On Wave Relationships and Struggle at the Margins: Transfeminine Histories and Echoes in Newfoundland

Photo of Jeannie Sheppard (*The Daily Register*, December 18, 1980) overlaid with waves.

Daze Jefferies and Rhea Rollmann

Editor’s note: the following work by Daze Jefferies and Rhea Rollmann is a piece of creative history. Transfeminine histories are often especially difficult to recount through traditional historical writing. By engaging with archival fragments, as well as oral histories completed by Rhea for her exceptional book A Queer History of Newfoundland, this article uses the power of narrative and poetry to weave these stories together and trouble our conception of history.

At Newfoundland’s far edges of the North Atlantic, transfeminine histories – of survival and resistance, of love and loss, of leaving and staying – are shaped by wave relationships. Ebbing and flowing over the past one hundred years, these relationships permeate the archive: re-storied in early twentieth century folksongs^[1]; emerging from rural youth voices within the medical and media record; held by sisterhood among drag performers and showgirls; tendered in the personals ads of local and visiting sex workers; affirmed through access to the early internet’s resources; echoing as protest chants through outport dirt roads and city streets alike; lingering in the wake of forced resettlement and outmigration; rising again through collective efforts to know and honour those who came before. Evidence of historical trans and genderqueer presence in Newfoundland emerges in wave-form, like so many gleaming shells half-buried in the sand, revealed by ebbing tides. Half-submerged fragments of memory disappear beneath a moon-swept shoal, signposts to lives half-lived, only to re-emerge in other places: Montreal, New York, British Columbia.

How might we encounter freedom, tenacity, and pleasure – with and against the archival record? While fragments reveal a long history of social, cultural, and medico-legal struggle, we hold on to an inherited resistance from trans foremothers for whom decades of silence, absence, or escape can be acknowledged as skillful means to reach for safer lives. This resistance helps to reframe a narrative of outmigration and community loss (or what Steven Maynard has described as “leaving in droves”) that has been all too common for queer and trans communities of Atlantic Canada. In Maynard’s editorial introduction for “A Different Drummer,” the 1993 gay and lesbian special issue of New Maritimes, he challenges a lineage of rural-to-urban queer migration. Although “trans” histories remain unacknowledged in his analysis, his call for more historical research into Black and Two-Spirit expressions of gender and sexuality could be imagined as an outstretched hand. The expansive nature of queer and trans lives beyond settler colonial gazes and binaries – as well as desires to both evade and survive their capture altogether – can redefine our relationships with, and expectations from, the past. Drawing from archival research and oral history interviews with trans foremothers and their loved ones, the following fragments seek to offer a counter-narrative of struggle at the margins. For a deeper engagement with these oral histories, see Rhea Rollmann’s book A Queer History of Newfoundland.

Alexandria Tucker’s story starts in Newfoundland, where she was born in 1974. She grew up in the small community of Kilbride on the outskirts of St. John’s. Teachers and family friends remember her maturity, conscientiousness, and clean-living; remarkable for any teenager growing up in the ‘80s, they attest. Then in her final year of high school she approached her sister one night in late fall and told her she was trans. Her confused sister had never encountered the term trans before, but the two siblings were tight and collapsed in a huddle of hugs and tears on Kelly’s bed. Alexandria’s sister kept her secret and accepted her, but the provincial medical establishment was less accommodating. When Alexandria worked up the nerve to approach a local psychiatrist seeking hormone treatment in 1993, she was warned, in no uncertain terms, that her choices were to leave the province to pursue that course, or risk incarceration in a mental institution. Propelled by tears, hopes, and the swelling tide of her own life, Alexandria left, and headed for BC; a story echoed by so many other trans Newfoundlanders in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s who also pursued lives (and hormone therapy) outside of the province.

Jeannie Sheppard was born in 1957, in the tiny – now abandoned – rural community of Sandy Point, on a small island off the west coast of Newfoundland. Her sister recalls her defying gender norms from a very young age, trading pants for skirts and dresses as they danced along the empty shores of the cove. Her family’s resettlement to a larger community left them dissatisfied and uprooted, so they continued the journey to Toronto, where Jeannie transitioned and became a fixture in the 1970s-era gay village. Her performing career eventually brought her to Montreal. Jeannie’s combination of flamboyant hand-made costumes, professional song and dance, and down-home Newfoundland manners won hearts and fans in both cities. Her sister recounts how Jeannie delighted in gendered play and whimsy, meeting people as a stereotypically feminine woman and then suddenly shifting into a deep-voiced, masculine Newfoundland brogue. Her career was cut tragically short when she was murdered at age 24 by an abusive American husband in 1980.^[2]

Unlike some trans Newfoundlanders, Jeannie didn’t leave to evade scrutiny or to disappear into a new identity; her family relocated for economic reasons. Jeannie was open with her family about her shifting gender identity and, by all accounts, they matter-of-factly accepted her. Stories of relocation ask us to consider how many other Newfoundlanders made it off the island during those years to pursue their gender journeys in the face of an ongoing lack of institutional support. This lack of proper care, and the determination to find it, outlines much of the media record documenting trans stories in the late twentieth century.

