Merle makes a big deal about everyone’s name but her own. She finds significance in Oz, she lectures on Lazlo, she validates Vyvyan. But she never tells her full name if she can avoid it, and she always says that she hasn’t yet learned her own true appellation.

Her mother named her for the movie star. She sent the Certificate of Birth in to the New York City Board of Health, with the names Merle Oberon Morgan printed on line one. “My full name makes me gag.” That’s what Merle said to me 30 years ago, after I finally heard her middle name. “I’d change it in a minute if I could figure what to change it to.”

I was Sigmund then. I wasn’t much stronger than Merle, but I didn’t hesitate to act stronger. I had to wrestle and tease her into giving me Oberon. And I laughed at it.

But for at least ten years now, I’ve thought the names suit her well. Merle means blackbird, and the lady is small, dark, and quick. Oberon was king of the faeries, and my love acts more like a king than a queen.

She has the strongest soul I’ve ever known. Not that I really know souls, but I’ve been as intimate as possible with her for a third of a century and in a variety of ways. King Merle has a grounded, adamantine ego. She’s also profoundly objective; she acts because of reason instead of feelings, even in situations where most people are governed by emotion. For example, she and her best friend ran away from their homes in high school. They only left for a couple of days. Neither of them was unhappy at home. They did it because they felt their childhoods would be incomplete without the experience. Merle told me they shoplifted, too. Not for need and not to keep: in fact, the only time they got caught they were returning some flatware they’d stolen the day before. No, they thought shoplifting was a necessary skill to be learned on the way to adulthood.

That’s a rare way to make decisions, but I tend to do it too. I spent the first 39 years of my life male and then switched to the woman I am now, and I didn’t do that because I was trapped in the wrong body… I did it because I wanted to experience life as both genders. I figure men have it over women in sexual matters for the first 25 or 35 years, but then the pendulum swings. A woman’s supposed to hit her sexual prime at 40 or so, and I didn’t want to miss that.

Funny. I started the switch earlier, but I didn’t feel female till the final operation. When I met Merle in 1967 I was Sigmund. I was a few years ahead of her at Cal, and I changed my name to Vyvyan the following year, when I graduated. I meant the male version of the name – that spelling had never been used by a woman – but looking back now, I can’t deny something was happening. I got into cross-dressing when I was 30, and once I started shaving my body hair I never wanted to stop. But it took actual dick removal for me to become who I am now.

So it would have been easy for us to have a kid, except obviously Merle would have to carry the child. She refused. Firmly, freely and finally. I even froze sperm before my operation, but she hasn’t consented to receive it.