I’ve heard parents say all they want is “the best” for their children, but the best is subjective and anchored by how they know and learned the world.
—Janet Mock, Redefining Realness
The first openly trans adult I ever met was Tony Ferraiolo, a genial trans man in his late forties who co-ran, and still runs, a youth support group for gender-variant teens in the New Haven area. I attended this group on and off my senior year of high school. We all just called it “Group.”
Originally, Tony told me, Group started with him and two members but grew within a year to encompass dozens of participants of all identities and backgrounds. He even started a group for parents and an art-based one for younger kids.
When I found out about Group and told my mom I wanted to go, she was highly conflicted, but eventually agreed to drive me to the next Saturday meeting. The first time we made the forty-five-minute commute, we got terribly lost and both ended up red-faced and stressed out of our minds. It reminded me of a game I played when I was younger, where I would leave the radio on an annoying station and see how long before my mom couldn’t take it anymore. It was always a big joke to me, because eventually she would cave and turn the dial.
But on the way to Group, I was terrified she would just say “fuck it” and turn the car around. And it wasn’t because of some static-infused banjo riff on FM. We were sitting with my gender trouble, seeing how long we could both last before something had to give.
“I don’t know if I’m the best parent in the world or the worst,” she sighed as we parked across the street from the meeting location.
I didn’t think she was either; I just wanted to get the heck out of the car.
Down the block I saw Tony outside the meeting address, stocky, bearded, and tattooed, emanating this energetic warmth. I remember thinking, to quote Liz Lemon, “I want to go to there.”
I only attended Group for a couple of months, but knew the formula well. We went around and introduced ourselves with our name and pronouns, maybe a line about what we liked or where we were from. We shared highs and lows from our week, got words of encouragement from other members and the adult facilitators. Sometimes people cried, really cried, but the mood wasn’t always low. Group members mingled afterwards with a kind of ease that you can’t cultivate anywhere but a safe space.
My mom worried that attending Group would give me ideas and push me headlong into radical decisions. I understood her worry as having two distinct parts:
1. The fear that I was delusional and that Tony and the kids would irresponsibly validate and encourage this delusion to permanent ends.
2. The bigger, more abstract fear that I needed something she couldn’t give and that I would seek it out wherever I could find it, whether she was included or not.
I have to admit: she was right about that second one.
I came out at seventeen. Tony came out later in life, in his early forties, and I always wondered if listening to a bunch of young adults talk about their gender dysphoria was frustrating for him. He never showed anything but patience and care with us. The frustration was my own projection, I think, as I personally always wished I had come out sooner and avoided the hell on earth of my first puberty. I held a kind of oscillating envy towards kids in the group who were younger and more “ahead” than me, or whose parents had pledged acceptance and advocacy off the bat. The over-comparative tendencies of those years was (and maybe still is?) pretty normal but ultimately unproductive.
Rather than urging me down new, corrupting paths, Group gave me company on the path I was on. I met other kids who shared aspects of my identity, who needed the same things I did. Even better, I met trans kids whose identities were entirely different than mine and who needed completely different things for themselves. In a journey that began at Group, and continues still, I learned that “trans” didn’t mean the same thing to everyone.
At the time, as much as I loved the queer space, I didn’t want to be queer. I wanted to be the Most Regular Boy in the World. If these kids wanted to live queer, I thought, more power to them. But I would be better; I would blend and blend until I had nothing in common with them anymore. I was filled with anger and frustration directed at my body and its refusal to command the male social validation I needed. I may have identified as trans, but I was far from understanding that identity in context. I was a hypocrite, steeped in toxic stereotypical ideas about gender, and my discomfort with queerness stemmed from this combination of pain and lack of education. You can’t value a space outside yourself and devalue that same space within yourself.
The summer of 2011, I left the circle of Group, my immediate family, and all their disconnections for my college (and gender) future in Boston. Throughout the next four years, I incurred many costs—financial, emotional, and physical. Sometimes I wondered if I could pay them all, and if it was even worth it. I’m still paying, and it’s still worth it.
