"don't worry you got the gay version" -- ND Stevenson

In 2018, I figured out I was trans, and my life changed. I had a lot of things to sort out, so I kept a journal of everything that was happening.

In 2019, I retold most of what was in that journal, in real time as it happened a year before, in a Twitter thread.

In 2022, Twitter was taken over and ruined by one of the worst people alive. I deactivated, and eventually deleted, my Twitter account. Which means the thread is gone.

I've heard a critical voice in my head saying that I'm not special and the world doesn't need to hear my transition story again. And that critical voice can shut the hell up.

I think of what kinds of people would want my writing to be gone from public view forever: transphobes and fascists. I'm not letting them win.

I have the archive, and the journal, and it's time to get this stuff back on the internet. It would be silly to leave it in the tweet format, so now I've edited it into this new form: 36 stories from the 12 months when I discovered myself, in reasonable paragraphs this time.

January 2018

One afternoon at work, I had one of those intrusive thoughts that left me paralyzed. The thought was: "Why am I not wearing a dress right now?"

I tried to shake it off. As much as my company seemed to be an accepting place, there was no realistic situation where I'd be wearing a dress at work, right? It would raise all kinds of questions that I wouldn't have a good answer for.

I didn't get anything else done that day. The moment I got home, I opened up a clothing store's website in an incognito window, and ordered a simple denim dress. I wasn't sure what I was doing or why I was so compelled, but I knew nobody could stop me. I knew I even had a window of opportunity where the package would arrive while my roommate was away.

Four days later, I furtively grabbed a soft package off my doorstep and hurried to my room, even though there was nobody who could possibly see me. I had apparently made a very good guess at my size. The dress fit pretty much perfectly.

The only dress I'd ever worn before was a flimsy costume dress that didn't fit at all. I feared this one was going to be the same as I fumbled around with it. Like maybe my body just wasn't meant to wear dresses. But as I zipped up the back, it all suddenly fit into place.

I looked at myself in the mirror, and felt every feeling at once.

As I tried to sort out my thoughts, my conclusion wasn't "oh that makes sense, I'm trans". It was more like "this is fucked up, I'm crossdressing again and now I'm obsessed with my reflection, I am the literal definition of a narcissist, how did I end up this way".

I knew that trans is something you could be, and I also knew that just wearing a dress doesn't make one a trans woman. I believed I was just indulging a fantasy, the same fantasy I'd never told anyone about.

Long after the point where I should have been bored with wearing the dress if it were just a sexual exploration, it still felt important. But I wasn't trans, right? I didn't fit the "formula" and I hadn't known since childhood. What was going on?

No answers came to mind. I kept the dress on and sat down to play a new game called Celeste.

Later, I started Googling some things.

January 2018

Content warning: this section contains harmful, discredited terminology that demonizes trans women.

If you search the 2018 Internet to find out what it means when you're dressing as a woman and you dream of being a woman, you might just get some shitty, depressing answers.

While I knew that Wikipedia articles could have a skew that depended on who their authors happened to be, I used to generally believe that I could rely on them to at least give me the outline of what a thing is. So I read some Wikipedia articles on crossdressing and the culture surrounding it, even venturing a little bit into specifically trans topics.

My browse through Wikipedia was how I learned about "autogynephilia", the diagnosis that I was an effeminate man with a fetish for seeing myself as a woman. I googled for it and found other sites that corroborated that view. So I looked into what my options were as an "autogynephile".

(What I know now is that a lot of articles on trans issues on Wikipedia, particularly at the time, were heavily edited by one very transphobic man, a "sexologist" who has built his career on diagnosing trans women as having a psychosexual disease. Sexologists, sadly, used to have near-complete control over the diagnosis and treatment of trans women. Now most of them have a vendetta against the trans community, just because we're defying their theories that categorize us by fuckability, taking their authority away, and pointing out that their entire field is unscientific.)

I found some blogs and subreddits where people worked out how to express their gender in the form of a fetish, without letting it affect the rest of their life. I learned a more positive-sounding term as well, "crossdreamer". The subreddits were active, but, I'd say they had very little community. Almost no long-time participants.

Over various threads, the "crossdreamers" would strategize how to find situations where they could crossdress but have an excuse. Maybe even ask close friends to call them a different name sometimes, you know, like a drag queen. But only for fun, ha ha. And there was seriously a thread about how if you're an "autogynephile", your best hope was to find yourself a nice "autoandrophile", so you could settle down into a perfectly straight relationship where your awkward fetishes would cancel each other out.

But occasionally someone would drop by with a radical statement like "if you want to be a girl, you can be" or "if you wish you were trans, that's because you are trans" or "it's okay if your gender is hard to define". Things I'd also been hearing from friends of friends on Twitter.

I didn't quite believe it yet. I thought "that would be nice, but it can't be that simple. You can't just change your gender because you think you'd be happier that way."

(You can.)

I thought of an agender friend, and the disgust I assumed they would react with if I tried to claim my life was anything like theirs.

(They didn't.)

I thought that femininity was a really nice place to visit, but I couldn't live there. I was just a tourist who was in the way. So I kept reading these dismal threads, hoping to find some useful advice about what I could actually do.

(It wasn't useful.)

And then -- this is quite a shift in tone, but I have this stuff written down in a journal, it is definitely what happened next -- I told people.

I sloppily came out to 6 friends that evening.

The a cappella group I was in did "check-ins": we'd go around the room and everyone gave updates on their life. You could talk about pretty much anything and it didn't leave the room. It was probably more important than the singing, especially as our average age entered our 30s, a time when you're kinda not encouraged to be an a cappella group anymore. And I knew that I could tell the group stuff and hear a different reaction than I'd get from other people in my life. The rest of the group is younger than me, for one thing.

I stalled. "I'll go last."

That just gave me like 20 minutes to get increasingly nervous. Then I took a deep breath, and I told everyone about the dress.

Me: ...and uh it feels really important
Everyone (expectantly): squeeeee :D
Me: That's all. I don't know what it means.

I remember that I just ached all over after that. I excused myself to the bathroom for a few minutes to get over it.

The part of me that hid behind an illusory masculine personality had summoned the effort to speak up and break that illusion for the first time. Even if it was just a simple thing about clothing.

January 2018

I knew that the only way I was going to be able to deal with everything going on in my head was to write it down. I opened up my notes app, then typed some nonsense words and a bunch of blank lines, in case anyone shoulder-surfing ever saw the top of the entry.

Here is the first actual thing I wrote there:

First of all, awww. Second of all, holy heck, I got my pronoun right the first time, by writing about myself in this dissociative, third-person way. It would be months before I did that for real.

I mentioned the game Celeste before. The game is a whole mood. It's a platformer game that's very difficult but not "punishing". It's designed to inspire you to learn from your mistakes, and press forward, and become a stronger player who is able to overcome the obstacles it throws at you.

It tells the story of a character named Madeline, who climbs a dangerous mountain as a way to either escape or confront her issues. The antagonist of the game is, in a very literal sense, herself. Her character design splits in two. They struggle against each other. There's a climactic battle, and the music for that stage, composed by the game's brilliant (and incidentally trans) composer Lena Raine, is a track called "Confronting Myself".

