Writing featuring the lives of characters prior to their fateful trip go here. Characters may be in one memory thread at a time, though one-shots and solo threads do not count against this number.
One of the first characters you ever wanted to be was Mary Poppins. When you were less than three years old, you wrapped your security blanket around yourself like a dress, and you danced around the house carrying your mother's umbrella with the handle shaped like a goose's head. You thought that Mary's bottomless purse was incredibly cool.
You were very young, less than five, and your family was out at a pizza place with some friends, and their daughter had brilliant blonde hair so long it fell all the way to her waist. You were fascinated by this. When you asked your mom about it, she told you that this girl had never had her hair cut in her whole life, and you were so jealous about that, and wished that you could have grown your hair that long already too.
You begged, and your mom let you start growing your hair out after that, though it never got as long as that girl's.
You decided that your favorite stuff animal, a cat, was a girl cat. Your third favorite was also a girl cat. Your second favorite was a boy cat, but only because he was very large and fat and kind of ugly.
You were, in your formative years, raised exclusively by your mother, and so you picked up a lot of her values and ways of doing things. She believed in more traditionally feminine traits, like kindness and caring and showing your emotions, and while she did make sure you knew that many people didn't think boys should hold those same values in that same way, she also made sure you knew it was okay if you did.
That was good, because you did, and even though you sometimes were quieter about that later in life, it never really changed.
In first grade, you made a friend who would be your best friend for the next twelve years. You started hanging out at recess because you were both weird and often alone. You both had long hair, and you were both a little awkward, and you had become very good friends before either of you asked the other's name. Your friend's name was James. This was also when you learned your friend was a boy, and it was when he learned that you were too. Before that, you'd both been kind of uncertain, but neither of you had really cared.
Your favorite fictional character for a long, long time was Princess Leia. You became obsessed with her when you watched Star Wars for the first time, and after that whenever you would play Star Wars with your parents or your friends you would play the part of Princess Leia. Princess Leia was also James' favorite character, maybe just a little bit because she was yours, but you made it work. You shared. You were Princess Leia, and James was Princess Leia's identical twin sister who was also named Princess Leia. Your mom had to be Luke Skywalker.
You always liked going to the toy store, or the toy aisle at Target, and whenever you were there you needed to thoroughly examine many items, even toys that you had no particular personal interest in. You walked around and looked, and you coveted things, and one of the things you coveted most was Polly Pockets. These were tiny little boxes that folded open into dioramas, and in terms of target audience they were totally and completely aimed at girls.
The miniature worlds inside fascinated you, and looking at them online years later, for no real reason at all, you found that you still remembered all the little details, a stool made from a mushroom cap, a tiny gate you could open and close. You imagined having one of these so much you actually sort of psyched yourself out, like maybe you did have one? Or maybe the want was just that strong. You're not sure. Your mom would've probably bought one for you if you'd asked, but somehow this one thing always felt a little extra forbidden.
You were afraid of needles in general, and of piercings of all sorts, but for some reason your mom had some clip-on earrings (despite her ears being pierced), and for some reason she gave them to you, and you liked having them. You wore them once or twice, but they pinched your earlobes, so you just put them in a little brass jewelry box, along with some pendants and bracelets and even a couple actual earrings. You treasured all of these things, and would look at them now and then for years. Where did you get all that stuff, anyways?
Your elementary school gym teacher liked to segregate the class by gender, and make the boys and the girls do different activities. Usually this meant that the girls jumped rope or hula-hooped, and the boys did team sports. You despised team sports. This very quickly became a confrontation. You informed the gym teacher that you wanted to jump rope. She said that's what the girls were doing, and you as a boy were to play team sports. You told her that gender discrimination was unconstitutional.
You got to jump rope, but your mom had a couple questions for you after parent-teacher conferences.
