Though I Hold You While We’re Dancing
by Max Christopher
part 1
“Hey, Cletus.”
“Yeah, Spike?”
“Looks like they gonna make me a woman.”
“The hell you say,” said Cletus.
“Says so right here,” said Spike. He slid the letter with the embossed official heading across the surface of the bar, then settled himself on the stool next to his friend. The bar smelled like wood polish. Country oldies twanged over the radio. Cletus kept the letter long enough to read it twice, then his gaze roamed over the Gender Affirmation Board heading and signatures. He rubbed the paper between thumb and forefinger.
Dick the bartender moseyed over. “Usual, Spike?” He set down a fresh bowl of salty trail mix.
“Double.”
Dick moseyed off.
“Well?” said Spike.
“Seems legit,” said Cletus. “But why you and not Bill Henkins’ boy?”
“Dunno,” said Spike. “Maybe they gonna switch him, too. Heard from Bill lately?” He took a handful of trail mix.
“Not a peep,” said Cletus. “That mine of his keeps him busy.”
Bill Henkins owned the largest transmiracite mine in two states. Transmiracite was the strange fat-soluble mineral that, when processed, made possible the most complete and successful sex reassignment procedure the world had ever known. “Be pretty funny if they used stuff from Bill’s own mine to switch over that boy of his.”
Dick set down Spike’s drink and drifted away. Spike bit into it like catching at the last branch between himself and hell.
“Steady, boy,” Cletus said. “Well, for now.” He chuckled.
“Damn it, Cletus, this is serious! I don’t want to be no woman! What’ll my kids think? What’ll they call me?”
“Well, you have been both mother and father to them since Emma passed.”
“You’re no help.” He peered into his glass. “Have to get all new clothes. I hate shopping for clothes. Emma did all that. Knew my size and what I like.”
“That what’s bothering you?”
“Part of it. I can hardly think straight.”
“Well, you’re halfway to a woman already, going by my wife,” said Cletus.
“You’re lucky to have Sylvia,” said Spike.
“Think she doesn’t tell me that twice a day and thrice on Sunday?”
“She’s knows you’ll forget,” said Spike. “Help me out, here, Cletus We were kids together. You know me better than anybody.”
“Thought I did.”
“You know I’m as much a man as you. Hell, you always did tell me I was the better fella.” His face brightened. “You get a letter like this and keep it to yourself?”
“No, sir. ’Course, I didn’t see today’s post yet.”
Dick ambled up. “You boys look serious.”
“Can I tell him?” said Cletus.
“Might as well,” Spike said morosely.
“Gender Affirmation Board wants to turn our Spike here into a woman.”
Dick’s eyebrows went up. “Not the Henkins boy?”
“We don’t know,” said Cletus. “But can you imagine Spike as a woman? Look at those shoulders. Is there still a pro female wrestling circuit?”
“They tell you why?” said Dick.
“Letter says something about an algorithm,” said Spike. “And fuzzy something.”
“Algorithms and fuzzy logic?” said Dick. “Those are reckoned to be problematic when used together.”
“Problematic for me,” said Spike. “I got to get out of this. My kids have been through enough. Hey, maybe I can appeal based on that. The pain of losing their mother, and now this.”
“When did Emma pass?” said Dick.
“Three years ago August.”
“Might be too long,” said Cletus. “They’ll figure the trauma will have passed long since.”
“They still mourn in quiet ways. Think I don’t notice.” Spike tilted his glass, found it empty.
“I’ll stand you to another,” said Cletus.
“Not right now.” He pushed the glass away. “They’re good kids. Maybe I should have remarried. But they were so attached to their mother.”
“Your Julie is the living image of her,” said Cletus.
“And after losing Emma, I couldn’t seem to work up interest in other women.”
“None?” said Dick.
“Didn’t see the point.”
“Try any dating websites?” said Cletus.
“Hell, no.”
Two men and a woman entered the bar and sat at a table. Dick went over with salty trail mix, took orders, came back. His hands worked with brisk competence, then he put the drinks on a tray and carried the tray one-handed to the table. The red bar towel in his hip pocket bobbed in the afternoon gloom.
“Makes it look easy,” said Cletus.
“Woman’s checking him out,” said Spike. “Nobody’d try to turn him into a woman. Transmiracite or no.”
Cletus said, “Hitting that transmiracite vein was the only good thing ever happened to Bill Henkins. That old coal mine was exhausted and then some. He was looking at receivership.”
