Gender Fraud: a fiction

Peg Tittle

You can do this, she told herself as she sprinted—well, as she ran as fast as she could—along the road toward the curve in the distance. Heart thundering, lungs heaving, she made it to the curve, rounded it, and saw an intersection in the distance. You can do this, she kept telling herself, as she kept moving, getting closer and closer to the intersection … Yes, she was over sixty, just a tad over sixty, but she’d been running since she was thirteen, since she’d entered high school and discovered something called ‘cross-country’. She’d done track in grades seven and eight, but— They ran through the forest! Or at least through the wooded parks on the edge of the city, which was, back then, the closest thing to forest she knew. She fell in love with it. The beauty. The quiet. The solitude. The rhythm. The distance. Between practices, she ran through her neighbourhood. Every day, further.

So she could do this. She’d been surprised to discover there wasn’t a women’s team at university, so she joined the men’s team. But then discovered that women weren’t allowed to run the long distances. It was the 70s. At all the cross-country meets, women did just three miles. Men did five. At the track meets, women couldn’t run even the 5,000, let alone the 10,000; the longest event for them was the 3,000. But she kept running further, and further. On her own. She didn’t know she was ready for a marathon in her late twenties. There was no internet. She couldn’t just google. She’d thought she’d have to be running twenty miles several times a week. Which is what she did. Which is why she was always tearing this or that.

Even so, she told herself, now trotting along a sidewalk, you can do this. It wasn’t until her forties that she’d discovered that a total of fifty miles a week was sufficient preparation as long as she ran something over ten miles once a week. And by her forties, she’d been doing that for almost twenty years. So she ran her first marathon. At forty-five. Finished in under four hours.

As she approached the intersection, she could feel her heart still pounding, her lungs still straining. Okay, so you don’t have the cardiovascular anymore, and you definitely don’t have the flexibility, you’ll be the tin man for days, but you’ve still got the strength. And the stamina. Because even at sixty, she’d been walking ten to fifteen miles every day, through the forest behind her cabin. You just have to get to forest, she told herself, you just have to lose whatever vehicles will be following you, and then you can walk. She stopped briefly to read the street signs, got her bearings, and was relieved to find herself at the south end of the city. She headed left. She could cut through the Walmart parking lot, then it was just a short bit to Seymour, which was the first exit, if you were coming from the south. She was jogging now. Limping, actually. It had been years since she’d run on sidewalk, on pavement. She was going to have shin splints. For the rest of her life if she didn’t get into forest soon. Scrub bush, at least.

But she would be. Soon. There was forest on both sides of the highway all the way from her cabin to North Bay. Ergo, she grinned, all the way from North Bay to her cabin. It was 80km by highway. Probably more if she stuck to the forested edges. She could do 20km a day. She’d be home in four days. She could find safe places to sleep along the way … Thank god it wasn’t winter. The bear would be hibernating, but there would be wolves, and coyotes had moved up from the south … Though, now that she thought about it, they were unlikely to live, or hunt, this close to the highway.

A year ago, she would’ve just hitch-hiked. A year ago, she was stupid. Out of step. Behind the times. Now, she understood that there was a good chance that anyone who stopped to pick her up would report her. Unless it was a woman who stopped. But, she grimaced, it could be illegal for women to drive now. It suddenly occurred to her that an unescorted woman might attract attention. Especially a sixty-year-old woman who was running. Even if she had been dressed for it. She abruptly slowed to a walk, her knees screaming.

And then it occurred to her that she couldn’t go home. That would be the first place they looked. Well, she could set up some sort of alarm system, prepare an escape route … into the crawl space, maybe. No, wait! Sam had turned his little cottage into a year-round rental, then decided it was too much trouble, to manage the renting of it. She still had the key he’d given her when she’d confessed that she often stopped at his place on her way back, having paddled the ten mile stretch of river past the end of the lake, to sit and watch the sunset. “Have a beer while you’re here,” he’d said. “Make yourself at home.” Okay, she would, yes. She ventured a small smile.