Puzzling my way through medical institutions and private practices, reaching out blindly to LGBTQ orgs, untangling the red tape, and making it all work, I acutely noticed the absence of my mom. Yet I was never alone, and during my transition I built some of the strongest friendships of my life. These friendships, including those at Group, often became their own sources of conflict. My mother felt cast aside and disrespected when other families provided the support and encouragement she could not.
Writing this book and looking back on the milestones of my transition, I’m not judging my words and actions but instead interrogating their meanings. My favorite professor, Tulasi Srinivas, uses the word “parse” to this effect: to examine or analyze minutely. It is this analysis, constantly evolving, inherently self-absorbed and self-bettering, that has led me to a contextual understanding of my own identity and of the barriers my mother and I faced as I claimed it.
To get pumped up before my first endocrinology appointment, I gave myself a haircut.
I had been long possessed by the notion that if I could just get my hair short enough, that if my short hair looked just right, people would understand that I was a boy, and all the confusion would be over. This never happened, and my shoddy, uneven haircuts made me even more self-conscious, projecting the barely-getting-out-of-bed aesthetic only severe depression can cultivate.
My hair has always been something of a miniature battleground between my mother and me. As a child, I expressed the desire to cut it more than once, and my dad, Andrew, who raised me in my biological father’s absence, would shrug why not, but my mom always fought me. The resulting compromise was a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory trim, hanging just beneath my ears. It gifted eight-year-old me with an androgynous surfer vibe and contributed to an (admittedly) outstanding second-grade class photo of me in a Hawaiian shirt.
I ended up covering my homespun buzz cut with a brandless, baby-blue snapback in keeping with my “it’s a boy!” look for the trip, along with baby-blue checked shirt, baby-blue sweater. I don’t even look good in the color.
In preparation for the endocrinology appointment, I had saved up my class skips. I left early the day before, catching a bus to New Haven, where my friend Skylar’s family picked me up. The plan was to stay the night with them and make the short drive to the doctor in the morning before catching a bus back to Boston.
I met Skylar Spear on my first day at Group, and he became one of my closest friends. When we met, he was a handsome fifteen-year-old with great socks and a prodigious LGBTQ advocacy record. Neither of us had started hormones, although we both wanted to. Over the next several years, he became my best friend, my benchmark, and my sibling.
During the Group stage of our friendship, I struggled with comparisons. I admired Skylar greatly and wanted to be more like him. He “passed” better than me, and his family was bigger than mine and supportive of his gender. He seemed to have a grip on himself when I was still in a place of shame and confusion. He readily accepted the word “queer” as an identifier and was unapologetic about his queerness. And he was three years younger.
Sometimes I had trouble being friends with Skylar and would retreat because I was jealous or sad or too darn concerned with my own problems to recognize that he had his own. Despite my various shortcomings, he treated me with unconditional support and respect, and his family welcomed me at their table.
Being trans, I’ve always, sometimes stubbornly, oriented myself as “behind” in a way. I’ve had to work extra hard to achieve the things other boys were guaranteed at birth, whether it was body parts, chemistry, a name, or the right to wear baby blue. In college I got pissed when my guy friends, with minimal effort, had the slim, tapered torso I wanted, while I stayed late at the gym. Sometimes I got so caught up in this Me vs. Him vortex that I couldn’t celebrate any of my accomplishments. I held my own body and masculinity to a ridiculous standard that I didn’t hold anyone else to. I never let myself rest or feel proud, and I burned out because of it.
We’re obsessed with the physicality of trans bodies, but so much of the long-haul gender-identity work is mental and emotional.
At the time of my endocrinology appointment, my mother and I weren’t doing great. I had begun my freshman year at Emerson College in the Visual Media Arts program, where I was pursuing a BA in screenwriting. I lived in the largest dorm on campus, ironically called the Little Building.
