I Am Transgender! Oops, What Is Your Return Policy?

Billy Bickers had grown up male, identified as male, thought and pursued as male, but had been urged by his parents – straight as arrows but susceptible to liberal cant and persuaded to consider the alternative.  

“Women have been oppressed for centuries”, they told the young Billy.  “Put upon, harassed, abused, and neglected.  Who would want to be a woman, you might ask? But the times are changing.  Femalehood has a new, righteous agenda.  To fulfill your political destiny and your moral obligation to society, you should consider an alternate sexual identity”. 

Now, this was very confusing to young Billy, delirious when he smelled the light, feminine scent of Nancy Booth in the eighth grade, followed her up and down the stairs at school, sent her notes and inviting glances, and was finally in heaven when she took him into the woods behind the golf course and got naked. 

He was too young to know what was what, and Nancy was precocious way beyond her years, so the sand trap was uneventful, discouraging and frustrating for Nancy and simply befuddling to Billy; but it had epiphanic qualities.  As young as he was, he knew then that someday his time would come, that women would be revealed.

The sexual allure of women became irresistible once he hit his early adolescence.  It was an obsession, filling every waking and dreaming moment.  Breasts, breath, lips, and hot, wet sex were his raison d’etre, his clarion call to arms, and his purpose in life.  When he first had sex with an ingenue from a proper women’s college who had, like him, unquenchable sexual passions, he felt that finally he had come into his own.  This was to be his life, his purpose, and its meaning. 

On second thought, of course, how could a scholar, a precocious interpreter of Francois Villon, a budding Medieval scholar of French literature, have so pedestrian, and common aspirations?  And his mother was the first to remind him of his patrimony – son of intellectual scions and liberal standouts.  

His grandfather, he was reminded, was in the armies of Samuel Gompers and the women textile workers.  His grandmother was at the barricades of Carnegie Steel, wounded by Frick’s thugs, as they fired on demonstrators gathered to protest inhuman working conditions; and his own parents were the first to march for civil rights, against the glass ceiling, and against heterosexual hegemony.

This last, his mother insisted, was the core of the progressive revolution.  Income redistribution, civil rights acts, ending coal emissions were nothing compared to the re-ordering of human sexuality.  Since the Paleolithic and the evolution of the first intelligent human beings, the male-female heterosexual order had been predominant.  No, it had been restrictively enforced and arbitrarily endorsed.  Men – and especially women – had been forced into an artificial illogical template – round holes into which square pegs had been fit.  An illogical, presumptuous, and ignorant assumption of sexual reality.

Finally the penumbra had cleared, the oppression lifted, and men and women were free to choose their sexuality.  The gender spectrum was the new reality,  and choose at will, settle with only what feels best.

Betty Colonna was a special friend of Billy’s parents.  She had been a Navy Seal, an officer in the team that assassinated Bin Laden, had played football under Bear Bryant at Alabama, and had received both the Bronze and Silver Stars.  Yet she had always felt uncomfortable as Barton Colonna, terribly attracted to her macho teammates, unable to express her desires, and woefully frustrated even in Pakistan before the assault on the compound, 

 “I want him”, she thought deeply and secretively about Lance Billings, leader of the mission, a man of quiet bravado and ineffable masculinity.  And so it was that Barton became Betty.  The medals and awards still were on the walls, but more as history than currency.  Betty never denied her machismo in the days of the Seals and Bin Laden.  The photographs were simply reminders of a distant past.

In any case Billy’s parents hoped that Betty would be an important role model for Billy.  Not that they expected any such radical changes, but that he (Betty) would serve as perhaps the most important icon in the progressive struggle.

Billy could only wonder who this freak delicately sipping tea in the parlor really was.   There was no hiding his five o’clock shadow, his Navy tattoos, and the thick, muscular legs above high heels.  His voice was deep and affected, but without the fluted, high notes of Billy’s Aunt Millie, the exotic, melodramatic, operatic diva of Easter dinners, he sounded no different from a truck driver or mess sergeant.

Betty/Baron was more suited to Barnum & Bailey than to a Washington drawing room; but there he/she was, coddled and displayed by Billy’s parents like a flag over the Alamo.  They did not want to push Billy over the gender edge – that would ultimately be his choice – but how could an American wartime hero fail to impress.  If this divine, macho, god of a man could reject his male, white supremacy and turn to the enlightened, historically relevant, future human species, why shouldn’t Billy?

