A story about a family with two boys aged 10 and 13, in which choice is a delusion and gender, an illusion. It’s a familiar theme in the TG literature, but this time with an unfamiliar twist. After the pandemonium at McDonald’s, Blair has ingested his first feminizing hormones and Maggie thinks she sees a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Or was that merely a Golden Arch? In this chapter Kirk get wiser about politics and Blair, about sex change.

Chapter 11 A choice of tea parties

After her three days of psychological evaluation, Miss Umbridge took a two-week, mental-health leave before returning to Lewis A. Clark. It was the sweet life for Blair, as the substitute behaved more like a stand-up comic than like a teacher. He eschewed homework for student reports on “interesting websites” they had found in the nether sectors of the Internet. Best of all, he had no idea that Blair was supposed to be treated with suspicion and contempt. Instead, he quickly established that anyone questioning a student’s heterosexuality would be putting his or her own sexual orientation into discussion.

In contrast, life for Kirk had deteriorated. Indeed, on the morning after Blair first felt his nipples tingling from his daily estrogen intake, Maggie received a call at 11:00 a.m. to pick up Kirk, who had been sent home from school at the insistence of his Social Studies teacher, Adlai Stevenson Tingle.

The confrontation between teacher and student had been brewing ever since Tingle, obsessed with current events, had begun lecturing his class about Barack Obama, subprime mortgages and Cinco de Mayo instead of World History, as decreed by the official curriculum. Kirk, who rarely showed much interest in his studies, might not have cared about the shift in focus had the teacher been less dogmatic (what thirteen-year-old likes being told what he must think and do?) and had Kirk not been keen on learning more about Saudi Arabian and Afghan women. Kirk thought it “really cool” that they didn’t have to show their face in public. That way their looks weren’t being constantly assessed by visually-obsessed males. A homely kid, Kirk sometimes wished he could wear a nijab.

But world history, even the recent past, slipped by the wayside during the healthcare tussle in Congress. Republican “obstructionism” provoked Mr. Tingle into telling the students, ad nauseam, what he really thought about Republicans and political conservatives; capitalists, corporate shysters and oil-spilling sons of BP; climate deniers and Gaia-raping, Viagra-popping miners; test-pushing school boards; Big Business, Big Pharma and small business; Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and all the other Wall Street bloodsuckers with Central European names; gun-toting, God-fearing, reactionary rubes; as well as foreign-owned companies, their runaway cars, lead-flaked toys and slave labor; Southern rednecks, addled Californians and toothless Appalachians; Cuban exiles and Hawaiian haoles; Mormon baby factories and Catholic baby molesters; Scientologists and babbling-in-tongues evangelicals; female-hating, ovum-loving anti-abortionists; treasonous (to the feminist cause) stay-at-home mothers; xenophobes, anthropophobes, anuptaphobes, tropophobes, gynophobes and homophobes; balding, middle-aged, male heterosexualists, ageists and lookists; ticky-tacky white suburbs and the “bourgeois” blacks who moved into them; methane-belching cows and bull-torturing Spaniards; Anglo-Saxon imperialists and their Afghan-hating friends; Bush-league presidents; Zionists, Texans and Nazis; “too-stupid-to-live” volunteer soldiers and deer hunters; the Americans who stole Oregon from its native people and the Southwestern states from Mexico; moose-hunting Alaska idiots; anti-immigrant bigots and racists; fatties, smokers, pet owners and carnivores; virtually all white males and most white females. Mr. Tingle said he especially “hated haters.”

Kirk didn’t know what to make of these tirades coming from the apparently self-loathing teacher, Mr. Tingle being a middle-aged, overweight, balding white, hamburger-eating Episcopalian from the California suburbs who still lived with his stay-at-home mother. Not only did the endless pronouncements from Mr. Tingle confuse Kirk, who was left uncertain as to whether it was Catholic priests, polygamous Mormons or Islamic mullahs who abused children, but he usually didn’t have enough prior knowledge to challenge the teacher to justify any of his self-evident biases.

Kirk did know, however, that he heartily disliked being told that he was a “privileged white kid”. Privileged? Did Mr. Tingle have any idea what it was like to grow up in a family where everything revolved around the sexual fancies of a kid brother?

There was one exception — one moment in the onslaught of opinion where Kirk espied an opening. It was during Mr. Tingle’s (by now) ritualistic condemnation of the Tea Parties as subversive, demagogic, racist and downright un-American. The teacher even mocked them as “tea baggers”.

