If only Blithe were under my gravity blanket right now.

Aiden and I walked into the brick-cube courthouse together. Sara K. met us in room 112 in the basement. She wore her steep red high heels, which meant she wasn’t fucking around. The room was full of somber, age-old wooden benches and plaintiffs in the most thoughtless earth-toned business-casual outfits. We sat together in the front row. Aiden looked hot and weary, wearing his SpaceShoes. That pretty much summed up the contradictions of our lives: being able to wear the trendiest accessories to a hearing where someone in a bonnet would decide your fate. While your friend was in the hospital, stunned into unconsciousness by his own hand or something else. As I thought of Blithe, I straightened up. When he woke up, he would need something other than flip and backhanded comments about what it felt like to be trans.

“All rise,” the court officer said.

We stood.

The judge entered and sat down under a portrait of herself, or perhaps an ancestor.

“Honorable Justice Wendy Arcana Williams,” the magistrate declared.

The judge bowed and we bowed back. Had she authorized her own middle-name change? Did judges have to subject themselves to the same humiliating process of three DNA samples, fingerprints, butt prints, notarized petition, character reference from an almost forgotten acquaintance, and the wearing of court-appropriate clothing palettes? Prob not.

“Penfield Ruth Henderson, approach the bench.”

She loomed up on the dais as I walked toward her. She began lifting a giant long-sword over her head. Shakily. The metal glinted, even under dead civic lighting.

“Kneel,” she ordered, and I did, one knee on the pea-green carpet, a position I might never again take because I would not humiliate a woman by kneeling to ask her hand in marriage when we all know that marriage emboldens the man to tower, grow, rise, erect, flourish, and the woman to sour, grow brittle, fill with venom, get fat, take up gardening, and dream of lost solitude.

I didn’t know how she was supposed to knight me from up above, but luckily, Tommy the magistrate came in. He was also dressed in an earth-toned button-down shirt and slacks. All that was left of his whimsy was a glinting shield pinned to his shirt. He went over to the side of the dais and was handed the sword.

“Penfield R. Henderson, I knight you Penfield R. Henderson, in the guise of the name-wielder Fiacha Sraibhtine, from now until eternity, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion.”

He hit me quite hard with the sword.

I pictured myself virile and boundless, no longer held back by the UTH in the center of my being.

I rose. The judge came down to press her wax seal onto my forehead, and Aiden gave me a hug. I saw that Minna had showed up, and she blessed me with her hands folded on her heart.