In a 1996 article from The Globe and Mail covering the deaths of sex workers on Toronto’s trans stroll, a street queen and transfeminine youth named Vivian noted that “you certainly can’t get away with this in Newfoundland,” where she grew up.^[3] Like Alexandria, and other trans girls and women before her, Vivian’s search for a livable future demanded that she also leave her “home” province. In her book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, Jules Gill-Peterson reframes the violent stigmatization and disposability of street queens and trans youth sex workers, honouring them not as tragic figures but fierce dreamers whose desire to transcend systems of oppression could make the larger queer community’s terms of resistance anew. Around the same time that Vivian’s story entered the archival record of outmigration, queer and trans youth activists were beginning to organize and take up space, embodying the “power of marginality to push back”and, perhaps, finally getting away with it as they lead pride marches and orchestrated political drag performances on the streets and strolls of downtown St. John’s.^[4]

In 1998, some five years after Alexandria Tucker’s encounter with a psychiatrist, another meeting took place in St. John’s. Only one of the three trans people in the room at this meeting were originally from Newfoundland. Dawn had come from the United States and Jennifer from British Columbia. The ebb and flow of life had brought them both to St. John’s, where they met Felicia, a local trans woman who worked in the construction industry. The three formed the first out trans cohort in Newfoundland Gays and Lesbians for Equality (NGALE), a community organization formed in 1993. As Jennifer recalled in an oral history interview, they too met patiently with the medical establishment seeking hormone treatment; a path that was abruptly shut down by health care administrators with an admonishment that: “We will have none of this here in Newfoundland. These people can go back to Toronto with the rest of their like.” While Dawn was eventually able to use a prescription from her American doctor to access hormones, Jennifer blackmailed a local physician to get hers, and in 1999, Felicia passed away. Her death fueled the determination of local activists to establish an accessible pathway to medical transition in the province.^[5] Their efforts lead to considerable headway in the past two decades, but the complex interplay of Newfoundland’s geography along with social and medico-institutional factors continues to impact the lives and experiences of trans people in this province.

Alexandria Tucker eventually returned to Newfoundland, visiting and reconnecting with family and friends not long before her death in 2005. But her life and death set waves in motion that affected the entire country. Such was the impact of her life and work in BC that friends and community members organized the “Trans Cycling Odyssey” – a country-wide bicycle tour that travelled from Victoria to St. John’s. Stops were made in cities along the way to hold meetings and raise awareness about transgender mental health. Some of those community meetings, the activists recall, catalyzed the first trans organizing in their respective cities. The largest gathering took place at the final stop in St. John’s, where community members gathered to remember Alexandria and to rededicate themselves to the struggle for trans liberation.^[6]

Addressing the work of historical reconstruction and the complex structural challenges for archiving trans lives, Viviane Namaste reminds us to acknowledge the clandestine and invisibilized labour of our foremothers’ existence. In the present moment of hypervisibility and anti-trans violence, we must recognize the ongoing necessity of covert survival strategies, remembering that “how we have made our bodies livable, in many cases, has yet to enter into the archive at all.” With this in mind, we return to waves – the defiant allure and ephemeral touches, the displacement and resurfacing, the undertones and echoes. While many transfeminine histories of rural and island geographies may be left to re-emerge in their own time, the archival record affirms how generations of Newfoundland’s trans girls and women, queens and outcasts, hustlers and whores, have withstood and reimagined struggle at the margins. May their practices of freedom and unrelenting dreams continue to guide our persistence ahead – like hearing the ocean in seashells, like hearing their voices in the water.

Daze Jefferies (she/her) is an artist, writer, and educator. Rhea Rollmann (she/her) is a journalist, writer, audio producer, and the author of A Queer History of Newfoundland (Engen Books, 2023).

Further Reading

Gill-Peterson, Jules. 2024. A Short History of Trans Misogyny. London and New York: Verso.

Hoenig, Julius and Elaine Duggan. 1974. “Sexual and other abnormalities in the family of a transsexual.” Psychiatria Clinica 7 (6): 334-46.

Maynard, Steven. 1993. “Going Down the Road to the Beat of a Different Drummer.” New Maritimes 11 (3): 2.

Namaste, Viviane. 2015. “Labour, The State, and Global Capitalism: Challenges for Archiving Trans Lives.” In Oversight: Critical Reflections on Feminist Research and Politics, 29-56. Toronto: Women’s Press.

Rollmann, Rhea. 2023. A Queer History of Newfoundland. Chapel Arm: Engen Books.

^[1] Greenhill, Pauline. 2014. “‘If I Was a Woman as I Am a Man’: The Transgender Imagination in Newfoundland Ballads.” In Changing Places: Feminist Essays on Empathy and Relocation, eds. Valerie Burton and Jean Guthrie, 172–98. Toronto: Inanna.

^[2] Graven, Mark. December 18, 1980. “Kin of murdered transsexual say they knew of no ex-lover.” The Daily Register (Shrewsbury): 1, 7.

^[3] Saunders, Doug. May 24, 1996. “Toronto a magnet for outcasts.” The Globe and Mail (Toronto): A6.

^[4] Hehir, Kevin. 2002. “A Day at the Races.” Arts Atlantic 19 (1): 19.

^[5] Hilliard, Will. August 8, 1999. “I am woman: Transsexual frustrated in quest for sex change.” The Telegram (St. John’s): 1-2.

^[6] Bradbury Mullowney, Tara. April 9, 2006. “A cross-country journey of love: Pair to raise awareness for transgendered friend who committed suicide.” The Telegram (St. John’s): A3.