As hard as it was for his parents to accept that they would never be biological grandparents, that the Bickers line would stop here and now, their political convictions always prevailed.  If they were adoptive grandparents to the in vitro offspring of their son and his/her partner, so much the better and for the world.  Genetic determination of genealogy and family history was now irrelevant.  One not only chose one’s sexuality, but one’s own family configuration.

Billy considered himself lucky.  A number of his friends with whom he played baseball after school were forced into tutus and frilly dresses when they got home. Their parents, even more doctrinaire than his, were, in the progressive lexicon, ‘directional’.  They would never be authoritarian about sexuality but would be encouraging of ‘choice’.  In other words although they thought masculinity to be noxious and anti-social and although they would encourage their sons to find their feminine side and even go over to it, far be it from them to insist. Billy had never been dressed in crinoline and lace.

Billy would have turned out to be a skirt-chaser, Lothario, Casanova, and Don Juan even if his parents had not intervened. Masculinity – the pursuit of women – was simply hardwired into his YY genome.  He never even considered the options.  He was never biased or prejudiced – live and let live was as good a maxim as any – but he could never imagine the horrible, painful twists of being to become other than what he was.

‘One and done’, he said, reflecting on his sexual life and that of others.  He was not one for Biblical exegesis and interpretation, psycho-social determinism, or bio-physiological recombination. ‘Male or female’, he said, “and be done with it”.

Playing ‘Monopoly’–Why This Capitalist Tool Is More Popular Than Ever

Denise Flanders was a member of the Washington DC Progressive Alliance, a group of like-minded people who aggressively pursued and promoted a radical social agenda.  Theirs was a big tent, open to all comers, and it was soon filled with advocates against global warming and for the causes of oppressed minorities, the ascendency of women in all spheres of American life, the redistribution of America’s wealth, and an inclusive gender spectrum.  Her particular fix was wealth and the concentration of it within the elitist, white cadres of the One Percent.

Such concentration of wealth was morally wrong, she felt, and all institutions, laws, and regulations which promoted or defended it should be dismantled and a new, fair system of wealth sharing should be created in its place.  No longer would there be the impenetrable bastions of Wall Street, de facto secret societies more secretive then Skull and Bones and cabals of financiers plotting to pillage the poor for private profit. 

When pressed on how this would be done, Denise was quick to answer “Redistributive taxes on the wealthy; punitive restrictions on capital investments, ownership, financial instruments; transparent accounting and reporting; limits on corporate salaries; and benefit packages no more generous than those offered to workers”.

How the board game Monopoly got into the basement closet Denise could not remember, probably in the remnants box, the grab bag of incidentals which in a frustrated moment, she had simply scooped up; and the tinker toys, dolls, purses, stuffed animals, and games that had never been given away were shoved into the back of the rental van and forgotten; but which reappeared again when her eight year old twins found it, loved it, and played it every afternoon after school.  The basement was their place – even children needed a secure refuge – and unless Denise heard a ruckus, they were left alone.  “Clean up!”, a carryover from pre-school, and shouted down the stairs from the kitchen, was all that was needed for the twins to carefully replace the shoe, the race car, the thimble, and the iron in their compartment; to shuffle and neatly order the deck of deeds, the miniature houses and hotels, and the Do Not Pass Go and Get Out of Jail Free cards. 

It was a while before Denise saw what her well-behaved children were doing in the basement, and she was appalled – not at what the twins were doing (they were just children after all) but that she had not destroyed and burned the vile thing before it ever saw the light of a Washington day.  How could she have been so stupid and so careless!

“Mommy would rather you not play that game, dears”, Denise said as calmly but as confidently as possible.

“But why”, Lizbeth whined.  “We like to play it”.

“It isn’t…”; and here Denise stopped to carefully choose her words.  How could she convey to eight year olds the absolute inappropriateness of a game which glorified capitalism, greed, and ambition.  “Well”, she said, “it’s, well, inappropriate”.

