This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  “Like baseball players are dominant over baseball announcers?” said Poppy. “That seems kind of fair because they’re doing the actual playing.”

  “No, like men have power over women,” said Roo.

  “Men throughout history,” Penn amended, “have often wielded more power than women, in many ways, if not all, and generally speaking.”

  “They have?” Poppy: awed, openmouthed, incredulous.

  “Afraid so.”

  “Because there’s so many more of them?”

  “Of who?”

  “Males?”

  Penn laughed. “Only in this household.”

  “Then how are the men more powerful?”

  “Well, in this case what Mr. Mohan meant is that men have most of the jobs in sports, especially the ones that pay well, and that’s not fair, nor is it the rules, but that’s the case anyway, and it’s self-perpetuating. Do you know what that means?”

  Poppy shook her head.

  “It means the fact that that’s the way it is means that keeps being the way it is. It means when a little girl says she wants to be a baseball announcer when she grows up, someone tells her she can’t because there are no female baseball announcers, which means no one grows up to be one. And so on.”

  “What will I be when I grow up?” Poppy was still young enough—if maybe just barely—to think Penn had all the answers, so thoroughly had all the answers that he could see even the future.

  “Anything you want,” he said.

  “Will I be a boy job or a girl job?”

  “You should be a boy job,” said Roo. “They pay better.”

  “Why?” said Poppy.

  “The hedge enemy.” Ben didn’t even look up.

  “Most jobs aren’t boy jobs or girl jobs,” said Penn. “Most jobs are open to either.”

  “But the boys get paid better for them?”

  “There’s a lot that breaks down about how the world … breaks down.” Penn was astonished, at once pleased and alarmed to find that gender inequality was news to this child. As usual, they had apparently done too good a job sheltering her from her world. “It’s true that men are often paid more than women, even for the same jobs. It’s true that jobs traditionally dominated by men pay more than jobs traditionally dominated by women. It’s also true that you can be whatever you work hard to be.”

  “No.” Poppy shook her head. They weren’t getting it. “When I get my job, whatever it is, will I get paid more, like a boy, or less, like a girl?”

  “It doesn’t really work at the individual level,” said Penn, “and it’s a bit more complicated than that, but—”

  “But if you went back to wearing pants,” said Roo, “you could retire ten years earlier.”

  Poppy stuck her tongue out at Roo and went back to her homework, but the conversation lingered for all of them.

  * * *

  She knocked on her parents’ door that night.

  “What’s up, sweetie?” Rosie and Penn were in bed reading. “Can’t sleep?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “I’m worried about what to be when I grow up.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that tonight,” said Rosie.

  “It’s for school.”

  “Pick something. They won’t hold you to it.”

  Poppy shook her head unhappily. “And I’m worried about who I’ll be when I grow up. A boy or a girl.”

  Rosie closed her book. “You can be whichever one you want,” she said carefully.

  “It’s expensive to be a girl.”

  “It is?”

  “Because of the hegemony. Boys make more money than girls.”

  Rosie’s expression split the difference between impressed and concerned. “I make more money than Daddy.”

  “You do?”

  Her parents both nodded.

  “But it’s because you do a boy job.”

  “Doctor’s not a boy job.” Rosie thought about the lopsided politics of her practice. No one was asking James to make breakfast.

  “And you have to spend a lot of money on makeup if you’re a girl and buy lots of shoes and hair stuff.”

  “None of that’s a requirement.” Rosie owned four pairs of shoes: winter, summer, exercise, and fancy. “Remember when we said you could bake cakes and play with dolls and have pink things, and that did not make you a girl?”

  She remembered.

  “Neither does makeup and lots of shoes.”

  “Are you…” Penn wasn’t sure how to put it. “You can’t determine your gender identity or your career identity or your anything identity based on what’s going to make you the most money. You shouldn’t not be a girl because you could make more money as a boy.”

  “And you shouldn’t stay a girl,” Rosie said, “if you think you are or want to be,” she hesitated, “or could be a boy.”

  “And if you want to be a baseball announcer,” Penn added quickly, “then that’s what you’ll be.”

  Poppy dug her toes into the carpet. “I said I wanted to be a baseball announcer, but really I want to be a scientist.”

  “What kind of scientist?” Rosie tried to sound nonchalant instead of overjoyed.

  “I think I want to study fish,” Poppy said shyly, “but a fish scientist is called an ichthyologist. And when we were researching our jobs in the library, I was looking up ichthyologist, and Marnie Alison said ‘icky-ologist’ and everyone laughed, so when we had to tell about our job to the whole class, I said baseball announcer instead, but then Jake was a jerk about it, so now I don’t know what to be.”

  Rosie couldn’t decide where to focus first: her daughter’s apparent interest in science, which was thrilling, her familiarity with the word “ichthyology,” which was news, her concern with the hegemony, which warranted further discussion for sure but, it being already past her bedtime, perhaps another night, or the fact that her classmates were bullying her about her career choices and who knew what else. She settled on, “Ichthyologist? Is that like marine biology?”

