Meghanology – book 1 of girldragongizzard

When I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams I found myself transformed in my bed into a mythical beast.

It wasn’t really that long ago, and I’m still getting used to this, but the circumstances strike me as so similar to the opening to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis I feel I have to start this account with those words.

I’d be lying if I said it took me by surprise, though.

Even if you live in a world, as we do, where the magical and the miraculous don’t tend to happen, if that world has always felt so Hellish and unbearable as it did for me, and you’ve spent your whole life since early childhood yearning with every molecule of your being for the truth that you feel in your very soul to become reality, when it happens I can report it just makes sense.

Everything feels like a ridiculous impossible dream, absolutely.

I cannot convince myself that any of this is real, yet. But I am not at all surprised by it.

I was so done pretending to be a man. It’s good that I no longer can.

You’d think it would cause all sorts of problems, too. But so far it isn’t.

Socially, I mean. Legally.

You’d think somebody would call animal control, or the national guard.

But once again, this morning, after puttering around my apartment in my true form, experimenting with ways of making and eating breakfast, and getting used to drinking coffee form a large wide bowl, I crack open the door and poke my snout outside to taste the air and determine if anyone else in the hallway before I can even catch sight of them.

And, once again, it is my neighbor, Rhoda. Her perfume stings my tastebuds briefly.

I push my head further out, tentatively, and tilt my skull so that I can put her door in the center of my left eye’s sight.

She’s leaning against the door frame, teacup in her right hand, left arm clenched across her lower ribs, holding her robe shut. Her simple wooden cane is hanging from her left elbow. And she’s smirking.

“Good morning, Sleepy Head,” she says. “Still a dragon today?”

Obviously, I am.

I can’t exactly smile with my mouth, and keeping it closed makes it far less threatening than opening it into any sort of grin, so I once again take a cue from cat body language and slowly squint my eyes at her and lift my head a little.

I’ve been practicing all sorts of things alone in my apartment, and I’m on the verge of figuring out how to talk again. But not quite yet.

I can make a pretty wide variety of awful squawking noises and phenomenally deep rumbles. And I’ve managed something that comes across as similar to a glottal stop, but it’s happening much deeper in my chest than anything I’ve got that resembles a glottis.

So, I’ve taken to answering her questions by giving her a cat smile for “yes” and turning my head away for “no”, and she obliges by asking a lot of relevant questions. It’s worked pretty well so far.

She knows not to call me by my old name anymore, even though I can’t give her a new one.

There’s no evidence besides her recognition of who I am and her bizarrely calm reaction to my presence, but I do suspect that Rhoda might be at fault for my transformation. Or, to credit for it, rather. I don’t know how. She doesn’t look like a witch. But when I first exited my apartment to find her waiting for me, it was the first thought that popped into my head, and it’s still there.

The thing is that I can go down to the coffee shop on the corner and the baristas will greet me with smiles, grins, and cheers, and serve me my usual but in the widest cup possible. And I don’t know why they’re doing that. How do they know who I am?

Anyway, today is going to be fascinating, because it’s the date of my first counseling appointment since my transformation, and I have no idea how it’s going to go. But I’m absolutely going to keep it.

It is, after all, one of the many requirements I have to continue to meet in order to continue receiving rent assistance and keep my apartment in my name. Also, SSI and medicare hinge on it as well.

They shouldn’t, but the government is like that, you know.

Anyway, before moseying toward the stairwell, I pull myself fully out of my apartment to rear up and close the door as carefully as I can, and then turn to Rhoda to give her my full attention, in case she has more pertinent questions that might actually teach me a few things about my new state.

“Can I get you anything?” she asks, taking a sip of her tea. Her face is glinting in the hallway light, fresh from her morning routine, and her hair is still in her favorite silk bonnet.

In turn my head to the side, still smiling.

“Are you sure?” she prods.

That honestly deserves a shrug, so I face her again and lower my head. It’s the closest thing to raising my shoulders I can manage now. I don’t really have shoulders anymore. Not like a human.

She looks me up and down, reading me with a smirk on her face, and says, “I’ve been thinking about AAC options for you. Your claws are going to make using a tablet really hard for you. But I bet you could use that tongue.”

That is, actually, how I’ve been using my own hand-me-down tablet. Typing with my tongue really sucks, but I’ve been able to respond to emails by selecting the suggested responses that gmail offers. So far. It’s how I’ve confirmed today’s appointment. But I hadn’t thought of AAC.

“I’ve got a sample app on my phone,” she says. “Would you like to try it?”

