None of the Above(13)

“Because Shylock’s the villain,” Natalie said. “He’s the one who gets punished in the end. Poor guy. He loses his ducats and his daughter, and they’re going to make him go to church every Sunday.”

“But was Shakespeare completely unsympathetic to Shylock’s situation?” Ms. MacDowell pressed.

“No,” Jessica said. “He gave Shylock the best monologue in the Western canon.” She stood up straight and used her actress voice. “‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands . . . ?’”

“Yeah, and the Christians in the play are kind of asshats,” Darren said. “They might win, but in the end they’re the hypocrites. I mean, Portia goes on and on about the quality of mercy, but at the end of the trial she’s just as vengeful as Shylock was.

“Plus,” he added, “in the allegory of the caskets, Shakespeare basically says that people should look past the appearance of things. ‘All that glisters is not gold,’ you know.”

Ms. MacDowell smiled at Darren, and looked around the circle at the rest of us. “What do you all think? Is Shakespeare subversively arguing for a world where, in the end, it doesn’t matter whether we’re black or white, Jew or Christian, man or woman?”

As my classmates piped up I stayed silent, my eyes riveted to the clock, my mind trying its hardest not to go there: maybe Shakespeare was preaching that it shouldn’t matter if you were a man or a woman.

But what if you were something in between?





CHAPTER 7


When I walked into the specialist’s office and saw all the old men sitting around, I was glad my dad had come, even if he couldn’t look me in the eye anymore.

Most of the magazines were about golf and cars, and all the little brochures by the windowsill advertised Viagra and drugs for people who peed their pants. I stuck out like a sore thumb. One of the other patients, a man with white hair and brows so bushy they almost flopped over his eyes, kept looking up from his magazine in my direction. I wanted to say something to him about how it wasn’t nice to stare, but I knew it would draw more attention, so I tried to focus on the paperwork I was supposed to fill out. On the top of the very first page it read:



NAME: SSN: DOB: SEX:



I stared at the posters on the walls, which were all colorful diagrams of kidneys and prostates. Each of them had cross sections of people cut in half—one male, with the penis sticking out like the mouth on a faucet. One female.

That was when I realized that life was a multiple-choice test with two answers: Male or Female. And I was None of the Above.

I was still staring at the posters on the wall when the nurse called me back to an exam room, where we waited for another fifteen minutes until a door swung open and a petite woman with black hair laced with gray came in. She reached out to shake my hand.

“I’m Dr. Cheng,” she said. “So nice to meet you. I’ve got Dr. Johnson’s notes, and I know that you must be totally overwhelmed by what she told you. Do you have any questions up front?”

I knew it was just her standard open-ended question to get me talking, but I almost started crying right then. Can you make me into a girl? I thought. Tell me that I don’t have balls.

What I said was:

“Am I really a hermaphrodite?”

She winced. “We don’t like to use that word anymore, because it isn’t really an accurate term and carries a lot of stigma.”

No kidding. I looked down at my blank form, and remembered the hours I spent memorizing the gender of certain nouns in French class. Hats and fish are masculine. Freedom and lemonade are feminine.

“So what am I?” I closed my eyes to remember the word my teacher had used when she told us that Russian actually had three genders. “Neuter?”

“Of course not,” she said. “When speaking about your condition, we use either the term intersex, or disorder of sex development—DSD for short.”

Like that was any better. When I didn’t say anything, Dr. Cheng rolled her chair and leaned in closer, as if she were moving in to look through a microscope, and I was the specimen. “Not that it matters what we call you, Kristin. You’re here because Dr. Johnson felt out of her depth and wanted you to talk to an expert about your condition and the types of treatment you could choose to have in the future.”

“Treatments?” my dad interjected. “What treatments?”

“Can you do uterus transplants?” I asked hopefully.

But Dr. Cheng shook her head. “Transplants aren’t really a viable option yet. I’m sorry.” She opened the folder she was carrying. Calmly, she explained to me that the ultrasound and blood tests had confirmed that I did not have a uterus, that my body was pumped to the gills with testosterone, and that my chromosomes were in fact XY. “All this suggests that you have something called androgen insensitivity syndrome, or AIS. Have you done any research on this yet?”

My dad nodded, but I shook my head. I’d been so stupid, burying my head in the sand.

“It’s actually a very common form of intersex,” Dr. Cheng said. She handed me an article that looked like it was written in Greek, and gave me a mini lecture on how embryos develop, using words like “mixed signals” and “defective receptors.” It was mostly gibberish, but the bottom line was that I was a car that came off the assembly line all messed up. I was a lemon.