  “Sort of, but better. Marine biologists have to do everyone who lives in the ocean. Ichthyologists get to focus on just fish. Did you know,” here her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper even though it was just the three of them, “lots of fish switch genders?”

  Her parents had no idea.

  “They switch or they’re both. Both at once, or first one then the other. Clown fish all start as boys, but some of them become girls later. Parrot fish are all girls, so then one of them has to become a boy—she changes color and everything—but then if another boy comes along, she might go back to being a girl again. Cuttlefish can split themselves down the middle so all the girls on one side can flirt with his boy half, and all the guys on the other side see his girl half so they don’t feel threatened.”

  Her parents’ eyes were wide, their mouths half open and almost, but not quite, smiling, a look she felt she occasioned from them too often. But she was too excited to stop.

  “But the best ones are the Hamlet fish. They’re called simultaneous hermaphrodites. That means Hamlet fish are both at once. When two of them get together to … you know … the first one lays eggs like a girl and the second one fertilizes them like a boy, but then, the second one lays eggs like a girl and the first one fertilizes them like a boy. Everyone’s both. They take turns. Isn’t that amazing?”

  It was. Rosie knew this moment from raising four other children to this point already, the one where suddenly your kids know more than you do about something they’ve discovered all on their own, something real and important not just cartoons or video games. Amazing was exactly what it was.

  “Ichthyologist sounds like a wonderful job,” Rosie said. “Why wouldn’t you write about all of this?”

  “I can’t write about any of this. Obviously.” It wasn’t just ichthyology, apparently, about which Poppy knew more than her mother. “Marnie Alison’s already making fun of me, and she doesn’t even know about t
he transgender fish.”

  * * *

  Penn waited until he heard Poppy’s turret door close. “Could be?”

  “Could be what?”

  “She shouldn’t stay a girl if she could be a boy?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “Okay,” said Rosie. “That’s what I meant.”

  “You think she should change back?”

  “She hasn’t changed forward. She hasn’t changed at all.”

  “She’s changed completely.”

  “Okay. She’s changed some. But some she hasn’t. She’s done nothing yet that can’t be undone. She needs to know she can reverse course if she wants to.”

  “Reverse course?” He said it like she’d recommended burying Poppy in sand up to her ears and leaving her in the desert for three days. He said it like she’d offered their youngest heroin as a midnight snack. “You think it would be easier if she’d just be Claude?”

  “I don’t think it,” Rosie said gently. “It would be. It would be easier. Maybe we put to bed long ago the idea that easier was the goal. Maybe when easier is a matter of degrees like these, it doesn’t even count. But no question, by anyone’s definition, it would be easier.” She considered their last New Year’s Eve in Madison when they’d decided “easy” wasn’t on their wish list. She considered how much harder “hard” had gotten in the years since then.

  “How can you think Claude would be easier?”

  “Well, for starters, she’s right: she’d probably make a lot more money.”

  “Is that what you’re—”

  “Jesus, Penn, of course that’s not what I’m worried about. It’s. Her. Penis. Are you daft? It’s her penis!”

  “But puberty blockers—”

  “Are not the perfect miracle you imagine them to be.”

  “They are though.” Penn got out of bed to kneel on the floor in front her like he was going to propose. “They are. These kids on blockers? You should read their stories.”

  “No, you should stop reading their stories.”

  He’d known that was what she would say, so he kept going. She was the doctor, but he was the reader, and he knew things too. “The blockers are effective. They’re safe—”

  “How do you know they’re safe?”

  “Mr. Tongo said—”

  “Mr. Tongo is not a doctor. Mr. Tongo has not read all the studies.” She closed her eyes. “And even if he had, the research isn’t reliable. It’s incomplete. They’ve only been doing this treatment for a few years in this country, so there are no long-term studies. It’s biased and unrigorous—”

  “How can it be—”

  “Because when a little girl wants to wear jeans and play soccer, her parents are thrilled, but when a little boy wants to wear a dress and play dolls, his parents send him to therapy and enroll him in a study. We just don’t know yet the long-term effects on these kids of puberty suppression.”

  “But they know the effect on those other kids, right? The precocious ones? And they’re fine.”

  Rosie’s fingers squeezed and unclenched, squeezed and unclenched under the covers. “The drug itself seems safe, but that’s only some of the picture. Those kids restart puberty in the normal way at the normal time. Here, you’re stopping the body’s natural inclination—”

  “But Poppy’s body is wrong. It’s always been wrong.”

  “It’s not that simple, Penn. This is the problem. You’re oversimplifying.”

  She understood his point because it was not logical. She understood because once she’d decided they had to leave Wisconsin, no amount of reason from her husband or misery from her eldest child or evidence from her mother or history at her hospital or love for her life just the way it was made any difference. On the way home from the ER after those unspeakable hours with Jane Doe, she had watched the sun come up and understood already that the only way forward was deeper. She saw this with her patients all the time. Through weeks of symptoms and months of tests, they didn’t want to believe it was what it was. But once they accepted, deeper was their only way forward too. They stayed up all night doing advanced medical research they couldn’t begin to understand. They joined support groups and read books and bought T-shirts and ran 5Ks. They rededicated their lives to what they’d rejected utterly only days before. And then when their story strayed from that path—the cure didn’t work, the cure worked too well, the indicators indicated something else instead—they found themselves more lost than ever. The wood was dark indeed, perilous and terrifying, but Penn could see a way through. She didn’t want to bar that path to him. But she wasn’t sure that around the bend up ahead, it didn’t plunge into the sea.