Thanks to playground gossip, Kirk understood the insult being hurled at the conservative activists who had organized “tea parties” in instructive emulation of the destructive Boston Tea Party of 1773 to protest against “taxation without representation”. So he put up his hand for the first time in weeks and asked, his demeanor innocence incarnate, his teacher to explain the term “tea bagger”. Tingle, who prided himself on his ability to discuss all things sexual with his sixth graders, patiently explained that tea bagging was originally gay slang for one man’s putting his mouth entirely around the scrotum of another.

“So it’s something gay men do?” Kirk asked for repetition. The teacher’s affirmative gave Kirk his opening: “As I understand things, you despise the people who go to a Tea Party; and to demonstrate how much you despise them, you accuse them of performing gay sex acts on each other. So, aren’t you a homophobe, Mr. Tingle? Isn’t using ‘tea bagger’ as an insult the same as calling a dude a ‘pillow-biting, cock-sucking punk’? And didn’t you tell us that those were hateful words that we should never use?”

Mr. Tingle spluttered with rage. “How dare you insult your teacher, you uppity little punk! Get out of my class! Right now! Get your books and go tell the vice-principal that you’re being sent home for the rest of the day as punishment for brazen insolence. As Kirk left the class, he heard his teacher admonishing the class that while it was necessary for Kirk to be punished for his disrespect for authority, that they shouldn’t give the boy a hard time when he returned to class because the “poor kid already feels bad enough having a sissy for a brother.”

Inasmuch as Tea Parties had led to a half-day suspension, Kirk, being a recently-minted teenager, had no choice but to attend one. With luck, Mr. Tingle would see him on television. Now that would be choice indeed! It was easy to persuade Laird to take him to a Tea Party, as Laird, who hadn’t voted since Ross Perot lost his third-party bid, had never heard of the T.P. phenomenon. Laird readily bought the explanation that Kirk was expected to attend and report on a Tea Party as a Social Studies assignment.

It was more difficult, at first, to obtain Maggie’s consent, for she had heard that the Tea Parties were as disorderly as a teen house party with the parents away. There was no way, therefore, that she would permit Kirk to attend one, as long as Blair childishly insisted on tagging along. Blair, assuming there would be cake, clowns and ice cream, refused to “be left out of a party”. However, after two successive evenings had been marred by Kirk’s tantrums, Maggie received an invitation in the mail that permitted her to announce that she would take Blair to a tea party in Polish Knob, a small town south of Beaverton, while Kirk and Laird attended the political Tea Party downtown. Blair readily endorsed her plans after being told, quite truthfully, that he was more likely to find food and drink at the Polish Knob affair.

Kirk convinced his father that they’d have to carry homemade signs if they wanted to have a chance at getting their fifteen minutes of fame on television. It was difficult to know what to put on the signs, since Laird had never tuned into politics and the political signals Kirk had been receiving had been thoroughly distorted by an opinionated teacher. Simply put, both father and son hadn’t the foggiest idea of either the values or the goals of the Tea Party Movement. Even so, Kirk was, as a onetime boy scout, determined to carry a positive, patriotic message. And what could be more patriotic than supporting the President? Thus, Kirk devised two slogans that used “black slang” to express his family’s support for Barack Obama, the country’s first black President: “Obama is the shit!” and “Obama is the dopest President yet!” It’s hard to get more complimentary than that, Kirk believed.

At their Tea Party Kirk and Laird found themselves at the back of the crowd, their view of the podium blocked by a “fence” of waving placards, two Uncle Sams on stilts, two guys acting like asses in a donkey suit, and several Founding Fathers including a toothless George Washington and a bearded Abraham Lincoln, the latter played (disconcertingly for Laird and his son) by an exceptionally short woman.

Kirk and Laird heard not a word from the podium, partly because their hoodies muffled anything beyond the immediate sound of rain pelting concrete cobblestones, and partly because of the sales pitches from strolling hucksters of patriotic caps, tee shirts and buttons, but mainly because the two Finlaysons were yelling their own slogans in raucous disharmony with those of their neighbors. As most of the folks in the back were like themselves — middle-class whites from the suburbs — Kirk and Laird received a warm welcome for their brazen “insults” to the “socialist” President loathed by most of the Tea Partiers. Whenever Kirk shouted, “Obama is the shit,” he got a thumbs-up or a pat on the back from the men around him, although two or three of the older women muttered about “washing the child’s potty mouth with soap.”

