Searching for a Safe Place to Swim

My dad loved fishing. It was one of the few things, by the time I knew him, that he still had a wholehearted passion for: waking up at three in the morning, sometimes even earlier, to drive to the river when the sockeye were running, to stand in the water with a rod and waders while the dawn rose and the bugs hummed and the bites were plentiful. Once, when I was very young, I was playing with a rod that had been left in the living room, pretending I, too, was casting. The delicate tip hit the floor, snapped off. As my dad yelled at me, I closed my eyes. Maybe if I tried hard enough I could convince myself to be somewhere else, somewhere I was no longer the target of someone’s rage. I pressed my eyelids shut, held my breath, stayed very, very, still. And it worked—as much as it could. My body was the one being yelled at. My mind was somewhere else: smooth, small, round, like a pebble sinking into the quiet depths.

When he didn’t go for longer trips, my dad would go fishing at the rocky beach not far from where we lived on Vancouver’s North Shore, at the end of a small lane full of beachfront mansions. He would take me and my older brother, and the two of them would fish. I was younger, and I wasn’t an eldest son, and I was all over the place, probably not to be trusted with a fishing rod. They fished, and I wandered. I passed hours clambering on the rocks, turning them over to watch the crabs and worms crawling underneath. Looking up at the towering houses behind their concrete, wondering what it would be like to live somewhere like that.

Mostly, though, I would swim. Leaving my sandals on the shore, learning to step lightly as I waded in—careful, weight balanced, lest the barnacles slash deep cuts in my heels or the fleshy parts of my toes. Feeling the cold creep up as the water got deeper; stopping at the edge of the dropoff; taking a deep breath in—and then, all at once, I was underneath it all. That’s how I always did it: no gradual entry. It had to be everything, all at the same time, plunging into the roaring quiet.

When I rose up again, I felt brand-new—what baptism was supposed to feel like in the testimonies I read, the words of saints and redeemed sinners that lined our bookshelves at home. The possibilities for movement were limitless. I stayed in the water, flipping, diving, swimming out ever deeper. To the buoys; to the outer limits of where I thought I could go, until it was all gone—the seafloor, the shore, the small figures of my dad and my brother casting their lines into the sea. They were beside the water, but they weren’t of it, not like I was. On the shore I was aberrant, my body a nuisance. I was never more alone than when I was around people. But out here, I was surrounded by life. I was a part of it all.

*

In that uncomfortable preadolescent time of childhood, when you are no longer small enough to be cute but not yet big enough to assert yourself, I went swimming as much as I possibly could. All summer, every summer, I dragged friends to the beach. When I was old enough, I walked there alone. Sunset was my favorite time—the perfect temperature, the best light, and usually few others there. In the winter, I went to the pool at the community center. It wasn’t as good as the ocean, but I made the most of it. In the evening, when the patrons were few, the lights were dimmed, and the diving boards were closed, I swam to the bottom of the deep blue, trying to see how long I could withstand the pressure—pushing against the pulsing blue weight around my head and the invisible pull toward the surface, willing my legs to stay crossed on the tiled floor.

But almost as soon as I gained enough independence to swim as much as I wanted to, I stopped wanting to. It seemed, all of a sudden, that everything had changed. The water was just as welcoming as it always was. But I was aware, now, of the looks I got in changing rooms. The way my body was seen as an intrusion. I was just a kid—a girl, for all anyone knew, myself included. I was eleven. I hadn’t thought to start shaving the hair on my legs. It only took a few comments, a few pointed glances, for my fear to take root.

The water was just as welcoming as it always was. But I was aware, now, of the looks I got in changing rooms. 

Outside the water, in changing rooms and at school, I was increasingly ostracized and harassed. I was called a lesbian, even though I wasn’t and barely knew what that meant. I was called other words whose meanings I didn’t know. I was accused of not really being a girl. For some people, these words gave them license to abuse me; for others, it meant license to turn a blind eye. All of this because I looked a certain way, acted a certain way, carried myself just so. But no one would explain to me what I was doing wrong. There was nothing I could do to fix it—nothing except try my hardest, through slouched shoulders and skipped meals and self-isolation, not to exist. And I had always existed the most when I was in the water, when I was around it.

More and more, I simply stayed away. I grew to hate the summer, the sunshine, the attendant expectations of joy. This resentment sharpened after I came to understand myself as trans and as my appearance changed. After being harassed in public washrooms, the idea of making myself vulnerable at a pool, a beach, a changing room—it was unbearable.

But I couldn’t forget how I used to feel. When my mind was at its darkest, I would sit beside the water. I could picture myself walking in, shedding the weight of my burdened body. Once, I had found in the ocean a place where I didn’t have to separate my mind from my physical self, where my fractured consciousness coalesced into a whole. I didn’t believe in any of it anymore. When I looked into the depths, I didn’t think about freedom. I saw a nothingness into which I wanted to disappear.