In second grade, one of your classmates, a precocious but troubled boy who would move away at the end of the year, decided to write and stage a play as a fundraiser for the school. This never went anywhere, of course, but you were drafted for the play, and recess was to be practice time. The play was going to be an original Star Wars story. But this ran into problems very quickly, because (this being a serious play expected to make money) the role of Princess Leia would need to be filled by a girl. You were very sore about this, because you would definitely make a better Princess Leia than the only girl who'd have anything to do with this, who didn't even like Star Wars and was only interested because the director had offered to pay her five dollars.
There were a lot of conversations about this subject. The director was unrelenting, and while this put some strain on your friendship, you were friends, so eventually you agreed, fine, you'd compromise. You would play R2-D2 instead, and shuffle around the playground grinding down the soles of your shoes and screaming incoherent beeping and buzzing noises. This slowly became your play role in general. If you couldn't be a girl, you would be a robot, or sometimes a cat.
Your elementary school was a weird hippie experimental school, and not a high-performing one. Students who were academically savvy tended to end up a little lost—you often ignored lessons to sit in a corner reading, for example, and you still seemed to understand the material so the teachers just let you do that. Anyways, there was this one retired math professor who was a little more traditional who had been given a supply closet in the basement to transform into an improvised classroom and who volunteered to teach the gifted special lessons in math, science, and computer use. You were in the math class.
While the school as a whole discouraged competition in favor of collaboration, this professor didn't get the memo, and nobody was going to correct him. He also split the class into a boy's and a girl's section. There were two boys and five girls, and he'd give each gender their own problem to solve, and the first to finish got a gold medal drawn on their paper, the second got silver, and the third got bronze. You thought silver was cooler and took a principled stance against competing for first, so he let you have silver even if you came in first, because it kept you from being disruptive about the process.
Anyways, once you finished your problem, you could do the other gender's, and that's what, ironically, you actually competed for. You became very, very good at math for your age. You were doing basic algebra in second grade. And the real prize was, while everyone else was still lost in their long division, to finish the boy's problem and then swing over and also snap up silver for the girl's side.
When you went to bed in the summer in your elementary school years, it was often too hot to wear full pajamas. Instead, your wore underwear and tank tops. Looking back, you're not really sure how or why your mom got you a bunch of tank tops, or why they were only used as sleepwear. They were boy's tank tops, but that didn't matter.
When you were under the covers, you'd hike them up to your chest, so your middle was exposed, and then pretend that you were wearing a bikini, or an outfit like Princess Leia when Jabba The Hutt held her captive.
Sometimes, the kids at your school would feud with one another, and start little factional conflicts. One of the more common options for this was the classic war of girls vs. boys. You thought this was extremely stupid, because there wasn't really any difference between girls and boys, and so you kept your head down and hung out with James, who thought more or less the same. But every so often, someone would drag you into it in some fashion. Usually they'd accuse you of spying because you were standing around the old tree picking bark off it and then pretending the chips of bark were little people, and that wasn't something the others could wrap their heads around, especially as a more attractive alternative to feuding. Whatever the case, once you were forced to participate, you immediately became a spy for the girls. You just felt a lot more comfortable around them.
You had a friend in fourth grade who liked to fidget while in class. One of his favorite things to fidget with was your long hair. He would sit behind you and braid your hair, and your would sit there and enjoy having your hair braided, the gentle tugging, the feeling of his fingers on your scalp. It was calming and relaxing and it's kind of strange in retrospect that nobody ever thought that was unusual in any way.
You used to love the water. You would swim in the ocean, in lakes, in public pools. Your mom liked that you liked this, because she liked swimming too, and also she always thought you needed to get more exercise.
But somewhere in there, you stopped liking swimming. It was maybe around the time swim trips stopped being appropriate classroom activities, right around middle school, right when everyone was hitting puberty. Suddenly you really, really did not like swimming anymore. Swim trunks were the enemy. You could kind of sort of stomach it if you absolutely had to, but you felt naked and disgusting and ashamed, and so you just quietly started dodging any situation that would bring you in contact with the water, or standing around on the shore. You told people it was because your mom made you take swim class for too long, and that was a bad experience, and that was true. Just, you know, only part of the truth. You didn't really have words for the rest.