It was only when Kirk and Laird chanced upon a middle-aged African-American wearing a business suit to the Tea Party that things got tense for the first time. An internist opposed to the Democrats’ healthcare package, he chided Kirk for making political dissent “so personal”: “Son, it’s always wrong to make an ad hominem attack on a politician, even the President, when it’s his party’s policies you should be opposing. After all, Barack Obama needed about 280 Democrats to get his mandates through Congress. I also think it bad manners for a child to call the President, any President, the ‘dopiest’.”

“Attack President Obama? That’s a crazy thing for you to say,” Kirk protested. “You’re a black dude, aren’t you? Don’t you know your own language? In ebony-icks, bad and dopest is compliments, heap big compliments. I’m calling Barack the dopest, not the dopiest. The “i” makes all the difference.”

“In the fourth century,” the internist replied, “an iota — that’s Greek for the letter ‘i’ made quite a difference. Adding it to the Greek word homos, thereby changing its English meaning from “the same” to “similar” when discussing Jesus and God, could get you declared a heretic to be executed. And your sign, son, does appear to have the damning ‘i’.”

And so it did appear because the incessant rain had caused the marker’s ink to run, an “i” magically surfacing between the “p” and “e”. Oops! After what the black man had said, Kirk now wondered whether his sign was somehow calling President Obama a “homos,” which appeared to be the Greek for “homo.” Kirk nervously looked around to see whether his father was standing close enough to cover his son’s back if they both needed to make a run for it.

“Son,” Kirk’s newest acquaintance now said. “After growing up in the home of two lawyers in Shaker Heights, Ohio, I went to Yale University and to the Harvard Medical School, and I do not, in consequence, know or speak Ebonics. Nor do I speak like a Hollywood Indian. But now that I know the true intent of your sloganeering, it’s incumbent on me to warn you that your message is not the one that this assemblage wish to read or to hear. Unlike you, they tend to dislike President Obama. Thus, I humbly suggest that before your apostasy becomes widely known that you and your father … RUN for your lives!”

The doctor chuckled as the party-crashers Kirk and Laird scuttled away like roaches from cake crumbs when the kitchen light comes on. “Those are two dumbass white boys” he said to a Latino friend, who replied, “Si, they’re as ignorant as an illegal looking for ‘la vida dulce’, the easy life, here in El Norte.”

Unfortunately, or unfortunately, neither Laird nor Kirk got to see themselves on television. Nor did anyone else, inasmuch as local television and radio deemed the rain-shortened, tri-neighborhood “Charity Run for Exotic Viral Diseases” to be a more newsworthy event. However, attendance at a Tea Party brought benefits to Kirk at school after Mr. Tingle somehow learned that Kirk had “courageously defied the riotous, neo-Nazi horde” with his pro-Obama message. From then on, Kirk could cut Mr. Tingle’s class at will, simply by saying that there was “anti-Tea Party stuff” to be done. While it would have been politically incorrect to call Kirk the “teacher’s pet”, he had definitely become the “teacher’s animal companion”.

Where attending a Tea Party ended up being a rewarding experience for Kirk, for Blair it proved more enlightening. Perhaps he should have realized that he wasn’t being taken to a political rally when his mom told him what to wear. Blair was to start with pink lipstick and eye shade, pink nail and toe polish, his electric pink Peace and Love bikini panties, a pink-and-white Peace Sign shaped (padded) bra, teardrop earrings and matching gold pendant (all with pink sapphires), a velvet pink hair band, her newest “party dress” (a thick strap, polyester tank dress in multi-tiered pink cloud chiffon and neckline of rosettes), and the only non-pink item — strappy, open-toe dress sandals with a soft satin fabric upper and glittering sequin trim and  ¾ inch chunky wedge heels. Blair had rarely looked more girlish and even now, after four months of dressing exclusively en femme, he felt foolish and vulnerable.

After the long, ninety-minute drive in the pouring rain to Polish Knob, a small town physically dominated by college buildings and a tall bulbous tower, the journey of Maggie and Blair came to an end in the visitor’s parking lot (aesthetically laid out in the shape of a camel’s toe) of the Yoni Punani Academy for Girls. Ominously (in a good sort of way), the rain stopped at the precise moment that Maggie turned off the car engine. The sunshine removed the last of the clouds that had been darkening Blair’s visage.