I widen my eyes and make a point of smiling again. I have the time.

The problem is that I don’t have very good eyesight right in front of my nose. Humans don't, really, either. Try typing with your own tongue on your phone. It causes a bit of eye strain at least, I wager.

And I do have pretty powerful binocular vision that gives me great depth perception, but my eyes work a bit more like an eagle’s, now, I imagine. I don’t really know. I’m guessing, but it’s definitely different. I have way more peripheral vision, and I have to turn my head to look at different things. No eye muscles.

So, when Rhoda loads up the app and then places the phone carefully on the hallway floor in front of me, I have to do a whole routine for each word I want to say.

I look at the screen with one of my eyes. I tend to default to my right eye, close enough that I can focus on the glyphs and read the words below them to pick out the one I want. Then rear back to put that glyph in the middle of my vision, to target it with my hunting instinct. And then stick my tongue out and dart my head forward to gently attack it. And then do it again for each word or command.

I’m really not used to this, and I don’t like it, but it is much easier than using a keyboard to try to spell things out. It is exactly the same thing I’ve done to reply to my counselor, only with a dedicated app.

“Works,” I report, the phone serving as my voice. I keep it really simple, “Thank you.”

“I bet that would be so much easier on your tablet,” Rhoda says.

I smile in my way.

“But if I install the full version of this on your tablet so you can talk to people, how are you going to carry it around?” she asks.

I look at her pointedly, tilting my head.

She smirks, raising an eyebrow and tilting her head down at her phone that’s still lying on the floor.

I make a point of rolling my head in an exaggerated gesture like someone rolling their eyes, then go about poking at her phone with my tongue again. It takes a while.

“Not idea,” I manage to reply. It was sort of a mashup of two different sentences I wanted to say, but where my frustrations led me to choosing the primary components of both and mushing them together, “not know” and “no idea”. I started with “not” but then couldn’t find “know” and went with “idea”. Next time, I’d just go with “no idea”.

I guess that’s what learning is, and I’ll get better at this with time. Faster, but not as fast as talking with my voice.

Rhoda holds her cup close to her face and taps it a few times with her left index finger, then says, “I’m thinking that I’ve got an old purse that would hold that old tablet of yours. You’ve still got it, right?”

I smile.

“Good. So we put that around your neck and then put a sign on it, saying something like ‘AAC inside, please place on floor for me.’ If that’ll fit. I could paint that on the purse with nail polish until we’ve got a better solution,” she mused. “What do you think?”

I hesitate. This is sounding like a lot of work to set up, and I suspect she’s planning on doing it right now. And I do want to go for a fly before my appointment. But, it would also be a good idea to have a better way of communicating with my counselor.

But now that she’s got me thinking about AAC, I realize I have been manipulating things with my claws surprisingly well. My foreclaws are a lot like the claws of a parrot. And they aren’t much bigger than human hands. I’m a small dragon, by dragon standards, I think. I just can’t operate a tablet with them because the claw itself gets in the way of my fat pad. Or, oh shit, I could use a knuckle! Why have I been doing this the hard way?

I guess I just think of my mouth and tongue first now for most things, and claws second. It’s just reflexes or something. But now have the idea in my head and I can do it all better and faster.

But then, also, I’m thinking that if I had a tray of kinetic sand, I could just write words in it with my claw.

Ordering that from online with my knuckle will be so much easier than doing it with my tongue.

Or I could find and go to an actual store. I think there’s a toy store with kinetic sand in town.

Rhoda watches me think about all this, and says, “You know you’ve got to be able to tell the world what it’s like to be a dragon, right? It’s your right! It wouldn’t be fair if you couldn’t. Let me do this for you.”

I fall back on my haunches and lift my head. Then I skootch aside to let her past to get to my door, which I now leave unlocked because I just can’t with keys anymore. And we do this thing.

If anyone is going to skulk into my apartment to steal anything, they’re going to be stealing from a dragon, and anyone around here has got to know that by now. And I haven’t seen any hobbits. But getting to carry my tablet around is going to rock.

And then, while she’s got the polish out, Rhoda asks me if I wanted painted claws.

This is really eating into my flying time, but I just can’t pass it up, so I tell her yes.

And she works on painting all of my claws, even the ones on my wings. And she apologizes that she doesn’t have enough polish for my horns, but I wasn’t expecting her to do those too.

Then, when she’s done, she pushes my tablet toward me, face up on my coffee table.

“What’s your name, Hon? What should I call you?” she asks.

