Growing Room festival returns with high-profile speakers including trans author Lorimer Shenher.
Discussions of gender identity have become increasingly nuanced over the past few years. Social-media platforms display countless images celebrating those whose gender differs from their biological sex. Trans and genderqueer characters are the focus of film and TV shows, and even the Canadian government has taken steps toward recognizing alternative gender identities, permitting trans or nonbinary individuals to change their gender marker on official documents.
That open-mindedness, though, wasn’t the case for most of writer Lorimer Shenher’s life. Born in 1960s Alberta as Lorraine Shenher, he spent much of his time trying to suppress his gender dysphoria by channelling his energy into career pursuits, including his work as a Vancouver Police Department detective and lead investigator for the harrowing case of serial killer Robert Pickton (described in his acclaimed debut book, That Lonely Section of Hell). It wasn’t until 2015 that Shenher began his physical transition to male—a process that he documents, along with his life from childhood to the present, in his upcoming memoir This One Looks Like a Boy.
More than most, he appreciates why gender is such a slippery concept, and why society carries the expectation that gender and sex should correlate.
“I think there are a million historical, underpinning reasons for it,” Shenher tells the Georgia Straight on the line from his Vancouver home. “But I have an English degree and a communications degree, so I often look at things through the lens of language. And I think sometimes it’s as simple as human beings need[ing] to be able to label things. The first thing we say when we’re talking about someone we met that day is ‘I met this woman,’ or ‘I met this guy’…i think it’s a need to...make [things] more understandable.”
Shenher’s nuanced approach to gender is mirrored by the long-running literary journal Room, which values the ability to express marginalization through language. Unapologetically feminist, its pages have featured work from women, trans, and two-spirit and nonbinary writers over its 44-year history, and offers a platform to wordsmiths often excluded from the canon. At the journal’s 10-day-long festival, Growing Room—now in its third year of entertaining Vancouver audiences with panels, readings, and workshops— Shenher will be discussing writing and surviving in a cis-sexist society.
“For me, everything comes down to intersectionality,” Shenher says. “I think within this feminist space, you can have women of colour, you can have people who identify as women, you can have trans men—you can bring a lot of voices, and everyone can relate to the experience of not being of the dominant culture. I think for anyone who identifies as female, right away you’re in the nondominant 50 percent of the world. All those other identities can share that experience, so we find a lot of commonality.”
More than anything, however, Shenher celebrates the Growing Room festival for its ability to create thoughtful dialogue. In a world where opinions are becoming increasingly polarized, the events, he says, are able to give space—or, quite literally, room—to different perspectives.
“I think festivals like this are so important,” he continues. “Again, when I talk about my people, my people are ‘others’, really. So to have a festival like this where people can come together and share that experience of marginality, I think it’s always so positive, and it’s really reaffirming for people to walk away and feel a little less bruised.” g Lorimer Shenher speaks at Growing Room: A Feminist Literary Festival on March 12 and March 16. The festival takes place at various venues from March 8 to 17.