After a short stroll (actually, Maggie strolled while Blair skipped) past the school’s pie-shaped garage and an adjoining tool shed bizarrely festooned with lobster pots, bear traps, conch shells, bearded clams and stuffed peachfish, Blair and Maggie entered a bushy park with a fringed mound of wiry brown brambles (sheltering the grunion nests) and an alcove containing a box (decorated with hand-carved beavers, bells and cups) planted with honeysuckle and sheaths of anemones of love. They then transited a grotto in a secret cavern with space for a special nook for a statue of the fertility goddess Astarte, the one with a vertical smile and a forbidden rose clutched by her right hand.

As they came back into the light, they snatched a quick glimpse of two whimsical, less sacred artifacts -- a bas relief of Mrs. Slocum’s pussy (that is, of her pussycat, from the sitcom Are You Being Served?), a statue of a bearded lady and a mosaic map of Tasmania (Australia). After these frivolities, they came to a slit trench filled with cream-colored water and a snatch of lotus flowers; after which they pushed as quickly as possible through a dusky, undercut tunnel (and possible bat cave) that slashed like an axe wound through the inner heart of the campus. After pulling out of this “stench trench” (for it smelt of rotten tuna), they reached The Velvet Cage (the school gym) and The Honey Pot (the school cafeteria, then advertising filet-o-fish, buns, loose meat and vertical bacon sandwiches (with optional cabbage) and sweets such as sugared almonds, cookies, cake and donuts).

From there they penetrated a field encircling Pleasure House (the girls’ after-school activity center), Treasure House (the school library), The Nooch (a snack stand featuring fish tacos, beavertails, jellyrolls and passion fruit) and The Cockpit (home of the girls’ debating society). By then Blair and his mother had reached the inner terrace of the Punani campus, the lower mouth of which led through a jade gateway to a golden doorway (trimmed with red pearls) behind which was the climax of their journey — the Theodora Williams Auditorium & Theatre (usually known by its acronym) — in which the Academy was hosting an open house and tea party for those girls (accompanied by a parent) intending to enter the school in September.

Waiting in an antechamber lined with black velvet was Madam Flossy Cabrá³n, the school’s headmistress, who greeted all arrivals with “Fellow quims, welcome to the gates of heaven. Here wisdom is not a forbidden fruit, but a cherry to be popped.” Madame Cabrá³n already knew about Blair, whose pink ensemble she praised extravagantly, before suggesting, “Child, I want you to meet Angela, who will become your roommate in September at the suggestion of her mother and yours.”

Blair turned in confusion to Maggie: “My roommate, mommy? Am I being sent to a boarding school? Don’t you want me at home anymore?” He was on the verge of tears.

“There, there. Don’t fret, sweetie. Your father and I have decided that the Yoni Punani Academy for Girls is the ideal school for you, given its emphasis on academics, music and theatre, and its de-emphasis on sports. You’ll love it here, and the school is the ideal place for you to develop the manners and poise of a well-bred young lady.”

“But boarding school?”

“Only for five days a week, Blair sweetie, and only because the school is a ninety-minute drive from our house. I’ll pick you up every Friday afternoon and we’ll spend the entire weekend together, as well as holidays and three weeks each summer.”

As Blair still looked glum, Madame Cabrá³n asked Maggie, “We expected that you would have already told your daughter about our policy requiring all of our students to sleep here a minimum of five nights a week so that the school may have the time and opportunity to acculturate them as pure Punani girls.”

“I’m a little surprised at Blair’s reaction,” Maggie replied. “She’s known for months that her father and I intended to send her to a private girls’ school in September — to get away from the bad example being set by her older brother — but she’s not yet eleven and so bound to have some last-minute jitters.”

“Of course, my dear. Blair, we at the Punani Academy are aware that young girls are prone to homesickness — they even miss helping with the housework — and that’s why we permit pre-teens like you to spend weekends at home. From experience I can promise you, however, that you’ll be more eager to get back to your friends at school on Sunday evening than you will be to go home on Fridays to see your brother. Now, do take my hand, and I’ll take you over to meet Angela. You two are bound to become best girlfriends.”

Angela turned out to be a pretty, raven-haired eleven-year-old, short and slight, yet pleasingly curvaceous for her age. After the exchange of a few desultory words interspersed with long pauses during which both girls looked nervously toward their mothers who were in animated discussion a dozen or more feet away, Angela suddenly whispered, “Blair, do be a sweetheart and lower your ear. I have a secret to share. It’s a really big secret, so I have to whisper it.”

Curious, Blair did as bidden; he could feel Angela’s breath gently misting his ear.

“Blair, my mother has told me all about you.” Angela’s voice got even lower: “I know you and I are the same — that we’re both girls with a boy’s body.”