  Rosie took a deep breath and tried again. “You’re stopping everything, not just her turning into a teenage boy. I understand why you don’t want her to grow chest hair, but it’s more than that. It’s slowing her growth—right now she’s supposed to be getting taller, her bones denser, longer, stronger, and if you stop the hormones, that won’t happen. It could impinge on her maturation, mental and emotional as well as physical. Hormones contribute to intelligence and creativity, critical thinking, abstract analysis. We might be taking that away from her. Aggie and Natalie and Kim are going to start to turn into young women, Penn. They’ll start to look older and more mature, but they’ll also start to act older and more mature. It’s not just that they’ll have breasts and she’ll stay flat. They’ll have crushes on classmates and anger at authority figures and moodiness at home—”

  “Yeah, it’d be a real bummer to miss that.”

  “You want to halt her puberty so you don’t have to deal with her foul moods?”

  “Of course not. I was kidding.”

  She knew he was. She just didn’t think he was funny. Or she knew he thought he was funny, but she also knew he wasn’t entirely kidding. Or somewhere in between those things. Just because she couldn’t pinpoint his objection didn’t mean she couldn’t disagree with it. Poppy or Claude, Poppy and Claude, needed to go through the part where they hated their family and no one understood them. They had to go through the part where they questioned who they were and where they came from and all they’d ever been told and taken for granted. They had to fall in love for a week and then get their heart broken over the weekend and then fall in love again on Monday. Whichever one, Poppy or Claude, he or she couldn’t stay a little girl forever.

  Penn raised himself from his knees to sit next to her on the bed and hold both her hands in his. They were switching roles here, she could see. It was like the Changing of the Guard. For no other reason than it was time, she was going to be the crazy one for a while and he got to be the calm one. “Puberty is one thing”—his voice was irritatingly reasonable—“but she shouldn’t have to hate her body.”

  “She’s going to be a woman,” said Rosie. “She should get used to it.”

  “Yes, ha-ha, but seriously—”

  “No, seriously.” Rosie could hear herself shrieking but could think of nothing to do about it. “You think Poppy will be the only kid to feel betrayed by her body when it goes through puberty? All teenagers feel betrayed by their bodies when they go through puberty. You think Poppy would be the only woman to hate the way she looks? All women hate the way they look. Her body may not be immutable, but it’s not like changing the water filter. The drugs, other drugs, yet more drugs, a lifetime of drugs, the surgeries, the stuff that can’t be made whole regardless of surgery, these things are huge. These things are scary. These things are mysteries, unpredictable, uncertain. There are strange effects, side effects, unintended effects. There are hard decisions that can never be unmade. There are hard decisions she’s not old enough to make. There are decisions that just shouldn’t be made for you by your parents. If she is a girl, if deep inside this is her truth, if she needs this, if she wants this, if she must, if she’s sure, then yes, of course yes, thank God yes, we will support her and help her and do all we can and much we can�
��t yet but will have to figure out, as we have already, as we do for all our children. But easier? It would be easier for her to be a boy. So if she’s questioning, if she’s on the fence, this is information she should have.”

  It wasn’t that Penn didn’t understand these things. It was that he didn’t care. The blockers were like magic, like a child’s answer to a child’s prayer: just make it stop, just turn it off. Blocked kids did not turn into people they were not, did not hide, did not despair, did not stand in the sand pleading with the sea, endeavoring to stop the tides. They did not poison or mangle their bodies. They did not choose death instead. Claude had been a boy, had had a penis, would grow into a man, but Poppy did not have to. Blockers meant Poppy’s time of being Claude was all behind her, never to resurface. She could stay child-Poppy until she could become adult-Poppy, Poppy-entire. Penn understood all of Rosie’s careful doctor points. But they were nothing compared to the capacity of magic.

  “Has she shown any signs at all”—Penn made sure not to sound condescending—“that she might want to go back?”

  “I don’t know how she’d know.” Rosie answered a different question. “She can’t even remember Claude. Poppy is what’s normal. And not just Poppy, Poppy with a penis. That penis is as unremarkable to her as her elbow. For something that’s the focus of all that’s coming and the zenith of the trouble here, she doesn’t give it a second thought. It doesn’t signify maleness to her. And you know what else?”

  “What?”

  “Soon it’s going to be something north of unremarkable. It’s going to start feeling better and better. It’s going to be fun to play with. And that’s hers too. I don’t want her to feel bad about it. And I don’t want to take it away.”

  “She’s a girl, Rosie. She is. Look at her. Listen to her. She’s not a fish. She can’t be both. She doesn’t have to take turns. Or maybe she’s that other kind of fish she told us about. At first she was male, but then she transformed—her colors changed, her patterns, her biology, her roles and relationships, everything. Whatever she used to be, now she’s female. Fully female.”