All your life, people have talked about things like feeling at home in your body and being connected with your physical being and that sort of stuff, and all your life this has been extremely confusing to you. Other people actually like having a physical being? Sounds fake, but okay. You have never associated with what you look like at all, in any way, except maybe identifying with being tall or skinny or having long hair, but even then those were individual attributes taken on their own that didn't come together into any sort of meaningful or coherent picture.
You're you. And the specific you that you feel you are has little to nothing to do with the you that everybody else perceives and reacts to and interacts with. The you that you are is mostly a viewpoint. It sees things and interacts with them, but does not perceive itself, except grudgingly and in passing. It's like watching a movie. Even if a scene is shot from a close PoV, nobody wants a blurry nose taking up the middle of the screen. All the trappings don't matter. You're basically a camera, and that's okay, and it's kind of weird and unsettling that maybe other people are not like that.
Somehow or other, you were in the car with your mom and stepdad, and the topic of discussion became: are you gay? This was probably James' fault, because you'd probably parroted a dirty joke you'd learned from James without understanding it at all, which happened from time to time. Whatever the cause, the conversation was extremely uncomfortable. Your mom has always been very supportive, but also the sort of parent who casually violates personal boundaries in attempts to be even more supportive. Privacy was transient because, if she never gave you cause to fear, why should you have anything to hide? This is one of the reasons you eventually became a very practiced liar.
Anyways, you fumbled your way through an answer: no, you were pretty sure you were not gay. Your stepdad, who was less accepting of anything unconventional and also of you in general, was being very quiet. Your mom, however, was not letting this drop. She asked the follow-up: why?
Why? Why are you not gay? Why do you say "pretty sure?" Whatever the real question, asking for clarification would just lead to more questions, so you scrambled. It's because, you explain, you mostly think about girls.
Your mom was just not letting up, and asked you what that meant. Oh, you said, you know, I just, well, think about girls. And stuff.
You were sort of trying to imply in your weird, barely-cogent, eleven-or-twelve year old way that when you fantasized, you fantasized about girls. But that was not strictly true. In your imaginings, when you made up stories in your head, or fantasies, most of the time the character whose shoes you put yourself in was a girl. You thought about being a girl, but you didn't want to say that, even though you were pretty sure your mom wouldn't have cared.
You've never liked or associated with anything traditionally masculine, or with masculinity. Even the word strikes you as vaguely unsettling and disgusting. Why would anyone want to be male? Like, seriously, what is there to recommend it? It's an unfortunate condition that is inflicted upon some people, you included, so maybe just don't talk about it much? To revel in it feels weirdly perverse. Traditional masculinity frightens you. It feels cruel and violent and unpredictable, and you hate when people try to make you feel good by implying that you're manly. You hate it when strangers call you "the nice man" or things like that.
The only male characters you've ever really been able to see yourself in are the ones who are not traditionally masculine, geeks and nerds and outcasts and weirdos. Intellectuals you sort of got, though you still preferred cool female intellectuals to stuffy, stodgy, eccentric, sexless male ones. But, you know, Professor Plum was alright. Could be worse.
As an aside, your name had you been born a girl would've been incredibly stupid. Your mom thought she was very clever, picking uncommon names, and her specially-chosen girl name was "Sur," pronounced "Sir," like what Marcie calls Peppermint Patty in Peanuts. Your nickname would've been "Sushi," and sometimes when you're trying to feel better about stuff you're like, well, hey, at least that's one bullet dodged.
Your name is actually mostly fine. You really like that it's an uncommon name. The idea of meeting someone else who shares your name is vaguely repulsive. People often think your name is "Xander" which is kind of annoying, but it's not, so that's fine. Your first job misspelled your name on your paychecks, but the bank cashed them.
Because your name is uncommon, it doesn't really strike you as gendered. It refers to you, and that is all it means and all it is. And that's fine.
Of course, you did, just once, find a fictional character with more or less the same name as you, just missing the H at the end. It was in a fantasy novel, something not very widely known, and that's why someone gave it to you. They'd been given the book (an advance review copy) and they'd read the back and saw that name.