“When did he strike that?”
“Must be four years,” said Cletus. “Around the time the news was full of stories about how good it was for sex changes.”
Dick was back. “It’s gender affirmation surgery now, Cletus.”
“What makes it the miracle drug, anyway?” said Spike. “I never paid any attention.”
“Transmiracite’s not a drug,” said Dick. “It’s a mineral substance unlike any found before. Say a child is born a girl but doesn’t feel right in her skin. Feels like she ought to be a boy. Really is a boy, in fact.”
“I get that,” said Spike. “She’s in the wrong body. Like there was some mistake.”
“Makes it sound like some bureaucrat checked the wrong box,” Cletus said.
Dick said, “In the old days she’d have to have about a year of hormone therapy before she could go in for surgery. Then, once she — now he — was a boy physically, he’d have to have testosterone in one form or another for the rest of his life.”
“But all that was before transmiracite,” said Spike.
“I’m drawing a contrast between then and now,” said Dick. “With transmiracite, a post-surgery man’s body produces its own testosterone. And a post-surgery woman’s body makes estrogen. No more shots or gel applications to worry about. No adjustments or side effects, ever.”
“I heard something about that,” said Cletus. “And something about the surgeries being more successful.”
“More than successful,” said Dick. “The gender reassignment takes in a way it never did before. The phalloplasty—”
“The what?” said Spike.
“The way they give the girl a fella’s you-know-what,” said Cletus. “Kind of reshape what she’s already got.”
“The testosterone plays a significant part in that,” said Dick. “And the transmiracite somehow makes the whole works go like gangbusters. Sometimes phalloplasty isn’t necessary. Girl’s still got a bit that would have turned into part of the male reproductive stuff if she’d been a boy.”
“Yeah?” said Spike.
“The transmiracite makes that grow out.”
“I heard the testosterone does that anyway,” said Cletus.
“What the hell, Cletus?” said Spike.
“Not like this,” said Dick.
Spike said quietly, “And for the man? When they, ah...” He waved his hands helplessly and swallowed.
“Something like the reverse,” said Dick. “Then it’s assisted by the estrogen, which the transmiracite lets the new woman’s body produce.”
“Why ain’t you a doctor, Dick?” said Spike.
“But the transmiracite lets the vaginoplasty heal and mimic an actual vagina so well that even gynecologists can’t find the cuts where the penis was sliced prior to... You all right, Spike?”
“You gone white,” said Cletus.
Spike swayed on his stool. Cletus put out a hand to steady him. Dick produced a glass of water without seeming to move.
Spike downed it with a shaking hand. “Damn it!” he said. “I don’t want them turning what I got outside in. That’s just not me. It may be right for some. I know a lot of people are lining up for it, and all power to them for standing up to be who they are. But that’s my point: it’s not who I am.” He clenched his fists. “And how dare some damn government committee...”
A man at the table made same-again gestures. Dick slid another glass toward Spike. “With something in there to steady you,” he said. He made a fresh round for the three at the table. Without seeming to hurry, he delivered the drinks and returned with the empty glasses.
“You know that woman?” said Spike.
“Never saw her before,” said Dick.
“She’s drinking you in like you’re that margarita and she’s dying of thirst in the desert.”
Dick laughed.
“You sure it’s not me?” said Cletus.
“I don’t know,” said Spike. “Which of you looks like a young Gary Cooper, and which like a runaway circus ape?”
“That’s my cue,” said Cletus. “Before you sour my milk too.” He set money on the bar and stood up to go. “Dick, take what Spike had out of that. Say, when’s this gonna happen?”
Spike unfolded the letter. “I’m to report to the Clarksville facility in six weeks if my appeal is denied.”
“A lot can happen in six weeks,” said Cletus.
“I hope so,” said Spike.
Cletus patted Spike on the shoulder. He let a knife of daylight into the bar, then the door closed behind him.
“This is a hell of a thing,” said Spike. “I even heard some people who got the surgery before are having it reversed by government order. Saying they made a mistake wanting to be the opposite sex.”
“I heard that, too,” said Dick.
“How do they figure a thing like that out?”
“Those same algorithms, I guess. And with transmiracite the reversals are more complete than ever before.”
“How’s that?”
“When people detransitioned before, certain things could not be undone,”
“Dee what?”
“Changed back,” Dick said. “A woman might never have a baby. Her voice would remain deeper. And she’d have to keep shaving. That’s all over.”