“I know what you’re thinking, but it’s named after a man and not its size,” I would later recite on campus tours.
In the LB, I occupied a single room on the seventh floor, which was weird. Most freshmen live in doubles, triples, or suites. But since my gender hadn’t been legally changed, the college told me they couldn’t allow me to room with boys; freshman rooming was same-gender only. It was girls or a single. I love girls, but after four years in high school women’s dormitories, I picked the single.
Even at a “progressive” and LGBTQ-friendly college like Emerson, these restrictive policies exist. They lurk in the back files of higher administration until some queer kid trips the wire.
My mom moved me in, and we corresponded during my first few weeks at Emerson. In November, my birthday month, I called to tell her I was starting testosterone. I had scheduled an appointment with a well-known doctor in the New Haven area, recommended to me by some people from Group.
I don’t think she was surprised. We had discussed early on her opinion that I should “wait” until graduating college before making any alterations to my body. Four years without progress on my terms meant four years wasted. Four unhappy years. I couldn’t handle it.
My mom emotionally reiterated her opinion regarding physical changes, this time with a new action stage: She didn’t feel comfortable having me in her home if I was starting hormones. She couldn’t handle it. But, as she pointed out, I was legally eighteen.
“You can do what you want,” she said sadly, a statement rather than the endorsement I wanted.
The call marked the beginning of a six-month period of estrangement. We didn’t talk to or see each other. I didn’t go home for my birthday and spent Christmas and New Year’s at a friend’s house. The Spearses and my endocrinologist were only forty minutes from my mom’s, but I didn’t consider reaching out to her when my bus arrived in New Haven.
Time and again, during our mending years, I felt the burden of tearing open the wound by bringing my medical experiences into the room. Things are good: “Mom, I’m getting top surgery.” Things are good: “Mom, I’m having a hysterectomy.”
Family members encouraged me to stay strong regarding my relationship with my mom, and I know they said the same to her. My grandmother and aunt were instrumental in helping maintain the delicate balance, emphatically supporting us both as we tried to work it out. But I never got the feeling my family wanted to hear about the ins and outs of my trans life; rather, I got the explicit sense that they didn’t.
It seemed natural then that I would gravitate towards Skylar and his family. Theirs was a living room where queer stuff was just a part of the conversation, not a conversation stopper. I could express myself and inhabit my cherished normality at the same time.
The Spears are a rare, dynamite combination of rural and urbane. They live in a pastoral town outside New Haven, where they have a vegetable garden and a massive dog named Ajax. In another life, I can see our two families sharing hikes, dinners, and movie nights. Skylar’s mom participates in local politics and runs an agricultural high school. His sister studies zoology, and his stepfather helps companies responsibly manage their toxic waste. Everything in their house is organic or vegan-friendly. They’re like human trees, soaking up bad vibes and putting out good ones.
The morning of my endocrinology appointment, they scrambled to iron out logistics. Skylar had school, and his mom, Melissa, and step-dad, Roger, were taking their own cars to work.
“Why don’t you take the van?” Melissa suggested, offering up the only other vehicle they had.
“Sure,” I said, trying to sound chill.
The van was an empty white Ford, some years old, sitting up off the path of their driveway. I had never driven a van before, only my AAA driving school’s long-suffering Mitsubishi Lancer and my mom’s Volvo station wagon.
Like most manual cars, the Spears’ Ford had idiot-proof gear options. I just so happened to be immune and chose “L,” eventually correcting my mistake a few strained miles down the road. I had a car phase in my masculinity spiral, but I think I missed the practical points.
The drive was mercifully short. I found my doctor’s address, parked, and waited. I was almost an hour early. Skylar texted me good luck.
Dr. H. is like the human embodiment of a cheerful wink. I trusted him immediately, though the stuffy atmosphere of his waiting room didn’t forecast his winning character. Small TVs showed close-captioned talk shows and last year’s People magazines were spread out on tables. Everyone there, except for another trans person my age, looked over sixty and struggling. The woman at reception exhibited saintly patience as I fished out ID cards from my overstuffed backpack.
