THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 25
windowless room with no doors, a sin-
gle dangling light that never turned
off. I tried out one metaphor after an-
other, then wondered if the pain was
just an excuse, an explanation that could
pull all my disparate memories into a
coherent narrative—a coherent gender.
And, anyway, if I admitted I was dys-
phoric, I’d have to decide whether to
do something about it, to decide if my
pain was real or imagined, if the prob-
lem was gender or me.
A
few months after I met Venus
on the beach, I deleted all my
social-media accounts. I didn’t want
to exist outside my body. My limbs,
my breasts, my genitals—these were
unwieldy enough. I couldn’t manage
a digital projection, too. And I didn’t
want to see my name anywhere. It
unmoored me and made me dizzy. I
wanted to be nameless, nothing. The
opposite of known.
The less I wanted a name, the more
compulsively I named everything I saw.
Caterpillar. Bird. Knife. Shit. Cunt.
Tree. I lay in my bed and imagined my-
self as every other thing in the uni-
verse, so diffuse and infinite as to be
indiscernible—unnameable. Every
morning, I walked up the hill from my
house to a scrubby field slated for de-
velopment, where a rope swing hung
from a black-walnut tree. Leaning
against the tree trunk, I practiced filling
up my body with air. Air into my toes,
into the arches of my feet, into my
shins. Into my bladder, into my anus,
into my ribs, even into my breasts.
The more of my body I felt, the less
like Grace I felt. She drifted away, an
idea or a dream, dislodged from some-
where within me. Had she ever existed
at all? I imagined her far out at sea, on
the other side of a swell, a white spot
bobbing in the water. I told myself there
was no bringing her back.
Each day, I imagined myself with
the name of a different man. Samuel,
my mother’s father, an orthodontist who
used to let me play with the tools in his
office. He had three last names in the
course of his life, each less Jewish-sound-
ing than the last. Simon, the first two
syllables of Samuel’s original last name.
Edward, my father’s brother, a lawyer
who had an encyclopedic knowledge of
Civil War history. Michael, the arch-
angel, and also the teacher who’d taught
me about white holes, the opposite of
black holes, where disappeared matter
emerges into another dimension.
In November, I told my partner at
the time that I didn’t want to be called
Grace anymore.
The name came to me one morn-
ing, sitting in front of my house before
my roommates had woken up. I remem-
bered the piece of green paper, framed
and hung on the wall of my childhood
bedroom. A column for the girls’ names:
Betty, Myrna, Georgia, Esther, Jane,
and a dozen more. Grace, with a circle
around it. In the boy column, just one
name: Cyrus. I said it slowly. I pressed
my tongue against the back of my teeth
to whistle the first syllable, pushed my
lips out for the soft “r,” let my mouth
curl around the “us.” Then I wrote it
down on a sheet of paper from one of
my yellow legal pads. In cursive, then
in all caps. Then in block letters. Over
breakfast, I slid the yellow paper across
the table to my partner, face down.
“Don’t say it out loud,” I told them.
They didn’t look up, just scribbled,
then slid the paper back to me. They’d
written an acrostic with “Grace” and
“Cyrus” intersecting at the “r,” an un-
even cross. I folded up the drawing and
put it in my jacket pocket. I didn’t tell
anyone else.
A few days later, my partner called
me Cyrus during sex. It was dark, and
I was on top of them, their arms wrapped
around the back of my neck. It was the
kind of sex that made me feel like a
man, which we’d been having more of
lately. They said the name—it wasn’t
my name, not yet—and I came. The
next night, they said it again. Cyrus.
“Shut up,” I said, without thinking.
I squeezed my eyes shut and rolled over
onto my back. Afterward, I apologized.
I knew it wasn’t fair to be so curt. It
wasn’t anger toward them that I felt; it
was my own shame. The humiliation
of longing to be something you’re not.
I taped the name to the wall inside
my closet, so I’d have to look at it when-
ever I changed clothes. Sometimes I
admired the shapes of the letters; some-
times I averted my eyes. Cyrus remained
a stranger whose ways I was trying to
understand. How would he wear his
hair? Would he be on time? Would he
be a vegetarian? Would he buy steak atthe grocery store and cook it alone?
Would he meditate? Would he have
sex with strangers and tell no one it
had happened? Would he have sex with
men? Would he wear sneakers? Would
he value success? Would he keep his
word? Would he lift weights? Would
he go running whenever he wanted,
even in the dark, even when it was rain-
ing? What truth did the name contain?
Was Cyrus inside of me already, or had
I invented him?I
told a few more close friends about
Cyrus, mostly in texts or e-mails. It
was too scary to say it out loud. But the
name spread. Soon I was running into
people who called me Cy, even though
I’d never asked them to. Quickly, it
seemed irreversible. The new name rang
with guilt for abandoning the old one.
Each time I was addressed as Cyrus, I
felt like I was betraying Grace, taking
her away from everyone who had ever
loved her.
When people asked me what I
wanted to be called, I froze. “Either is
fine,” I’d say. Or, “Whichever you pre-
fer.” I sounded casual, but both names
became reminders of all my uncertainty
and fear. I asked my partner to call me
nothing for a while.
I hesitated to explain why I’d cho-
sen the name—to admit that it was, in
some way, a name that belonged to my
parents. It suggested loyalty; wasn’t I
supposed to be looking for differenti-
ation? But seeing “Cyrus” written in
my mother’s looping script comforted
me, as if he had always been there, wait-
ing in an adjacent dimension.
I didn’t tell my parents about Cyrus.
When we spoke on the phone, they
called me Grace. I feared what I
would be taking away from them—a
daughter.
I still grew dizzy when I thought
about changing my body, through hor-
mones or surgery. I was too full of doubt,
even just about my name. When friends
of mine changed their names, it seemed
clear that it was a matter of survival.
Their birth names had simply stopped
being livable. I held myself to harsher
standards: I ought to be able to redefine
myself without a new word, a titular
fresh start. Why wasn’t I strong enough
to be Grace? Did I hate myself? Did I
hate my family? Part of me believed that