It’s a Boy

There’s an entertaining bit of gender in Richard Rhodes’s iconic history of thermonuclear weapons development, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. You could probably find this story other places, but because I’m a bit of a Richard Rhodes stan, that’s where I found it.

Edward Teller, one of the central figures who conceived and nurtured the concept of a thermonuclear bomb, was largely cut out of the process of the final engineering to materialize the idea into a first real-life test. While the team from Los Alamos assembled the device and filled a dewar with liquid hydrogen ripe for atomic fusion, Teller worked out how to determine whether the test succeeded from his lab in Berkeley. The seismic shock of a successful detonation in the remote Pacific would be so great that it ought to be visible in the way the ground trembled in California.

20 minutes after the explosion, Teller saw the line jiggle on the seismograph. He knew from the sight of it that it meant the device had worked, and had worked spectacularly. The islet of Elugelab at Eniwetok Atoll had been erased and replaced with a 200-foot-deep crater.

Brimming with pride, Teller wanted to get the word out to his colleagues of the successful test. Since openly discussing sensitive and secret nuclear developments was (and remains) frowned upon, Teller improvised a code to express himself plainly to anyone who knew what Los Alamos had been up to. The message was simple:

“It’s a boy.”

This is probably all too much exposition, but the point is how often we signal to each other that maleness is good and normal, something to be celebrated, and femaleness is, well, not that. This is one little silly example, but we’re saturated with examples like this from moment to moment. Growing up the way I did, I certainly felt that saturation.

So often I worked on reinforcing what I got through cultural osmosis. I’d remind myself that I had it good, that being male must be one of the key features of making my life better. All that messaging can’t be completely wrong, right?

It’s a head trip to give all that up. You hear the little voice screaming that you must be trading a greater for a lesser, no matter how good it feels as masculinity bleeds away and femininity pours in.

For me at least, that voice has been getting fainter over the last year. That’s been nice.