Step Inside One Brave Fight for Trans Life

In Your Nature
Estlin McPhee
Brick Books (2025)

[Editor’s note: this story contains depictions of suicidal ideation.]

A description of the delicate way a mother peeled apples was the image that lingered six months after I heard Estlin McPhee read their poem “The Dream Jar,” which opens their debut book of poetry, In Your Nature.

In our January house, my mother
peels an apple with a knife, the skin of the peel
looping endlessly toward the table,

never once breaking.

The sweet recollections appear to conjure a spell before things got dicey.

Raised in the evangelical Christian church and homeschooled until Grade 8, McPhee grew up in the Fraser Valley, also known as the Bible Belt of B.C. They stopped attending church at age 12 and came out as genderqueer at 15.

In high school and beyond, McPhee needed to figure out who they were in relation to evangelical Christianity, gender and even pop culture. Now in their late 30s and based in Vancouver, McPhee explores identity and transformation with In Your Nature. The poems aren’t strictly autobiographical — personas are employed at times — but they’re deeply personal.

“For all my trans beloveds — I love being in the world with you,” the collection’s dedication reads.

“Listen: you bodies / who feel you’re unwanted here — you are beautifully, // gracefully wrong. You are thistle resilient and resplendent,” they offer in the poem “Keep Our Bodies.”

Some of the poems in this collection were decades in the making. One of them, “Lupo Mannaro” about their nonna, or Italian-speaking grandmother, was named the Poetry Gold Winner in Alberta Magazine Publishers Association Awards.

McPhee holds a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and authored the poetry chapbook Shapeshifters (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2018). For many years, they co-organized REVERB, a popular queer reading series in Vancouver, alongside poet Leah Horlick.

In Your Nature is organized into an unholy trinity of sections populated with shape-shifting werewolves, moons and stars. The first part, “Boy” illuminates a youth rife with magic and exploration. “Wolf” riffs off the biblical teachings that saturated their upbringing and explores notions of self, and “Forest” presents the self in the context of the world and culture.

In “Forest,” “Transvection of a New Kind” describes an incident on a Greyhound bus to California.

An excerpt reads:

Two in the morning the bus puffs to a stop
and a white guy in a red ball cap
slams down in the seat next to me. Turns
to me and says, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’
He takes out his lighter, flicks it into flame
next to my knee. Closes it again.
‘Do you fuck girls?’ Snick of fire
near my leg before it extinguishes.
I conspire and appease, stay seated,
stay awake. Hours later the sky sends up
its own blaze and the bus clinks him out
at a stop in California. I exhale. Whoever I was
before stares at me from the blurry window
and I stare back, imperceptibly altered.

Witchy magic

McPhee rebelled against evangelical Christianity by taking up witchcraft as a teen. In In Your Nature, they dabble with magic and re-envision Biblical stories with expanded characters, boy bands and a homoerotic Jesus.

At their double book launch alongside poet Hari Alluri in late April, McPhee apologized, as they always do, before reading one of the three poems in their collection that reference Harry Potter. This series of fantasy novels and their author have played a prominent role in McPhee’s life — from captivating them as a young reader, to being books kids in their church wanted to burn, to author J.K. Rowling’s possibly transphobic views and her reaction to the U.K. Supreme Court’s ruling that a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law.

“Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists,” reads a line from an essay that Rowling published on her personal website about why she speaks out on issues related to sex and gender.

McPhee used this statement as the epigraph to their poem “Data on Transgender Youth.”

Turn eleven and an owl swoops in
  through your chimney with a letter

that says you’re trans now–
  one of two percent, a lucky few,

chosen.

The troubling statistics enter later:

You’ve heard the stories–
  only fifty percent of people like you

have families who call them
  by the correct name.

Seventeen percent don’t have anywhere
  safe to live at all.

Eight percent will be forced
  into conversion therapy.

Considering these figures, who should be feeling terrified?

The poem later continues:

  In between classes you dodge

every disappearing staircase
  to try to make it to the one

single-stall bathroom. Seventy percent
  of the time you just avoid

the bathroom all together, practice
  a new kind of magic

called dehydration.

In their childhood, McPhee was permitted to read Harry Potter — with its Christian-adjacent morals — but secular music wasn’t played in their home.

Defining themself in preteen and teen years demanded a crash course in pop culture. “That was a really big part of me having a separate identity from the familial religious context that I grew up in,” they said in a Tyee interview.

Backstreet Boys provided salvation, but it’s One Direction’s lyrics they’ve interspersed in a poem with an epigraph taken from the gospel of Luke.