(Maddy Thorson, the creator of the game, is trans too, and Madeline is canonically trans, but that wasn't known when I first wrote this!)

The game as a whole manages to convey a very positive message about mental health, a message that comes through not just in the cutscenes but in the entire gameplay. I related to it a lot more than I expected, and perhaps that's how I had the moment of clarity that let me write that. I, too, felt myself splitting into two parts and confronting myself.

And there was one thing about myself I could do battle with right then.

I shaved off all of my body hair. I was in the shower for like an hour and a half. I went through multiple blades and clogged an electric razor. The drain became a carpet. And I stepped out feeling lighter.

My journal entry on January 30 was just:

February 2018

I needed to talk to my best friend. Whatever I was doing, I didn't want to try to do it without her knowing. I didn't want her to find out from someone else.

I knew I needed her to plan time for us to really talk about things -- since she'd had a baby, that kind of time didn't necessarily happen naturally.

I texted her and asked if I could come over and talk to her later. "Sure, about what?" she asked, but I didn't want to tell her. She called me, very concerned, and even angry that I'd leave some unspecified serious conversation hanging over her head all evening, which is fair but I still don't know what else I could do. I promised her it wasn't bad, very unconvincingly given my voice.

I went to her place when I could. She made tea. I said vague things about femininity and how I kinda wanted to express it sometimes. I hedged a lot. I sabotaged my own identity. If this was coming out, I botched it.

She said she was happy to talk about it but wasn't sure how to react. She gave me some makeup and clothes to try.

In the following weeks I was feeling more alone and adrift than ever. What I'd written in my journal seemed silly when I looked back at it. I turned back to trying to get the Internet to tell me what was going on.

I summoned the courage to make a post on one of those depressing subreddits. I asked a confused question about what to do about feeling like a trans impostor. I asked how I could avoid cheapening real trans issues with my existence.

I got one response. You might be surprised: It contained gentle encouragement and a link to /r/asktransgender. Someone understood exactly where that confused question comes from.

I hadn't gone looking for /r/asktransgender before, because I didn't think it was for me. Because I didn't think I was trans. A kind soul telling me to go there changed the whole deal.

(Is this still a thing someone can do? Is there still an /r/crossdreamers, and can you go there as a trans person and give a nervous trans egg a helpful hint that there's a better place for them? Do I owe it to someone to pay it forward and try to do this?)

I read some pretty good questions and helpful answers there. I encountered links to /r/traa, the trans memes subreddit, where I found endless silly posts that surprised me with how they spoke directly to my soul.

I also encountered a YouTube video that had just been released, and was being intensely discussed in those circles: ContraPoints' video called "Autogynephilia". The thing I had just been reading about on Wikipedia. She pointed at the sciencey-sounding word that was making me feel fake, and said, at length, what even is this bullshit.

(2018 was a better time to be inspired by ContraPoints than 2019.)

Autogynephilia is a discredited diagnosis. I'm ashamed that I ever believed it. It harms the people it was intended to diagnose, which is one way to totally fail at psychology. It has no explanatory power. It doesn't even account for the existence of trans men and non-binary folks. It is not a real part of transgender health care. I gained a slight understanding of some of this, and it helped get me back on track.

By the way: If you want to learn more about why AGP is false, here's an excellent article by Julia Serano: "Making Sense of Autogynephilia Debates".

February 2018

I started to understand that I might not be an impostor, that there was something really going on with my gender. At times I tried on the clothes my friend had given me. I was taking very long showers while I attempted to keep my body hair under control. So there was no use hiding from my roommate any longer.

"Hey, uh, I've been questioning my gender identity," I said out of nowhere in the living room.

"Oh. Hmm. Okay," he answered. "Is there anything I can do? Do you want me to call you something different?"

"I don't even know yet. Just, warn me if people are coming over because I might need to change clothes, alright?"

I truly didn't know what I was going to do with my real life. But I also had a pseudonymous Twitch stream and Twitter account. My identity when I was playing games online was already different from offline. I had room to experiment. I could try different pronouns and be called something different, particularly in the Necrodancer community, a community I knew would be incredibly accepting.

Crypt of the Necrodancer, for those unfamiliar with it, is a wonderful game where you make your way through a randomly-generated dungeon where both you and the enemies move to the beat of the music. It's endlessly replayable, and once you're good at it you can finish the game in 6-10 minutes. As a bonus, all the characters you play as in the main story are women.

I was part of a group of people who race the game against each other, broadcasting our gameplay on twitch.tv and seeing who could clear the same instance of the game fastest. I knew there were top Necrodancer racers who were trans or non-binary, I was on voice calls with them where nobody made a big deal about their voice, and I'd seen how swiftly one transphobe was ejected from the community. Whatever I did would be safe there.

I formed a plan. One day, I was going to come out online. When I did, I was going to have some cute artwork ready for my Twitch stream, so others could see me as I wanted to see myself. And this would of course include an avatar. A picture of a girl. Who is me.

I can't really draw, but I knew exactly who should draw it. I really hoped they were taking commissions.

I got a response from the artist, @ritterdoodles, on Discord: "hey what's up?"

I replied to them with a big messy paragraph. They were the first person I was coming out to online. And they were really cool with it! The conversation that followed was wonderful. It was basically a consultation on cuteness. It was the beginning of creating a character out of nothing.

What's strange about this now is that the character we would end up designing was me, Elia, the one writing this. But if I was the one being created, who was doing the creating?

February-March 2018

I tended to spend my weekend mornings just staring at the ceiling, trying to figure things out. Sometimes I looked around my room and asked myself "why do I even have these women's clothes". Other times: "why do I even have these men's clothes".

I backslid on my request to my roommate. I felt like I was imposing on him unreasonably to warn me when people were coming over, so I went back to just hiding in my room.

I missed a couple of invitations to lunch. I told some people I slept through them, which was at least close to true. I told a small number of others (who knew more) that it was okay, I wasn't avoiding them, I was just working shit out. I hope they believed me.

But one Sunday night, I was more decisive about something. I walked to my a cappella rehearsal, about a mile, wearing one of the skirts my best friend gave me. I gave the group an update on all this. One person, let's call him D, who hadn't been there the first time, made a very excited noise and followed up with: "Do you want to go shopping?"

I sure did. We made plans to go to Goodwill together and look for clothes.

At the end of the rehearsal: "So, um. I'm new to this and I haven't even had to think about this before. Should I even walk home now that it's dark? Would I be safe?"

The women in the group generally agreed that I'd be walking through a safe area where they didn't feel threatened at night, but that I should really decide for myself. So I called a Lyft. The driver confirmed my name, and I acknowledged quietly. But I knew it wasn't a name that fit me very well.

At home, I added "they/them" to my Twitter bio, and wondered if anyone would notice.

February 2018

I met up with D from a cappella at a coffee shop next to a Goodwill.

He'd suggested Goodwill as a place to experiment with random clothing, where you know you won't end up paying a lot, and where nobody is judging you.

