TRANS-SPECIES
By Chad Descoteaux
(for more sci-fi from this author, go to www.turtlerocketbooks.com)
For Carrie Wynn, a woman who spent decades being passionate about social change, organizing fund raisers and protests alike on the hopes of making the world a better place for her future offspring, motherhood came at a price. Marriage was less of a sacrifice. It took less away from her passions, because she now had a supportive husband named Jason who would be the bread-winner, allowing her to let her volunteer humanitarian work BE her job.
But motherhood meant that activism would have to take a back seat. It meant that she would have to leave the protesting and other movements to the younger generation, who both lacked her experience and considered many of her convictions to be old-fashioned. It meant that, for lack of a better term, this was it. She spent those years working to make the world a better place for her offspring and now, her offspring was here. This was her daughter’s generation. Her thoughts fluctuated from being proud of how hard she had fought to change the world, to being worried about her daughter in a world where more needed to be done.
These were the thoughts racing through the mind of Carrie Wynn-Jacobs as she leaned on the handlebars of her daughter’s stroller. They were in the zoo, escaping the blazing hot sun of this July day by ducking into the air conditioning of the reptile exhibit. Eighteen-month-old Liz was staring blankly into one terrarium with a big smile on her face. She was a quiet child. Always had been. Didn’t cry much as a baby. But she seemed fascinated by this particular lizard, who was hanging upside down from a tree branch. Its tail was curled up. When insects dropped down from above during feeding time, the lizard gobbled them up, using its elongated tongue. Its eyes moved back and forth, an instinct that served it well in the wild, making sure that there were no predators around. Liz loved it, pointing at the lizard and saying, “Ma! Ma! Ma!” repeatedly when she knew that her mother was watching.
Liz loved watching this one lizard so much that when her mother tried to pull the stroller away from the terrarium, she started to cry, coaxing her mother into going back to watching that one lizard yet again. Liz was eventually okay with moving on to another exhibit, but that exhibit contained a lizard, so she would be fixated on it for what seemed like hours to her mother.
This continued for years. Every time Liz’s mother would take her to the zoo, she would spend most of the time obsessing over lizards. And the more that Carrie learned from their pediatrician Dr. Blazi, who was also the doctor that had delivered Liz, about autism in children, the more she understood that a fixation on one subject, like lizards, was normal for someone with that neurological condition.
When Liz was three, she refused to eat with any utensils, despite her mother’s insistence and direction. She would eat by leaning her chin onto the rim of the plate or bowl and shovel each individual noodle or piece of meat into her mouth with her tongue. Her father was quick to correct what would seem to be poor table manners, but Carrie understood that this was just another manifestation of her obsession with lizards. She was trying to act like one. This was why she always slept at the foot of her bed with one arm off, the way that lizard at the zoo would rest on its branch. Instead of trying to explain to Jason that she identified better with lizards than she did with people, Carrie pointed out that at least their daughter was eating. Like many children on the autism spectrum, Liz was a very picky eater. Jason agreed that he would rather see Liz eat her hot dog laden pasta with no utensils than not eat at all.
Carrie would take their (then-four year old) daughter to the nearby park to use the playground equipment. She loved the jungle gym, but instead of climbing up and down and swinging from it, Liz would spend most of her time there hanging from the top beam. Even if there were other children playing in the same playground, Liz would just hang from this top beam, twitching her head back and forth and jutting her tongue out every now and then. Liz rarely talked to her own parents, so it did not surprise Carrie that she was anti-social around random neighborhood kids at the park.
And like any decent parent of a special needs child, Carrie always kept a close eye on Liz. She caught her daughter a couple of times trying to eat insects that she found on the ground or stuck to a tree. Letting out a shriek that let her daughter know that she was being very bad, Carrie heroically rescued doomed ants and grasshoppers when they were mere inches away from her daughter’s twitching death-dealing tongue.
Carrie had no problem trying her best to let her daughter be herself, a right that she had proudly fought for during her days of civil rights activism. Carrie was getting used to her daughter imitating the lizards that she obsessively read about in her room. Heck, she was the one who had bought Liz those lizard pop-up and picture books. But she had to draw the line somewhere. This was a health issue. Liz was human, after all.
***
Regular visits to the pediatrician were opportunities for Carrie to fill Dr. Blazi in on Liz’s behavior issues. “I always thought that autistic kids jump from one obsessive interest to the other,” Carrie told the doctor when he was holding a popsicle stick up to Liz’s tongue and looking down her throat. “Lizards one month, then baseball, weather, boats. That kind of thing.”
“That’s not always the case, but she is young yet,” Dr. Blazi retorted, signing a paper that would allow Liz to start kindergarten in a few weeks. This is why she was here, for her pre-K physical. “Most five-year-olds get obsessed with their hobbies, autism or not.”
“Are there any autistic kids who stay with one obsession for their whole lives?” Carrie asked.
“It does happen,” Blazi admitted. “In fact, there was one very unique case that I saw when I was working in Africa.”