You can do this, she told herself again.

It had happened so quickly. One day, she was walking along the dirt lane, as she did every day, along the fifty metres from her cabin to the path that led deep into the forest, dressed as she always was, sweatshirt over a tshirt, baggy cotton cargo pants, thick socks, and track shoes. She had a small pack belted around her waist, that held her ID, a small pad of paper and a pen, an alarm and, in case that didn’t work, bear spray, and a flashlight if she did something stupid and took longer to get out. Bug spray in season. Earplugs for Thursdays when the gun club had their get-togethers, a shot every six seconds, echoing for miles and miles. Once when they’d started early, it had been sheer hell for the hour it took to get back inside her cabin, windows closed, music on.

She hadn’t had to use the bear spray. A bear did catch her by surprise one day, as she no doubt did it, but it just growled and took off running. She’d also come across a momma bear and its two cubs, but they were far enough away that she noticed in time to stop. They were on the path ahead of her, the only way out, so she just stood there, patiently, to let them go where and when they wanted. Tassi had been so good, content to be held in her arms—they must’ve been upwind and too far away for her canine nose and eyes to notice them. After a while, she carried on, talking in a singsong voice to let Momma know where she was and, hopefully, to convey her harmlessness. That had always worked with the dogs who’d come charging at her on her long-distance runs. Back when.

She’d also met a wolf one day. A juvenile by the way it was moving, so easily. It had been trotting along the path toward her, oh what a wonderful day—she’d been thinking pretty much the same thing—and when they rounded the curve to find themselves suddenly face to face, they both came to a sudden and complete halt. Astonished. As for her, also delighted. The creature was absolutely gorgeous, its coat a mix of cream, tan, and chestnut. It considered her, then simply turned around and trotted back the way it had come.

The only other animal she’d come across—aside from the numerous, though decreasing numbers of, squirrels, rabbits, and grouse—was a young moose. Like the bear, it too had just taken off when it heard her.

The day it happened, she was a few feet from the path when a car coming down the hill pulled up next to her. Was a time she’d’ve waited, ready to be helpful, to offer directions, to tell the driver ‘No, you can’t get to the highway from here, it’s a dead end, you have to go back—’

“Are you Kat Jones?” The uniformed man in the passenger seat had quickly gotten out to stand before her, blocking her way onto the path. He was young—that is to say, under forty—and clean-cut.

“Yes.” So?

“Would you come with us, please?”

What? “Why?”

The uniformed man in the driver’s seat was also out. And standing behind her.

“We’ve received reports.”

This wasn’t making any sense. “Reports of what?”

He flashed a badge. “You are hereby under arrest for Fraudulent Identity.”

“Under arrest? For what?”

“Fraudulent Identity. Section 380(1) of the Criminal Code. Subsection 4(a). Gender Fraud.”

The second one reached for her arm before she had time to process— Certainly before she had time to get out her bear spray.

“You’re presenting as male,” the first one explained, “when, in fact, you’re female. That’s fraud. And a criminal offence.”

The second one pulled her arms behind her, bound her hands together with one of those black plastic zip ties she’d often used around her cabin, then forced her into the back seat. Just like that. Her world ended.

It hadn’t even occurred to her to make a run for it.

She never did find out who had reported her. It could have been Chuck, who lived down the lane. Nancy’s husband. When she’d left a print-out in their mailbox, informing them of the toxicity of the smoke that blew her way every time they burned their leaves—something they often did, forcing her inside—and there was no reason they couldn’t simply rake them into a corner of their one-acre lot and leave them to decompose—which was actually better, ecologically, than burning them—he’d been enraged. He’d knocked on her door and when she’d opened it—foolish, yes—he’d stepped inside without invitation and proceeded to yell at her, thrusting out his massive ex-footballer chest and punctuating his words with a jabbing finger. When she’d tried to respond, to engage in a civil conversation, he’d screamed at her to “Just Shut Up and Listen!” and a few moments later concluded his tantrum by calling her a cunt.

