As the drama of the tragedy of the Golden house moves into its later acts, I return my attention—now! But I was derelict in my duty then!—to the increasingly painful life of Dionysus Golden. It was hard to be in any kind of regular contact with [him]. (I still used the male pronouns when I thought about [him], though that increasingly felt wrong, and so as a gesture toward [his] ambiguity I put them in square brackets. In the absence of clear guidance from [him]—“I don’t yet know what my pronouns are,” [he] told me with a kind of embarrassment—this was my interim solution.) The world around D, the world in which D felt any kind of a sense of safety, had diminished to two and a half places: the Two Bridges Girls Club on Market Street near three playgrounds in the angle of the Manhattan Bridge and the FDR, where [he] volunteered four days a week, and the Chinatown apartment where [he] lived with Riya Z. Sometimes they went to the nightspot on Orchard Street where fire-haired Ivy Manuel sang—this was the half place in [his] comfort zone—but then there was the question of how to dress, and who might approach, saying what, and D’s growing and crippling shyness. At 2-Bridge the problem of attire was solved by the club’s unisex staff uniform, a white collared shirt worn over and outside loose black Chinese pants, and black sneakers on the feet, but everywhere else D was at a loss to know how to present [himself]. After [his] adventure in Vasilisa’s clothes closet [he] had admitted to [himself] [his] pleasure in women’s clothing and had found the courage to tell Riya what had occurred and Ivy also and they had talked about it. “Good,” Riya said. “It’s a first step. Think of this as the beginning of the next three years or so. Think of transition as slow magic. Your private one thousand and one nights, in which you stop being the frog you don’t want to be and you become, maybe, the princess.” And Ivy added, “But you don’t have to go further than you want to. Maybe you’re just a frog who wants to look pretty in pink.”

[He] was getting professional help but it didn’t really help. [He] kept wanting to argue with the Professional. [He] refused to tell me who the Professional was; instead, [he] used me to vent the frustrations [he] kept to [himself] around Riya, whose thing was identity, who had dedicated herself to the idea of the transmorphic fluidity of the self, and who sometimes seemed just a little too eager for D’s MTF transition to occur, and to be a complete metamorphosis. I should have been able to help [him]. Maybe I could have prevented what happened. Maybe we all could. Or maybe D Golden was just unsuitable for life on earth.

I imagine the following conversation taking place in a bare, black-and-white, cell-like room, with the speaker sitting expressionless on an upright metal chair, and [his] interrogator, the Professional, as a highly sophisticated android, a sort of combination of Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina and the supercomputer Alpha Soixante in Godard’s Alphaville. We do not hear either of the figures in the room speaking. There is no sync sound. We hear only the Monologue; although, as the Monologue quotes direct speech, the lip movements of the figures in the room sometimes—not always—match what is being narrated. There is something about the scene that is like an encounter between a prisoner and [his] attorney on visiting day in jail. It would not be surprising if the speaker were wearing an orange jumpsuit (if the scene were in color), or shackles on [his] wrists and ankles. There is also something about the scene which, if properly filmed, might be funny.

MONOLOGUE OF D GOLDEN REGARDING [HIS] OWN SEXUALITY & ITS EXAMINATION BY THE PROFESSIONAL

Chapter One. She asks me, right at the beginning, the Professional, comes right out with it, first question, when you were a child, did you prefer the color pink or the color blue?

I am frankly amazed by the inquiry. Is this a question to be asked at this date in the history of the world, I say: blue or pink?

Indulge me, she says, humor me, as if she’s the patient and I’m the shrink.

I reply, because I’m in that kind of obstinate mood now, Diana Vreeland, editor of Vogue, once said that pink is the navy blue of India, so I guess pink and blue in India are the same thing.

Why do you find this question so irritating, she asks, it’s just a choice between two colors. I might also ask, did you prefer train sets or dolls. Would you rather answer that question instead.

I should say now in parenthesis that I have never been a Marxist but her line of attack provoked in me strong anticapitalist sentiments. I thought, I replied, that we had moved beyond the materialist categories imposed by the market, pink for a girl, blue for a boy, trains and guns for boys, dolls and frocks for girls. Why are you trying to push me back into this antique, exploded discourse?

You are responding with considerable hostility, she said. Have I touched on something that triggers this display of emotion?

