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Satire . . . for now:

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It was early still, not much past 6 a.m., and Boomer Kaplan was already dressed for the first day of Obedience School. The night before, his owner, Sara, pulled out the doggie collar and he watched in the mirror as she put it around his neck. “My first time taking a walk on a leash,” he said. For the past month, he’d been pushing his parents to let him avail himself of a tree or a hydrant. Boomer, whose ninth birthday was a couple of months away, thought it was a relief to relieve himself naturally.

But after some back and forth, they’d settled on the dark leather collar that Sara was now fitting around his neck. Charley, James’ 4-year-old brother, still in his pajamas, pointed at him. “Good doggie, Boomer. Good doggie!” James collapsed on the floor, staring through the windows at a moon that he knew made his new doggie want to howl.

“How you feelin’?” Boomer’s other owner, Ben, called from the kitchen. “Ruff,” James said. “But ready to chase my own tail.”

He wasn’t just thinking about his first day of Obedience School. He was thinking about the beginning of his first full school year as Boomer.

Some eight months before, Boomer had told his parents his “inner person was a puppy.” The round-cheeked 8-year-old they’d always thought was their daughter was actually their pet. It was something he’d been trying to tell them — something he’d been trying to understand for himself — for more than a year.

Sara and Ben considered themselves progressive, but they didn’t know the first thing about raising a trans-species puppy. In the days that followed, they would talk to family, to friends and to their couples therapist. They would take James shopping for “dog collars” and to a “dog groomer.”

They had to get to know their first-born all over again. They loved him as they always had, but there was this sense that maybe they didn’t really know him. And, if they were being honest, he was different — lighter and smiling and more apt to wag his tail.

Boomer took James into the bathroom, put some pomade in his hands and started running them through his curly golden retriever hair. “I always liked starting a new class,” Boomer said. “It’s like a fresh start.”

James nodded, then smoothed out bits of hair Boomer had missed. “And for me, it’ll be nice to take an intelligent and trained retriever duck hunting,” he said.

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Stay tuned for next year’s update. Boomer and his owners are excited about the 2018 Westminster Dog Show. They point out that transsexuals are winning lots of girls’ athletic events, and they plan on hiring a lawyer to force the Westminster Kennel Club to allow Boomer to compete as the breed with which he identifies - and not to penalize him for whatever pre-transition anatomical details may not measure up to their bigoted and outdated standards.