Shannon Phillips

This year we have a killer bunny, Spider-man, and a hand-me-down Ghostbuster:

I’m a fairy but I’m not sure you’ll get a picture as the light is already gone!

Some kids have imaginary friends. Davy has an imaginary enemy. Whenever something is broken or misplaced in the house, whenever someone makes a mess, it’s Goo-Goo Face’s fault. I have no idea where Goo-Goo Face came from but he’s now a staple of Davy and Robin’s play: any time a villain is needed, it’s generally Goo-Goo Face. Goo-Goo Face is, conveniently, invisible to everyone but Davy.

Davy, by the way, isn’t even Davy at the moment. He’s decided his name should be Bat and we’re all doing our best to honor this decision.

We actually got into this fix because I was trying to explain about trans people in a way a five-year-old can understand. What I said to Robin and Davy (sorry, Bat) is that usually boys have penises and girls have vaginas, but sometimes a boy is born with a vagina or a girl is born with a penis, because it’s really what’s in your heart that makes you a girl or a boy. And then the parents might think they have a baby girl when in fact they have a baby boy, and they won’t know that they were wrong until the baby gets old enough to tell them that he’s actually a boy. I thought I was rocking along quite well with this.

So the artist formerly known as Davy had some questions about what happens then, like, what if the boy has a girl’s name? And I said the parents might have to change the name. And then I said (and this is where I made my fatal mistake, in retrospect) “we thought you were a boy when you were born so we named you Davy, but if you told us we were wrong, then we would let you choose a new name.”

And he said, “I am a boy but my name isn’t Davy, my name should be Bat.”

So now we all have to try to call him Bat, it’s a whole thing right now. I’ve been assuming that it’ll blow over soon but then I read about the case of Loki Skylizard, actual person whose parents allowed him to pick his own name when he was eight. Dr. Skylizard is now Chief of Thoracic Surgery at a hospital in New Jersey so I guess he turned out pretty okay? And in my heart of hearts I have to admit that Bat Phillips is a pretty cool name.