Super Awesome Sylvia was a role model to girls in science
Then he realized he is a boy
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Avi Selk.
This is the story of Super Awesome Sylvia, an ingenious little girl who made robots, or so everyone thought.
It’s also the story of Zephyrus Todd, a 16-year-old boy who prefers art to science, and knows a lot more about himself now than when people called him Sylvia and assumed he was a girl. It’s about how Zeph got stuck inside Super Awesome Sylvia, “trying to be that person,” as he puts it.
And how he broke free.
Chapter 1: Sylvia
At age 8, Sylvia Todd put on a lab coat and started a web show with the help of her mom and dad. She was a gaptoothed kid from Auburn, Calif. with a pony tail and soldering iron, a rare sight in the boy’s club of amateur inventors.
“Hi! My name is Sylvia and this is our super awesome Maker shoooow!” Sylvia said in the first episode. “Let’s get out there and experiment!”
Before long, Sylvia had tens of thousands of viewers. And tons of robots, of course.
Chapter 2: Famous
- She got invited to the White House Science Fair in 2013, when President Barack Obama tried out her famous WaterColor Bot and told its shaky-legged, 11-year-old inventor that it was great to see girls in tech.
- Then came reporters, magazine profiles, even book deals. A story in the New York Times described Sylvia as half-silly, half-serious — and “(almost) certain that her future lies in science.”
- By middle school, Sylvia was giving speeches all over the world, from the United Nations to elite girls’ schools in Australia.
This was a big deal for a kid from a small town in Northern California, whose parents often worried about paying the next bill.
Chapter 3: Transgender
Underneath the pony tail and the prop lab coat, Sylvia didn’t feel like a genius, or a celebrity, or a girl.
Zeph remembers asking a friend in seventh grade, “Is it weird to want to be a boy?” In his private sketchbook, he started to draw himself with shorter hair and hairy legs.
Zeph became reluctant to make new Web shows, and eventually stopped altogether. His parents weren’t sure why at first. They didn’t know that Zeph that could no longer stand to look at his long curls, or listen to “how squeaky my voice was.”
He was drawing himself as a boy in his sketchbook all the time, prototyping new haircuts. He was looking up words on the Internet.
Lesbian; gay; gender fluid; pansexual; asexual; bisexual; tri-gender; demi-girl.
“So many labels,” Zeph said. But one seemed to fit.
He sat down at the dinner table one evening, and told his parents and sisters and brother: “I have something to say. I think I’m transgender.”
It took some time for the family to get used to that.
Chapter 4: Zeph
The family came to realize that Sylvia Todd’s greatest project had been to figure out that he was never Sylvia Todd at all.
So the Todds all sat down and brainstormed a new name. They settled on Zephyrus. It was fun to spell, and reminded the family of a character from a musical they’d once seen in London.
“But it’s actually a Greek god,” Zeph said. “God of the west winds.”
It all seems pretty simple, in hindsight. It was anything but at the time.
“In the palette of human experience, about the best thing we can do is apply labels that almost match,” James told Zeph one day.
“Saying ‘trans boy’ probably covers 90 percent of what you are. The rest is something else that’s just you.”
Chapter 5: Comics
“Do you want to just shut it down?” James asked Zeph one day. He meant the show, and Super Awesome Sylvia. To erase and move past that whole chunk of a life.
But Zeph didn’t want that.
“I was this girl role model at one point,” he said. “I didn’t want it to just end.”
So he decided to keep Sylvia alive, as art — a drawing, a brainy girl character who both is him and is not.
Zeph drew her into a comic strip, explaining his transition. He sends it to people who still write to him, asking Sylvia to make an appearance.
“I definitely can see it becoming a TV show or something kids would watch,” says Zeph.
And if it ever does become one, he hopes to include a trans or queer character, too.
