Hnn.... It’s been a while.
Still with Liz. Briefly dated a trans girl long distance over teh interwebs but it went downhill.
Still... grappling with gender, even though I’m way more comfortable with being not-cis than I was last time we talked about this, dear internet.
I read a thing today. Its keeping me awake, and I have this weird feeling that if I tried to talk to anyone about it, it’d come off as... either inscrutible, offensive, or both.
Ugh it’s embarassing really. Fucking Homestuck. I know, what is this 2015? But seriously I had read that entire trashfire of a webcomic when it was being released and I only just learned about the epilogues so I figured I’d read that.
It’s a bit weird. Go figure, right? Hussie is a weird dude who leans into his weirdness even harder than Dan Shive does. The entire thing is framed around a dichotemy, a choice that one character makes and all the action that follows comes from that choice. You get to make that choice for that character, but the story only really makes sense if you do it both ways. And, perhaps typically, even though this is the epilogue to a vast spanning story, somehow it’s not even really about tying up the loose ends. In fact, it leaves you with more than you started. The antagonist of the epilogue isn’t even the villain that was built up throughout the run of the comic and then never directly addressed.
But that’s not what’s bothering me. What’s bothering me is, of course, the trans question.
In one of the two branching timelines, a character comes out as trans. In that timeline, he is given time to examine his gender with an understanding partner and winds up deciding on a full transition to being male.
...but in the other timeline, the same character winds up being married to a straight dude and remains a woman, has kids and basically... goes as straight cis as she can. And its really hard to say which version of them is happier in the end. A bunch of shit goes terribly for both versions (either/both ways, this was not a happily ever after for pretty much anyone involved), but both versions wind up soliloquizing about how they struggled with their gender and are happy with where they wound up.
This... is a thing that as a tran myself I know I’m supposed to be foaming at the mouth over. Implying that trans is a thing you can choose to be, implying that, if things had gone differently you might wish to not be what you are, even if specifically asked about it... these are cardinal sins.
And certainly for some people, they’ve known on some level who they were their entire life. But... I am not one of them. I can point to the exact moments in time that pushed me towards this self-realization, three sentences that various people have said to me, and two life-decisions that culminated in me being forced to examine what all this meant. So I guess since I can’t sleep and this is a self-indulgent exercise to begin with, it’s mOtHerFuKiNg StOrY tImE hOnK!
The first moment that led me down this road, the point that planted the first proto-seed of thought about my gender in my mind was, perhaps predictably, about a game. In this case a long-standing DnD game I’d played with my OC friends in the early days of my relationship with C before she decided she hated them and didn’t want me to spend time with them and that’s own fucking rabbit hole.
In our game, our characters had become so intrinsically involved in the politics of the nation our game was set in, that we realized that going on adventures was irresponsible and might cause irreparable harm to the world. So rather than end the game, we statted up our characters’ children. To make things interesting, we randomized who got who. To my (at the time) mild dismay, I drew a girl, When I showed the others my slip of paper with the name “Tamora” written on it, one of my friends snorted “God, it’ll be hard to imagine you playing a princess.” And it.... stung. It hurt in a way I’d never before experienced. My first brush with a now all-too-familiar sense of dysphoria. As if there were a part of me I’d never before examined that had its ego crushed. I don’t remember how I responded.
Thing is, I played Tamora like a fucking champ. And no one ever made another comment about me playing a girl. I think I’d proven that I could convincingly play any role I wanted to.
Which brings us to the second sentence. I’ve talked about this here before, a friend on an online game admitting to me that the gender of her character did not align with the one she was assigned at birth. It was both shocking and enticing. In a way its laughable now (we’ll probably get around to why) but at the time, I just sorta assumed that... I’d be able to tell? And S was... she was as female and feminine as anyone I’d ever met. I’d never wondered for an instant.
And those two things... those two moments. The pang of hurt, the desire to be perceived as a girl; and the sudden realization that there was a venue where that might be possible. That lead me to make the first of those life choices: creating a female character, deliberately this time, and dive into her so thoroughly that there were times where I was’t sure where she ended and I began.
Things got a bit weird in all this. I mean, people asked me questions about myself ooc and I would answer as if I were a girl. Hell I even gave myself a name in all that. Karen, if you can believe it. Its not the name I’m currently using. Who the fuck would name themselves Karen in 2018-19 right?
But ultimately none of that really mattered, I’d so thoroughly compartmentalized my brain throughout all this that barely anything of my character in the Game leaked into my real life or vice versa. For all intents and purposes, “Karen” who played the game and the me who did everything else were two entirely separate people.
And yet some of it must have seeped through because C noticed. Or at least, I’m pretty sure she did. She knew I was playing the Game, but I never talked about my character or her gender. She knew that that rp involved romantic and sexual subplots, but I never discussed them with her, nor she her own sex-rp’s with me. It was a sorta tacit polyamory with very specific confines that we’d agreed to in a purely theoretical sense some years back and then adhered to rigidly in practice while determiniedly never talking about it.