Dr. H. sat with me for an hour, explaining how testosterone worked, why I was starting at the dose he was prescribing, and when my blood would be tested. He drew a little picture of a line graph, a floating hill representing the effects of T in my system over the two-week shot intervals.
“The goal,” he explained, “is that your waves aren’t too up and down. We want the shots to keep the level of T in your body as consistent as possible.”
Health-care professionals like Dr. H., who are welcoming, communicative, and trans-positive, are in high demand and short supply.
Diabetes is the most common endocrine disorder, followed by thyroid diseases like goiter and Hashimoto’s. Hormone replacement treatment, as developed for non-trans people, started in the 1930s to aid menopausal women and men with hypergonadism. Around this time, trans medicine was just getting on its feet.
One of the most famous endocrinologists in this new field was Harry Benjamin (1885–1986), a German-born doctor and colleague of Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), the renowned sexologist whose Berlin-based Institute for Sexual Science pioneered the study and understanding of gender and sexual diversity. Nazis burned the institute’s library in 1933, which led Hirschfield to flee for France, where he would remain until his death, two years later. Benjamin set up practice in San Francisco, where he soon became known as “the leading medical authority on transsexuality,” collaborating with other progressives such as Alfred Kinsey.
However, while Benjamin advanced the medical interest and understanding of trans health needs, he also contributed to a set of treatment guidelines that placed psychiatrists and doctors in total control of who was allowed medical treatment.
Trans people who were “chosen” for surgical and hormonal treatments had to check off a ridiculous list of prerequisites to please their cis gatekeepers. Ambitious physicians and researchers thus exploited a desperate population; those willing to submit to observation and invasive research in order to get medical care.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) sets the medical-industry standard for diagnosis and treatment “for every psychiatric disorder recognized by the U.S. healthcare system.” Until 2012, “gender identity disorder” (GID) was the diagnosis for trans people. When I was approved for my top surgery, my insurance validated me as a “true transsexual,” a phrase that goes all the way back to Benjamin’s 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon. The DSM has since replaced GID with “gender dysphoria,” attempting to acknowledge the emotional distress of gender dissonance and not infer mental illness.
In May 2016 Lambda Legal released an updated (and free) publication called Creating Equal Access to Quality Health Care for Transgender Patients, intending to aid physicians and medical centers in effectively and respectfully treating trans patients. The updated release followed on the heels of the Obama administration confirming discrimination protections for LGBTQ people in medical environments under the Affordable Care Act.
The safety of trans people in health care and the controlling way health-care systems treat trans people are coming under scrutiny and are on the slow road to reform. But a diagnosis is absolutely still needed to attain treatment promptly and legally. I’ve had four therapists, two psychiatrists, three general physicians, three endocrinologists, and two surgeons, and they were always sending each other letters about me.
Today, hormone replacement is becoming a more culturally recognized option in trans-related health care; however, in part due to the recentness of its acceptability, we still don’t know a lot about its long-term effects. We do know, through the use of hormone therapy in cis men and women, as treatment for menopause, prostate cancer, or chronic “low” hormone levels, that there can be significant risks, including an increased likelihood for cancer and cardiac problems.
Like the word “trans,” hormone treatment is different for everyone and should ideally be tailored to an individual. Not everyone needs it or wants it, and there is a broad range of starting doses. Hormones can be administered by shot, taken orally as a tablet, rubbed on in the form of a gel, and even time-released subdermally via surgically inserted “pellets.”