“What’s that mean?”, asked Jack; and for the first time in a long while Denise was tongue-tied.  She was used to using words like ‘inappropriate, inclusive, diverse, systemic, access, social justice’ and not having to explain what they meant.  She had taken a course on Deconstruction at Brown and remembered how at first she bridled at the invented words of Derrida and Lacan, but then elided quite nicely into their prose.  Her term papers, unintelligible to all but those few students who had persisted with Bernstein’s course, Meaning, Un-Meaning, And Invention – The New Language Of Social Dissection, won praise and high marks.  Bernstein himself offered to write her a recommendation for admission to Duke for graduate study in semiotics.

How, then, to explain the exploitative capitalist system – so embodied in Monopoly and so hated everywhere else – to her young children?  “Try to find something else to do, please”.  Denise, in keeping with her political philosophy, tried to be just as inclusive, respectful, and supportive of her children as she was of black people and abused women, and never issued ultimatums or gave orders; so the children quite naturally continued to play; and play with gusto they did.  They howled with delight when one of them was sent off, yipped with delight when they built another hotel or send the other into bankruptcy.  There was a thrill to the game that the Parker Brothers, who sold it on a commercial scale beginning in 1933, knew well.  After all 1933 was a year in the heart of the Great Depression and the game still sold brilliantly.  Far from a hated ‘capitalist tool’ as Denise was fond of saying, adults and children from the Dust Bowl to the hollers of West Virginia loved it. 

“How could that be?”, wondered Denise, overlooking the thrill of competition, winning, acquisition, and victory – human nature, and the imperishable desire to be on top.  Ironically the earliest known version of Monopoly, known as The Landlord's Game, was designed and first patented in 1904.  Its designer Elizabeth Magie  a follower of Henry George, originally intended the game to illustrate the economic consequences of Georgist progressive ideas based on the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value derived from land should belong equally to all members of society.  The poor man would turn over in his grave if he had seen how the Parker Bros. had perverted Magie’s original, reasonable, sane notions.

Be that as it may, Lizbeth and Jack played the game at every turn, and every day Denise could hear their yips and shouts and happy shrieks.  Perhaps it was time to revisit George, progressive socialism, and anti-capitalism and to deter the twins from playing such an insidious, morally corrosive game.

Yet every time she tried to introduce a core concept of socialist progressivism – sharing of wealth, cooperation and collaboration, and a flat, classless, non-competitive society, she was met by bored, impatient faces.  “Just let us play, Mommy”, Jack said. “Don’t you talk about that stuff at work?”

On Saturday afternoons, the children heard their mother and her political tea party friends reliving the lives of George, Gompers, La Follette, Henry Wallace, Susan B. Anthony, and Upton Sinclair and shouting about Black Lives Matter, the glass ceiling, the pack of Wall Street wolves, the rightness of Noam Chomsky, and the socialist ideals of farmworkers.

“Just take it away”, they heard one woman say to their mother.  “Give no quarter, especially to your own children”.  The woman in question had also had a ‘Monopoly experience’ but doused it in lighter fluid, tossed it on the Weber grill, and watched it incinerate as her children yelled and cried. 

It didn’t surprise Denise that the children of wealthy Republican families were members of a Monopoly Club, but she was dismayed to learn that there were children from families like hers – committed, dyed-in-the-wool progressive Democrats – who were almost as numerous.  “Oh yes”, said the After-School Activities Supervisor, “the children love it.  It is more popular than Dungeons and Dragons ever was.”

The Supervisor went on to praise the game.  “It teaches the children fundamental economic principles”, she said, “and no matter what your political persuasion, knowing how to navigate the complex world of supply and demand is important”. 

Denise couldn’t believe her ears – this drivel, this uniformed, retrograde nonsense coming from someone in charge of children! “As much as we try to limit the competition and bullying on the playground”, the Supervisor went on, “we can’t.  Children will always be children.

“Some degree of girly bitching and little boy machismo will always be there.  Oops, I shouldn’t be saying all this”, the Supervisor giggled. “So better they get it out around a board game.”

Some version of Monopoly had been around for over a hundred years, Denise unhappily thought.  What does that mean?  It was popular during the Robber Baron brutally exploitative era of laissez faire capitalism, during the Depression, during the high-flying Eighties, the hippy Sixties, and now in the most progressive era the country has known since the 30s.  Is there something I am missing?  Would life always be buying and selling?  Haven’t we progressed at all?

The progressive meme was that progress was indeed possible, that there was a Utopia, a light at the end of the tunnel; and the fact that the world was as pathetically competitive and aggressively capitalist was because of too little progressive investment. Human nature has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.

