None of the Above by I. W. Gregorio Read Free Book Online Page A

in his plays are controlled by men and don’t have power unless they cross-dress.”
    â€œInteresting. Why do you say that the play is racist and sexist,” Ms. MacDowell asked, “rather than saying that it’s a play about racism and sexism?”
    â€œBecause 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.”
    â€œBut was Shakespeare completely unsympathetic to Shylock’s situation?” Ms. MacDowell pressed.
    â€œNo,” 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 . . . ?’”
    â€œYeah, 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.
    â€œPlus,” 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’tmatter 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.
    â€œI’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:
    â€œAm 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