But first, we ordered hot drinks and talked a bit. He told me about what his trans boyfriend was going through. He didn't tell me that much about himself, possibly because he thought I already knew.

I remembered D saying once that his gender was "do you have 20 minutes?" but the topic hadn't really come up a lot since then. We didn't quite have 20 minutes. In fact, the Goodwill next door was 20 minutes away from closing.

D did a bit of shopping for himself but mostly hung around to help me out. In a mad rush through the women's section, I grabbed an assortment of clothes and then headed to the (non-gendered) dressing room to try them on. Some of them fit, and that was enough. I bought 4 things and paid a total of $17.

I don't wear any of those clothes anymore. But I got the most use out of a thin jean skirt, and that alone made the trip worthwhile.

Wow, I thought. D sure knows a lot about how to help a newly out trans woman. I wonder what their own gender journey really is, like if they're some flavor of non-binary.

At no point in that evening did I piece together that D had been a fully passing trans man for the entire time I'd known him.

March 2018

I called my sister, Zay, on her birthday.

I couldn't not tell her. It wouldn't be a good phone call catching up with my sis about our lives if I couldn't tell her the single most significant thing going on in mine.

So after the usual pleasantries, I came out to her. As non-binary, which wasn't quite correct in retrospect, but I was still figuring things out.

Zay certainly knows people of all kinds of gender identities, and she was really supportive and happy that I told her. But when it came to understanding her own little sibling, I don't think I gave her a lot to work with at first.

It's not like there were a lot of signs from when I was a kid, at least none that were easily distinguished from me just being a weird kid who idolized my big sister.

(I wonder if she noticed the time I borrowed her leg razor.)

I don't remember exactly how the conversation went, but my explanation of my genderqueerness relied a lot on gender essentialism at the time. So she was supportive but with an undertone of "okay but hold on" that I think was justified.

To jump forward a bit: A few months later, when I was riding in a car with her, we talked about this and sorted out gender identity from gender essentialism in a more satisfying way. I still had a lot to learn, but at least I could quote from Imogen Binnie's "Nevada", so that was something.

"It's not like I had a lot to complain about before puberty," I explained later.
"You got the cooler toys," she added.
"I really did."

In this phone conversation, she gave me encouragement and asked me to keep her updated. And she left me with a really cool recommendation: the Boston Gender-Free Contra Dance that she'd heard about.

My heart was pounding after that phone call. Telling a family member made it extremely real, more than just telling a few friends and walking around in a skirt.

It was also clearer than ever that I needed a name.

March 2018

In Western culture, we don't have much of a reason to celebrate name days, but it seems like something that should happen for trans people. Maybe this is already a thing.

One day in March that happened to be Pi Day, I put on some non-committal clothes and went to play Pandemic Legacy with some friends. It was time to let them know about my gender at all.

The group included me and some close friends, and also a couple of kibitzers who had already played it, including one who is agender, who I'll call A.

It was hard to figure out the right time to bring it up, even when we took a break from the game to have some apple pie. So I just kind of blurted out toward the end that I was non-binary and genderfluid and trying out they/them pronouns.

The most immediate reaction was from A: "Oh my god, do you want to join Quorum right now? We need more baritone voices."

Quorum was an LGBTQ+ choir in Boston. I'd seen A perform with them before. I enjoyed it. For some reason, though, I didn't commit to joining it. I thought I would be joining too late in the season.

I didn't bring up my name in person, because I hadn't 100% committed to it. I felt I needed to talk one-on-one with A to be sure, and it was late.

There are two reasons I know I had picked my name on this day. One is that I immediately signed up for OkCupid with it when I got home. I didn't really know the right words, but I took an okay selfie and wrote a profile that finally described me, not some fake dude.

But more relevant is the email I sent to A, late at night:

March 2018

"You have to stop doing this. You don't want the problems you're going to face."

"Being genderfluid is a thing that people do in college. Grow up."

"I support trans people but you're not trans."
Me: "I am trans."
"This isn't what you said earlier."

"It's because you're lonely, isn't it."

"So this is it? [Deadname] is over?"

"Oh god you're going to start taking drugs. Don't take drugs. I read about how taking hormones shortens your lifespan."
Me: "Have you considered that the things you're reading might not be objective sources?"
"Oh what are your objective sources? Reddit? Some trans woman who drove you home from choir rehearsal once?"

"You need therapy."
Me: "I'm looking for a gender therapist."
"No, you need real therapy."

"Trans people die. I don't want you to die."

March 2018

I joined some friends, mostly the group I had just come out to, for an online puzzle-solving competition. Now that I was out in this context, I was more adventurous with my clothes, despite still not having many. Which means I was wearing a way-too-revealing top whose neckline plunged down to my navel.

I was cold and I presumably looked awful. Nobody really bothered me about it. It was a start.

Another context where I had to make big decisions about clothes was that I'd started dating. I was matching with people on OkCupid on the profile I'd made as Robyn.

The first of these dates was not much of an accomplishment. I still considered myself genderfluid, and she considered herself straight, so I went in "guy mode".

It was a bad date. I couldn't figure out how to present myself and I don't know what she expected from me anyway. I don't know why we even matched. We had a cup of coffee and tea respectively and we bailed.

The next one, with a woman who was pansexual, went better.

It was an unseasonably nice day. My outfit included a new black miniskirt, tights, and flat shoes. We walked along the river and talked, for a long time.

I hadn't been visible outside for this long before, or so far from home. Eventually my feet were killing me and I needed to pee.

Oh no.

I couldn't really stop at a coffee shop. I would feel obligated to buy something, I had spent the tiny amount of cash that I had fit in my tiny pocket, and I wasn't going to beg it off of my date.

Being trans is not mostly about bathrooms. But everybody needs to pee.

I wasn't brave enough for gendered public restrooms, and I realized this was going to anchor me to my home until I was.

In this case, I was saved by a rare and magical thing: an all-gender single-occupancy restroom that was accessible to the public. There need to be more of those. She happened to know where it was, and nothing could have helped me more.

I got her number to text and got myself home. I felt small and afraid and my feet were very sore, but it was still a good day. After all, I had just introduced myself, as Robyn, to someone who hadn't known me before.

March 2018

I joined Quorum, the choir that my friend A had invited me to.

Quorum was a Boston-area choir of queer folks that endeavors to sing the works of queer folks. (This means a lot of experimental modern music, but there are also some dead gay composers to draw on, like Tchaikovsky.) I have to use the past tense for it now, because it's one of many things that was wiped out by COVID.

Keep in mind, I had some supportive friends but I had never actually participated in queer culture before.

It wasn't an instant revelation. It wasn't "all of you are my new friends and I suddenly know how to keysmash".

I'm still an introvert and it still takes time and effort for me to meet new people. I mostly hung out around A and let them introduce me. But it was nice! Everyone gave their name and pronouns, and we took our seats in fairly gender-uncorrelated voice parts. I got to hear the astonishingly soothing trained speaking voice of the woman next to me in the bass section. I hoped to get to know her better.