People are often surprised to learn that I will take hormones for the rest of my life. For me, right now, that means a shot a week. Since I’ve had a hysterectomy, without testosterone, my body would produce no dominant hormone on its own, which is not healthy and can lead to osteoporosis (brittle bones). I also really like the chronic effects of being on T. Some changes, like my lower voice, are permanent, but others, like my weight and muscle distribution, only occur if I maintain my levels. For trans people on estrogen (E), these effects are different: hair and skin soften, breast tissue develops, muscle mass decreases, and fat moves to the butt and thighs. The voice, however, is unaffected by E, and many trans women arduously modulate and train their voices to a higher, more stereotypically “feminine” range.
As of 2016, I have been on T for five years, firmly monitored by health-care systems. To get this care covered, I have literally run all over for consultations, taken trains and buses to doctors, switched policies, switched back, won some claims, lost others, and sacrificed around 75 percent of my credit on the blue “medical” slice of my bank’s pie-graph spending report.
Treatment, and the ability to tailor it safely, is a massive issue of access and privilege in the trans community. According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 20 percent of trans respondents reported being uninsured. Among those incarcerated, 17 percent reported being denied hormones outright. And although 62 percent overall had experienced hormone therapy, respondents weren’t asked how they got their hormones. Unable to find or fill prescriptions, many trans folks procure through backdoors, sharing with friends, buying online.
Testosterone instigated a complete sea change across my entire life. I began to feel invested in my body and actually started taking care of it.
For much of my early transition, I believed in a person no one else could see. I couldn’t expect my mother to understand what it feels like to recognize this disconnection in oneself, the disconnection hormone treatment helped me bridge. What I wanted, more than my mom’s understanding, was her trust. By not supporting my health-care decisions, I felt my mom didn’t trust me to know what was best for myself.
Gradually, over time, my newfound confidence and well-being helped her to reactivate this trust. Though she still does not agree with my surgical decisions, she doesn’t deny the significant, positive effect they’ve had on my quality of life.
The judge asked for my Social Security number, which I had stored in a note on my phone to keep from forgetting. I read it to him, glancing at the screen.
“You really shouldn’t keep that on your phone,” the judge chided. “You should have it memorized.”
I remember him saying this so clearly, and to this day it still bothers me so much. I’ve told the interaction to countless people in the hopes that eventually I will crack that mysterious re-memory code, the one that makes dumb tiny things stay with us forever.
Now I’m convinced I remember it because I wanted nothing more in that moment than to say, Shut the fuck up! Fuck youuu!
The summer of my name change, I worked at a day camp in my hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, with two of my roommates from college. The camp, which I attended as a child, paid well and gave me somewhere to be that wasn’t Connecticut. For three months I stayed locally with my dad, Andrew, a native Virginian who champions waterfront conservation and has built shelves especially for his rock collection.
As previously mentioned, my dad is technically my step-dad, as I have never really known my biological father. I met him once at fourteen for Thai food, but it failed to lead to any grand reunion, definitely nothing to make a movie about. My mom didn’t want to marry him, and he didn’t want a child growing up between two homes, so he stepped back and she had the baby (me!) on her own. We never asked him for any child support, never got any, and when my mom started a conversation about him possibly helping with college, he denied paternity. As a lawyer, he knew the procedures and paperwork required for DNA testing would go past my eighteenth birthday, absolving him of any responsibilities.
“That’s pretty douchey,” I said when I heard.
“Yeah,” my mom had replied on the phone, “it is pretty douchey.”
My mother married Andrew when I was five, and they were together on and off for a decade, divorcing when I entered high school. We had some really good years and some bad ones. I never took my parents’ divorce personally or too hard, and I don’t really consider it a defining point of my adolescence. By the time they separated officially, the wheels had been in motion for a while, and I wasn’t stunned. I accept what my mom and Andrew separately contribute to my life and try not to get hung up on some sepia-toned dream of a perfect family (although clearly I struggle sometimes).
Andrew and I correspond long distance, and I see him once or twice a year. We have a good relationship, albeit an incomplete one. He’s never been a live-in parent like my mother, whose last name I have and who was always, rightfully, my sole guardian.
That is to say, when I came out as trans to him, the stakes weren’t as high.
