating an idol out of sex and sexual activity.

The hashtag #exvangelical started to gain traction in 2016, after the Trump election. All of a sudden, the floodgates were open and people started to tell their truths about growing up in this environment, and what it does to you.

As Chrissy Stroop, an #exvangelical activist stated to Bradley Onishi, a fellow exvangelical writer, “those who associate with #exvangelical on Twitter are going to be in the vast majority of cases liberal to left. People who were harmed by patriarchal politics because we were queer, women, people of colour.” Indeed, by 2016 it became clear the Church wasn’t protecting their flock of all nations; they were pruning and protecting those who fit the image they wanted to project, one born of whiteness. The anti LGBTQ2S+, racist and sexist belief systems touted by Trump were quietly (and sometimes not-so-quietly) endorsed by evangelical Canadians too. Indeed, after Trump was actually elected, chosen by the very people who preach love and acceptance, there became a stark Before and After
in my life and the life of my friends.

I saw people I used to know in school, and once respected, pledging their support for conversion therapy, anti-immigration policies, and white supremacy. My former principal sent out an email appealing for parents to contact their representatives in order to block the proposed conversion therapy ban in Calgary. In the U.S., white evangelicals prayed for Trump to be re-elected, and held fundraisers and pray-a-thons all for him. I no longer wanted anything to do with any of it. I stopped calling myself a Christian. I dropped the phrase “spiritual, but not religious” from my vocabulary. What used to be vaguely annoying now felt sinister to me.

In the eight years since I graduated, I’ve run into old classmates and realized they have been prompted into leaving as well. “I just couldn’t stand by anymore,” is the constant refrain. Friends I open up to refer me to therapists that specialize in religious trauma syndrome. Friends have stays in mental hospitals. Friends divorce their spouses when they discover they’ve actually been repressing their sexuality, their gender, or their politics. The more evangelical Christians become synonymous with republicanism, conservatism, fascism, the less we can stomach it. As Stroop tells Bradley Onishi in their interview, “being an ex-evangelical is inherently a political position.” It becomes one for me.

Last year, a friend and former schoolmate said something to me, as the leaves were just starting to turn ochre, that I have been turning over in my mind ever since.

“When you silence a girl’s agency, sexually, when you say that you have to say no—” she pauses here. Blinks. “Not even that you have to say no. I would frame it as you cannot say yes. That’s saying you cannot consent. Because your decision is made for you. And when that decision is made for you, that you cannot say yes? It makes it that much harder to say no.”

This is what purity culture took from me. I have trouble saying yes, making decisions on my own. I need input, to think for a while, to measure out every angle to make a decision. I rarely know how I feel. When people try to get to know me, I find it easy to throw up barriers, to stomp out any potential connection. I have trouble saying no. If someone is persistent, eager, controlling, and perseverant in their quest to make me do something, I will stop saying no around the third time. I will take the hurt. And every time I talk to the others, the other women just like me, the more I see the recognition in their eyes, and the pain in their voices, and I realize I am not alone.

Faith may be the prison of belief, but it can also be a way forward. Having faith in each other’s stories and experiences, having faith that we can and will heal from this, has saved me a thousand times over.
I am born again.