Journal entry, March 17:

Journal entry, March 20:

Journal entry, March 25:

My twitter post, March 31:

(The Territorial Oak on the right was my profile picture at the time.)

April 2018

I went on a lunch date. I didn't really have enough prep time. I texted my date to ask if she'd be okay with me not presenting as femme that day, with me being genderfluid and all, and she said "you know I don't care".

It turns out she didn't care, but I did.

I was wearing guy clothes to work every day, but wearing similar clothes on this occasion felt wrong. We looked like a straight couple. I felt myself slipping into old patterns of interaction as if we were a straight couple. I felt like I had cast myself in the wrong part.

I couldn't enjoy the date. I just wanted it to be over, and eventually it was.

I don't remember how long it took afterward, but at some point a question came to me: is that what dysphoria is?

April 2018

My parents wanted to come visit. I had been staring at the e-mail for a while, wondering what to do.

I'd mentioned that I was singing in a choir, and my parents said they'd been planning a trip to Boston anyway and they'd like to come see the performance.

I needed to make plans with them that would at some point involve them finding out why I'm singing in an LGBTQ+ choir, or at least find a way to decline. Either one basically put a deadline on me coming out to them.

So, I texted my mom, saying I'd call to make plans later, and asking to make sure Dad was there on the call too.

You might have this encroaching feeling of dread as you read this, if you're a queer person with parents, or a queer person without parents anymore, or maybe if you are my parents. I need to give another spoiler here: it comes out pretty much okay.

But there was a lot of communication that needed to happen first, and it would have to begin in my Kryptonite of a communication medium, the telephone. It had to be that way.

I wasn't going to come out in a damn e-mail.

I poured some scotch. I braced myself. I called their house, my mom answered, and I started in nervously with some pleasantries about the weather and my job.

And then: "So before I tell you about the concert, there's something I wanted to talk to you and Dad about."

So I told them my name was Robyn, I was questioning my gender identity, and I was using they/them pronouns. From there I was left with the task of trying to explain what "non-binary" means to my over-70 parents.

My parents said they loved me and they'd support me and they just needed more information.

But the anxiety was overwhelming me and I needed to end the call. I told them I'd follow up by email and I remember hearing my dad's voice in the background shouting "WAIT YOU HAVE TO EXPLAIN".

I told them I wasn't suicidal or depressed, which was true and important. And I told them I wasn't planning any major changes to my body, so hahaha I'm glad I didn't hold myself to that one for too long.

In much of that email, I was still kind of bargaining with the world.

I got an e-mail back from my mom the next day. All of it was written in very loving and supportive language, but she expressed some concerns that were really not what I needed to hear, and the message ended with "I love you and you will always be my son but I accept these differences in your life."

"Always." It was so well-intentioned and it sounded like a curse.

Don't be mad at my mom. She was trying to support me. Eventually she would succeed. We just needed to communicate more, so I could give her more context, and then she could be the open-minded, progressive parent she hoped to be. I would like to say that's what happened next.

Well, what I did next could technically be described as "communicating", but would more accurately be described as "panicking".

Clearly I hadn't gotten through to them. I needed their love and understanding and I only had one of those.

I imagined my parents in the audience of the Quorum concert, baffled by all the queer subtext. I imagined them visiting and poking around my room. It was terrifying.

I e-mailed them back, saying that maybe they shouldn't come visit for the concert.

Later I looked back in horror at the pretty blunt e-mail I'd sent to my parents, and sent an important follow-up:

"I love you, Mom and Dad. If we don't understand each other right now on this one topic, there is time."

April 2018

This trip to Iceland had been planned for a few months. The group of us that was going was, approximately, that group of close friends that I came out to over Pandemic Legacy.

I'd also flown a couple months before, for work, and I just put my gender out of my mind for the whole trip. I had assumed that that was just how I was going to travel. But nah, that doesn't work for long.

So on this trip I packed various kinds of clothes. Two pairs of men's underwear for getting scanned at the airport. Women's underwear for the rest. The one skirt that really fit me. Women's jeans that you might not notice are women's jeans. A simple women's top from Primark. Other clothes given to me by a friend who was on this trip. T-shirts. Fleeces. An ambiguous long-sleeve shirt that I'd found on display at the exact midpoint between an Express and an Express Men. And a men's bathing suit, unfortunately, to wear in a place where hot springs are the biggest tourist attraction.

My plan overall was that I would wear what I wanted inside our AirBnB, and then pass as male when outside it.

I bent the rules a little.

Late at night, after we arrived, we walked to the nearest convenience store to get snacks, and I wore my favorite skirt. And the clerk didn't ask me "hey, American, why are you wearing a skirt". Why even would he.

It worked out that everyone who wanted their own room in the house we were staying in could have it, as long as someone took a certain room.

And I was like, yes, I will fall on this very cute sword.

At pretty much any time in the past, I would have had a visceral fear of a room like that. It would have brought up unwelcome thoughts, and memories of being mocked and bullied as a kid for even the slightest violation of the harsh rules of masculinity.

But now it was clearly okay. I was among friends, and the rules didn't apply anymore.

The room was a bit small, I admit, but surprisingly comfy.

In the following days, we headed out to see what we could of the harsh, cold, beautiful environment we had traveled to.

This is the last pre-everything photo of me, and I am surprisingly okay with it. This is the face of someone who realizes that her clothes are a disguise, and that she just needs to fool the world for a little longer.

May 2018

My parents came to visit for the weekend, as planned.

I went to dinner with them, presenting masculine, and they seemed a little confused by the whole thing because I'd also been talking about the black dress I was going to be wearing at the Quorum performance the next evening.

My explanation was something like "look, it's like being trans, but I'm not fully trans" and I don't think it was a very good explanation in retrospect, especially because I'm trans as heck.

One of the things going on was that my dad was helping install some shelves he'd built in my room, so my parents got to see my room including the conflicting piles of clothing. It was mostly fine. Whatever it was that I was asking them to accept, they were prepared to accept it.

Clearly my parents accepted that I was queer in some way because they were there mostly to see me perform in a queer concert. But I'm not sure that I was getting them to see me as anything but a straight man in the wrong clothing.

The concert was lovely. An old friend was even unexpectedly in the audience (I should have recognized all along that one of the choir members was their partner, but I am bad at recognizing).

Later I saw a video clip of the concert on Quorum's Facebook page, and realized that - as much as I had done with my dim understanding of makeup to make my face acceptable in the mirror - I couldn't stand the way my face looked from an angle.

There, once again, was that dysphoria that I didn't think I experienced. But what could I do about it besides becoming a makeup pro? It wasn't like I was going to go on HRT or anything.

June 2018

This part involves the word "drag", in what turns out to be a positive experience, and I'm still as surprised about that as you are.

Trans women are not drag queens. It's very important to say this up front. Drag is at best unconnected to what it's like to be trans, and at worst a cruel parody.

But anyway, the director of Quorum, Lorraine, had announced our program for the summer season, and it was "Drag Messiah".

A pretty simple concept: we were going to sing Handel's Messiah, the whole thing, as a drag performance.

When this was first announced I was just thinking: She'll change her mind. She has to. There are trans people throughout this choir. We can't do that.