Or it could have been Mike, the guy who owned the property across the cove. When he started cutting down the trees along the shoreline, she’d called the Ministry to ask whether there were any by-laws against that. So the next time he saw her, he too screamed at her. Gave her a shove and called her a bitch. And kicked Tassi.

Or it could have been Alfred. He’d wanted to hire her to clean his house; she’d declined. She already had a job, with a company in Princeton, writing logical reasoning and critical reading questions for the GRE. He hadn’t known that. And why would he? It’s not like she walked around proclaiming it to the ‘hood, and no one had ever invited her to dinner or whatever. She didn’t … fit. He’d just assumed: she was a middle-aged woman, ergo.

Or it could have been Don, who owned the cottage two lots down from her and the empty lot next to her. She’d told him, thirty years ago, when she’d bought her cabin—a cabin on a lake in a forest!—that if he ever wanted to sell the empty lot, she’d buy it. The previous summer, she’d had occasion to speak to him because he kept letting his dog crash his way through her fence—admittedly a sorry affair of chicken wire strung from tree to tree—but it did the job, which was to keep Tassi safe inside—with the added bonus of being virtually invisible. His dog was big and young and unruly, whereas Tassi was relatively small and, by then, elderly. And although the dog’s intent was to play, Tassi would’ve been hurt if Kat hadn’t intervened. Three days after she’d asked Don—yes, with some vehemence—to keep his dog on his own property, a ‘For Sale’ appeared on the empty lot, and when she’d called to make an offer, he said he had no intention of ever selling it to her. She’d been anxious for weeks, knowing that she’d have to move, give up her little paradise, if someone bought the lot for a permanent residence. They’d be too close: her solitude would be forever ruined. Even if they’d bought it just for seasonal use … If they had screaming kids or ATVs or snowmobiles or late night parties or used a generator instead of paying for an electrical hook-up … The sign eventually disappeared, and a year later someone told her he’d had no intention of selling it; he’d just wanted to upset her.

Or it could have been the guy who’d called out at her from his fume-belching ATV, when she was picking up the litter along the trail—as she often did, partly just to do her bit to keep the trails clean, but, eventually, mainly because she liked it better without the beer cans and the fast food containers and the cigarette butts—that it was ‘Good to see she was good for somethin’!’ She hadn’t understood the comment until it was explained it to her: the man had probably thought she was a lesbian and so, since she wasn’t any good for sex …

Yes, she lived in what she privately called ‘a hostile neighbourhood.’ But to be honest, she wasn’t convinced it was just her neighbourhood. Men everywhere seemed to take offense when a woman spoke up, challenged them in some way. Or when she didn’t at least pretend to be sexually available to them. Women weren’t much better, either treating her like a kid, presumably because she wasn’t married with kids of her own, or treating her like she was, in some way, off-putting. She didn’t understand it. And yes, she was hurt by it.

So yes, she’d become a hermit. At sixty, she’d had enough, quite enough, of her uneducated, thick-skulled, and downright dangerous neighbours. And as for the world beyond, she found kin online. Sites like I Blame the Patriarchy and Feminist Current became her community. They were frequented by intelligent women who offered insightful discussion. Women much like her, she imagined. Radfem, for the most part. Probably over forty, for the most part.

And she was content. To live so alone. Though, actually, she didn’t live alone. Well, hadn’t lived alone until just recently. Tassi, her sole and constant companion, the love of her life, had died after fourteen years of happy, fourteen years of … sheer joy. A tumour had developed in her urethra. Malignant, aggressive, inoperable. Two months later, at the end of an absolutely wonderful day together, Kat had had her euthanized, to spare her the last stages of transitional cell carcinoma. And she was still … convalescing.

Maybe that’s why she hadn’t really noticed the car until it had pulled up beside her.