Okay, I said, the truth is that my favorite color was yellow and remains yellow. For a time I tried to swear in yellow like Stephen Dedalus’s friend, damn your yellow stick, but I couldn’t hang on to the habit.

Good, she said, this is progress, yellow on the spectrum is halfway between the blue and the pink. I thought that was very stupid, Neanderthal stupid, Cro-Magnon stupid, but I swallowed that back and didn’t say it. Maybe this isn’t for me, I thought.

As to the other question, I told her, I never had a train set. My brothers had one and I watched them play, though they were too old for toys. Also Scalextric cars, it was embarrassing, I mean, grow up. I was the much younger half brother, you see. Me, I had a pair of sandalwood animals to put in the bath because water released their perfume. A sandalwood elephant and a camel. I made up adventures for my sandalwood friends and each night there was a different bath-time story. What the elephant hid in his trunk, why the camel hated the desert, and so on. Maybe I should have written them down. I don’t remember most of them now. So, in answer to your questions, I suppose, if the choice is dolls or trains, well then, sandalwood animal dolls. I never dressed them up, however. I only told them stories and got them wet.

So we went on, she pushing, I pushing back. At a certain point I told her the story of my stepmother and the keys to the house. I admit it: the worst thing I ever did. I told the Professional so. I told her my regret. She wasn’t interested in regret, she went down the same road Riya was on when we had our fight and I got out of the car. Hatred was not enough to explain why I did that, she said. In the end we got to it. Suppose I suggest, she said, that you wanted to be the lady of the house. Suppose that I suggest that that was at the bottom of it. What’s your immediate reaction to that. So my immediate reaction was, boom!, I’m out of here, this isn’t going to work, and when I’m almost at the door she asks, quietly, what are you going to do instead, and I stop, my outstretched hand falls away from the doorknob, and I come back and sit down and I say, I guess maybe you’re right. So what does that make me. Who am I.

That is what we’re here to find out, the Professional said.

Chapter Two. I ask some more about the toys and colors. Once upon a time, I say, if a boy liked pink and dolls his parents would be afraid he was homosexual and try to interest him in boy stuff. I’m saying they might have doubts about his orientation but it wouldn’t occur to them to question his gender. Now it seems you go to the other extreme. Instead of saying the kid’s a pansy you start trying to persuade him he’s a girl.

Okay, she said, then are you gay? Are you physically attracted to other guys? No, I said. This is maybe the only thing I know I am not. Good, she said. So let us stop trying to untangle the motivations of imaginary parents and focus on the task in hand, which is you. If you are not a male homosexual are you a female homosexual?

What, I said.

Are you a lesbian, the Professional asked.

I’m not yet in transition and I am living with a heterosexual woman, I said.

In the first place we are not discussing your lover’s sexuality which may also be complex and which you may be simplifying to make it serve you better, but this is not the subject. And in the second place the question does not have to do with what you are doing but with who you are. It’s the difference between saying, I work as a pizza chef, and I’m a person who loves good food.

You’re weird, I told the Professional.

I am not the subject, the Professional said.

How can I be a lesbian, I protested, it’s physically impossible.

Why.

For obvious reasons.

So, two questions. The first question: have you ever felt attracted to a lesbian woman? To a woman who prefers to make love with other women?

There have been occasions, I said. One or two. I did not pursue them.

Why.

For obvious reasons. They would not have wished to sleep with me.

Why.

Oh come on.

Very well. Second question. What is a woman?

This is a mystifying question that suddenly makes me feel extremely foreign. I cannot imagine it being asked in most of the countries of the world. Is this something Americans have become confused about? Are you going to ask me about toilet facilities? Are you going to recall the banning of The Vagina Monologues at Mount Holyoke College?

Is this something you are confused about.

I know what a woman is. I just don’t know if I am one. Or if I want to be one. Or if I have the courage to become one. I am very much afraid I do not have the courage. In general, I am very much afraid.

Of what are you afraid.

The nakedness of the change. Its drama, the extremeness of the alteration, its appalling visibility. The gaze of others. The judgment of others. The injections. The surgery. The surgery above all else. This is natural, correct?

I don’t know the meaning of that word, natural. It is a word that has been misused for so long that it is better not to use it. Another such word is the word sex.

I live with someone who would agree with you.

Allow me to propose a sentence to you. “There is no such thing as a woman’s body.”

