Paradigm Shift - Conceal, Don't Feel #1
My Transsexual Memoir - How I came to identify as transfem
Note:
I will be retroactively misgendering some people in this story. I want to reader to feel as if they are in the moment. I want the reader to understand my experience at the time. All names for non-public figures will be fictionalized. Names for public figures will be genuine, but I will avoid deadnames
Table of Contents
Paradigm Shift
Boy Toys
Don’t Let Them In, Don’t Let Them See
No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm A Weeaboo!
Kiss Kiss Fall in Love
Open Up the Gate
Spring 2014 - 9th Grade - 14 Years Old
Pansexual. That’s what Athena said, just over the noisy chatter of the lunchroom. “I’m pansexual”. The rest of us, seated at the table, just stared at her.
“What’s that?”, someone asked.
“You’re attracted to pans?”, said Heracles.
“No, it means I like everything”, she said. She wasn’t making eye contact and at this point she was beginning to back out of the situation almost as suddenly as she arrived, no doubt headed back to the safety of her primary clique.
Despite 3-4 years of knowing each other at least on the level of acquaintances, and eventually on the level of friendship, she’d never been directly within our tight friend-group. She only sat with us at lunch occasionally. She wasn’t part of our Skype chat. She never played Minecraft with us. But that day she did come to tell us this.
I hadn’t said anything at this point, just waiting for understanding. But understanding didn’t come. Frustratingly, as she was closing herself off, the rest of the group turned inward, bouncing off each other in jest over the idea of liking kitchenware.
So, as Athena walked fast towards the exit, I got up to follow her. I think it was because I wanted to be a good friend. I always told myself that if any of my friends ever came out as gay, I’d accept them so fucking hard. And I mean, ‘Pansexual’ certainly sounded homosexual-adjacent.
I already had a proven track record. Just the year prior in 8th grade our mutual friend Persephone from Athena’s previous clique confided in me about her bisexuality and her crush on Athena. In my opinion I took it in stride, treating it as entirely normal, even despite my own crush on Athena. And whenever Persephone wanted to yap about her feelings and fantasies, I listened happily. I was such a good ally.
I caught up with Athena, but despite my expressed interest she kept walking without looking at me, and all she’d say was “It means I like everything”.
“What is ‘everything’? like bisexual?”
“Everything”.
As we reached the threshold between the cafeteria and the main hallway, I ended my pursuit.
That night —or maybe a few nights later, I can’t say for sure— I was lying in bed, scrolling through my YouTube feed on my smartphone as usual, when I suddenly had an amazing idea. I could look up “Pansexual” and find out what it means. So, I did just that. I found one video that looked promising called My Identity by a creator called “HeyThere005” (Now known as Ash Hardell)
Obviously, I was immediately enthralled by her adorable charm and appearance. I loved her catchy “Beer & a Chat” subtitle.
In this video, Ash does offer a definition for “Pansexual”, but I don’t think this is where it really clicked for me how this was distinct from “Bisexual”. What it did do was give me a whole bunch of new terminology to look up, opening my mind to the idea that there were all these concepts in gender and sexuality that I wasn’t yet aware of.
Either later that night or a few days later, YouTube recommended me the videos by Ash Hardell that really transformed my perspective. Spectrums and Spectrums #2
“Now unfortunately, we live in a society that can view gender in a very binary way. It sees: males, females; men, women… not much else. But one day somebody said, ‘no gender is a social construct and therefore there is no correct way to define it! Also, it exists on a spectrum!’ There are men women and an infinite amount of identities in between.”
— Ash Hardell, Circa 2014
And that is when the vibes officially shifted.
I didn’t immediately start identifying as trans after watching these videos, but I was super excited about it. It all just made so much sense to me, and I felt like I was having a moment like when I learned that there are more than 3 States of matter.
However, I did start immediately seeking out related content, including one video by Arielle Scarcella (Former Trans ally) about being trans, featuring a trans woman. (This video no longer exists). And while it’s not like I saw this video and immediately said to myself “woah, I’m a trans woman and I’m going to transition”, I did have a very notable creeping sense. I might have thought something. Along the lines of “I have a really bad feeling I am about to find out something about myself that I’m not emotionally prepared for”. And that was a feeling I’d get whenever “trans women” were discussed, or when a trans woman was featured in a video. Before this I didn’t even know what the T in LGBT stood for. But now I did, and I was honestly genuinely scared.
For the next week or so, I spent every night going down the pre-2015 trans internet rabbit hole. There wasn’t a lot of good MtF Trans content back then, but I would find random low-tech vlogs here and there, mostly by older trans women. I did however watch a gazillion “boy-to-girl transformation” videos by people like Clawdeena9 who is now a very popular ‘Monster High’/Doll youtuber, and cosplayer.
I won’t post the videos I watched of her(?), because she and most others I watched were young teenagers like me at the time, but here’s one from 2019 where she is 19 and explains what’s up with her identity
Over the course of roughly a week, I learned about gender transition and HRT. And I realized that I definitely wanted to be a girl. I think HRT is what really sealed the deal. The idea that I could just become a girl. Had I known this was possible sooner, I’m sure I would have identified as such long ago. I was not however sold on the label “Transgender”. This was partially because I thought the words “Transgender” and “Transsexual” sounded scary. They sounded deviant. They sounded like the kind of words that someone might say in the same breath as “pedophile”. In fact I thought I might have heard these terms in the past without enough context for me to grok anything beyond their relation to sexual deviance. But I think it was primarily because I’d watch these boy-to-girl transformation videos and see how much work it was to present as a girl while being male. I wanted to do the things they were doing, but I didn’t think I’d want to do that every single day. Some days I would rather just present as a “boy”. Not in like a masculine way, but more like the way it looks when girls cosplay as an anime boy. Because of this, I adopted a different label.
Genderfluid.
Once I accepted it, I felt as if so, much of my life was starting to make sense. Memories from my childhood would pop into my mind, colored by a whole new perspective….