You were sort of uneasy about this, because it felt kind of invasive, like someone was writing about you even though obviously they weren't. But you skimmed through the book in your room that night, very quickly.
It turned out that the plot of this novel was that the young prince Zanda was coming of age, but through various twists and turns it was revealed that actually the reason he always felt ill at ease around his peers was that "he" was a princess, not a prince, and had been transformed into a boy through a magic spell to hide him from evil. Halfway through the book, there was a scene in which, finally on the sixteenth birthday, the spell was undone and the main character cast off her false male form and became the person she actually always was.
This made you extra especially extremely uncomfortable for reasons you couldn't explain. You never properly read the book, but sort of just decided it was bad. But also, for reasons you couldn't explain, you never threw it away even when you conducted periodic purges of your bookshelf. You just kept it hidden behind an Isaac Asimov book, and tried not to think about it much.
One day in middle school, everyone in class was getting paper mache masks of their faces made. This was a right of passage at the school, and the masks were hung in the hallways to watch over the class. Each student decorated their mask to represent something about themself. You of course were making yours the face of an orc, because being human was overrated and you could associate with a wildly fictional mask a lot better than something at all like your own face.
The time came for everyone to go wash their hands and faces to clean off the paper pulp, and you followed some friends to the bathroom, and stood in line waiting your turn, and slowly realized that everyone was giggling and looking at you. So you looked at one of your friends in hopes that she might clue you in to what was wrong, and then very belatedly your realized that you were standing in line in the girl's bathroom, with a bunch of girls, and you screamed and fled because you didn't want to be thought of as some sort of weird pervert.
You have never ever ever liked your face. It doesn't look like a human face to you. Other people look like people and you look like some sort of strange jumbled mishmash caricature. All your life, when people have called you handsome, you've smiled and thanked them and thought, wow, are they blind? Are they just being nice?
As you've gotten older, though, your face has started to look a lot more like your father's, and while that's not perfect it's at least better. If you look like your dad, at least you look like a person. It's somebody's face, even if it's not yours.
It was pretty rough when you started growing facial hair. Your stepdad was very excited, and bought you a razor and showed you how to shave, and you were horrible at it. You still had occasional acne, and you were bad at careful handling of the razor, and you cut yourself a bunch and were there in front of the mirror trying not to look at your face while everything stung from where the shaving cream was getting into the cuts. You decided not to shave much after that.
The problem was, having facial hair was also pretty intolerable. You grew a full beard very quickly, and looked older than you were, and it was an ugly, scraggly beard. You hated how grainy it felt, how the hair curled, and you wanted it to go away, but shaving was just such an awful experience for such a temporary respite that it didn't seem worth it. Every so often you'd have to shave for an event or something, and you'd feel so much better, but it was fleeting and soon enough you'd be right back to the same predicament.
It might've been more distressing if you weren't already pretty used to pretending your face didn't exist. But since you were, as established previously, just a camera, it usually didn't matter that much if you were a camera with a beard.
When you were twenty-one, you stayed overnight at a friend's house and in the morning he shaved with an electric razor, and somehow you'd made it that long without knowing those existed, because your stupid macho stepdad believed in the "ritual" of shaving or something. You got an electric razor of your own as soon as you could, and it's not perfect and doesn't get a super clean cut but you haven't had a beard since.
You were in a film class in high school, but you were always the camera operator for your group. This is because you hated being on camera. You also hate being photographed, just in a general categorical sort of way.
One of the members of your usual group was very, very into film and wanted to be a director when he grew up. He took things way too seriously and printed out a contract for everyone to sign, which pledged that you would do what you had to for the shoot, including changing your hair or wearing specific things as needed. You absolutely refused to sign that, even though you doubted it had any teeth, because this guy was a lot more traditional about men's roles and women's roles and there was no way you were even opening the door to him talking about your long hair.
You were one of only two boys in the fashion design class in high school. You were already pretty good at sewing, because you'd been in sewing club in elementary school, and at the time had been the only boy there. You sewed a purse for a girl you had a crush on, and you sewed some shirts and a hat, and you got a very good grade in the class. You wished there were better clothes you could make for yourself, though. All the cool clothes in the world were girl clothes, and that seemed incredibly unfair.