Dr. Blazi had mentioned Africa before. He, like Carrie, had done some humanitarian work for extra credit when he was in med school. The Army paid for his education, so being able to travel around the world with soldiers was one of the perks.
Blazi remembered one young man in particular, who was twelve at the time, who honestly believed that he was a baboon trapped in a boy’s body. Despite the constant attempts at rehabilitation by his parents and doctors (both medical and witch), this young man lived with the baboons and acted like one in every way possible. He ate, slept and made noises like he was one of them. Once, his parents tried to take him home and he threw a handful of his excrement at them.
“And it wasn’t like he was raised by apes like Tarzan or something,” Blazi explained as Liz chewed on the rubber spider toy that she had brought with her. This kept her calm enough for Dr. Blazi to take a blood sample from her left arm without too much discomfort. “He had a normal upbringing for this part of the world, including a loving family. He just identified with baboons. Some of the doctors I worked with started calling it ‘species identity disorder’.”
“Like gender identity disorder?”
“Sort of,” Blazi said, joking flippantly with a patient that he felt more comfortable with than most. “I suppose if more people had it, there would be this big awareness movement and then you couldn’t call it a disorder anymore. I call it trans-species.”
Carrie started to think of all of the people she had met in her life who were transgender, people who were born one gender, yet identified with the other. She thought about the protest that she had organized when she was fresh out of college against a company that had fired a male forklift driver who wanted to become a woman. Is this the same thing? she wondered, watching her own daughter flick her tongue in the air.
“It is not the same thing,” Liz’s father Jason adamantly said when Carrie brought up the subject later that evening. “Look, human beings, human embryos have the potential to be either
male or female, because their parents are male and female. And then some people struggle with feeling like they were born the wrong gender, which makes sense because they technically have both genes. Where would Lizzie get a lizard brain? I’m not a lizard! Are you a lizard?” Realizing the absurdity of loudly insisting that he was not a lizard, Jason joked, “Actually, my mom’s a lizard.”
“Maybe it’s not genetic.”
“Then it is mental. We already know she has autism. This is one of her strong, obsessive interests, which she might hold on to for quite some time,” Jason said, but Carrie couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more to their daughter’s odd behavior. “Doesn’t mean she’s secretly a lizard. Nothing against trans-gender people, but I’ve known girls who were tomboys and just grew out of it. Still wanted to be women. Still liked men. Well, most of them. Point is, she’s five.”
“You didn’t see the look on her face when I stopped her from eating that insect. For her, it’s…a lifestyle. I’ll bet she eats insects when we’re not looking.”
“How is that a lifestyle? We have an autistic five-year-old who doesn’t understand boundaries,” Jason said, eventually feeling bad for scoffing at his wife’s statement. “Look, Carrie. Liz is not going to start some big political movement, like you always wanted to do, for trans-species people. Can’t we just let her be the weird kid? That’s something I can deal with! Honestly, I would be a little suspicious if our child wasn’t a little weird. Are you cheating on me with a normal person?”
Carrie knew that Jason used humor to deal with matters that stressed him out. She just had too much on her mind right now to find him funny.
***
Three weeks later, Liz started kindergarten. She attended a school that was about forty-five minutes away from the school district that her family actually lived in. Ever since Carrie heard that there was such a thing as ‘college prep kindergarten’, she pulled some strings with her old friends from her activist days and got Liz in. She’s a smart girl, Carrie thought to herself. A lot of smart people have some form of autism. Her social skills shouldn’t get in the way of having the best education possible.
This meant that Carrie got to drive her daughter to school every day, kissing her goodbye before she exited the car. She felt like the kind of mom that she would always watch on television with her own mom as a child. She was aiming for some combination of the polished perfection of June Cleaver and the blunt honesty of Roseanne. Or maybe the hippie activist turned mom on ‘Family Ties’, that was more her style. And the fact that Liz didn’t talk much made it more important in Carrie’s mind that she communicate to her daughter that she loved her every day.
Needless to say, Liz was uncomfortable surrounded by other kids. She couldn’t focus on the lessons, which combined playing with building blocks with simple math so that the kindergarten teacher could segway into geometry before the first quarter was up. She looked out the window and fantasized about climbing trees, running from branch to branch, as her teacher spoke.
Socially speaking, Liz was just quiet. None of the other kids picked on her during her first week of school. During recess, they were so busy playing kickball and rough-housing with each other that none of them noticed the quiet girl that would climb a tree and just hang there, observing her surroundings with jerking head motions as she enjoyed the mid-day breeze. She did her lessons and the resulting grades were good. Carrie was very proud of her daughter and tried to encourage Liz through the anxiety that she felt every day while getting ready for school.
But one day, Liz found a way to work through it. She spent her weekend in her room, which was normal for her. But instead of reading about lizards, she sewed the large suction cups that she had found at a local hobby shop to the back of the hooded sweatshirt that she always wore to school. And she glued one to the bottom of her sneakers as well. Carrie commended Liz on her fashion design and creativity, not sure what prompted the idea, but trying to be positive. She hoped that Liz was coming out of her shell and this design was an attempt to be noticed by her peers. Her dad was always the class clown, Carrie thought. Maybe that’s it.