Blair almost leapt out of his skin.

Angela held tightly onto Blair, keeping him seated: “Don’t worry! I’ll keep your secret if you keep mine. Let’s get out of here. My mother told me about a music practice room where we can have some privacy. If we’re going to be best girlfriends, as I really, really want us to be, then we can’t have any secrets between us.”

In the soundproofed practice room, Angela was a torrent of information: That her mother is a real ball-breaker who learned to hate males as a result of her grandfather’s lecherous eyes and fingers, her father’s early abandonment of the family, her two old brothers who fled home after years of regularly forcing themselves onto and into her in every sexual way conceivable (her pregnancy scare at twelve precipitated their flight), and three failed marriages, broken each time by a philandering, absconding husband, the last of whom left her with Andrew, a male infant to raise.

There being no way that she was going to let Andrew grow up to be the sort of person who hurt females — in other words, to grow up as a male — the much aggrieved mother immediately renamed him “Angela” and raised him — actually there was no longer a “him”, just a “her” — as a girl. Angela said that she had no doubts, whatsoever, of her own gender identity until a year ago when she had accidentally seen another girl and a boy fully in the nude. (They were, Angela blushingly affirmed, “in the act of doing it,” which made the naked truth about her own sexuality even harder to deny.)

After much questioning and challenging, her mother had finally brought Angela to a recognition that not only had she always been happy being a girl, but that she also couldn’t conceive of living life as a boy. But Angela wanted things regularized: in return for continuing to live as a female, her mother had to agree (reluctantly, given the expenditure involved) to give Angela an appropriately female body (with the appropriate birth certificate) before year’s end. However, her mother’s assent had also carried a condition: to wit, that Angela thereafter attend a boarding school. This condition her mother imposed because, as she admitted, she no longer wanted to have around her any reminder of “the weasel who screwed my life the most.” Her mother had hoped that a year of feminizing hormones would eliminate any resemblance the girl had to her father, but it hadn’t happened, and it was time for Angela to leave home to complete her education.

“So you see,” Angela concluded:

My mother pretty much decides what will become of my life. I learned long ago that it was pointless to resist her will. I think I could have been a good athlete, but mother said that it wasn’t ladylike to sweat, and so each year I become ever clumsier and prissier — I can’t seem to help it any longer — and now I want to vomit if I see dirt on my dress or grass stains on my slacks. I am so very pleased that this school puts little emphasis on sports and actually bans jeans. Mother definitely picked the right school for me. She always knows what’s best for me. I always do what she wants because I’m happiest when she’s happy. It must be the same for you: you too are mother’s little darling. That’s why you’re wearing that darling pink dress — to please mommy.

“I wear what I want. I do what I want. No one’s the boss of me,” Blair shot back. He hadn’t appreciated the aspersion on his … Well, “manhood” wasn’t the correct word; maybe “autonomy” was. Yes, “autonomy” would have been the correct word had Blair ever come across it. His “manhood” was not something he had much defended even before the momentous trip to the Mall, but he had an independent streak apparently lacking in Angela.

“I’m sorry, Blair. I wasn’t trying to diss you. I was just talking about the facts of life. Your mother, like mine, holds all the cards. You’re just a kid, and nobody listens to a kid. So your mother can do whatever she wants with you. You don’t have any choice if she’s really determined for you to be a girl.”

“Yes, I do have a choice. I’ve got an ace up my sleeve. I can play it if I have to. You’ll see.” Blair stood defiantly, his feet placed firmly on the ground — looking more like a male footballer than a girl in a party dress.

Angela wisely changed the subject: “Let’s not fight. We’ve got so much in common that we just have to be best girlfriends. I’ll let you see my breasts if you want.”

The offer definitely intrigued Blair, who bombarded Angela with questions about her breast development. It emerged that she has been taking the same herbal capsules as Blair, but for twenty-six times as long as his two weeks. The result, she boasted, were “boobs as good as those of a thirteen-year-old girl. Like my mother, I’m going to have big jugs.”

These Blair definitely had to see. And so it came to pass that Blair saw his first female mammaries. They were, remarkably, on a boy. Could Blair touch? Sure, if he reciprocated. And so, Blair got to touch his first breasts since his birth mom gave up breast-feeding. To his surprise, Angela’s felt not all that different from his own — at least, as they had become during the past two days. Their mutual curiosity soon stripped Blair of both dress and bra, and Angela excitedly confirmed that a mass was forming under each of his nipples that felt very much like a woman’s mammary. Angela estimated that Blair would no longer have to pad his bra in a week or two and that by the time he entered the Punani Academy that he’d be further along in female puberty than most of the girls in his class. “You’ll no longer fit into boys’ clothes. Won’t that be great?”