But for all the fucked up shit, she knew me well, maybe better than anyone other than Liz has. I mean, we were a couple of woke 20-somethings in the Obama era, so lgbt issues were pretty forefront at the time. Guess they still are, we were just a lot more... hopeful about it. But she kept sending me articles about trans people. Like, human interest articles.
There was one in specific that she got really... enthusiastic about, about this one trans-woman’s journey to self-discovery through WoW. C read part of the article to me out loud, culminating when the person in the article was confronted by her wife: “You can be a girl if you want to be”. She kinda repeated that a couple times, looking at me hard. And in retrospect, yeah, it wasn’t fucking subtle. But at the time... it was not a thing I was willing to examine. Like fuck, honestly I think there was a part of me that knew. I mean there had to be at that point, right? But I didn’t want to pursue it irl. I think I made up my mind that it would be something I’d approach the same time that I approached the poly question that was inevitably hanging over C and I at that same time: after we were married. So I just nodded and went “Huh, interesting” with a straight face as my at-the-time girlfriend all but told me that if I wanted to come out to her, she’d be okay with it.
Never got a chance to see if she really would have been.
After we broke up, all this shit got put so far back on the back burner that... well hell, go back and read my first few posts if you have the fortitude to stand a lot of bitching. Like way more than I’m doing now.
And I mean the funny thing was I was still playing the Game I just sorta figured that once... I got another girlfriend, that’d have to stop? That who and what I was in the game would stop mattering. Because I was monogamous right? Just like I was male and straight, and the fact that my character was none of those things meant that I’d have to put her out to pasture. So it didn’t matter that I’d been playing a lesbian ethical slut for the past five, six years, because once I was in another sanctioned cishet relationship, I’d have to put all this foolishness behind me and never speak of it to anyone ever again.
Goddess alone knows if I even could have but I would have tried. I suspect it would have gone badly.
Instead... by almost comicallly random happenstance, I wound up with a poly girl. And after some initial winging about whether or not I wanted that, a part of my brain I’d been ignoring went, “Hey dumbfuck! You never cared when A--- slept around or when E--- was in another relationship, why should it matter to you that CR has a boyfriend?”
And the rest of my brain took a second to process that and was like “E--- and A--- weren’t involved with me irl, only my character in the game.”
And the first part was like “Oh yeah, smart girl, if that wasn’t a thing you wanted on some level than how come you fucking jumped into it with both feet in the game?”
And the rest of me rejoined rejoined, “I suppose you have a p--wait! smart girl?”
“Oh yeah, that’s a thing too. You probably better process that because this whole fucking thing is tied together like a goddamn giftbasket of deviancy. Good luck having anything resembling a normal life once you’re done untangling it”
And at that point there was no turning back. I’ve dragged my feet certainly, not... as much out of a sense of general reluctance as a bunch of worries about how my family (who I’m still reliant upon) will take it. But once that realization had occured there was no putting that bunny back in the box.
Which I guess brings me to my point, if one can even say I have one.
In a lot of ways this whole misadventure seems less like something that was always there and more like... a memetic virus that somehow burrowed into my brain, incubated for a few years and then burst forth from my skull like some horrifying amalgam of Athena and a chestburster. Like, if I had pulled a dude’s name from that hat... would literally any of this happened? If my friend hadn’t admitted that she was experimenting with gender herself would it have occurred to me to try? If I hadn’t created that first female online character, would I still think I was a man? Would I still be a man? I mean that’s the crux of all this. In the fucking Homestuck epilogue, is candyverse Roxy still a man like they are in the meatverse? Sorry, spoilers I guess. To them, the only real difference is an opportunity to prioritize their own self expression and gender identity. But Candyverse Roxy still has put thought into those things, just because of how and when they had the time to do so, she arrived at a different conclusion than he did in the other timeline.
And yes, I know that the Meatverse is considered more cannon than the candyverse, and yes, Roxy is the only character in the meatverse who isn’t being manipulated by Dirk’s mind meddling and therefore we can safely say that his epiphanies regarding his gender are genuine, more truthful and relevant to the character than the weirdness going on in the Candyverse.
But... where does that leave me. Obviously we’re playing the “what if” game on a weird scale here but, what if that series of events hadn’t occured? Would I still wind up roughly where I am, genderwise, by a different rout? Or would I have continued to labor under the false assumption that I was a dude... and would that assumption in this case even be false by any empirical standard? That’s the question that’s kept me up tonight.
I think I can safely say that by the time I had constructed this Karen figment that it was a foregone conclusion. But.... if either of those two inciting incidents had gone differently... Ugh... I don’t know. I feel like some people would want to take my trans card away from me for even suggesting that there’s a universe out there where I’m happily continuing to think I’m a dude. Maybe there is... but ultimately it’s not relevent or true for me, because its not a thing that I can go back to now. In short: it’s simply not cannon.