For a little while after you graduated high school, you actually did make an attempt at becoming fashionable. Of course, you had to do it on your own terms. You wore an explosion of brightly-colored everything, hideous Hawaiian shirts and homemade floppy hats in bright pink, deep purple jackets, the works. Hot pink was everywhere in your wardrobe. Your stepdad made some snide comments about going to a Pride parade, but that just encouraged you more.
But somewhere in there, you became aware of that whole "Real men wear pink" thing, and that took a whole lot of the fun out of it. And then a little later, you became aware of so-called pickup artists, and a technique called peacocking, which was where you wore something aggressively flamboyant and ridiculous as a show of confidence to attract women.
None of that was why you wore bright colors. You wore them because they were fun, and because if you had to go around the world feeling like you were some sort of alien clown, you might as well dress the part and own it.
Slowly, inevitably, you drifted back to bland, plain colors and cuts, and to not caring about making any effort at all. It didn't matter what a camera wore.
One of the very few male characters you actually sort of liked and identified with as a kid was James of Pokemon's Team Rocket. You weren't really sure why. Maybe it was that he just seemed generally nicer and, oddly, more emotionally open than Jessie and Meowth. Maybe you liked the blue hair. It certainly was a little unusual for your favorite to be a man; you didn't care for Ash at all, and Brock was whatever. Misty was the second coolest.
Years and years later, when you hadn't thought about Pokemon in a long time, you came across a wiki all about the show, and you found an article compiling all the disguises Team Rocket wore, and you thought, wow, James sure wore dresses quite a lot, didn't he?
You wore a dress exactly once. Your first girlfriend wanted you to, and badgered you to do it until you did.
It was an odd relationship. She was at first sort of thrown by your total disregard—and, indeed, vocalized disdain—for traditional masculinity. Then, after a few months, she started working on you about the dress, maybe seeing it as a possible point of hypocrisy. See, you really didn't want to wear the dress, and she couldn't understand why, if it wasn't some sort of masculinity thing. And it wasn't something you could put into words for her. You sort of just repeated that, no, it wasn't about masculinity, but you didn't want to.
Finally you agreed to do it, in order to get her to do something you wanted too, because she'd started using it as a bargaining chip, offering various things in trade. The deal was set. You'd put on the dress. Absolutely no pictures would be taken. It would be brief. Then you'd never mention it again.
You couldn't really explain why the whole thing was so unpleasant in the moment. But what it was was this: you didn't object to wearing a dress. But you didn't want to be a man awkwardly filling out a dress all wrong. You didn't want to be an object of ridicule.
When you chatted with people online in high school, you always used perfect grammar and never used emojis of any sort. This made your tone rather infamously difficult to read. Then after a while, once you'd graduated, you started using emojis more, first just every so often, then to the point that certain specific ones became your thing and were strongly associated with you.
Nobody really knew why, but the reason was this: you read an article that said that emojis could be helpful in conveying mood through text, and also that women used them more than men.
Quite a large number of your friends are in the LGBT+ community, and have been for a long time. Sometimes you sort of joke that you're the token straight guy in the group. You had a very easy time wrapping your head around people coming out, and you've never especially understood how people in the world at large can be so prejudiced. Some of this is that you were introduced to these concepts young, at that hippie elementary school. Some of it's that your mom was very open, and usually told your stepdad off if he got homophobic in front of her.
This is part of why you always told yourself that you were just what you seemed. Because if you weren't, you'd just come out, right? Your whole friend group is accepting. Your mom is accepting. So what's there to be afraid of?
There's this hypothetical question posed sometimes, about how if there was a magic button that would change you to the opposite gender, instantly and irreversibly and without side effects, would you push it? And your answer is, well, yeah, of course. This has some slightly uncomfortable implications.
