My first thought: Does he really want the juice?

Usually, people greeted us trans with a weak smile because their minds were too busy calculating, Okay, you are actually a girl, but through the wonders of pharmaceutical intervention and liberalism, you are able to transform yourself into a boy, and here they get very distracted because as long as the biomedical technology is available to help trans people, that low rung of society, couldn’t it allow rich people to transmogrify into birds, great winged predatory people who can fly across the land unhampered by conscience, gravity, taxes, or common sense?

My second thought: Oh, he’s a failed artist who has ended up as some finger of the Law and is taking every opportunity to pour his frustration into the sundry duties assigned to him on a whiteboard to-do list.

“You want juicy?” I said.

With a sigh of relief, he threw himself into a chair.

“My parents were killed in an avalanche, seeking a rare mineral deposit. They named me Penfield Ruth Henderson because they looked Jewish but wanted their child to fit it ‘anywhere,’ and perhaps they mystically predicted that the pendulum would swing backward against the Jewish, and so they started this whole name business, and I’m happy to keep the Penfield and the Henderson, but the Ruth, it sits on top of me, a large-breasted pale woman who reads The Red Tent, with dirty ringlets running down her back, wearing a faded shift that barely covers the top of a gaping vagina.”

“You crazy.” He raised his eyebrows and glanced at the clock. “Okay, let’s move this along,” he continued, reverting back to a civil servant who still had a long list of people to press for juice. “The dead-parents part is a little tedious. It’s really less charming and more devastating outside the realm of a Dickens novel. If we had more time, I’d push for some sort of ‘turning over a new leaf’ narrative: By wrenching the Ruth from your name, you are able to become your true self, a spirited and emotional young man with a hard bod.”

Pressing my biceps, he squirmed with delight, then made some notes on a form.

I was led back into the courtroom. After hearing the judge, a Jewish man with wiry strands sticking out from his bonnet, grant a number of name-change petitions on the basis of familial breakage, TV-character obsession, and domestic violence, he took a look at my petition and said, “Ms. Henderson, I’d like to ask you something. Let the court note that we could all recount some childhood folly where we put on Nana’s high-heeled shoes and clomped about in the living room, or got a unisex bowl-cut, asked for implants for Christmas, or switched the arms and legs of our secret Barbie so that at least she, too, could be grotesque. Why, I ask, are you allowed to switch genders? Who has granted you the moral grounds to bring into adulthood the urgent caprices of childhood?”