*

In September 2020, Frontiers in Sociology published an article titled “Transgender and Non-binary Swimming in the UK: Indoor Public Pool Spaces and Un/Safety.” The article’s findings draw on discussions with focus groups and sixty-three drawings created by participants in the research. Issues of transgender rights and public existence in the UK are, as the article notes, particularly fraught at this moment. And public pools and bodies of water, with their often strictly gendered changing and showering spaces, are frequent focal points for these debates. In the cis public imagination, they are particularly vulnerable to violation by hypothetical trans intruders. As a result, the pool and the beach are not simply public leisure spaces, made for people to hang out in and around water. They are battlegrounds.

The researchers collected testimony from participants in a “Trans Swim”—wherein a pool space was booked out specifically for trans and nonbinary swimmers, and where the usually highly gendered and surveilled environments of changing spaces were temporarily dismantled. People could choose where they wanted to change; they knew, either way, that they would be among other trans people. A running theme in the responses was that Trans Swim was the first time many participants had gone swimming in years. According to one person, “[they] hadn’t submerged in water . . . at the beach and swimming pools, for at least ten, twelve years”; another said it had been “nine years” since they had been swimming. Experiencing public harassment in the past made them fearful of making themselves vulnerable to further attacks in places like swimming pools. Avoidance was a matter of self-preservation.

But behind the self-preservation was still a desire to return—the ability to be in the water and be safe at the same time, if such a thing were possible. The words they commonly used to describe their emotional states before the Trans Swim session: anxious, nervous, shy, stressed, self-conscious, dysphoric, tense, awkward, restless, worried, and excited.

After the swim, the words transformed: happy, content, calm, relaxed, confident, healthy, body confident, relieved, refreshed, peaceful, natural, energized. One participant wrote:

Trans swim is the first time in 15 years that I’ve been swimming. I feel safe here. It is beyond words how it feels to let all guard down and just swim and relax. It feels normal in a way that I am normally denied. It reminds me that me and my body are normal.

Normal as in worthy of respect.

Worthy of self-love.

Worthy of living.

A drawing depicts a squiggly figure, hair standing up and arms in the air, splashing water in every direction, their body submerged in the waves. On their face is a wide, unmediated smile.

The positive health effects of swimming, particularly for mental health issues and stress-related conditions, are well-known. Trans people are a population disproportionately likely to suffer from these very health issues. Yet it remains excruciatingly difficult to access the benefits that swimming could provide. Not feeling safe while swimming is not the biggest problem facing trans people. But it is symptomatic of the way that trans people are expected to cede all public joy, all public movement, all public physical expression—to disappear in order to protect some imagined state of safety. The reality is, of course, that that safety never existed in the first place. It is a fantasy based on violence—the deliberate, crushing absence of those it excludes.

*

Transition has made me feel at peace in my body in a way that I never have before. No longer is dissociation my default state. I no longer flinch from all sensation. I no longer believe that I am broken, defective, a machine made with missing parts. My body is my home—not a prison, but the place I live, the place I willingly return to.

My body is my home—not a prison, but the place I live, the place I willingly return to.

The irony is that transition has made going to places like pools and beaches feel more fraught than ever. Bodies don’t come with tidy endings. There has been no moment of magical transformation, where I suddenly become embodied in a way that makes being at the beach and the pool risk-free. So, mostly, I don’t go. I wait until I can find a day to escape to an isolated lake or a rocky, inhospitable cove—where, with the safety afforded to me by being around friends, I can take a moment to float.

Many trans people don’t even have this luxury. Meanwhile, in North American and UK media, there is a barrage of anti-trans sentiment. Olympic athletes face transmisogynist and racist backlashes; denial of trans children’s rights to play recreational sports, and sometimes to even exist, are enshrined in law. Trans people, almost always trans women, are characterized as frightening, intruding in every public space that they exist in—even as they are the ones who are at risk of facing violence, who must carry the burden of fear.

Every so often on social media, I will come across pictures shared by trans people gathered at Jacob Riis Beach in New York City. I live nowhere near New York City. I have never been and might never get there. But the idea that a place exists where trans people are free to be in and around the water—a place made and maintained by trans people—fills me with joy. It seems so little to ask: to be able to spend a day with your family in the sun, the water beckoning nearby. And it is bitterly unfair that, when you are trans, such spaces have to be created and kept safe with great effort.

In the water, the participants in Trans Swim felt all of their previous anxieties fall away. They felt liberated. They felt free. Like I did as a kid; like I still do, sometimes, when I am able to be out in the water—how I want to be more often, not hidden in some isolated nook of ocean but at the beach with my friends, in the open. It is still hard to forget the fear, like the tension carried from a held breath long after it is released. But the great lesson of transition is that fear can only carry you so far. At some point, you have to close your eyes, breathe in, let go.

*

The sun is shining. That’s about all I can see from out here. The glistening of light against rippling water, the blue sky. The shore, its barnacled rocks and little stones, is so distant that it might as well be a dream. When I turn over on my back, letting my eyes fall closed and my torso rise, my ears sink under the surface, and the world is submerged in a loud silence. I am in the ocean; I am against the ocean; I am above the ocean. In the open water, everything can coexist.

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