“Great? I don’t know yet. But I definitely want to know what it looks and feels like to be a girl. I’ve got to grow me some melons. That way I’ll be a better able to owdishon for roles where an actor dude has to pretend to be a girl. I’ll know exactly how to walk with breasts, since I would have had ‘em once.”

Angela was incredulous at Blair’s naivety:

Blair, they’re not going to be asking you to play male roles after you’ve developed breasts and feminine curves. You’ll only get girl roles. Don’t you know that you and I are playing the gender game for keeps? Once you’ve got breasts, the only way to get rid of them is for a surgeon to cut them off with a hacksaw. The same goes for your hips if they get too big for boys’ jeans. Hack! Hack! You could die from the loss of blood! It makes me shiver even to think of someone sawing off my nipples! As my mother splained, when young kids like us take estrogen and suppress the guy hormones in our balls there soon comes a day where there’s no going back. My mother says it’s already too late for me to ever look like a normal dude. She says the only choice I’ve now got is between being a popular, pretty girl or an unpopular, weird-looking guy — both for the rest of my life. That’s not much of a choice, is it? I mean which would you choose?”

Blair was thoughtful. He could now see that Angela’s pretty face had such round, soft, feminine features and her body, such wide hips and perky breasts that it was already difficult for her to “pass” as a male.

Angela, anxious to talk to someone about her transformation, added:

Tomorrow a real doctor will be giving me a shot of super-duper hormones that will, unfortunately, make me sick for a week, like people often are from a flu shot. A bit of wooziness is, my mother says, a small price to pay for the peace of mind I’ll have from then on. She says that after that first shot I’ll never ever wonder again whether I should become a boy. In fact, she says I’ll no longer think at all like a male, which my mother says is a messed-up way of thinking. I’ll be thinking only like a girl after my shot — more emotional, more in touch with my feelings, better able to make friends. Once I get the first shot — like polio boosters there will be more than one — I’ll hate my cock and balls so much, according to my mother, that I’ll be begging, actually begging! — for her to have them cut off. She says I’ll go crazy if I don’t get rid of them. Luckily, the doctor has a clinic in Cuba where he can replace my boy stuff with … well, you must know what we girls normally have between our legs?

Angela, her face reddening at having to mention, sort of, girls’ unmentionable parts, stared over Blair’s shoulder at the school’s crest etched in the glass door of the practice room: it contained an engraving of a sheath made from a split piece of wood into which a sword was deeply thrust, under which was arrayed the school motto, “Ipsa vulva angusta et tenera potestas est”.

The phrase was Greek to Angela at the time, but the following September Angela used a Latin-English on-line translator to figure out that it roughly meant, “There’s power in a soft, tight vagina.” After she began dating teen boys, she knew what the motto really meant.

Angela next told Blair: I’m really looking forward to my shot tomorrow, because I want the certainty, the peace of mind that it will give me. You’ll understand what I mean when the time comes for your shot….”
“I won’t let anyone stick me with a dumb needle that makes me want to be a girl forever,” Blair interrupted.

Angela smiled condescendingly (she was after the elder):

You don’t think you’ll ever get a shot or want one? Blair, you’re such a baby; you don’t understand mothers at all, do you? Mine will tell yours that you’ll be much, much happier after a shot in your arm, and yours won’t give you a real choice about getting it because she’ll be convinced that the final disappearance of the boy in you is for your own good. She’ll want you to stop having doubts about completing your sex change; she’ll want to give you the finality, the certainty that the shot will give you. Blair, once the super duper hormones surge through your body, your dick and balls will start shrinking so fast that you’ll be able to watch them get smaller, and soon your dick will become so tiny, much smaller than your pinky, that you’d rather die than let anyone, including your father and brother, see it. That’s when you will beg your mom for an operation to give you a girl’s private parts ‘cause they will look a lot better and work a lot better than a baby peepee. I know that’s what your mom has got planned for you.

This was a lot for Blair to absorb. There was no question that his self-confidence has been sorely shaken; he was much less confident of being master of his destiny than he had been before Angela told him about the mind-control shots and the mothers’ master plan. He realized, of course, that their “mothers” were quite different: His was one to love, hers was one to fear. And yet, both mothers wanted a daughter so much that they were administering ho-mones to feminize their son’s body. According to Angela, if Blair continued dutifully taking his cocktail of ho-mones, after two or three more weeks he’d have a girl’s body for the rest of his life.