The Monopoly game was never fully retired.  It got put away as other interests intervened; but it was pulled out of the toybox by the twins in late childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. It had perennial appeal, she now knew, because buying and selling, competitive advantage, supply and demand, advantage and disadvantage, victory and defeat were indeed hardwired, ineluctable, and permanent.

So in the end, Monopoly was what derailed her progressive express.  Her heart was simply not in the panoply of liberal causes.  The big, diverse, inclusive tent, had gotten overcrowded and stuffy – bad air, blandishments, and cheerful, playful optimism.  It was time to leave, and leave she did, and never looked back.

‘I Guess That Means There’s No Easter Bunny’–The Debunking Of Santa Claus, Faith, And The Persistent Fiction Of Truth

Billy Tompkins was beginning to have doubts about the existence of Santa Claus.   The reindeer on the roof, the chimney, the milk and cookies, presents and the lump of coal, were all suspect.  He was convinced that Santa Claus was just a fairy tale character and that the fabulist tales of a Nordic genie in a flying sled who brought toys to all the children in the world were simply not believable.  Yet, being still a child and not yet completely trusting his instincts and logic; and still trusting his parents for all truth, he finally asked his father the  question.  “Is there really a Santa Claus?”

“What do you think”, his father replied, hoping to defer the inevitable; but his son, coming into his own and increasingly confident of his judgments, said that he no longer believed, choosing the right phrasing to suggest that the fiction of Santa Claus had been very nice while it lasted, but that was over with, no hard feelings, and no lying implied.

So, both father and son evaded the issue nicely and had a happy Christmas.

Most children would have left it at that.  Santa Claus was no different from talking rabbits, and by the time they had moved from fairy tales to puzzles and dinosaurs, little ones were unconcerned about the disconnect. 

Billy was different, however, smarter than most, precocious in a way that gave his parents pause.  He saw through things more quickly than other children, never bought the white lies his mother and father told to keep him from unpleasant family secrets, questionable whereabouts, or why Mommy and Daddy were fighting. He never challenged his parents but had a way of knitting his brows that forced them to backtrack, insert a bit of truth here and there, cobble over the rough patches to keep him innocent.

Father Brophy and the nuns in Sunday school were particularly big on lies and deception, and when prompting a child before first confession, they always mentioned lying.  A venial sin, it might be, they warned, but still a painful sin against our Lord.  They never bothered to parse and disaggregate the concept – when was a lie only a fairy tale; what were the consequences of untruth; and why did everyone seem to lie – for they assumed that young children were not yet ready for Thomas Aquinas and his dispelling of heresy.

Billy always raised his hand to ask Sister Mary Joseph to explain what she meant and always put her on the spot.  “There is no Santa Claus”, he began, “so my parents lied to me for eight years”.

The nun had never been confronted with such a question, and being from the strict, disciplinarian Carmelite order, thought it insolent.  Nevertheless she hemmed and hawed, got herself tangled in semantics and morality, and barked at the boy, “That was a fairy tale, not a lie”. 

But Billy was persistent.  If his parents had made up a story, deliberately avoided the truth, perpetuated a myth, and insisted on its veracity long after Billy reasoned the facts on his own, why were they not liars? 

“Children are not adults”, the nun snapped, “and parents know what’s best for them.  And besides”, she added somewhat conciliatorily, “hasn’t  Santa Claus been good to you?”.

The Santa Claus conundrum – fantasy, lie, or conspiratorial strategy – has been the subject of serious inquiry. Toby Young writing in The Telegraph admits that he like most parents appreciate the few weeks of added discipline the Santa Claus myth confers:

As Christmas approaches, I can control my children by telling them that Santa will give them a lump of coal if they don’t behave better. Five-year-old Charlie once asked how Father Christmas would know if he’d been naughty and I pointed to the motion detector on the kitchen ceiling that’s connected to the burglar alarm and told him it was Santa’s CCTV.

“Every time the little red light goes on, that means he’s watching you,” I said.

His table manners improved significantly after that.

Billy’s parents had indeed looked forward to the Christmas Season for exactly this reason – disciplinary duties would be shared with Santa Claus; and already the Church angle was right around the corner.  Being good was counselled not just because it was the the right, responsible thing to do, but because someone was watching.  Now Santa, very soon God.