The Alexandria weather was sweltering, sometimes criminally polluted, and I counted my luck to be a computer lab counselor, indoors with air conditioning and access to a ubiquitous amount of cold diet sodas. Somewhat less lucky was the uniform, a jumpsuit orange T-shirt.
If you bind your chest, you come to see single layers as a near impossibility. Beneath my orange staff shirt, I wore an undershirt, two binders, and another undershirt to create the appearance of “nothing.” I frequently slouched, fidgeted, and adjusted when I thought no one was looking. In the heat, I wilted.
My campers tugged at me all summer to swim during the camp’s pool period, and I always brushed them off with some excuse.
“I didn’t bring my bathing suit,” I would say. “I didn’t bring a towel.”
“You said that six weeks ago,” my camper Ryan would counter without fail.
To him, I was just a party pooper.
My torso’s miserable quality of life slowly but surely overshadowed my original summer name-change objective. Imagine this, but with a flat chest, became the recurring thought. Imagine drinking this coffee with a flat chest. Imagine going for that run with a flat chest.
My sizable weekly paycheck gave me the confidence to begin planning. It was groundwork only. I could afford my chosen surgeon’s hundred-dollar consultation fee and the thousand dollars down to secure a date, but beyond that, I was counting on insurance to come through. And all of it would have to wait until I was back in Massachusetts for my fall semester.
Despite knowing this, I would obsess spasmodically about my surgery planning, tallying payment options on Sticky Notes and napkins, and dumbly berating myself for the merest personal expenses. I didn’t need that ice cream; I didn’t need that night at the movies. Then I would always return to earth.
My surgery is not going to happen today, tomorrow, or next week.
Yes, I needed to plan, but I also needed to focus on the task at hand. And I was allowed to make the present livable in the meantime.
A legal name change required a hearing at my local probate court, which otherwise deals mainly with estates and wills. Since I was a Connecticut resident, that meant taking a train up the coast from Virginia and going to the West Hartford town hall.
To obtain a hearing, I needed to fill out PC-901, the official adult “change of name” form, and send it to the probate court along with my birth certificate and passport. And since I didn’t have my birth certificate, I contacted Virginia’s Office of Vital Records to order another. It cost me a few bucks and, temporarily, my driver’s license, which I sent along as identity verification.
My mom kept the original birth certificate at home in my “memory box,” and asking her to mail it so I could be Donald on paper was not a phone call I needed to have in my life.
As much as I hated having to take a seven-hour train ride to court, I lucked out with my standing as a Connecticut resident.
I’ve never really considered the state my home but rather like a way station between lives. I didn’t grow up there and only moved back to go off to boarding school. Upon arriving from Virginia, I didn’t like our drafty colonial house. I never really got to know other kids in town because I spent all my time boarding. These are my spoiled grievances.
In 1992, Connecticut was one of the first states to pass a law explicitly banning discrimination regarding sexual orientation. In 2011, Governor Dannel Malloy signed “An Act Concerning Discrimination,” adding gender identity to the list of protections. I remember attending a local ACLU function in celebration and listening to several trans folks speak about their employment experiences, dishing about what corporations to avoid and who had real insurance benefits.
As these people taught me, passing laws didn’t guarantee a discrimination-free experience, but it did speak to the state’s strong community-based advocacy, and policies worked in tandem with other social-support networks. There are Connecticut chapters of LGBTQ organizations like GLAAD, PFLAG, and GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), as well as information-laden Planned Parenthood chapters and local support groups like the one I attended.
One bonus as a Connecticut resident was the state’s approachable policy on name changes, which its Supreme Court declared were to be “granted liberally.” I imagined an Oprah-like giveaway. Name changes for all. This was optimistic.
The fee to change your name in Connecticut is $225. I gathered together a check, my birth certificate, the completed forms, and my best vibes, sending everything to the probate court. My application was accepted, and I scheduled a hearing a few weeks away, on July 25, got the day off, and booked a train ticket to Hartford. By that point, the process had taken around seven weeks.
