Rae Spoon will be performing in Haliax on Feburary 4. You can listen to their most recent album online here, and while you're at it, check out the text below, which talks about Spoon's personal experience with gendered pronouns and journalism. It was originally posted to their Tumblr.
"Instead Of An Interview With Xtra," Rae Spoon, January 3, 2011
Where I grew up it was pretty much impossible to find a queer publication. We had to sneak downtown and buy the Advocate from the same magazine store that used to sell cigarettes to underage kids. I remember once going to a café because I heard a rumor that it belonged to a queer couple. My High School date and I then sat huddled together waiting for some sort of acceptance to happen, but it felt like any other café in Calgary.
When I was nineteen I changed my name and moved to Vancouver I remember the first time I saw newspaper boxes on the street where you could grab a copy of Xtra West out in the open. I was astounded. Thanks to some lucky turns I had an interview about my music in Xtra West within a year. It was the very first interview of my music career.
A year later I changed my pronoun to “he.” Then my first album came out and I started touring around Canada. I was playing country music and had shows in a lot of small towns. The interviews I did in newspapers at that time were often rife with transphobic statements such as “She says she is a man” and so on. I would spend entire interviews answering the inevitable opening question: “What is Transgendered?” A lot of those papers would substitute my name for every pronoun because the editors claimed my chosen pronoun was confusing for the readers. It was misleading for people to hear my high voice and then see a male pronoun. I was 22. I needed the press, so I didn’t protest the way my identity was being treated.
One of the papers that didn’t use the pronoun “she” or substitute my name for a pronoun was Xtra in Toronto. In fact, over the years Xtra in Toronto and Ottawa have been very supportive of my music, putting in listings and reviews once in a while. Currently,...
Comments posted by Hillary