You tell yourself that it's not precisely because you want to be a woman, per se. You tell yourself that you're just the sort of person who is fascinated by the human condition, and by the vastness of possible experience, and you tell yourself that if you were a girl and had been since birth and were asked the same question you'd probably say you'd push the button then too and become a boy. You tell yourself that you're just that sort of wild, experience-seeking person, who'd change key facets of your life permanently on a whim.
You've worked at the same cafe for six years, letting opportunities for something else pass you by again and again, and you don't even like it. You're just scared of change.
A big thing that makes you sure that nothing is going on with you is that if there was something going on, that might lead to some expectation of change, which terrifies you. You don't want to take pills. You treat ibuprofen like a dangerous prescription drug. You got a tooth drilled without painkillers once to avoid having to take anything. You are terrified of needles and anything even loosely adjacent to body modification. So obviously, none of that's ever happening, so nothing's going on.
Now and then, your friends have asked why you don't have your pronouns set on anything. You were very in favor of getting a pronoun bot in the Discord. You directly support all the causes that normally come with pronouns, and are an enthusiastic ally. You have explained why having pronouns listed is a good thing to people. You attend the DEI meetings at your job, and actually enjoy it. So why do you not use pronouns anywhere?
You have a few answers. You tell your friends that you just feel kind of icky about choosing to identify as a man, like it's something you got stuck with but you don't have to like it, you know? You tell them that it's in solidarity with people who might not put their pronouns down because they're in the closet. You tell them you don't really care if people misgender you, that you want to normalize that not being a big deal.
You did put your pronouns in your username in a big group chat once, and it didn't feel that horrible, just a little bit, but mostly because you didn't care about or know a single person there and almost immediately ghosted the group.
Sometimes, your trans friends shoot memes back and forth to each other about the trans experience, and about coming out, or what it's like to be in the closet. Whenever that's going on, you just kind of don't say anything, and nobody really questions it, because why would you?
Nobody suspects that you've already seen them all on r/egg_irl.
You basically always play female characters in video games, if given the choice. You sort of hate the classic rationale given for doing that as a guy ("if I have to see someone's butt bouncing across the screen for thirty hours, it might as well be an attractive one") but also you sort of appreciate that probably a lot of the people who say that don't really mean it.
You just connect more with the writing for female characters, usually. They also tend to have much better outfit options.
In roleplaying games you play with actual real life people, it's a little difference.
If it's a text-based game, well, usually if you really gel well with a character, that character will be a girl. You don't only play girls, or even mostly play girls, because that would look kind of weird, but it's probably over 50/50, and if you could measure your personal investment it would tilt a whole lot more.
If it's more of a D&D thing, over voice calls or in person, then you usually play guys, because you don't think you can convincingly vocalize as a female character (or really do voices well at all) and you don't want that to be distracting. Your characters in these games tend to be very chaste, and not very masculine, and held at a comfortable distance from you.
You quietly played a non-binary character in a game that lasted half a year or so, but were so understated about it that only the GM noticed, and only because you kind of danced around pronoun usage in your backstory. All the other players just assumed you were playing a guy, which was fair enough, and it wouldn't have been in-character to say anything because the character you were playing genuinely didn't care and was mostly just sort of beyond the concept of gender, but it still felt a little weird to you and maybe you should have said something.
Recently, your mom brought something up that you'd forgotten about. She said, "I remember when you were little, and you always liked the more interesting, brightly-colored things, clothes and shoes and toys, but those were always the girl ones. I didn't have a problem with that, but I asked you, 'Doesn't it bother you when people mistake your for a girl?' And you told me no, and said that you liked correcting them."
You remember the part where you liked girl things, but you don't remember the conversation, and you have to wonder: did you really like correcting people, or did you like that they made the mistake?
You only remember getting mad about being mistaken for a girl once in your life. You were on a ski trip, maybe nine years old, and you were miserable, because you hated skiing. Some stranger said that you were a cute girl and maybe you snapped back? Or maybe it was someone else in the party who was thought to be a girl, and you've inserted yourself in that role for some reason? It's very hard to say. You remember it being you, but it's also so wildly out of character for you. And that's kind of unusual too, isn't it?
