Birthdays

Lydia Labovitz (she/her)

   ​People are, for some reason, quite fond of asking when your birthday is. Usually, I assume they have the best of intentions. Maybe they practice the American cultural tradition of birthday parties (which are actually, believe it or not, a very recent innovation), and want to plan gifts or festivities in advance. They could perhaps be believers in astrology, hoping to predict someone's fortunes and personality from the stars under which they were born. Or maybe they're just a scammer seeking answers to security questions, in the name of stealing your Internet accounts.

   There's an issue there, though. All of those reasons rely on the idea that people have a birthday - a single day out of the 365.25 options, special to them and them alone, that recurs every year. There are lots of flaws with this plan. Those unlucky souls born on the 29th of February, for instance, only have a birthday once every four years.

   In my case, though, the problem is a little different. I need to answer that omnipresent question with another one of my own. "What's your birthday?", they say. 

   I say, "Which one?"


  I was born on a hot summer Tuesday, in times just a bit beyond my memory. It happened (as I understand it) in the normal way, with a hospital and a mother and a doctor and rather a sizable mess. I can't say I entirely recall the details; it's been a while, and this sort of thing is easy to forget when you're a baby still learning how to eat and breathe. Others do, though, and their testimonies line up to form a consensus of what happened that day.

   This is when legal documents say I was born; it's on my driver's license, my college applications, and too many other things besides to count. When someone asks if I'm old enough to drink or drive, this day is what they check against. And I can't blame them, really. I thought that day was my birthday, too, for a long while.

   But that's not right, is it?

   It depends on who you ask. My parents, and the doctors, and all the boring paperwork and government officials, would certainly agree; on that Tuesday, a baby was born in a hospital maternity ward, and grew up day by day to become a living (I'll maybe accept healthy, but not happy) adult. The same bones, the same brain, the same continuity of experience. They're not exactly wrong; a child was born that day, to be certain. Yet it's not quite accurate to say that the crying little someone in that hospital is still me.


   I was born at an elementary school book sale. By then, the baby from the hospital had grown into a shy, awkward youth, fond of hiding from the world by burying himself in books and fantasy. I walked into my school's library, pockets sagging with a few dimes and quarters given by my mother, and wasn't quite sure what I was looking for. Whatever I sought to find among those worn-out old paperbacks, it wasn't this.

   That afternoon, I left the book sale a few quarters lighter, carrying (among other things) a weathered fantasy novel - the fourth in a series - called The Price of Power. I reread it recently, just to refresh my memory; from an adult perspective, it's not a good book by any definition of the word. The plot switches on a dime between simplistic and nonsensical, the prose is overly purple, the setting is full of inexplicable racism, and it has entirely too many sex scenes for what's clearly intended to be a children's book.

   The events of its story, though, managed to draw me in both then and now. The protagonist, a wandering warrior named Mika of the Wolf Nomads, falls under the curse of a magical jewel. (He also falls under a second, unrelated curse. Don't worry about it.) Each time Mika drew upon the jewel's power, he could unleash powerful spells to escape whatever danger befell him; as he did this, however, he would be turned little by little into a woman.

   I don't recall if I ever finished that original paperback of The Price of Power. Maybe even the boy at the book sale had an eye for literary analysis, and realized how bad most of the story actually was. Long after I put down the novel, though, I couldn't stop thinking about that jewel's curse. For Mika, femininity was a thing of horror that spelled the end of his adventures, but that didn't seem right to me - after all, the girls in my books and my school were full of adventures of their own. He feared the trappings of dresses and jewelry, and the ability to grasp his own emotions, but never bothered to compare them to the life of drunken violence and bloodsoaked furs he spent the story leading.

   The elementary schooler in a T-shirt didn't relate much to Mika's struggles. While the novel's hero fought thieves, demons, and a band of cultists, the greatest dangers I'd encountered had been little more than incautious drivers and a larger-than-average dog. Still, where the cursed jewel was concerned, Mika and I finally saw a common conflict. With very different eyes, we looked at what sort of fate might befall us at the end of the tunnel. What would a transformed woman's life be like, whether for the Wolf Nomad or for the person reading his story?

   I don’t recommend reading The Price of Power. It's not worth your time, even if you're some far-future historian thinking of writing a biography on me. At that elementary school book sale, though, it was exactly the right story at the right time. The curse of the jewel (a plot point forgotten halfway through, by the way) was laid on not just the protagonist, but the reader too. It planted a seed in a young boy's brain, an idea of what could be possible. In a sense, too, I was born from the day I read that book - the seed it planted, little by little, grew up into me.


