Candace is 10 when Perry comes home from the pet store. He’s round and small, and smells kind of funky, hence why she makes an immediate rule that he is NOT to sleep on her bed. He is generally content to accept the love lavished on him by her little brothers, but does sometimes come to her, particularly when she’s feeling sad.
When she tells her parents this fact, they tell her Perry doesn’t actually know she’s sad, he was just wandering. But she knows. Her feelings towards the platypus were ambivalent, but there was no denying that anytime she was in a darker spiral, Perry was there, and he was soft, and things were a little better.
One day, she had fallen asleep with Perry snuggled up to her side, and woke up to find him covered in a milky substance. She shrieked and grabbed him, startling him from his sleep. She ran to where her parents were watching tv, yelling about how Perry was melting or something and it was all over her bed!
Her parents calmly explained that platypi did sweat milk, he was fine, and they would help clean up. When Candace asked why their pet sweat milk, she was told to look it up herself. So she did, sitting in front of the computer, and Perry followed her, jumping into her lap. “Hi, meat brick,” she muttered, the term somehow both insulting and endearing.
She was scanning a website when she found the part on milk sweat: it wasn’t sweat, first off, and it was how mothers fed their children. But then…
“Perry, are you a girl?” Perry looked at her with an expression that could only be described as discomfort. And Candace didn’t know why, but she knew, just as she knew Perry came to her when she was sad, that he was telling her ‘no, no he was not.’
She started typing again, vaguely remembered something her friend had said about their cousin. She finally found the word again, and held Perry up to the screen, which had the transgender flag on it. “Is this you?” Perry chattered and tried to self pet on her hand. It was as close to a yes as Candace could have expected. “Cool.” She set Perry on the ground. “Now get out of here, you sweat milk on me.”
A few years later, her brothers started having the same questions she had, and she, not looking up from her phone, informed them their platypus was trans. Their mom leaned in and, while she was obviously ok with trans people, she wasn’t sure platypi-
Perry walked up and head butted Candace, chattering happily. Everyone in the room nodded, and that was that.
When Phineas and Ferb’s friend from across the street nervously told them her name was Isabella, rather than the confusion (or, even worse, hostility) she was expecting, they beamed, and Phineas explained that their platypus was trans too! And Isabella knew her friends were sincere, or she might think they were making fun of her. They called for Perry, and when the boys told him excitedly they had another trans friend, she would have sworn he smiled at her.
Perry had to miss Danville’s Pride parade that summer because of his fight with Doofenshmirtz, and he felt bad, especially because the boys had been planning to bring him along. Monogram had awkwardly wished him a happy pride day, but Perry knew his heart was in the right place; after all, he was the one who had called him into his office when he started to make sure he hasn’t had trouble with his paperwork.
When he got back, he went to his bed, only to have the kids run in, calling for him. He found them, and Ferb ran up to him and placed a small trans flag next to him. “We got you a flag, Perry!” Perry reaches down and picked the flag up in his mouth, waving it around. The kids all cheered, and snacks were had.
To this day, that flag is neatly taped to the dashboard of his hover car, along with a family portrait.