Discipline and family order aside, says journalist Young, this elision of fantasy and religion is the very foundation of Christian belief. If a child can believe in a superior, all knowing being – Santa Claus ‘knows when (all children) are sleeping, and when they (all children) are awake, and whether they have been bad or good – then it is but a short step to the Almighty.  Santa Claus paves the way for religion. 

The obverse is also true. Why can one so easily encourage belief in Santa Claus but without hesitation dismiss the existence of God? asks Young. If you can’t prove that God exists, then for all intents and purposes he doesn’t, a rational, logical, and persuasive argument; but if you have been prepped for fantastical belief by the wonders of Father Christmas, then devotion is not far behind.  

Atheists who celebrate the ‘tradition’ of Christmas, Santa Claus, his sleigh, and his reindeer, are denying their disbelief and unwittingly greasing the wheels for faith.

Such traditionalism among atheists, suggests Young, is a sign of their undeniable belief. Few parents, atheist or faithful, can deny the almost spiritual innocence and beauty of the young child, and this belies their dismissal of God.

I might talk about the importance of encouraging children to engage in fantasy, of allowing their imaginations to roam beyond the world of sense and sight, and quote that famous editorial in the New York Sun pointing out how dreary a wholly rational childhood would be: "The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished."

There is something very appealing about a reindeer-drawn sleigh coursing through the starry night, alighting on rooftops while Santa comes down the chimney to give presents to little girls and boys. Whether a Jungian psycho-mystical link to the past, the magic of myth described by Joseph Campbell, or simply a desire for God, Santa Claus is not only for children.

Happy myths prepare children for religious belief and consolidate the more conscious and deliberate conclusions which lead to it.  Hinduism, an esoteric, intellectual religion with a subtle cosmology, has needed the Ramayana, the epic battles of Siva and the Sri Lankan monkey gods, and the exploits of its heroes to give it popular appeal.  The myths of the Old Testament are equally fundamental and supportive of belief.   The Battle of Jericho, the parting of the Red Sea, the Flood, and Armageddon itself are mythical devices created to assure Jewish solidarity and undivided belief.

In the New Testament the story of the Nativity is an equally fanciful but compelling one.  A woman leading a rough life as a carpenter’s wife in Palestine gets pregnant.  It is a woman’s lot in life, so although she and her husband live in poverty with barely a roof over their head and not a lot to eat, she is resigned to her fate.  Then the Angel Gabriel tells her that despite the penury, hard and unpromising life of the past, things will be different from now on.  The child will be special and worth the nine months of discomfort and difficulty.  In fact, he is God.

How different is this from the belief in Santa Claus? Both prepare children for similar stories of resurrection, miracles, rapture, and life everlasting in a blissful paradise.

Billy’s world collapsed when he finally realized that if there were no Santa Claus, then there could be no Easter Bunny; nor Hansel and Gretel, The Three Bears, and Little Red Riding Hood.  This was not the catastrophe, tragic loss of innocence, and fall from grace that it might seem.

The newly rational and cognitive Billy understood the nature of fantasy, how there were really no monsters under the bed, and how in fact there could be two parallel, equal realities; but the damage had been done.  Despite the relegation of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny to history and the deconstruction of The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, there in fact might be, just might be something else besides this.

As an adult Billy was more a rationalist than a believer, although at times the ‘Santa Claus Syndrome’ kicked in and he went to church.  More than anything, however, he was surprised at the constant anger at supposed lies, misstatements, and untruths by politicians. Hadn’t people learned from Santa Claus? It didn’t take the likes of Browning, Kurasawa, or Durrell to confirm what everyone knows – there is no such thing as truth or fact.  Everything is fungible and subject to interpretation.  

From the Old Testament to the New, from historical interpretation to myth-making, from credulity and the New Age, from settled science and scientific ‘fact’ to Ptolemy, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein; from religious ecstasy to atheistic lists, there is neither anything new under the sun, nor anything permanent.  Andy Warhol was more right than he imagined.  Not only is everyone famous for fifteen minutes, but that nothing lasts longer than that, nor has as little importance than a cinder in a grate.

Billy’s children believed in Santa Claus and he encouraged it.  He told them stories of Santa’s sleigh, his reindeers, his bag of toys, chimneys, his vigilance, and his absolute, universal presence.  God would come soon enough