Until now there hadn’t been much of a downside to Blair’s playing the part of Maggie’s daughter. In fact, it had been a primo role: His father and brother no longer muttered about his being a homo; strangers looked at him with more respect than they had when he’d come across as a sissy boy; there were also a lot more men now watching his every move and lauding his looks, and Blair loved the attention; in Alicia he’d found a girlfriend who did wonderful things to his body; he had been able to play soccer and to “star” in ballet without anyone’s expecting him to perform like a male; he’d had a chance to perfect his acting by playing a really difficult role, at least for a boy; he had been able to “bug” his least favorite teacher; he had acquired an extensive new wardrobe and no longer wore seconds from Kirk; he had learned that girls’ clothes were a real turn-on, psychologically and erotically; he was being offered a chance to go to a better school (although he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of boarding over); and best of all, his mom paid far more attention to her daughter than she had to Laird’s second son.

Indeed, there had been so few negatives to the role of Maggie’s daughter that it had been almost three months since Blair had seriously considered giving it up. He reckoned that no matter how he dressed or behaved, his future was his to control. Yet Angela was now saying that in less than a month his choices would be as restricted as a breast in a firm-support bra.

Somehow everything was different after talking to Angela. What a killjoy she was! It didn’t surprise him that she was already asking for the lower bunk because she wet her bed. A bed wetter! And she dared to call him a baby!

His mind thus occupied, Blair gave a start when Maggie, coming up from behind, tapped him on the shoulder to announce that the two girls were wanted in an antechamber of the auditorium where tea and cake would be served.

At the tea party Blair was a severe disappointment to his mother and Madame Cabrá³n. His mind now buzzing with a hundred unwanted thoughts and images, he forgot to sit and sip demurely like a girl. Indeed, he even showed a flash of panty as he sprawled slack-jawed and his little finger simply wouldn’t behave itself. It kept on trying to grip the cup. The words “please” and “thank you” seemed to be beyond his linguistic skills. In his unseemly (for a proper young girl) passion for cake he kept reaching far across the table, accidentally bumping arms and brushing against bosoms, in each case causing spilt milk or tea. As for his tea-pouring technique, Blair, his hand shaking, had so much difficulty finding the target that he scalded Angela’s mother, even as he drowned the cake crumbs on his own dress.

Madame Cabrá³n tried, in her own haughty way, to be kind to Maggie when discussing Blair’s performance at his first tea party:

Oh my, I see that there is some work to be done with Blair, who is not yet as poised and ladylike as our Punani girls. As you know, we receive more applications than we have spaces in the sixth grade, and frankly I wasn’t sure until now that the Yoni Punani Academy was the best fit for a girl from one of the newer suburbs. But I now appreciate that Blair desperately needs an elite finishing school like ours for her to have any hope of growing into a proper young lady. It won’t be easy, but our staff will rise to the challenge. She will, I promise, be ready for her debut in polite society eight years from now. If you will now see Ms. Gloria Huffington, our registrar, she will explain the procedure for enrolling Blair. I look forward to teaching her voice, posture and overall poise.

The news from Ms. Huffington was unsettling: To enroll Blair she would need his transcript from the Lewis A. Clark Charter School and a copy of his official birth certificate. Of course, Ms. Huffington had used “her”, and she was unlikely to be pleased with the “male” notation on Blair’s records. Indeed, Joy Torres, Angela’s mother, had already confirmed that there was no way in this lifetime that the Punani Academy would knowingly admit a transgendered student.

“Is there a way,” Maggie asked Joy, “to fake my child’s school and birth records? Do you happen to know someone good at forgery?”

Maggie thought no one could overhear. What she didn’t know was that Blair, intent on eavesdropping, had secreted himself behind a marble statue of a vestal virgin (also known as a temple prostitute).

“Forgery?” Joy replied:

Why settle for a fake when you can have the real thing? Doctor Benny Sentirsi, he’s the gender specialist I told you about, well, he gave me the phone number of a computer geek. He’s barely fourteen-years-old, but he can hack into any system, without anyone being able to track him down. And all the kid wants for pay is a Spiderman comic. I bought him an Amazing Spiderman #50 for $150, and for that small sum he hacked into the newspaper and government database in which my child’s original name and sex were identified. The complete record now shows that eleven years ago I had a baby girl whom I named Angela Maria Torres. Nowhere in the world of bits and bytes is there any evidence that a boy named Andrew ever existed, and with paper records everywhere heading for the dumpster, that’s all that matters.
Are you saying that this teenager has the ability to change Blair into a female -- that Blair’s school records and birth certificate can be altered to show that he’s always been a girl?”

