Making Changes	
																	         						
	Ginny met Carl quite accidentally at the Bay Area Derby.Girls battle against the Richmond Wrecking Belles at Craneway Pavillion. They sat next to each other in two of the only open bleacher seats inside the metal hanger where ships were once built during World War II. They struck up a conversation easily, as if friends for years, at first about the Rosie the Riveter Museum across the way with a past Rosie now one of the docents, and then just about the beauty of fog spilling in across the yard outside.
	Ginny told Carl how she liked to skate as a teen laced up in her white leathers with pompoms bouncing and wearing her short pleated skirt with satin jacket, wheeling all night long with her girlfriends. But these B.A.D. Girls, Carl was quick to point out and Ginny quick to agree, were something else in tight shorts and hardhats, kicking and hip whipping, jamming and sprinting, racing in pack speed on the power of hips and legs on wheels.
	Carl gestured his head toward Ginny’s partner, who was scrolling through her phone, and fired off a series of questions: “What’s up with her? She doesn’t like skating? And what’s with the B-Girl shirt?”
	Ginny explained, “Lisa lost a coin toss between coming here with me or for me to go with her to a breakdancing competition at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco. She’s a B-Girl, a break dancer, and wants to compete.” Ginny went on to say: “Lisa also wanted to stay on for the Hubba Hubba Burlesque show, so I expect her to be streaming the dancing the whole time we are here and the babes back at home.”
	Carl said, “What I’d like to do is skate as a B.A.D. Girl like T Wrecks, Biggie Brawls, Chiquita Bonanza. I’d be Grandiose Canyon.”
	That’s when Lisa, half listening and half watching a livestream, chimed in: “Canyon? Are you kidding? That’s something for a map, not a person!” 
	Carl snapped back with “Well like Walt Whitman once said: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’” which seemed to shut her up as she dove back into her phone.
	Ginny found Carl attractive in an androgynous way with his soft features and long dark braids and told him so. That’s when he told her at first about the old practice at off-reservation boarding schools of cutting off Native American children’s braids, then that he was two-spirited from a Navajo Nation near the Grand Canyon where he sometimes traveled to do The Circle of Life hoop dancing at powwows, ending with “You should go sometime. It’s really something.”
	That’s when he also confided, as if they were much more than new acquaintances, that he was transitioning from male to female, adding: “I am tormented by my brain telling me I am a woman, but my body arguing with it that I am a man. Canyon will be the name for my authentic self once I wholly transition from Carl.”
	They remained good friends thereon in. They even made a trip to Lake Victoria, B. C. to see the First People displays of beading, weaving, woodworking, and other artistry. Afterwards they went to the opening of the shoe exhibit on the Vancouver Art Gallery steps, a bereavement for children whose graves were unearthed at Kamloops Reservation School. There they wrapped their arms around each other there and wept.	
	As they grew closer, Ginny became Carl’s support animal as he traversed psychological and physiological testing and counseling, hormone therapy, throat scraping, breast implants. She was happy to do it, her platonic love growing ever deeper. Especially after Lisa took off with another B-Girl with whom she developed a dueling choreography for competitions. 
	“No regrets,” Lisa barked the day she left, “You have your Carl or Canyon or whatever he or she is.” This did offend but didn’t surprise Ginny since Lisa’s mother was a separatist lesbian who associated only with “womyn born womyn.” Lisa and her mother were equally intolerant of gender transformation.
	Around the same time Lisa left, Carl returned to the reservation to discuss his transitioning with family and tribal elders. With both of them gone, Ginny invested herself back into the acupuncture practice her Asian parents bequeathed her that she’d been halfheartedly running for years, taking on new clients and expanding into a small boutique carrying aromatic candles, lotions, oils, and the like. She was feeling solidly independent for the first time in a long time, as if she were returning to herself. Ready to leave early for the weekend, she saw one last minute online appointment with a  new client, Clara Nadleehi.
	 When the client walked in, Ginny ran to her with open arms crying out: “Canyon, what are you doing here?”
	“No, not Canyon. It’s Clara, the person who transitioned from Carl who is part of the person I have become as Clara. I chose the surname Nadleehi, Navajo for one who changes or one who constantly transforms. And I’m here to invite you to the Sacramento Contest Powwow
where I am hoop dancing in a jingle dress, having long discarded the wrongheaded fantasy of being a B.A.D Girl.”
	Clara went on to remark she was proud Ginny was living for the first time on her own and returning to a meaningful business, a really good transition. Ginny agreed wholeheartedly, saying “A transition within myself, all of it in progress, and always to be continued,” adding “and in Nikki Giovanni’s words: ‘I’m here and if I mist on emotional soil a weed will grow— Make me rain. Let me be a part of this needed change.’”




Andrena Zawinski is a social justice poet and fiction writer. She is the author of four full-length books of poetry with the most recent Born Under the Influence and a debut collection of flash fiction, Plumes & Other Flights of Fancy. She lives on Alameda Island in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and their dog.