As Thomas Page McBee writes in his slow-burning memoir Man Alive, “The tasks felt manageable, if endless.”
On July 25, my friend Helena picked me up early from the train station, all smiles. She and I had met while interning for a local theater my last summer of high school. She was a few years older, a recent performing arts grad, and together with our third intern, Maha, we became best friends. Helena and I look strangely related, preternaturally youthful and alert, like the secret-keeping village children of a Grimms’ fairy tale. She accompanied me to the name-change hearing as my witness and would later drive me to my top-surgery consultation.
Like Skylar, Helena somehow made the chores of transitioning fun. Having hamburgers and milkshakes with her and Maha later at our favorite lunch joint, I realized I wasn’t as “behind” as I thought. In fact, at that moment I was right where I wanted to be.
The courthouse in West Hartford was a generous half mile from my mom’s door. I don’t even think I told her the date, only that I was pursuing a hearing. As Helena and I strolled down Farmington Avenue, I felt a tinge of guilt color our otherwise carefree afternoon. I felt sad, and a little paranoid.
After the judge rebuked me for keeping my Social Security number on my phone and signed my probate orders, Helena took a picture of me holding them up in a folder outside.
It’s sunny out, a perfect day, and I’m dressed too preppy, khakis and a polo. In the background, a man intrudes to pour a bucket of water on a sidewalk spill.
My work as “Donald Collins” had only just begun. The probate order opened the door to the real business, starting with a new Social Security card and continuing to this day with a passport I have yet to correct.
My wallet’s makeover thinned it out. Each document requires separate paperwork and, usually, a fee. Insurance, bank cards, driver’s license, passport, school ID and e-mail—everything has a process. When friends asked me about the wayward “F” marker on my license, I told them the truth: I just got tired.
In fact, I recently changed my gender marker when I switched my driver’s license to California. After a humiliatingly useless first visit to the DMV, I was forced to have a doctor fill out a form confirming my gender as “male” and my transition as “complete” before they would assign me that tiny “M.”
“Do you have any letter to prove this?” the clerk had asked me upon noticing my application said “male” while my passport said otherwise.
“Only my life,” I replied.
A few months after my name-change court date, I returned, on the radar, to West Hartford and sat for a family dinner at my grandmother’s. We all gave it our awkward best. My name rang strangely in everyone’s mouths, like a code word.
Donnie is enjoying Boston. Donnie is going out with friends tonight.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, there was already another “Donnie” in my family, a cousin of my mother’s who was a fighter pilot. My mom had hoped for a more gender-neutral name for me, or a boy’s name she liked better. “Hayden” maybe, or “Ian.” If I had been “born a boy,” she had planned to name me “Russell,” which I briefly considered adopting. I dabbled with a derivative of my birth middle name, but ultimately decided I wanted a clean break. I can’t really explain how I settled on “Donald,” only that the movie Donnie Darko probably had nothing to do with it.
In the swing of the 2016 election season, I remind myself of the good Donalds: Glover, Antrim, Sutherland, Faison, Westlake, Duck. Sure, there are a weird slew of serial killers with that first name, but then we’ve got Donald David Dixon Ronald O’Connor, best known for his role as Cosmo Brown in Singing in the Rain. Three of my best friends’ dads are named Donald.
Although I originally stuck with the nickname “Donnie,” I now prefer “Donald.” I like its vintage and the way my friends say it. I like that it has fewer search-engine results, fewer embarrassing photos. I like that it’s kind of a new start within a new start.
My mom noticed the change in my e-mail signatures and asked about it. I was surprised when she did, even though we talk about so much now; the issue still seemed immortalized with a kind of parental revulsion.
“I can never call you ‘Donnie,’” she had once said, weeping in the den. “I can never call you ‘my son.’”
Now, as I plan a trip to the East Coast, she says, “Donald! It’ll be so nice to have you home.”