“You’d think they’d have made it harder to get switched in the first place.”
“In the early days they did,” said Dick. “Made people convince the medical authorities they were really the opposite sex deep down.”
“That’s only sensible.”
“Then courts started upholding the trans status of minor children over the objections of their parents.”
“They let young kids decide?” said Spike.
“Yep.”
“To go through all that surgery?”
Dick nodded.
“The parents couldn’t do anything?”
“Not only could they not do anything, judges started ordering parents to comply with the child’s preferred gender pronoun.”
“What?”
“He and she, him and her. At least one father in Canada went to jail for violating the order. This legal outlook became the trend, then the way of the world in North America.”
“What about sending the kid to a therapist?” said Spike.
“To talk them out of it?”
“To see if they knew what they were getting into, what with people changing their minds afterwards.”
“Even recommending counseling was treated as a violation of the trans child’s rights. Politicians cherry-picked examples of Bible-thumping parents who sent minors to camps to ‘get the gay beat out of them.’ All a child had to do was self-report as transgender.”
“Seems crazy.”
“A few parents began to wonder out loud when the state was going to take the next step and start making the decision itself. It had already been taken out of the parents’ hands. Why not the child’s? Children are still children, after all.
“Sure enough, it was decided that the decision to transition was too important to be left to children. The Gender Affirmation Board started up six years ago. The role of transmiracite in sex reassignment was discovered two years later.”
“About when Bill Henkins made his fortune by striking the stuff on his land four years ago,” Spike said.
“That much is common knowledge,” said Dick. “As is how they decide. Or rather, how they appear to decide.”
“Algorithms and fuzzy logic,” said Spike. “I’m not having it. I’ll take the kids and run off if I have to. Take us off the grid.”
“Listen.” Dick made a keep-it-down gesture. He lowered his voice. “Nearly every legitimate transaction is recorded on the Internet these days. Many are conducted on the Internet. All that information about habits, preferences, a good chunk of secrets people keep from their families. But never mind people communicating to other people on the Internet. The Internet of things is having a thousand conversations a second about each of us. It probably knows how often you’ll eat macaroni and cheese in the coming year while watching Shooting with the Stars.
“We hear the Internet is constantly compiling data on us, processing that data into information, and that authoritative bodies like the Gender Affirmation Board make use of that information in framing their algorithms. We accept this as part of the modern world.”
“Sure, but what—”
“Spike, what if I told you none of that matters?”
“What?”
“Have you noticed that most advertisements for sex change services—”
“When Cletus called it that, you corrected him.”
“That was for Cletus. Who seemed to get a chuckle out of your predicament.”
“Emma picked me over him all those years ago.”
“Anyway, most of the ads and most of the stories we see feature female-to-male surgeries. Why do you think that is?”
“Beats me. More women want to be fellows?”
“Spike, did you mean it when you said you’d take your kids and go off the grid?”
“Damn right. Without Emma there’s nothing in this world matters to me except those children. And if this is what the world’s coming to—”
“They’re how old?”
“Julie’s fourteen and Sam’ll turn twelve in March.”
“They should travel well. Spike, how soon can you be ready to go?”
“Go where?”
“Later. Any assets you can convert into cash?”
“Cash? How much is this gonna cost?”
“The escape is free. But you’ve got to live once you’re away. Cash is still handy. Gold is better.”
“Now just a damn minute,” Spike said.
“Not so loud.”
“I believe you mean it.”
“Don’t you mean it?” Dick said. “Tell me now. You said you didn’t want to live in a world where the state decides what sex your child should be.”
“I didn’t say that, exactly.”
“Near enough.”
“But there’s no guarantee the Gender Affirmation Board is gonna step in and decide to make my little Julie into a boy.”
“It won’t be Julie,” Dick said. “It’ll be Sam.”
Spike blinked.
Dick said, “Over ninety percent of sex reassignment surgery is male-to-female. That’s why the media tilts it to look like it’s the other way. They’re turning boys into girls and men into women at the rate of two million per year. And you know what?” He leaned in close and whispered, “The new females are growing wombs!”
The same man at the table made the same gesture. Dick whipped up drinks and fresh trail mix and carried them over. He scooped up the empties and returned, setting the laden tray on the bar with a thunk A boozy smell drifted up.
“Did you hear what I said, Spike?”
“I heard you. How can that be?”
Copyright © 2021 by Max Christopher