But Lorraine was aware of these things, and she sent an email explaining what "Drag Messiah" meant to her. You need to hear it in her words. I'm just going to quote the whole thing, with her permission.

And it's not that I was immediately convinced by every point in this e-mail. You'll note the reason for Drag Messiah that's hinted at instead of stated: Quorum was out of money and we needed to put on a performance people would actually go to. Quorum was my only queer community at the time. I had to give it a try.

If you're familiar with this piece, you may have another concern that a friend of mine expressed.

"So which parts of the Messiah are you going to be performing?"
"All of it."
"ALL of it?!"

We were a community choir. We managed to sing some pretty difficult things sometimes. We'd sing things by modern composers who are like "oh hi I reinvented music notation, we're singing in chromatic 1/6 steps instead of half-steps now, also I discovered some new vowels". But learning a well-known, hours-long piece, full of virtuoso moments, in 12 weeks, was still ambitious as heck.

It was the first rehearsal. I was getting the score for the first time and sightreading. We were going to sing through as many of the choral sections as possible.

Altos: And the glory, the glory of the Lord
Everyone: AND THE GLORY--

It was an explosion of harmony I hadn't heard out of our choir before.

Some folks already knew the piece. Some were yearning to sing it again without having to participate in a church. Some had just joined the group for that purpose.

And of course many were just flailing and following along as best they could, like me. And one was missing, because she had quit the choir rather than be associated with the word "drag", and that's okay.

Anyway the other thing about this piece is all the Christianity. Like, of course I knew the entire thing is about Jesus. But as we sang through it, I encountered the lyrics for the first time, and their literal meaning gets super aggressive and scary.

By act 3 it's like "Jesus is in charge of everything now and Christianity is taking over the WORLD and we are going to DESTROY THE UNBELIEVERS HECK YEAH."

This message, of course, is super bad news for queer folks.

I know that Christianity is heavily entwined with classical music, and churches are great performance spaces. Quorum even had a pretty good relationship with some local churches, the kind that fly rainbow flags and not just during June.

But organized Christianity has also harmed and abused several people I know, and we were going to be singing what's on the surface a two-and-a-half hour advertisement for it. How were we actually going to queer up the message?

June 2018

On a Thursday after work, I ran home to smear some numbing cream all over my face, put on some slightly femme clothing, and got myself to an ugly boxy building on the edge of town. It was time for my first laser hair removal appointment. This was the first thing I was actually doing about my body.

I hadn't shaved in a couple of days because I had misunderstood and thought that's what you're supposed to do for LHR. This was a mistake, but not a showstopper.

I introduced myself to the laser tech. She was happy to always call me Robyn, but said she needed my "legal name" on the form because this was a "medical procedure". I don't understand the relevance.

I want to digress about this. There are multiple times that I've encountered services that are particularly needed by trans people that have insisted on legal names, when AFAICT they interact in no way with the legal system or government ID.

Sometimes they say they need it for "insurance reasons" but they don't accept medical insurance, which wouldn't cover them anyway. Why do they do this?

Anyway. Lasers. They hurt. You really want the numbing cream to work so that it hurts an acceptable amount.

I wasn't going to summon a ride back; I'd already paid quite enough for the procedure. I walked a long way to the subway. People would just have to deal with what I looked like.

My face was a war zone of black and red smoking craters. It seemed like there was hair melted onto it. Everything smelled like burnt toast. I stopped for a banh mi, which tasted like burnt toast.

Stopping at that banh mi place would become a ritual. I wonder if they thought my face just looked like that all the time. Or I wonder if they saw the progress, seeing my face be less and less of a disaster each time until it was just a woman's face.

I took another look at my face when I got home, realizing that I couldn't even shave this mess off my face. I called in sick for work the next day.

June 2018

CoNDOR is a racing league for the game Crypt of the Necrodancer. It's an amazing and inclusive community. And it's where I started to interact with trans people (who are well represented among the top racers of the game) even before I realized anything about myself.

When you're racing someone in CoNDOR, there's often someone else in the community doing commentary, and part of CoNDOR commentary is making sure you know the racers' pronouns. So I was on stream being referred to as they/them.

Afterward I had a DM from fellow racer sylverfyre: "Oh hey - I didn't realize you were gender nonbinary too!"

We started talking. They invited me to their Discord. It was a good place. It was the start of me having a trans community online.

June 2018

I'd forgotten to learn the three choruses of the Messiah I was supposed to learn. I tried to cram them while getting changed between work and rehearsal. I got to see Lorraine's "I'm not mad, only disappointed" face.

I got to thinking about how much easier my schedule would be if I could just be out and femme at work.

Around then I was spending half an hour to an hour between work and rehearsal making the transformation. I had to re-shave my 5-o'clock shadow, put on lots of makeup, and figure out an outfit from my limited options.

I mean, not that I "had" to, because nobody would actually care how I looked at rehearsal. But I'd gone directly from work once, and it was awful. I was the wrong person and missing an opportunity to be me.

I was still dealing with pushback and "concerns" from a couple of people I had come out to, like the reactions I got in the section I called "The Gauntlet". One of the causes for concern was "well I support you but what would person X think?"

In retrospect, person X usually turned out to be fine with it, so the concern was misplaced. Also in retrospect, what's even the point of sheltering hypothetical transphobes from my existence?

If I were doing this again I'd carry cards to hand out, saying "if someone else disapproves of my gender identity, that's not my problem or yours".

But the pushback had its effect. I had to consider all the implications of each situation I came out in. That's stressful. So I pretty much stopped coming out.

Eventually I learned that a friend of mine, Dan, who I'd known since I was 12, had learned about my identity secondhand instead of from me. That should have been a really meaningful conversation, and I missed my chance to have it.

I'd learned by now that any statement I made about myself that wasn't quite right could be used to express "concern" about me later. It became clear that I couldn't just say "hey I'm trying this gender thing" anymore. I had to be ready to defend my identity, at any time, and I barely even knew how. I couldn't just do it on my own.

At one point I reached out about this, and I got a very quick response from my friend Yuri, inviting me to come over to their house and talk about it. I sat on their couch, and vaguely panicked about how to come out and whether this is the part where I lose my cis friends.

They made tea. I don't usually drink tea. It was good.

June 2018

It was another Messiah rehearsal, another chance to be myself out of the house. I'd caught up on learning six of the choruses, mostly, and even put together an audition for a solo.

I got to rehearsal, and like usual there were name tags for names and pronouns. Like usual, I grabbed a purple marker to write "Robyn" on my tag. And then I stopped before I wrote the usual "they/them".

I knew what I wanted to write. And I finally knew that that's the only thing that matters. I wrote down "she/her".

My journal kind of stops existing for months at this point. It seemed for a moment that it was going to be hard to continue the thread, until I remembered why I hadn't been putting stuff in my journal: because I was starting to be able to say it on Twitter.

I was out as they/them on my Twitter profile, but I hadn't said that much about it. My handle was still "arboretic". But I'd just gotten something back from ritterdoodles that exceeded my expectations and changed my world.