You've been mistaken for a girl other times too. In your early 20s, when you first started playing online games, you'd always RP as a girl, not for any particular reason. You weren't trying to deceive anyone, and in fact the idea of doing so made you deeply uncomfortable. Anyways, you told an RP partner, whose character yours had been lightly flirting with, that you were a guy, and he was kind of surprised and said that he'd just figured you were actually a girl because your character seemed very authentic.
Anyways, you've held that conversation close to your heart for more than half a decade.
You're not much of a LARPer, but you've been in a game or two, and one time one of your friends who at the time presented as male turned up to an event in a skirt and a blouse, and got a very positive reaction. You were pretty wowed, and thought to yourself that you would never be that brave.
A couple years later, that person came out, and all you could think about was how happy she'd seemed that night in the skirt, and how happy you were for her.
You don't think you have dysphoria. You've kind of avoided ever actually learning the full official definition for dysphoria just in case, though.
How you describe it is like so: you don't feel wrong in the body you have. You don't feel right either, of course, but you haven't really ever in your life had a feeling of rightness so it's not a big deal. You often wonder what it would be like to be different, and think you'd take better care of yourself if you were, but you figure everyone probably thinks that stuff.
You really do not like your chest being touched outside of very specific and controlled circumstances. You don't like being touched without permission in general, but it's especially bad about chest-touching, which is at least mercifully uncommon to encounter.
You had a girlfriend who liked to press her head against your chest and listen to your heart, and oh did you hate that. You told her to knock it off. It was the perfect storm of an uncomfortable physical sensation and an uncomfortable reminder of your physical existence, with a little side order of mortality because every time someone talks about hearts you think of them stopping.
You kind of wonder what it would be like to have breasts, like you sort of just imagine that sensation, randomly, pretty often. Mostly just while walking around, out of nowhere, for no reason.
For a school assignment, you watched Some Like It Hot, starring Marilyn Monroe, and it's exactly the sort of movie that maybe should've felt uncomfortable for you but for some reason didn't. A big part of it is that, despite everything, everyone's gender identity is pretty set. The protagonists who aren't Marilyn Monroe just have to cross-dress for most of the movie to avoid being whacked by the mob. You sometimes say "Nobody's perfect!" and nobody ever understands what you're talking about.
There was this behind the scenes feature about how part of getting the correct convincing feminine hip wiggle for the men walking in disguise involved shaving down the heel of one shoe, to create an asymmetrical gait or something. You can't fully remember. You thought, hey, come on, wiggling your hips while you walk can't be that hard. And you tried, and you thought you were pretty good at it, so you stopped right away.
Sometimes for no reason at all, you walk on your toes like you're wearing high heels. You've never worn high heels, and you don't need any extra height, that's for sure. If you were a girl, you're pretty sure you wouldn't wear high heels anyways, because they're sort of stupid and inconvenient. But you still walk that way sometimes.
When issues relating to gender and sexuality come up in areas where you hold any sway, you have this tendency to bow out while protesting that you're not really qualified to have an opinion as a straight guy, and it would be insensitive for you to tell people how they should feel. And that is definitely true. It's the same reason you're quiet and hesitant about conversations regarding race, or culture, or religion: you're all too aware of how easily loud white guys can suck the air out of the room. But with gender and sexuality specifically, there's something else there that makes them hard to discuss like that, but you can't talk about that either.
You thought you wished you were gay at one point. This was when you hadn't dated anyone for a while. It just seemed easier. Obviously that's not true at all, and gay people have to deal with a lot of stuff you don't, but a big thing for you was it felt like gay men could engage with their own sexualities without the horrible lurking imbalance that is heterosexuality. You felt like women, and maybe even non-binary people, also didn't have to worry about that. Most men didn't worry about it either, of course, but they should've.
Unfortunately, that same horrible lurking nastiness inherent to your perception of male sexuality did make you quite convinced that you're not gay. Men are just not attractive at all in any way. The closer anything masculine comes to your thought processes, the more clearly and intensely un-erotic it is.
