Carl’s Jr.

It’s a strange thing to realize that I spent half my life trying not to be myself. It’s not about gender, though it is about that: I am more like the person I was as a child, now, than I was before my transition. It’s not that I’m more childish (I hope) but that my interests, my personality, seem like a natural and direct evolution of that kid. 

What was I like, as a kid? What did I like? I read a lot. I was quiet and shy and morbidly sensitive. I was said to be good with younger kids, and I enjoyed being around them. I was deeply religious, prayed all the time, aspired to sainthood. I didn’t enjoy most kids my age, but I typically had one Best Friend that I loved with insane proto-romantic passion. Swing with me at recess one time and I would sit gazing at the sunset and writing a poem about how it was the exact color of your hair. 

Small, quiet, private passions, undertaken with bizarre vehemence: That was my deal, as a kid, and it still is. I meditate rather than pray, I have a spouse rather than a Best Friend, I take care of my own kid rather than someone else’s. But I am recognizably the same person I was back then. The person I tried to be as a young adult wasn’t. 

Another thing about me, as a kid: I really loved learning about science. This got beaten out of me by my middle-school science education, and specifically by one George Waters (his real name, which I use purely out of spite). He was an old man then, and he is probably dead now, but I will speak ill of him nonetheless, because he printed out spreadsheets, for each member of the class, and made us each fill in our precise grades on every single assignment and test, and then average them out to find our grades in his class, and he did this, reader, every week. 

He graded you on how well you kept the spreadsheet. If you lost track of one assignment, in the rush of your ordinary life, or if you did the math even slightly wrong, you were fucked mathematically for the rest of the semester, and if your math was even slightly different than the math of George Waters, your class grade would go down, due to poor spreadsheet maintenance. I am bad at math, and I tended to lose track of paperwork even under the best of circumstances. You can guess how well things went for me. 

I sincerely hated George Waters, and (I’m glad to inform you) so did the adults he worked with, because my aunt taught at that same school, and she would come home with consolatory anecdotes for me, like how he’d printed out a multi-page guide on how to use the photocopier and made all the other teachers read it before they were allowed to use the thing, or how, when asked what he had done that weekend, he happily informed everyone that he had stayed home color-coding his socks.  

Now: In the name of self-awareness, I must also tell you that, as much Hell as I got from George Waters, I must have been a real little shitburger in my own right, because he also hated me. I know this because, when I got his class for the second semester in a row, he saw me sit down at my desk, looked me in the eye, and muttered, in horror, “oh, dear God.” 

Before George Waters, though, science seemed beautiful. In third grade, I used to carry around a copy of Cosmos — the Carl Sagan coffee-table book, which is not easy to carry — and I managed to read Contact and some of Sagan’s other non-fiction books by the time elementary school was up. I doubt I understood them, but the words definitely passed through my eyeballs and into my mind. I had a whole mythology around how Carl Sagan was secretly my biological father, or — alternately — that he would meet me and realize that I had great potential to contribute to the sciences, and thus adopt me, as Batman did Robin. 

In the alternate timeline where Carl Sagan raised me as his own, I was a boy. We will speak no more of it. But he definitely represented, to my mind, an array of possibilities. Billions and billions of them. 

If you listened to Carl Sagan, or Jane Goodall, or Stephen Hawking, or any of the other scientist-celebrities I liked back then, science was not about grades and spreadsheets. It was a way of being in love with the world — an invitation to contemplate creation and be awed. The universe vastly exceeded our ability to comprehend or even to imagine it. Scientists kept bringing back new bits of information from the edge of the void, making our picture of the world bigger and more detailed and more beautiful. 

Carl Sagan raised the most awe-inspiring possibility — life on other planets — and what he said about it has always stuck with me. Life on other planets would not look anything like life on this planet, Sagan said, because it had not evolved under the same conditions. The Star Trek vision of a bunch of human beings with minor cosmetic differences — pointy ears, wrinkled foreheads — described reality on this planet, not on other worlds. Alien life would be truly alien: Giant sentient balloons evolved to surf the atmosphere of gas planets like Jupiter, slime molds with their own civilizations. 

We did not need to search the universe for human beings like ourselves. We already existed, and we didn’t do a great job of recognizing or honoring each other’s humanity, even with all we had in common. We needed to look for beings who were different from us in every imaginable way, or in ways we could never imagine, and work to understand them on their own terms. We didn’t need to find more people, we needed to expand our concept of “person.” 

We still do.