By which you obviously do not mean to say that there is no such thing as a woman’s body. Because there are women, that can’t be denied, and there are bodies, this is also objectively true, and the one is contained within the other. Ergo…

You have grasped my point, even as you argued with it. We exist and so do our bodies and we inhabit our bodies but we are neither defined by them nor confined by them.

And so we arrive at the mind-body problem. You propose that we should reject the idea that there exists one unifying reality, substance or essence, and so the separation of mind and body is impossible. This is monism and you don’t like it? You prefer Descartes and his duality. But is woman, then, or even female, a category of the mind alone? Is there no physicality to it? And is this noncorporeal gender, this disembodied nonphysical thing, incapable of change, even though by reason of being nonphysical it ought to be as mutable as smoke, as the breeze? Or are we in religious, or perhaps Aristotelian, territory, and gender, like mind, is a quality of the soul? I have been doing my reading. But this is hard for me to grasp.

I will put it simply. To be born with female genitalia and reproductive organs does not make you a woman. To be born with male genitalia does not make you a man. Unless you so choose. This is the proposition to which I am asking you to respond. That there is nothing definingly female about a vagina. Nor are you excluded from the female if you possess a male member. A trans woman with a penis is still a woman. Can you agree with this or not?

You mean I might not need to have the surgery.

The castration.

Even the word hurts.

Not unless that is what you choose.

So we’re back at this choosing.

I could propose you call it freedom. I could say, this is your right.

I know something about choosing. I am from a family that chose to transform itself. I chose the name by which you call me. I chose to leave the world that made me to come to a world in which maybe I could make myself. I’m in favor of choosing. I have already been transformed once by this choice I made. But.

But.

If I say I’m a woman but I keep my male organ and then I’m among lesbian women and I want to have sex but they don’t want to have sex with a person with a male organ then how am I a woman if my choosing to be a woman is not acceptable to women.

If a person reacts to you in that way then that person would be a TERF.

TERF.

Trans exclusionary radical feminist.

And that’s a bad thing to be.

In the conversation we are having, that is a bad thing to be, yes.

So you take these women with vaginas who won’t have sex with women who have penises and you call them by a bad name and say they are bad people and how does that help me.

It helps you stand by your choice.

Because I am right and they are wrong.

There is a women’s private festival in Michigan and it’s forty years old, a place for women to come together and make music and cook and talk and simply be together, and these are some of the women who made the women’s movement, cis women, older women, mostly, revolutionaries in their own time. But they will not allow trans women with male organs to be a part of the event and so there is a dispute that is on the edge of being a physical fight. Trans activists camp outside the festival with weapons, and they plan protests and disruptions and sometimes carry them out, graffiti, cut water lines, slashed tires, and flyers of their penises. I am proposing that in this dispute the women with vaginas are wrong because they cannot adapt to a different time in which a woman with a vagina is just one kind of woman and other kinds of women are as much women as they are. If you choose to be an American and become a citizen you don’t have to give up everything about who you were before. You yourself became an American but when you are challenged you say that you feel foreign so you have kept your foreign part in some way intact. If you choose to be a woman the same liberty exists. And if somebody tries to exclude you from your gender choice it is your right to protest.

But what if I can’t see that these choices are choices. What if I learned from the male gay community that homosexuality was inborn, that it was a human way to be, it couldn’t be chosen or unchosen, and what if I hated the reactionary idea that you could reeducate a gay person to make a different choice and give up his gayness. What if I can’t see how these choices you are proposing, these multiple-possibility gender nuances, are not part of that same reactionary ideology, because what is chosen can be unchosen, and it’s a lady’s right to change her mind. What if I propose that my identity is just difficult, and painful, and confusing, and I don’t know how to choose or what to choose or even if choosing is what has to happen, what if I just need to stagger blindly toward finding out what I am and not who I choose to be. What if I believe there is an I am and I need to find that. What if this is about discovery not choice, about finding out who I’ve always been, not about picking a flavor from the gender ice-cream display. What if I think that if a woman’s I am means she can’t have sex with a woman with a male organ then that needs to be respected. What if I worry that there could be a civil war on this side of the gender divide and what if I think that’s the wrong war. What if we are all separate kinds of women and not all the same, and if separations, including sexual separations, are okay and not bigoted or bad. What if we’re a federation of different states of being and we need to respect those states’ rights as well as the union. I’m losing my mind trying to work all this out and I don’t even know the words, I’m using the words I know but they feel like the wrong words all the time, what if I’m trying to live in a dangerous country whose language I haven’t learned. What then.

