I MISSED TWO calls last night. Nobody ever calls me apart from my parents and my Bubbie, so I never bother to answer my phone. I almost choked on my beer when I finally listened to the voicemail and it was from her. The blonde bombshell I happened to be Googling when I silenced her calls.
I’m not quite sure what to make of her wanting to discuss my students, so I decide to just ignore her call. We’re dissecting frogs this week in my seventh grade science class. I have a lot to prepare and I don’t have time to listen to someone else tell me about their incorrect assumptions about my students.
I wipe off my glasses, straighten my tie, and stride into my classroom, ready to face a room full of young teens who smell worse than the formaldehyde in the bins of frogs I stacked under the back window. “Morning, scholars,” I say to my first period class.
They stagger in slowly from breakfast in the cafeteria, teasing each other, talking about football. I pull out my notes for first period and start arranging everything on my desk until a cracking voice interrupts me. “Yo, Mr. T.”
I look up. “What’s up, Dante?”
“What’s the deal with the new art teacher?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, like, how do I say his name?”
“Ah.” I reach in my drawer for a dry erase marker and write Mx. Tran on the board. “Remember, their pronouns are they and them.”
The bell rings and everyone takes a seat, silently waiting for me to elaborate. “And the M-x honorific is pronounced MIX.”
Dante taps on his desk a few times. “Okay, but, like, isn’t that weird?”
“Well, would it feel weird if I called you ‘miss’?”
He laughs but then looks around. “Well, yeah. Cuz I’m not a girl.”
“Right. Well Mx. Tran is non-binary. They are not a girl, either. Or a boy.”
Jayden seems to ponder this a bit and raises his hand. “Doesn’t someone have to pick, though?”
This is actually fitting in with my lesson plan about the reproductive organs in the frogs we’re about to dissect, so I brighten up. “Glad you asked, Jayden. Let’s make a list of all the things that make a girl and a boy.” I draw two columns on the board and turn back to the class.
“Okay, who’s got something for our list?”
“Boys have short hair,” says Maya, a red-head with a long braid tossed over one shoulder. Another girl with a buzzed undercut turns around and says, “Yeah, but so do girls.” She turns to face me. “Girls wear skirts.”
Someone brings up the kilts on Outlander. The kids debate breasts and beards. We go back and forth this way for awhile, not settling on a single trait that seems to fit just one of the columns. Dante seems more confused than ever. “Mr. T, isn’t this science class? What does all this have to do with biology?”
I grin and erase the columns from the board, writing “gonads” instead. I tell them to pull out their textbooks. We talk through the diagram of the frog reproductive systems, and I tell them how tadpoles sometimes switch sex before metamorphosing into frogs.
“Any given amphibian could be genetically male based on chromosomes, but have female gonads,” I tell them. “Who can remember what we talked about with chromosomes?”
We talk through the different chromosome arrangements for a bit and I’m just about to pivot back to the frog diagram when Jayden interrupts me again. “Yo, Mr. T. There’s someone at the door.”
I look over my shoulder to find her standing there. Samantha Vine, leaning against my doorway with her arms folded, wearing the hell out of a pair of checked pants and a bright red top.