Part Three: How To Prove the Null HypotheCis

Opening the Black Box

M—’s kind face, framed in rich, thick blonde hair, is worried on the screen of my monitor. This is the first time I’ve seen her in a couple of months. I’d thought I was doing all right.

“Hey, Zac. You look like you’ve had a long week,” she says. It’s an understatement. I’ve barely slept since Saturday. I’m a mess, my thinning hair greasy and unwashed, the bags under my eyes so bad I can see them in the thumbnail of the telehealth window.

“Yeah,” I say. My voice is small and tired and scared. I’m a teacher, and a big personality. This isn’t how I talk.

My heart finally slowed to something approximating a regular rate on Monday. The pulsing, intrusive thoughts, though? They’re still just as strong, as insistent. Maybe even moreso. I push against them, but it’s like resisting the tide—they swirl around whatever I do and fill me up.

“You want to tell me about it?” she asks. No. I’ve barely even been able to tell B— about this. She’s been following me like my shadow all week, holding and comforting me. The pause after M—’s question becomes noticeable, then awkward.

“Guess that’s kinda how this goes, right?” I eventually say. She nods and waits. She’s always been able to wait me out.

I tell her. I tell her about the comic, about my thoughts, my heart, my inability to sleep, to think, to find my sense of self. The impossible idea that I might be trans. The words, stoppered up in me for nearly a week, pour out with a gushing force that surprises both of us. I barely pause long enough to breathe. I run out of words, and a half hour’s passed.

There’s a beat, a pregnant moment in the conversation. Another.

“M—, I can’t be trans!” I say, more loudly than I’ve said anything so far today. Probably too loudly. B—’s out in the living room, worrying, but I can’t keep the fear out of my voice.

“No,” she says with a smile, but I’m tumbling on.

“I’m just another guy. Boring cis guy,” I say, reining my panic in better this time.

“Of course you are,” she says comfortingly. Warmly. M—’s incredibly smart. If I was trans, she’d know. She does gender therapy as well as the grief counseling I first started seeing her for. She’s actually mentioned some of her trans clients in passing a few times over the years. Even if she hadn’t, I’ve seen the books she keeps on her shelf in the office. Four of them, lined up on the end of the middle row closest to her chair, are all on trans psychology and treatment.

I can’t remember what any of the other books on her bookshelf are about, and I don’t have the presence of mind to pay attention to that fact.

“So this has to just be stress, right? From the pandemic and work and everything?” I ask.

“Let’s talk about some things you can do about that,” she says, and I’m hoping so hard that I don’t notice that she didn’t answer my question. We talk about centering and meditation. In the back of my head, even now, the thoughts are bursting, insistent. What if you’re trans? What if you’re trans? Over and over and over. Ten minutes pass.

“I’m still having these thoughts,” I say when there’s a pause.

“Which thoughts?” she asks.

“You know,” I say, suddenly hesitant. “The ones about being trans.” She smiles a little sadly at me.

“Well, there’s an awful lot of ways to be trans, you know,” she says. “It’s pretty much impossible to disprove all of them.”

“So, what do we do?” I ask.

“Well, maybe the best thing is that we flip the question around,” she says. “You’re a scientist. You can’t prove a negative, right?”

“Right,” I say.

“So, we can’t prove that you’re not trans. There’s too many possibilities. Instead, we try to disprove just one: that you’re cis,” she says. “If and when we can’t, that’s pretty convincing evidence that you’re cis after all, right?” My mouth drops open, stunned. It’s brilliant. Visionary. Obvious.

“I absolutely cannot believe that I didn’t think of this,” I say, and relief is finally, finally washing over me. I really should’ve, too. I’ve had a bunch of talks with students about disproving null hypotheses.

“It’s okay. That’s what I’m here for,” M— says. “Have you ever crossdressed?”

“No,” I say.

—23 years ago, give or take—

I’m twelve and a half, five foot seven inches tall, and I’ve just passed 170 pounds. A foot of that came in the last nine months. I feel gangly and freakish and wrong.

Mom’s at work, and I’m in her walk-in closet. She’s working days for once, which is unusual. Dad’s not home yet, and won’t be for hours. My brother’s still at school. I’m alone in the house for maybe the third time this school year. I always seem to find myself in here when that happens.

Her clothes drape from hangers in long, glistening sheets of cotton and satin and polyester. Brown and black herringbone, shimmering in the half-light. A blouse. Next to it is a pair of charcoal slacks, in warm wool. Beside it is the red satin blouse I gave her for Christmas. And on, and on, and on. I reach out, my hand trembling, and run it through the cascades of too-fine, too-soft fabrics.

They’re so much nicer than mine. Prettier, lighter, smoother, softer.

My mom is a very petite five feet and four inches tall. 120 pounds when she’s having a bad day, and always, always working on her body. There’s not a scrap in here that’d fit me if I tried, and most of it would probably burst if it even tried to contain me. I never even consider the possibility.

I run my hands through the hanging clothes again, and I don’t understand why.

—Now—

“I mean, I couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to,” I add, a beat later. I don’t know why I do.

“Oh?” M— asks, and tilts her head to the side.

