A couple of seconds later, a link to the offending piece popped up. The headline was We Always Knew He Was a Tw*t, which I thought was unfair for two reasons—firstly because they blatantly hadn’t always known that, they’d just said it because of the hat, and secondly because it wasn’t like I was even doing anything. I was walking across a park with my boyfriend. If I hadn’t been wearing a vulva on my head, it would have been quite a sweet picture. Hell, even with the vulva.

But Dr. Fairclough wanted to see me anyway. Which was…it was not okay. Things had been going well for nearly two whole years. The most recent Beetle Drive had been a huge success. We had more donors than ever. What more could I do here? Get a second, even more respectable boyfriend?

Deciding that indignation felt better than dread, I marched up to Dr. Fairclough’s office and showed myself in.

“Ah, O’Donnell,” she said. “I’ve just seen this picture.” She rotated her screen towards me and there we were: me, Oliver, and the vulva hat.

And this time I wasn’t backing down. “Yup. That’s me. And that’s my boyfriend who I love, and that’s a hat shaped like a vulva because I was celebrating a friend’s hen night and I thought having only penis hats would be heteronormative and/or transphobic, so yes, I was walking through the park with a set of labia crocheted to my face and I am not ashamed, and if Cee-Arr-Ay-Pee-Pee has a problem with that, then they should remember that this time I’m dating a lawyer and I’ll take them to fucking court.”

Dr. Fairclough blinked exactly once. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Oh.” It’s not that I’d been looking for a fight. But I did feel a bit like a matador who’d shown up at the arena only to have the bull politely ask if I needed it to hold my cape.

“After all,” she went on, “it’s a very mean headline. They call you a twit.”

They hadn’t, in fact, called me a twit. “I’ve had worse.”

Dr. Fairclough blinked exactly once more. Sometimes I thought she genuinely was part praying mantis. “Well, thank you for this little talk. I hope you consider yourself to be emotionally supported.”

In a funny way, I did. Yes, I was pretty sure that Dr. Fairclough believed that human feelings were an evolutionary dead end caused by a misguided lack of exoskeleton, but she was trying, and I could give her points for that. “Thanks, Dr. F.”

“Don’t call me ‘Dr. F.’”

“Sorry. Thank you, Dr. Fairclough.”