July 2018

Something that a misguided concerned person told me was: you can't just conclude for yourself that you're trans. You need to have a therapist tell you that you're trans.

This is very wrong, btw. Of course you conclude for yourself that you're trans. You are the only person who has the relevant experience of being you.

But I wasn't convinced enough. I considered the possibility that maybe gatekeepy people were right and wonderful people on the Internet were wrong. So I looked for a therapist.

First I looked at therapists my insurance would cover, but anyone who even mentioned gender was apparently expecting to deal with suicidal teens. What the heck would my intake appointment be about if I tried to go through the insurance-approved mental health system?

I at least understood this: I'm not mentally ill. I'm just trans. Could I say that to an insurance-approved therapist? Would I be caught in a Catch-22 where they wouldn't diagnose me because there was apparently no problem to diagnose?

I never found out, because I didn't put myself through that shit. I went out of network. I went to Psychology Today, which sounds like a magazine but turned out to be a website where you can find therapists. I read some recommendations, and found myself a therapist with the specialties I seemed to need. They were non-binary themself. And they didn't need me to call them on the phone.

They responded by e-mail fairly promptly, quoted me their hourly rate (which was exorbitant yet typical), and asked me to tell them a little about myself.

I told them a lot about myself.

The e-mail I sent was very long and sensitive, so I'll just string together a bunch of fragments from it.

Right there at the end -- while I was really uncertain about it, and had been told exaggerated negative things about it -- was the first time I was asking for HRT.

July 2018

I'm okay with my old handle. It's a word borrowed from Bon Iver vaguely mumbling nonsense lyrics about trees. But "arboretic" doesn't sound feminine enough. And I'd finally decided what I was going to change it to.

It was a name for my character, a name for my Twitch stream and Twitter account, and -- even more than I realized -- a name for me. So arborelia came into existence.

I announced a Twitch stream where I was going to make some "exciting changes". I let a couple of loyal viewers (how did I even get loyal viewers) know what it was about and gave them mod powers in case it all went wrong.

It didn't go wrong.

I sloppily played some Necrodancer until I had 8 or so viewers, then cut to a new scene, put on Yoko Kanno's "Girl with Power" as background music, and revealed my name, my new avatar, and my pronouns. arborelia was she/her. No question about it.

I overhauled the visual presentation of my stream. I replaced black backgrounds with bright colors and cute artwork, and replaced Necrodancer-inspired pixel fonts with more cheerful ones. I made some of these changes while I was live on stream.

I soon noticed that being called "Arbo" for short didn't sound right anymore, but that I could take the nickname from the other end so I'd be called "Elia".

You might be able to tell that it stuck.

July 2018

I went to meet my therapist, J, for the first time. As a compromise between femininity and traveling to an unfamiliar place, I was wearing a plain black T-shirt and my one comfortable pair of women's jeans.

J's practice was in Milton, requiring going to the other end of the Red Line and beyond, to the other red line, the mysterious Ashmont-Mattapan High Speed Line. You may have seen this on T maps in Boston. But have you been on it? It's surreal. You transfer at Ashmont and get on a trolley that's literally from the early 20th century. The name "High-Speed Line" is incongruous. It's not very fast.

Making the trip interesting and extra surreal, the trolley driver was acting like a tour guide. He explained that the area used to have trolleys on the roads, which got increasingly stuck in traffic. The "High-Speed Line", with its grade separated track, didn't, and that's what made it high-speed.

Newly informed, I got off the trolley and searched for my therapist's office. It took a few texts to find the door. I was worried if I was presenting femme enough to be taken seriously. I was worried what this appointment would be like.

J greeted me. They were wearing a roller derby jacket with a skull motif. Their appearance and presentation reminded me of an old friend named Fish who I wasn't in touch with, who I realized had something going on with gender and I didn't know what it was. Soon I was at ease and I just became a fountain of gender feels, for an expensive hour that felt like 15 minutes.

I tried to work out whether I was "she" or "they". I knew it was flattering to be called "she", but was it my real gender?

J's input there was "you seem pretty feminine to me". Mostly they just listened. And we ran out of time with many things still unsaid.

Fall 2002 / August 2018

Jumping back about 16 years: Fish was one of the first people I met in undergrad. I soon joined the same living group as them. They were a mentor to me in a lot of ways.

The house was for all genders but had evolved out of a fraternity. It had a kind of formalized thing called "big sib / little sib" where incoming members would be paired up with an upperclassman mentor. Fish was, quite appropriately, my big sib.

Fish drew this adorable comic when they knew they were my big sib, but had to wait for weeks to tell me because the sibs weren't all assigned yet. They gave it to me afterward. I kept it even though it depicts previous-me, because, aww.

So I sent them an email, from my new email address, and reintroduced myself. And then I was very apologetic, because I thought they had come out to me as trans or non-binary way back in my first year and I didn't get it.

I got a response the next morning, saying "Ahh! Congrats!! I am so happy for you!" And then they were bewildered what I was apologizing for, because they had definitely not come out, or even understood their own gender, in undergrad.

(We worked out this discrepancy later. It's a weird story involving another friend of mine from back then, and I think the moral of it is: do not just decide your friend's friend is trans and unilaterally assign them new pronouns. Even if they do turn out to be trans. Just don't. Thanks.)

So I guess I was absolved. The sad fact is, if Fish had come out to me back then, I probably would have botched it anyway. I had some internalized transphobia at the time.

But that was then. Now, in 2018, we were trans friends who were planning to catch up over dinner.

We talked about a lot of things! And after dinner, Fish offered to walk home with me so we could keep talking.

Eventually they brought up HRT. And I was like haha that sounds great, but I don't even have a doctor. Fish asked whether I had tried going to Fenway Health, where they went.

I had heard of Fenway, early on, and in one of those amazing acts of self-gatekeeping I had decided it wasn't meant for me. Like, I just needed a doctor. Fenway was clearly for queer folks who didn't have access to the health care they needed. Right?

Yeah, it took me that long to piece together that that described me. I was queer people who didn't have access to the health care I needed.

I signed up with them the next day. It was tricky because I needed to make a phone call. Phones are my nemesis, and in 2018 I was even worse at them.

"Could you repeat the name you'd like to be called, please?"

"Not at the moment."

"...what?"

"I can't. Not at this moment."

"..."

"Okay my coworker was walking by and I didn't want to out myself right then. I'm Robyn."

I got through the call. I got on their 6-week-long waiting list. Queer-friendly health care is in very high demand.

August 2018

[ ] confirm Fenway Health appt (SOON)
[ ] sperm bank (by Sep 6)
[ ] pay off student loans
[ ] HRT! (ideally Sep 6)
[ ] re-come-out to Zay and parents
[ ] apply for name change

August 2018

it was the weekend of Quorum's "Drag Messiah" performance. Inconveniently, it was also the weekend of my Mystery Hunt team's retreat. Fortunately, they were both in the Boston area, so I just had to travel back and forth a lot.

I'd just come out to my Mystery Hunt team, which was a happy occasion and not even a big deal. This team was the first place I'd worn pronoun badges, anyway. I brought the outfit I'd be performing in to the retreat.

