Don’t Worry Be Happy
To change his body, Chase needs a letter from his psychiatrist. Not just any letter: one written in the exact language demanded by his health insurance. Without it, the surgery won’t be approved.
In 2033, state medicine, psychiatry, and police speak through one synthetic intelligence: the Division for Institutional Knowledge. They’ve stopped pretending those cistems are separate, fusing into one predictive body and calling it DIK.
By the thirteenth appointment, he’s explained the requirements too many times to count. The psychiatrist still hasn’t written it properly.
The rules were clear: the letter had to say he experiences clinically significant distress, that psychotherapy wouldn’t alleviate it, that he identifies within the binary model of gender, and that he has completed at least twelve sessions of therapy.
Chase has done everything. He brought the printed guidelines, highlighted them. Showed the doctor exactly what was required, step by step. Wrote a biography, with Ray’s help, crafted to fit the expected narrative: how trans enough he was. Tried every approach: calm, desperate, assertive, cheerful.
Still, nothing changed. The doctor keeps producing the bare minimum, insisting it’s enough.
At session thirteen, Chase tries once more. Not hopeful, just determined. The psychiatrist leans forward, palm flat on the desk, and says with finality: “You should send it to the insurance right away.” As if Chase hasn’t already done everything. As if the problem was him, not the letter.
Then the shrink says: “Don’t worry, be happy.”
If Chase wrote that in fiction, no one would buy it. He stands, asks for the toilet. The office is too small for two gendered WCs. Lucky.
He murmurs to Ray while peeing: “Record this. Remind me to edit later. I feel I’m gonna explode. It goes like this: It sounds simple. Basic. Human. I dream of a new plumbing cistem. I can’t go pee in peace. She will put me in pieces. I can’t go pee in peace. He pisses me off. I heard your calling. You asked me to pee. Further away. It’s a piss contest. Show me how to pee in peace. My bladder hurts. I beg you. Make them piss their pants. Even their bladder feels entitled. To pee in peace.”
He goes back to the shrink. It smells like formaldehyde.
Specialist in Psychiatry Psychosomatic Medicine Psychotherapy Sexual Medicine
Chase wants to ask: “Who gets to be this mediocre? Seriously? Don’t worry, be happy?” But he doesn’t. He freezes. Nods politely. Says sorry and thank you, like he learned to do with social workers as a kid.
He knows how easily access can be revoked. Push too hard, sound ungrateful, and he might have to start over. Finding another psychiatrist could take months. Years.
The doctor hands him the new document. The required diagnosis: transsexualism. Chase slides it into a plastic folder. He’s followed every rule. And still, it isn’t enough.
He feels like a coordinate on an illegible map, a numbered point in a collapsing cistem. It doesn’t need to hate you. It just needs to sort you. Anything it can’t sort, it erases.
Chase belongs to the hole-world, where logic fails and cistems sort you wrong again and again. It’s the place on the back of the official papers, where the rules say you should be moving forward but the output is always the same: no access, no care.
He imagines the sorting algorithm.
No change: preserve the current order. Random: scramble the human points. Reverse: flip the path backward. Sort by X, Y, or Z: reduce a life to one axis.
That’s how the cistem works. Input: a human. Output: looped back in one dimension.
Today is Transgender Day of Visibility.