   I was born on the Internet, in a slow process over several years, forged through the crucible of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before the lockdown shut down schools and social events, I'd never been particularly social in real life. The community at my school and in my neighborhood (nevermind the likes of clubs and sports teams) didn't accept me; when I looked for friendship, I had to find it online. I'd picked up some measure of Internet safety along the way, so I knew not to use my real name or identity. Following that faithfully, I wrote a new name and a new life, and lived in it until it became more real than the crying baby at the hospital ever was.

   The people I met online took me at my word, and I had no reason not to show them the same courtesy. I learned about other queer people online, simply encountering them and hearing their stories across forums and Discord servers. Little by little, I remembered the "curse" of The Price of Power, and once again started to wonder. I was online, armored behind a screen name and an invented history. If I used a new profile picture, or changed my displayed pronouns, then who would possibly stop me?

   Some people describe the moment they realize they're trans as a single grand revelation; that wasn't the case for me. At most, I went to bed one day unsure and woke up the next with a tentative grasp on an answer. All in all, though, that realization for me was a slow and gradual process–each time I heard my own name (any of them, really) in a conversation, or I saw a pride-flag pin on someone's backpack in the street, the wall of my answer grew by another brick.

   Each time I turned off the computer and saw nothing but my reflection in the black glass of the screen, I grew more and more sure that the face behind the mirror wasn't the one I wanted to be.


   I was born on August 21, 2023, the day I arrived at college. My parents' car wheeled away from the dorms, leaving me standing there alone under the revealing light of the summer sun. I watched, for a while, until I was sure they were out of sight. Then, at last, I began to speak to the people around me.

   I had found out who I am, during the pandemic, within the safety of a digital screen. The thing that stood in my way was always the strictures of the real world, and the expectations of my peers and classmates and family around me. But my parents' car drove away, leaving me standing there alone. They left me far from home, true, but that wasn't a bad thing. It means no more of home could stand in my way.

   When I introduced myself to my classmates and neighbors, I started using my real name.



   I was born the winter after that in the safety of my dorm room. The lights were off, sunlight coming in through the window's off-angle, warmth not coming from the dubiously-functional heating, but from a comfortable hoodie. My roommate was away in class, leaving me alone as I furtively dug through my backpack. For the first time, I pulled out a pill bottle and opened the cap.   

   It's hard to believe this scene took place over a year ago. I've come a long way, even just in this relatively short span of time. When I compare old photographs to new ones, it's difficult to tell that they're the same person. Despite everything that's changed in the world around me, too, my own existence in my own life and body feels so much more comfortable, more correct, than it ever has before.

   The world is full of people who see the face and body of the baby in the hospital, or the youth at the book sale, or the teenager behind the laptop screen, or the college student newly free from home, and they think that's all that person can ever be. Indeed, when I look back on my past selves, I find myself being trapped by those same viewpoints. Yet, I think I always knew, on some level, that this wasn't quite right–that nobody, really, was seeing the person they should.

   I wish I could tell the child from all those memories and birthdays what I know now–what's right and what's wrong about what they assumed, and what they should do to make it to a place in their life where they can find peace. But time only marches forwards with each new day (birthday or otherwise). I think all we can do is continue to reshape our futures, and our existences, to make sure they'll be a little bit better.


   What is a birthday, anyway? The word's not simply tied to the messy physical process of babies coming out of wombs; people assign birthdays to the founding of institutions, or to the day they adopt pet animals and bring them in from the cold. All racehorses, for some reason, have their birthday celebrated on the same day; surely not every newborn colt was brought into the world on January 1st. In that sense, then, it's made clear what someone's birthday really is: not an ironclad fact of their creation, but a choice assigned by the society around them.

   My parents thought I would be born days before the date my birth certificate says. When the process of pregnancy didn't go according to plan, they changed the world's understanding of my birthday to suit their new understanding of when I came to be. That understanding changed again, and again, and again, thanks to them and to me and to countless other people throughout our lives. What's one more candle, or one more slice of birthday cake, to add to that list?

   All in all, maybe we shouldn't be so absolute about the concept of birthdays at all. Every one of us is constantly in the process of becoming new, little by little, day by day. Every time we wake up in the morning or learn something new, every time our body is stretched or scarred, every time we learn a bit more about who we are, it's our birthday that day. A new version of us is born.

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