it feels more than a little insulting to me and a deliberate misunderstanding of what it means to be trans. When Shannon, decades later, learns that I am trans, she will also say something like He always wanted to be me!
I admired Shannon’s brilliance as an actor, her sense of humor, her fierceness of character, and it’s true that among the women I knew when I was young, she did provide a feminist model for how a woman could be in the world. There weren’t a lot of women like that, at least not in Devon, Pennsylvania.
But I didn’t want to be her, either. I’ll hear this refrain again and again, after I come out and finally step into the world. The heartless and the cruel and the just plain stupid will declare, Well, he just wanted to be like his sister, or his girlfriend, or little Natalie Wood, and while I’m always delighted by the felicity of people’s invention, the fact that such theories are colorful and clever should not overly distract us from the fact that they are, as it turns out, laughably untrue.
This is a good point to mention all this as well because in the story that lies just ahead I will find the first opportunity to leave the world of men in which I have dwelled. I was only nineteen or twenty, and to be honest, the boy who spent his days feeding Hamburger Helper to his Venus flytraps is not all that well buried within me, no matter how many letters I received from London Donnas declaring their love in French or how many evenings end with College Donnas imploring me to wait just long enough for them to get their birth control devices.
When I was young, I was haunted by the person I imagined I could never be. Now that I am old, what shocks me is not that, against all odds, I became that person. What shocks me now is that all the boys and men I once was still live within my heart, along with every last dog that ever helped them on their way.
* * *
The vet was out in Berwyn, which back then was a working-class town with a toilet seat store, a blacksmith, and a Mexican joint called Tippy’s Tacos, where Jim Wilson and I had once engaged in a hot-sauce-eating contest that had not ended well. It was also the home of Conestoga High, where I’d have gone to school if my parents hadn’t sent me to Haverford instead. The vet was close by a set of railroad tracks, where a year or two earlier a boy my age had been electrocuted on a signal bridge. I thought about him sometimes, wondered if he’d done it on purpose, wondered if that had solved anything, or if, like Anna Karenina, at the last second he’d thought, No, wait, I’ve made a terrible mistake.
“Come on, Matt,” I said, pulling into the parking lot. The electric wires suspended above the Paoli Local tracks hummed in the early winter air. I put the dog on a leash, which he immediately began straining against. He yanked and bounced and jumped. “Just relax,” I said to him, although given the mystery of the nuclear option I had come to explore, I can’t say I’d have done much relaxing myself, were I the dog, which I was not.
We entered the vet’s, checked in with the receptionist, who invited us to take a seat. It was just me and Matt in the waiting room, plus a guy who had what I presumed was a bird in a cage underneath a cloth. The cage was on the bench next to him. There were chirping sounds. Matt the Mutt bounced and yanked, like a jumping bean.
“He’s a cute dog,” the bird-man said.
I looked at Matt, the white fluff ball with the black spots on either side of his head. I had long since forgotten how adorable he was. “Yeah,” I said. “He’s pretty excitable, though.”
The man nodded. “You have him fixed?” he asked.
I said yes. “He’s still all wound up, though.” Matt was desperately trying to get to the man’s leg.
“I had a dog like that once,” the man said. “Now I got a bird.”
I looked at the cage, hidden by the sheet. “Is your bird sick?”
“Well,” he said. “His droppings is all bloody.”
“That’s a shame,” I said.
“Tell me about it.”
The vet came out, and Matt and I were ushered in to a private examination chamber. “Ah,