THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 27
the definition of your pectoral muscle.”
“Is that good?” I asked.
“Yes. We’ll make the incision along
that line.” He smiled, took a step
back. “Very good. You’re an excellent
candidate.”
Candidate. As if I’d been selected, as
if I might win. My parents didn’t know
I was in Oakland, or that I was seeing
a surgeon, but I had an overwhelming
urge to call them and tell them what
I’d accomplished. “Mom. Dad. I’m an
excellent candidate.”
A
hundred and fifty-five days before
my surgery, I wrote a succinct
e-mail to my parents. For years, they’d
watched me in pain—watched me try-
ing to get rid of that pain. But I’d shared
little with them. They didn’t know I’d
picked a new name or decided to start
hormones, and I still hadn’t told them
that I was getting surgery. “I am trans,”
I wrote to them. “Not intellectually, or
partially, or aesthetically.”
My confession implied that my iden-
tity was simple and fixed. That I had
been born in the wrong body. The truth
was something harder to explain: some
days, I felt like a man. On other days—
called “ma’am” and “she” and “Grace”—
my feelings of manhood seemed like
a child’s fantasy, as delusional as think-
ing I was a bird or a car.
The day after I wrote the e-mail, I
heard back from my father. “Thank you,”
he said. “We understand.” My mother
texted me soon after. “Good morning
sunshine,” she said. “Or should I say,
good morning sonshine.”
Son. The word made me nauseous,
filled me with shame. I had known that
the definitiveness of my announcement
would make my parents listen. But I
wished I could have written more, could
have let them into my confusion with-
out making them doubt my conviction.
I had made the choice to sacrifice nu-
ance for legibility.
M
y surgery took place at the begin-
ning of July, four months earlier
than expected. A slot opened up after a
last-minute cancellation. My friends had
planned to take care of me after the pro-
cedure, but I felt too guilty asking them
to take off work or change their plans in
time for the new date. I asked my par-
ents instead, even though the idea of
being in my family’s care filled me with
fear: I didn’t want to be reminded of my
childhood—my girlhood. Still, they came.
I couldn’t wait another four months.
We stayed in an Airbnb with a picket
fence. There were framed family pho-
tos all over the house: a white family
of four in pastel clothes. Parents, two
daughters. I stayed in one of the chil-
dren’s rooms, in a twin bed with a mono-
grammed pillow. On the day of the pro-
cedure, my father woke me up at 8 A.M.
“Morning, girlie,” he said, and I couldn’t
bring myself to correct him.
The drive to the hospital was eight
minutes. I turned on the radio, and
thought about asking him to turn
around. I wasn’t wearing a binder that
morning. I reached my hands under
my shirt and squeezed my breasts.
In the operating room, the nurses
laid me down on a crucifix-shaped table:
arms outstretched, legs spread. One
friend who had already been through
top surgery had warned me it would
feel sacrificial. I scanned the room for
red as they started to pump fentanyl
through the I.V. But everything was
white or gray plastic. I lifted my head.
The doctor asked what was wrong. I
was about to say, “Can you get me some-
thing red?” when I saw, in the lower
right-hand corner of my eye, five let-
ters—F-O-C-U-S—in bright-red font
across the bottom of the door.
“Why’s it say that?” I asked the nurse.
“So we focus.”
My spine got warm. I liquefied.
I woke up to someone saying “Cyrus.”
“You’re in recovery, Cyrus. You did
great. You’re all done.”
I was shivering a little.
“Can you call me Grace?” I said.
“Cyrus” was the name on my fluo-
rescent-green hospital bracelet, but
Grace was right under the surface. Vul-
nerable, wrapped up tight.
“You’re in recovery, Grace.” I smiled
and cried, asked where my parents were.
My voice sounded soft and high, a voice
I knew from a long time ago, waking
up groggy in the morning to my moth-
er’s knock on the door.
A
few weeks before surgery, I asked
a writer I admired how they know
when a book is finished. They responded
with a question: “When did you be-
lieve your name was Cyrus?”
The answer was never, or sometimes,
or not yet, or not fully. Conviction
comes in bursts, as does fraudulence.
Sometimes I say “Cyrus” out loud and
there’s a click of alignment. But Cyrus
is also tentative, a liberating gesture
that I always fear will be taken from
me when I’m yanked back to reality by
the “truth.” That I’m a girl, and a daugh-
ter, and that to claim anything else is
to lie. That I’m consigned to being a
liar forever.
The week before my surgery, my
friend sent me an e-mail with no sub-
ject line. It contained a Bible passage
about the Tower of Babel, which Earth’s
people built after travelling west to es-
cape a great deluge:
Come, let us build ourselves a city, with
a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that
we may make a name for ourselves; other-
wise we will be scattered over the face of the
whole earth.
The people wished to be known by
God, to reach up to the heavens and
become stars. God did not approve of
this hunger for recognition. And so he
flung the tower’s inhabitants across
the world. Before, everyone had spo-
ken a common language; from then
on, they could not understand one an-
other. This was called the confusion
of tongues.
In this story, the will to make a
name for oneself is full of ego, deserv-
ing of punishment. Some people still
believe this: that the will to rename
oneself is naïve at best, grandiose at
worst. That naming oneself is akin
to playing God. But what is the al-
ternative? To let other people play
God? To accept the constraints of a
given name, as if acceptance is always
humble?
Any name can be destroyed, can
destroy itself. I know myself only in-
sofar as I know that I will always sur-
prise myself, that “I” will collapse and
be scrambled whenever I think my
own structure is sound. Cyrus is a
sign, and he may not last. And, still,
I am him now. I need to be him now.
I choose to move toward something
like manhood—a concept in which
my belief flickers—because, for rea-
sons I still do not know, it makes me
feel closer to Earth, to everyone and
everything else in the dust.