The drag that Quorum was performing in was, in fact, a spectrum of all kinds of representation. Lorraine had made it clear that "yourself, but extra" was one way to perform. There were options in her expansive vision of drag that had nothing to do with gender and the bending thereof.

I went with the "yourself, but extra" option to the extent I was prepared for, which still wasn't very much. I was wearing a long, sparkly, red cocktail dress I'd gotten from a clothing swap, and trying a little harder than usual at eye makeup.

The trans women in the choir weren't the only ones performing their own gender. Some cis women did the same. A cis man with a powerful voice, who sang many of the baritone solos, wore a glorious black cape. A trans man was dressed as David Bowie's character Aladdin Sane, shirtless and proudly displaying his chest scars.

I think Lorraine said she had considered slightly changing the text of the Messiah to use a variety of pronouns for God, but instead decided that if she changed the text, it would distract from her interpretation.

She described the interpretation in some extensive program notes. We weren't really singing about a religious figure. Our "messiah" was the queer community.

You might doubt the whole idea for this performance. But it was powerful. It honored those who died and are dying. It celebrated the light that the queer community brings to people's lives. When it comes to the "reign forever and ever" part, the program notes had a sly comment about the Gay Agenda.

We had some fantastic instrumentalists who had joined us in the last week of rehearsals, and we just sang the heck out of the piece. Not everyone was a virtuoso and that was okay; the stronger singers carried us along.

I sang a duet with A (the agender friend I'd come out to six months before) on "O Death, Where Is Thy Sting", which I love because it is just so much jauntier than you would expect. Haha, suck it Death, you don't matter.

I was dropped off outside the church, and that's where I found the whole choir. On the street outside the church. The rainbow-flag-flying church had locked us out.

I don't know what kind of miscommunication, administrative decision, actual hate, or neglect led to this. I only know the effect. They could have hosted the queerest performance of the Messiah. Instead they locked the doors, while we were there, and left us on the sidewalk in Harvard Square. Passers-by saw our flamboyant attire and shouted uncomfortable things. I'm surprised I wasn't outed to people I knew right then.

We considered performing outside. Which would have terrible acoustics, probably be illegal, oh and it was about to rain on us and our outfits and our precious instruments.

I spouted useless panicky suggestions, and Lorraine tried to reformulate them as something more coherent, with the words "what she's suggesting is..." The "she" still caught me by surprise.

One of our members then used zir connections to save everything. Ze was involved with the Democracy Center, a small public space in Cambridge, MA often used for community organizing. It happened to be available.

Members who were good at Facebook contacted the invitees and told them of the new location and time, which I thought couldn't possibly work.

But the audience found us. They filled the room, which wasn't hard, but still.

The church wasn't there for us in the end. The secular, leftist community was. It was a civic miracle.

The lyrics of Handel's Messiah, with their new interpretation, were twice as powerful to me as we performed. We were rejected, but still our message went out unto the world. Our performance was resurrected. If Cambridge be for us, who can be against us?

After that weekend, with all the panic about the performance, my traveling back and forth to a Mystery Hunt retreat, and the sleep I didn't get in between them, one line from the Messiah stuck firmly with me. "Behold, I tell you a mystery: we shall not sleep, but we shall all be changed."

September 2018

I had been "partially out" for too long, and it wasn't going to work for much longer. I was trying to be out everywhere but work. I was two different people every weekday. I didn't like being two people.

Two former co-workers had met the new me already. It was just happenstance that none of my current co-workers had, especially given I lived so close to work at the time.

I tried to geo-fence my identity. I gave different names at different branches of the same coffee shop. I entirely avoided a restaurant I liked that was too close to both.

I had even gone to a puzzle hunt that my co-workers also typically went to. I went with my friends, wore a skirt, and signed in as Robyn. If anyone from work saw me, they didn't mention it.

And my motivation at work was gone. Every day I counted down the hours until I could stop appearing to be a guy.

A trusted friend kept telling me that "now is not the time" to come out at work, based on complex and ultimately irrelevant factors, but I told them it was time.

Also, I was about to finally go to my appointment at Fenway Health. All of this was exciting and scary. But I had my arborelia Twitter account, where I was out, so I could talk about it:

And I got an encouraging response from a new Twitter mutual named Kat, who I really looked up to.

"So you know we're not just going to give you pills today," my new doctor said. I nodded as if I had known that and considered it perfectly reasonable. I tried to hide my disappointment.

There was a Process to be Followed, after all. But at least things were going to start moving faster -- she let me schedule the next appointment for a week later. And at least I finally had a doctor who was on board with me being trans.

Back at work, I arranged a meeting with our HR person. Given I didn't tell her what it was going to be about, I assume she expected the worst.

When I said "so, I'm transgender," she was surprised, but then relieved.

There's probably a reason I shouldn't relay the exact content of the meeting, but roughly: she suggested a very bleak and bureaucratic way to come out, I said no that sounds terrible, and I substituted my own plan, which was fine.

From there I called a quick meeting with the two employees who reported to me, and came out to them too. I was on a roll. I was so much better than I was at the start of the year of skipping the awkwardness and just getting to the point.

And at the end of that week, I told the CEO, who was a bit tongue-tied about it. I gave him the heads up that on the following Tuesday I was going to come out to the whole company.

Why not sooner? There was going to be an all-hands meeting on Tuesday morning. I imagined someone trying to be helpful, gesturing to me, and saying I had something to tell the company. I imagined obligatory polite applause. I shuddered. Not like that.

I went to work like it was any other day. I used the men's bathroom for the last time.

In the late afternoon, I went home early, then logged back into work Slack, in the all-company channel. I typed "@here" and introduced myself, with my name and my she/her pronouns.

As the heart-emoji reactions poured in, I followed up with a link to a document called "[username] 2.0 is out". This was inspired by my friend's similar document that they had shown me.

It started out like software release notes: "I had a bug in my gender identity. I am breaking compatibility with a few minor things about my old self so I can fix it." It went on to be a sort of FAQ, addressing the basic questions people might have about what this meant, how to use pronouns retroactively, how to update address books, in what contexts to be concerned about outing me, what kinds of questions would be bad to ask, and so on.

It seems really overdone in retrospect, but co-workers told me that they found the document really helpful. It was clearly a very accepting workplace, but lots of people just don't know how any of this works and are afraid to ask.

One bit of feedback I got about the FAQ was that I used the word "cisgender", in "don't ask me questions that would be inappropriate to ask a cisgender person", and people didn't know what it meant and had to look it up.

So I know that for some, work is the most hostile environment to be trans in. I know I had some advantages that led to my coming-out going well. I was living in a progressive city and working in a progressive industry. And I was a binary trans woman. I had it easy.

Oh, and one of my co-workers was already out as trans. I was the first to come out on the job, but look, it's software, there are usually more trans folks around.

I found a direct message from her in the morning, along the lines of:

Her: "ha!!! I knew it! I knew the whole time!"
Me: "Really? I didn't."

It's funny how cis folks say "There Were No Signs" and trans folks say "yeah, that's an egg".