Now that she’s got me thinking about AAC and I’ve figured out using my knuckle, I realize I could have done this on the first day.

I hit home and pull up the Tumblr app, then hit the link to my blog and make sure it’s scrolled up so that she can see the name I’ve been using for myself there for the past ten years. The full name is in the bio. She also sees the URL, of course.

For Reasons, I haven’t shown this to anybody I’ve known in person before. But, it feels less embarrassing now, and I think I trust Rhoda.

After staring at the screen for a second, taking it all in, including my profile pic of a dragon from an ancient illuminated manuscript, she sits back, turns her head to the side, and looks at me out of the corner of her eye.

“Girldragongizzard, huh?” she asks. “I have to admit, I didn’t know that about you. But I like it. OK, so, she/her for you?”

I blink, and then nod like a human, long and slow, then smile.

I didn’t realize quite how nervous I was feeling about that until that shock of recognition and excitement I felt throughout my gut and chest when she said that pronoun.

I have a moment where I feel confused and dizzy, because I’m a dragon. Human gender isn’t really supposed to be something that makes sense to me. Maybe I lay eggs now? I’m not sure. I’ve been assuming I don’t, that I still carry spermatozoa, and can deliver it with a cloacal kiss or something like that. And I thought I was OK with that because I wasn’t feeling my physical dysphoria anymore. Who the heck knows exactly what’s going on.

But, apparently, I’m genuinely trans? If that was gender euphoria, I guess I am.

I’m fifty years old. I was a big guy as a human. I’d just been playing girl on the internet for as long as I can remember to keep myself functional and reasonably happy, I guess. But I’d never actually considered transitioning.

This transformation is the transition I always wanted, anyway. But, then I get gender euphoria from she/her still.

I think, momentarily, about someone trying to misgender me now, and I end up grinning like a human.

“OK, woah,” Rhoda says, lifting up both hands. “That’s a lot of very sharp teeth!”

I carefully close my mouth, smile like a cat again, and lower my head, to indicate to her an apology of sorts. Which she seems to accept.

“Anyway,” she says, “I really like your name, Meghan the Dragon. I see it says that Meg for short is OK?”

I indicate a yes.

“It’s unusual for a trans girl name, from what I’ve seen,” Rhoda says. “But I bet you’ve been sitting on that name for years and years.” She leans back and puts both her hands on her knees. “Well. I bet you were going somewhere. Now that you can talk a little more freely, I probably shouldn’t keep you any longer.” Then she looks around at what’s happened to my apartment since my transformation, and says, “Hm. Do you want me to help you dragon proof this place?”

I don’t go flying before counseling, but I do make my appointment on time. And I’ve got an agreement with Rhoda to work on my apartment together later this evening. I’ll get my flying in after the appointment and before that. Also, some coffee.

But now I’m standing in front of my counselor’s door, wondering if this is a good idea.

So far, I’ve had no trouble with anybody.

It’s bizarre.

It’s like they’ve all expected this and recognize me anyway, if they’ve known me. And if they’re a stranger, they don’t really give me another glance. Unless we’re doing business or something, in which case they’ve all given me a considerable amount of patience and understanding.

And the longer it goes on like this, the more it makes me nervous that the other shoe is going to drop. Or it’s all going to fall apart. Or I’ll wake up and discover it’s a dream.

And I do worry a little, every time I meet someone who hasn’t seen me as a dragon yet, that they’ll react badly.

But what’s eating me, and keeping me from trying to figure out how to open this door with a round knob, is that I’ve realized that maybe today is the day I come out as trans to my counselor.

I’ve been hiding that from her, and waffling on whether or not to go through with it. That is, when I’m not in denial, and I let myself even think about it.

But I really, really like being called Meg in person, and I don’t think I can stand to hear my government name anymore.

So this is a dilemma.

But it turns out that the previous client has been taking longer than usual and running into my time, and the door opens as they emerge from the office and come face to face with me.

This solves the dilemma of whether to open the door.

I’m presented with a short, fat person with pink hair, jeans, and a navy blue t-shirt that says, “I am Nimona” on it. 

Their side cut coupled with that shirt causes me to flash them the peace sign.

Which they silently, meekly return.

Then I do my sideways shuffle to get out of their way, and they edge carefully by, eyeballing me the entire way.

They keep an eye on me all the way to the elevator.

This is the first time anyone has done this.

I’m watching them, trying to figure out if they’re scared of me or what, when I hear my counselor.

“Come on in,” she says.

But I keep watching long enough to see the other client bite their lower lip as the doors of the elevator close between us.