Liz’s kindergarten teacher heard an unusual amount of ruckus as she was walking towards her class room that morning. She opened the door and, just like every day, the students scrambled to put down their toys and find their seats. Then, she looked up and saw what was causing the children the heightened level of excitement. Liz had suction cupped herself to the large window that allowed kindergarteners in this class room to look out onto the playground. Sunlight beamed into the class room all around Liz, creating a shadow on the floor. Some children were trying hard not to snicker when the teacher saw this for the first time. They thought for sure that Liz was in big trouble.
But this understanding, autism-educated kindergarten teacher did not scold Liz. She went along with it. She placed Liz’s schoolwork on the vent next to the window that she was attached to and continued her lesson like this was normal behavior. Liz peeled herself off of the window long enough to do her school work and then reattached herself to the window when the teacher was teaching. Liz’s plan worked. There was something about her exposure to the sun and the quirky bodily position that she was in that allowed Liz to pay attention to the teacher better than she could sitting in her seat surrounded by students. That day, Liz got her first A on her school work ever. Yes, it was only two weeks into kindergarten, but, all things considered, it made her very proud of herself.
But before Liz could proudly show her mother her first good grade, the teacher called Carrie in for a parent-teacher conference. Instead of picking Liz up at the door like she normally did, Carrie went into the classroom and spoke with Liz’s teacher. The teacher asked Liz to climb on the window like she had ben during class, to show her mom what the teacher was concerned about.
“She was like that all class?” Carrie said with some surprise, watching Liz effortlessly peel herself off of the window and land on her suction-cupped feet.
“Yes,” the teacher replied. “She would come down to do her school work and then climb back up there while I was teaching.”
“Well, she sleeps in some pretty odd positions in her room. I guess she’s just comfortable like that.”
“I realize that she was comfortable like that. Mrs. Jacobs. But I’m sure you can understand how this could be a distraction for the other students in my class.”
“Of course. I remember the first time we had a kid in a wheelchair in our class. It was second grade, I believe. That was a little distracting at first, but we all liked the kid after we got to know him.”
“Well, I was hoping that you could have some suggestions as far as what I could do to discourage this behavior without stunting the progress that you’ve made as far as her other issues are concerned.”
“She did her school work today?” Carrie asked.
“Yes. In fact, she got an A on her quiz today,” the teacher said, pulling the paper out of a folder in front of her.
“Why would you want to discourage this behavior?” Carrie asked, annoyed, but not wanting to sound rude. “This is who she is. This is what she identifies with. This is the wheelchair kid in the class.”
“I realize that this is part of her autism issues, but…”
“It’s more than that. You ever hear of species identity disorder?”
The teacher had to admit that she had not. “Um, no…” It was this apparent sign of weakness that caused the tiger that Carrie had once identified with herself, the activist that voraciously attacked injustice, to come out full force.
“Well, let’s just say that this is a civil rights issue, sister!” Carrie barked confidently, pressing her finger against the table with determination as she leaned forward. The teacher was taken aback by this sudden change in Mrs. Jacobs’ demeanor. “You push this issue, I’ll have this school on the evening news so much that your PTA cronie
s will mistake you for Dan Rather!”
This was the first time that Liz had ever seen her mother like this. Carrie had put her hard-nose activist days behind her when she found out that she was pregnant with Liz. As it turned out, it would not be the last time that Liz, her father, or the entire town, would see Carrie like this.
Carrie was fully prepared to call some old friends of hers and get the news media involved in what she perceived to be a discrimination case by the school. But first, she arranged to meet with the principal. With the principal on one side of the table and Liz’s teacher on the other side, Carrie related her concerns about the way this was being handled. The principal nodded his head, agreeing with everything that Carrie said, during their entire fifteen minute meeting. “I do think that what Liz’s teacher did was only a minor oversight,” he explained calmly. “Yes, it might be a slight distraction at first, but like you said, it’s like the kid in the wheelchair. She certainly has the right to cling to the window if she wants to. I hear her grades have gone up since then, so I would be amiss to argue with that.” He instructed Liz’s teacher to let her continue to “sit where she felt comfortable” and get the kids used to it. She reluctantly agreed.
After Carrie left, Liz’s teacher and principal had a meeting of their own.
“You know who that was, right?” the principal asked the teacher.
“Yeah,” the teacher replied with a smirk. “I was in a very feminist sorority back in college. We’ve all heard of Carrie Wynn. I never protested with her, but my roommate did.”
“She reminds me of a lawyer that I had to deal with back in California. Did I ever tell you why I left my last job?”
The teacher nodded. She had not.
“I was the vice principal of a junior high school in Modesto, California. There was a young…student…named Erica Gagnon.”
The teacher’s eyebrows shot up. She recognized the name. She had heard it on the news many times a few years ago and understood why the principal had referred to her as a ‘student’, avoiding pronouns. “The little girl who was born a boy?”