“I was most of six feet tall by my thirteenth birthday. My mom’s tiny,” I say. She looks puzzled for a moment, then nods. I feel like I’ve said something entirely different than what she’s heard.

“Have you ever thought about maybe being genderfluid?” she asks.

“No. That’s not me.” It’s absolutely, utterly not. I can’t say how I know, but it’d be like the moon being made of cheese. Just… an utter impossibility. I know next to nothing about genderfluidity. Somehow, I don’t need to. M—’s head cocks to the side again, eyes narrowing in consideration. Again, I feel like I’ve said something very different from what she’s heard.

—3.5 years ago, give or take—

“Seriously, for your trans clients, especially the younger, nerdier ones—they’ve got to read Dreadnought,” I’m telling M—. My dad’s had pancreatic cancer for seven months, about as long as I’ve been seeing M— so far. He’s stable. Not good. Stable. He’s out of the hospital, at least. I’d flown out to visit him for his birthday two weeks ago. I spent the whole time in his hospital room with him while he, mostly, slept through his recovery from yet another infection.

And I’m in therapy talking about a novel featuring a transfeminine superhero.

“Yeah?” M— says, smiling. I nod enthusiastically.

“I don’t really understand it, but I’ve always kind of been drawn to stories like this,” I say, smiling. Not superhero stories. I actually hate American-style superheroes. They’re boring. “It’s weird. I’ve always felt this… affinity? Identification with? I don’t know. But trans stories have always been really relatable to me.” I shrug a bit theatrically. “Especially trans women.”

“Really?” M— asks. I laugh, rolling my eyes at myself. This is not the first time I’ve mentioned the fact, and I know she’s humoring me a little bit.

“No joke, I have a statistically improbable number of trans friends, and they’re almost all women.”

We don’t talk about Dad that week.

—Now—

“What about nonbinary?” M— asks. I shrug.

“There’s a million different ways to be nonbinary. Kind of the original problem, right?” I say.

“Right,” she says. “Okay, here’s what I want you to do this week. Simple stuff. Some of it’s going to be for your stress, and some of it’s going to be for our experiment.” I nod, leaning forward. “I want you to meditate, first of all.” I groan. I’ve never had any success with meditation. “There’s apps to help you. I’ll email you a list.”

“Okay,” I agree.

“I want you to actively engage with these intrusive thoughts for a while each day. Maybe an hour or two, whatever’s comfortable for you. Then set them aside and do other things,” she says. I nod. “I want you to try dressing in B—’s clothes. You never tried it, and it’s really common for trans people to try that kind of thing out.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I kind of expected that one.” She smiles and nods.

“Then I want you to paint your toenails. Not your fingernails,” She says, firmly. Easy enough. “When you do, pay attention to what you’re feeling. Strong emotions of any kind. That’s what we’re looking for here.”

“Got it,” I say, feeling more confident.

“Okay,” M— says. “And message me if you need to, OK? You don’t need to feel really bad before you do. I’m worried about you.”

“I think I’m going to be okay,” I say. “This is what I needed. I can do this and then get on with things.” M— smiles, and I don’t notice in the moment that it’s a little thin, a little strained.

“See you soon,” she says. I don’t notice that she usually says ‘see you next week’.

I shut my computer down and I stand, feeling better, calmer, more confident than I have in a week. B—’s waiting out on the couch, long legs stretched out and doing her best to read something on her tablet, almost conspicuously nonchalant.

“Hey, hon,” I say, and walk over. She looks up and smiles, and I kiss her forehead, a gesture we’ve been exchanging for a decade and a half. It’s almost a wordless greeting for us. Her eyes are tight with anxiety, but her smile is real.

“Sounds like it went well,” she says. I nod, rolling my eyes, and flop down onto the other couch.

“I feel about a million times better,” I say, and the anxiety eases from her eyes. I tell her about M—’s plan eagerly, noting that I’ll need her help with the clothes and nail polish, since I have zero experience with either. Somewhere in the retelling, she offers me her hand, and I hold it gently while I finish. Light touch of skin on skin, soft pressure on my palm as it rests on the beige arm of our secondhand couch. We’re always touching. It’s like being tethered to the Earth—it keeps me from flying away.

“You really do sound a lot better,” she says eventually, when I pause to organize my thoughts.

“Yeah,” I agree. “The thoughts are gone already.” That’s not quite right. I amend what I said after a beat. “Well, not gone. Just not insistent. Like…” I fish in the air for words, my eyes roving the ceiling. “Like as soon as I gave my permission to think them, they were okay with waiting.” B— nods and squeezes my hand.

“I’m glad,” she says.

“Me too,” I agree. We pass the evening quietly, together, and the churn of my thoughts remain still. I sleep like the dead.

Continued in Part 4.

Author’s Notes

I’ve also left my maiden name in this narrative. I’m one of a few trans people who isn’t hurt by it, and who doesn’t consider it to be dead in the least. I actually feel a fair bit of affection for it. That identity, that way of being, protected me for a long, long time, and got me to a point where I could finally be me. I could never hate that.

The title of this section obviously owes a great debt to the incredible work of Natalie Reed’s The Null HypotheCis, an excellent article which I wholeheartedly recommend.