Christopher

“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.

What Ronald Reagan lacked in technology, he made up for in so-called culture wars, the accelerant for pyrotechnic “gender reveals” that would spark 21st-century wildfires in a changed climate. “Girl power” was still a few years off from its Bikini Kill zine origins turned Spice Girls marketing catchphase that would lose further meaning when a pound sign evolved into a hashtag. Government agencies like NASA relied on early versions of the Internet while lay people like my mother, nearly 40 weeks pregnant, watched the Space Shuttle Challenger explode on her Zenith television set.

I was born ten days later.

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