“Yes, Maggie. Josh — that’s the teen’s name — will also alter Blair’s sex in the birth announcement in the newspapers, in his baptism certificate, in his library card — anywhere that you can think of. And fast! Is that kid ever fast! I promise you that Blair will no longer exist anywhere on the public record as a male within one week of your cutting a deal with Josh. Take this — it’s Josh’s mobile phone number.”

Maggie stuffed the note into her purse, but she still looked doubtful about using it: “I don’t know. It’s got to be risky to alter Blair’s school and birth records. There must be a law against doing that.”

“Maggie, there probably is, but it’s worth some risk, isn’t it, to enroll Blair in the Punani Academy? Once Blair enters it, you’ll have a daughter for life. Which reminds me — here’s Doctor Sentirsi’s phone number and address. He’s the one to contact, discretely mind you, when you decide to hurry up Blair’s feminization with injections and when, a while later, you decide on surgery to give Blair the female genitalia she’ll need to be a happy teen. Sentirsi has a protected clinic in Cuba where he’s transformed several colts into fillies, though none as young as Angela or Blair. But there’s always a first, isn’t there?”

To Blair’s consternation Maggie accepted the second phone number with greater alacrity than she accepted the first. Even worse, after hearing the entire conversation so far, he missed out on what Angela’s mother said next, because she dropped her voice real low, real conspiratorial-like. But he thought he heard this much — “… of course, Doctor Sentirsi will say that he never breaks the law; but it’s easy to call his bluff, all you have to do is ….”

And that was the last of their conversation Blair overheard, for Angela, finally locating his hiding place, tugged at his hair. That led to tickles, and the two mothers, alerted to the presence of their chicks, ended their discussion of Blair’s future. All four then took a quick tour of the school’s classrooms and residences, during which Angela and Blair decided that they wanted to share a room in Cooch Hall. They thought it somehow more “real,” its girls less prone to vain display and artifice, than Merkin Hall.

After the two “girls” kissed each other a tearful adieu, Maggie and Blair drove home quietly, pensively, in the pouring rain, the windshield wiper being their lone musical accompaniment. Blair couldn’t remember the last time Maggie hadn’t said a word for more than an hour, and he considered the silence ominous (in a bad way).

Dinner was a blur. Blair couldn’t concentrate until he knew what Maggie was going to do next. Did she intend to use those phone numbers? About half an hour after he was supposed to be asleep in bed, he crept into the upstairs hallway in his powder blue nightie and pink ballet slippers because he thought he’d heard Maggie pick up the phone. Suspecting at first that it was only his imagination — the kitchen and TV room phones were so far away — he pressed himself tight against the hallway wall when he suddenly realized that she was, remarkably, phoning from the bedroom. That was almost never done when both parents were at home, for they kept no secrets from each other. But here she was, his own mother, sneaking a phone call while her husband watched the NBA playoffs downstairs.

Blair realized that his life was spinning out of his control as he listened to Maggie’s side of the conversation:

Hello, Josh, my name is Maggie. I’m a friend of Joy Torres and her daughter Angela. Joy told me that you’re a whiz with computers. She also told me what you did for Angela. I’ve got a daughter named Blair; she’s got the same problem that Angela had. You know — a foul-up in her official records so that all of them erroneously state that she’s a male. Do you think you can fix the records so they all say that Blair has always been a female? You can? Great? I’ll email you the details. When can you do it? We’re in a bit of a rush because a school is asking for Blair’s birth certificate. By next Thursday? That’s super. I have the perfect Batman comic as a reward for you. It’s quite choice, as you kids say.”

A batman comic! For the price of a batman comic he was being sold down the river by another boy. In less than a week he, Blair, would be officially a girl in the eyes of the law. He knew what that implied, for he had seen the commercials about identity theft. He knew that it was almost impossible to get one’s good name back once it had been lost. And what about one’s sexual identity? Would the guys in the government tell him that it would take too much effort to change his sex back to male and that he should therefore bring his body into full compliance with the government records as quickly as possible? Might not the federal government actually mandate a sex change for him to avoid its having to admit that its computers had made an error?

Questions like these can keep a boy from falling fast asleep.