Then I would say, we have work to do to break the cotton ceiling in your head.

Which is.

Underwear is made of cotton. The contents of a trans woman’s underwear act as an axis to oppress and marginalise her. Quote unquote.

Somebody told my girlfriend a joke about becoming a transbillionaire. I identify as a billionaire and so now I’m rich, she said. How would you respond to that?

That isn’t funny.

[He] reached the threshold but [he] never entered the room. Trapped between the fear and the language, [he] found [himself] unable to move, but [he] couldn’t stay where [he] was, either. The warning signs were plain enough. Riya got a call from the 2-Bridge girls’ club telling her, not unkindly, that they had had to ask [him] to stop coming in, because [he] had begun to importune the girls with intensely personal questions and they were no longer comfortable with having [him] around. The atmosphere at 2-Bridge was at once relaxed and committed, the girls felt at ease and worked hard in social justice or environmental education programs, or learning digital and audio arts, or doing introductory STEM courses, or helping to run the building’s astonishing planetarium (a gift from a wealthy benefactor), or studying dance or nutrition. I visited [him] there in the early days of [his] volunteer work, before the downward spiral began, and [he] seemed happy around their happiness, and their relaxed attitude to gender diversity seemed to help [him]. Gay or straight, cis or trans, asterisk or no asterisk, genderqueer or agender, none of this was a problem. At first this was encouraging, even exciting, but as [he] confronted [his] own roadblocks to transition, [his] physical and social fears and [his] difficulty with the new language, it didn’t help [him] to think that [he] might be suffering from generational problems, by which the generation following [him] was untroubled. I thought of the early Neanderthals in Golding’s The Inheritors looking with anger and uncomprehending envy upon the new, more sophisticated, fire-owning human race, Homo sapiens, when it showed up for the first time and doomed them, the forerunners, to extinction. So [he] began to see [himself] as a primitive entity, and the girls at 2-Bridge as the new people who were better than [he] was but who were also [his] replacements, able to go where [he] could not, able to enter the promised land which was barred to [him] by the limitations of [his] perceptions. So [he] began to harry them, to corner them in the canteen or at the doors of their classrooms or at play on the nearby softball field or hockey rink, to ask for answers they did not have and advice they did not know how to give, and, becoming aggressive, to upset them. [His] dismissal was inevitable. [He] accepted it without demur.

We took our eyes off [him]. No question of that. We should have seen [his] growing fragility and maybe we did but we all chose to look elsewhere. After Apu’s murder Nero Golden withdrew from all society into a darkness whose apparent cause was obvious but whose more occult meaning would only later become clear. He kept the urn containing his son’s ashes on his desk and, it was said, talked to him continually, every day. The two dragon ladies had access to him, and he made time for Petya, always made time for his most obviously troubled child, was constantly forgiving and supportive as Petya slowly made his way back from arson to his better self; but for his rudderless and crashing no-longer-youngest son he had next to nothing. What he did have was young Vespasian and a wife who found many ways of insisting on the infant’s special claims on his father’s affections. Little Vespa, they called him, as if he were a motor scooter they could both ride back to happiness. In little Vespa’s company Nero’s face was sometimes softened by a smile. Vasilisa treated her husband with the same motherly care she lavished on her young pride and joy, in part, I’m sure, because she saw and wanted to lessen his grief, but also, I have no doubt, for selfish reasons. Of all of us she was the one who saw most clearly the dwindling of this bullish and ferocious man. She saw the advance of his forgetfulness, the loosening of his grip on the chariot reins, and understood that in time he would be her baby too, and all this she was willing to accept because the prize at the end of her project was very great. (My thoughts regarding Vasilisa had soured considerably since the birth of my son and the wall she subsequently erected between the boy and me.) Vasilisa’s mother was in the house too but Nero had taken against her and Vasilisa kept her headscarfed babushka away, essentially using her as little Vespa’s nurse. In their relationship, it was clear, the mother had no power. She did as she was told. And she too was biding her time. She too knew the nature of the game that was being played. She stayed in the background and sang Russian songs to the boy and told him Russian stories, including perhaps the story of Baba Yaga, the witch, so that he could grow up knowing the score. If she had been able to read children’s books in the English language she might have said that Vespasian was the golden snitch.