Christopher
Fearing the man society could have made me into.
“Christopher,” my parents planned to name me. They declined to learn my assigned sex in utero. “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be),” my mom used to sing the Doris Day song, which lifted an Old English heraldic motto that had cosplayed Italian for 400 years and mistranslated it into grammatically incorrect Spanish.
The force of my fetal kicks nevertheless had my parents convinced I’d be a boy. Christopher was the boy’s name they chose.
Ultrasounds were just starting to become standard prenatal care in the 1980s when Mom squeezed into her little red Monza—no, not a Mazda—and drove from Staten Island into the city for her obstetrical checkups. Cold War-era doctors could not fathom the new millennium’s genetic screening tests nor their ethical considerations for abortion, ableism, and autonomy, all the while projecting sex onto a developing fetus the size of a Castelvetrano olive at 10 weeks’ gestation.