McPhee takes even more liberties in “Gay Messiah,” an excerpt from which reads:

      At the party

in my mind, I’m in charge for once
so Jesus is here, is queer,

and looks eerily similar
to Rufus Wainwright. He slouches

at the piano, playing songs
he learned from the dead.

Emo, yes, but you work with what you’ve got.

Contending with a conservative upbringing

I recently saw gay American singer-songwriter and musician John Grant perform to a small crowd of devoted fans in Vancouver.

From a grand piano, he told us he was initially raised in the Methodist church, but after moving to Colorado, his family transitioned to a religion with a more conservative doctrine. He grew up learning gay people were perverts headed for hell, eliciting much shame and fear in his teenage years in the ’80s.

In the realm of poetry, McPhee contends with the realization they’re different in ways the lord wouldn’t relish by wielding werewolf imagery in “Turning:”

  … Is this my life,
a voice inside you wants to know
  and when the answer comes

you cannot go back
to what you were. Mirrors shatter
  in your wake; walls grow

fur, grow forest. Limbs
lengthen, gangling. Hearts
  harden. Even Jesus turns

his face away, won’t speak with you.

Grant’s self-loathing led him to self-medicate. He found a new community among alcohol and drug users and engaged in risky sexual behaviour. He also had to contend with his mother expressing disappointment he wasn’t following God before she died in 1995. Even after the success of his critically acclaimed 2010 album The Queen of Denmark, Grant felt suicidal.

McPhee is all too familiar with others’ thoughts of suicide. Their poem “Young Hearts Run Free” was inspired by their time working with LGBTQ2S+ youth.

At work, I talk about suicide with teenagers
over and over until the word loses meaning,
scrambles itself with sluice in my head —
a recurrence of teenagers, a sluice of suicide.

And later:

Eventually the sluice runs so strong
that I take time off work to stop thinking
about teenagers killing themselves.
At home, I watch a Norwegian TV show
about teenagers over and over and weep
extravagantly. On the blinking blue of the screen,
Norwegian teenagers watch Romeo + Juliet,
then kiss under water. Somewhere without me
my teenagers muddle through. Or they don’t.
At night, they dart into my dreams like arrows,
always something in their hands—a bottle,
a needle, a knife.

How many people have had to struggle under the weight of homophobia and transphobia taught in their churches? How many LGBTQ2S+ exvangelicals have turned to processing their identity, experiences and emotions via the arts?

‘Trans people have become a state-endorsed scapegoat’

McPhee would rather talk about art, the earth and spirituality, which is at the core of their poetry, than President Donald Trump urging the federal government to purge itself of “woke” ideology, but they’re a political person and recognize their identity is politicized. “It is infuriating to me that we have to take this absurdity seriously, but we do,” they said.

“Trans people have become a state-endorsed scapegoat that used to be more underground,” said McPhee, who recalls the intensity of the conversations about removing SOGI 123, or Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, resources from schools when they were a youth worker in 2017. “All these things feel a lot more mainstream, but they don’t feel new.”

When I ask McPhee what people can do to support trans folks, they recommend people get to know their neighbours, involve themselves in their community, participate in local and municipal politics and vote. As a librarian, they recommend countering the censorship of books and other materials available in public spaces, as well as protests to drag storytime. It’s even nicer, they say, to support trans marches and other positive actions.

McPhee encourages people to educate themselves about what it means to be trans and which questions are inappropriate to ask.

Using the names and pronouns a trans person has identified as appropriate for them goes a long way. “You don’t need a lot of education or information to talk to someone in a loving, affirming way.”

Considering recent and ongoing events in the U.S., it’s not enough to champion trans rights exclusively, they say.

“There are no trans rights without the rights of undocumented and other people. Refusing to be siloed and put into these little wedges is a very good strategy for strength against fascism.”

Ultimately, In Your Nature is not a call to action or a response to the present times. Instead, McPhee anticipates readers will find it emotionally resonant.

“In the acknowledgments, I talk about this book in a lot of ways being dedicated to my friends and friendship and the power those relationships have to anchor and transform a person’s life,” they said.

“That’s where I hope my book will land with people. I hope, if nothing else, it causes them to strengthen their connections with people they love.”

I will love you until the tide changes
and we’re all swept backwards—

your mother calling you into the house
instead of telling you to leave it.

— from “What Love Can’t Do.”

Estlin McPhee is reading in Duncan, B.C., on May 21 and at a livestreamed event in Victoria on May 23. Details are available online.