You think that maybe if you were a woman you could possibly be bisexual. It's either that or being a lesbian. You find the idea of heterosexual sex intriguing, in theory and okay, yeah, in practice. And you think it would be really interesting to experience from a woman's perspective. You think maybe in those circumstances you could overcome how much men gross you out.
When you were in high school, a girl you had a crush on pressured you into singing a song called I Wish I Was A Lesbian, by Louden Wainwright III, and you actually did it for some reason, and it was a horrible experience and made you feel gross and slimy. It wasn't because you didn't agree with the sentiment. It was because it was treated as a punch line, and because it was being used to humiliate you.
You can't say for sure, but that was probably the point where you started to not have a crush on that girl anymore.
You read someone's blog glorifying the use of ecstasy one time, and one of the things this guy talked about was how having sex on ecstasy, he and his partner had this strange out of body experience where they felt like they switched bodies, and you're definitely not looking to do ecstasy and were way too young when you stumbled across this anyways, but it certainly did more to make the drug sound appealing than anything else you've ever encountered.
You always find little things that you do that are considered feminine or un-manly, and then you quietly latch onto them. Eating lots of tofu and drinking soy milk is considered un-masculine, because soy has lots of estrogen or something. Maybe that's where the term "soyboy" comes from? You sort of avoided learning the origin of that. Anyway, it's lucky, because you love tofu and soy milk.
You read somewhere that women tended to have index and ring fingers about the same length, while men usually had one longer than the other, and that this has something to do with hormone exposure in the womb. Your ring and index fingers are pretty much the same size, especially on your right hand, and the science behind the whole thing having any meaning is pretty obviously garbage if you look into it at all but it still feels a little bit good to have fingers like that. You checked again even as you thought about how it didn't actually mean anything.
For a while, you shaved your armpits. You said this was because it meant less potential smell, and also you believed in gender equality, and also it's common in Europe. The only reason you stopped is that it kept getting prickly and itchy, because you still use that electric razor for everything and it doesn't give a close shave.
Every time another one of your friends comes out, you're really excited for them but also just a little bit jealous. You're not sure why that second part comes in. Maybe you're jealous that they're brave. Maybe you're jealous that they seem to actually understand what's going on with them. Maybe you're just a jealous person.
There was, like, one single person in your friend group who modeled something approximating traditional masculinity in a way that didn't make your skin crawl. Well, you thought, it's not all bad, then, right, if they're cool like this? Maybe I can be too?
Just as a purely hypothetical sort of thing, you've thought about what it would be like to come out to everyone in your life if it turned out you were trans or non-binary or something. And you think for the most part it would be, well, you think people would try to be supportive. But they'd also mess up, or not understand, or be too gung-ho, or it would just be complicated and a lot of work and that's all scary. Change is scary. And how things are now is kind of more or less okay, and that's not perfect but it's also not frightening.
The thought of people, parents and friends especially, trying to be supportive and messing it up is probably the worst part of this hypothetical. And how could you possibly explain it? They'd all be talking about the change, and you'd be like, what change? It's been like this forever. I just finally told you.
You are exceptionally good at keeping this stuff under wraps. It's a lot easier as someone who doesn't care much about gender norms and actually sort of feels like the whole idea of gender is pretty much stupid and fake. But on very rare occasions you slip just a tiny bit.
You dated this girl for a while and she was trying to wrap her head around the concept of non-binary people and how to be a good ally, and somehow in the middle of you trying to explain it she maybe got some ideas about you, and you shut that line of discussion down real quick.
She stopped calling you handsome, though, and started calling you beautiful instead. And you couldn't really tell her how much that meant to you, but it was a lot.
Sometimes you forget all of this. Sometimes everything is fine, and sometimes it feels like you're not just telling yourself that. And then sometimes you sit down and wonder what would happen if you actually listed out everything that felt a little bit funny, and the list goes on and on and on, and you just know you're still missing so many things. It could be twice as long again, if you had all the time in the world.
But sometimes you forget all of this for a while.
Diagnosis: Having reviewed all available evidence, we have come to the conclusion that you are a strictly cisgender, heterosexual male.