I could have had a normal day at work, just with new attire and a better bathroom to go to. But, in fact, I had to leave early again. I went downtown to a follow-up appointment with my doctor.

I didn't even take the pills right away. I was running and training for a marathon and I didn't know what they would do. I waited until later in the evening.

October 2018

I wasn't about to have a "normal day" yet. The next day, I took an extra-long lunch break to visit the county courthouse and start the process of changing my legal name.

I strode optimistically up the grandiose courthouse steps... and then right back down them, to wait in line for the metal detector in the dingy basement where you actually enter the courthouse.

I'd heard from a friend that I could get the requirement waived to publish the change in the local newspaper. I asked the clerk. She said that would be unusual and take longer and I should just publish it. I didn't know the right words to say, so I gave in.

By the way, I don't mean a paper that actually exists in a relevant form, like the Boston Globe. I was ordered to publish in the local local paper. Somehow.

I'm sure that, once upon a time, people read this paper with their morning coffee. Once, you could probably go to the newspaper office and hand over a piece of paper with a notice they should print.

There is no office now. The paper is operated out of Perinton, NY along with hundreds of others. Look for its website and you get redirected to a local news aggregator called "Wicked Local", because that is how people not from Boston think Bostonians use the word "wicked".

The problem was that "Wicked Local" was not a website that would tell me how to get a specific legal notice printed in a specific one of the vestigial newspapers it is made of. I sent some emails. I was redirected to a different address, and then another.

Someone who could actually print the notice got back to me on the last possible day for it to go into the paper in time. They told me it would cost $160, and I was in no position to argue.

October 2018

It was the day of the marathon. The registration process had required my ID. So at the check-in table, unfortunately, they had a race bib with my legal name printed on it in bold letters.

I grabbed a sharpie. "This is important", I said. I defaced the bib, in front of the race staff, so it looked kind of like it said "Robyn". They didn't stop me.

My a cappella friends were there to support me with some amazing signs, including one that you just had to be us to get, and one that just said "YES ON 3".

(Yes on 3 was the Massachusetts ballot question of "should trans people still have rights?" The "no" side would have banned us from bathrooms and more. Some of us would have been out canvassing about it, if it weren't for the marathon.)

I ran and ran, in my new running skirt. I tried to remember to slow down to my new pace. I had been taking half my prescribed dose of spironolactone for a month, which I believe was part of making the marathon possible for me to complete at all. About 19 miles in, I got a dehydration headache and started walking, eventually got to the gatorade table, drank a lot of it, and walked some more because slosh slosh.

I eventually got back to running. I made it. I moaned a lot at my extremely supportive friends. They asked if I was actually okay and I said "yes I'm really happy auuuuuughhhhhhh".

Since then, I've been able to run less and less. My body doesn't cooperate. I think I was constantly hitting the "testosterone" button to keep going, and that button doesn't work anymore, and now when I run even a mile I feel like I have a hangover.

November 2018

Content warning: pet death

Election Day was looming, and there was one very important thing to vote on here: Yes on 3. The "no" direction was a bathroom bill plus more. The ballot question amounted to "should trans people still have rights" and it never should have been a question.

I joined the campaign very late, through a combination of not wanting to out myself and phone anxiety. I know my friends were out there doing a lot more.

It was my last chance to help. I signed up to take Tuesday afternoon off from work to join the GOTV effort.

Unrelatedly, one morning, my cat Alex walked across my chest to wake me up. When he stepped on my chest, I yelped, feeling a sensitivity I'd never felt before.

So that was neat. I spent a moment in awe at the process that was beginning within me, and now that I was awake and Alex was continuing to yowl and step on me, I grudgingly got out of bed to see what the deal was.

I checked on his food and water and litter to see if he needed any of them (he didn't). I checked the closet to see if he'd peed in it (he had). I groaned and half-heartedly yelled at him, and got to spraying and scrubbing.

Alex was 17 years old and he was a mess. He was frequently upset, vomited a lot, peed in unfortunate places, and had been diagnosed with arthritis. He was mostly blind and might have been mostly deaf too.

The vet could never recommend a next step that seemed to actually help his situation, just painkillers and chill-out drugs that didn't seem to have an effect for long.

And despite everything, Alex seemed to appreciate my company. He seemed content when I was around. The sense that worked just fine for him was touch, and he was cuddly as heck.

On Election Day I left work, cast my own vote, and then headed home to get stuff I'd need for canvassing. But at home, I found Alex wheezing in a corner of the closet, his food and water untouched.

I'd put out that food and water as replacement for the previous day's food and water, which he also hadn't touched.

I'd been faced that whole time with the harrowing question of, if he's suffering and I can't help him, does he actually want to be alive? And every time I wavered on that, he'd do something adorable that seemed to imply he wasn't done with this life yet.

I'd concluded that, when he was actually ready to go, he would let me know, and I would know him well enough to recognize it when it happened.

This was him letting me know.

I took him to the vet (he didn't resist at all), the vet suggested the usual temporary remedies, and I forced myself to say, no, look, I think it's time. The vet didn't live with him, didn't hear the way he wailed at night.

It had to be up to me, and this broke my heart.

The vet had no idea I changed my name or gender or anything, but he never asked why I was wearing a skirt. We both had weightier matters at hand.

We scheduled a follow-up for euthanasia at the end of the day. He injected Alex with some IV fluids to make him more comfortable in the meantime.

I took Alex home and brought him to the couch. He put his head on my lap and didn't move from there. The canvassing group texted to ask where I was, and I apologized that I couldn't make it anymore.

I called my friend who knew Alex best, and she came over to keep us company for a while.

Later, I opened some mail. One piece of mail I had received was hand-addressed to my deadname from the county courthouse.

Inside was the legal document recognizing my name change.

I finally had a legal name I could go by, and I was in no mood to celebrate.

At 5 PM I put Alex back in the cat carrier (he hadn't moved at all) and headed back to the vet. The Lyft driver asked how I was doing. I said don't ask.

The vet confirmed with me that I really wanted to go ahead with this, and had me sign a form. We proceeded. He injected Alex with some things, then said I could be alone with him for a while.

I petted Alex as he lost consciousness. I talked to him. I said "I'm sorry" dozens of times. I knelt on the floor and wept.

A tangent about crying. In my childhood, I cried a lot. It was a liability.

In my teen years, I figured out an inexplicable thing I could do that would stop me from crying. So I did that, every time it was necessary, until I didn't cry anymore.

After that, for many years, I had trouble crying at actually sad things, and would only cry for weird unexpected reasons.

But when I watched my cat die in front of me -- my friend, my confidant, my tormentor, the only cuddling companion I deserved -- I could finally cry. A lot.

I took another Lyft home. The driver asked if there was a kitty in that carrier. I said no, and don't ask.

I went to an election-results-watching party with some friends. I broke the bad news about Alex to those who didn't know by then. I ate snacks until they constituted dinner.

Election-results parties are always weird vibes, but the most important election result came in quickly: Massachusetts upheld trans rights, the first time trans rights in state law had ever been supported by a popular vote. It was a landslide. It never should have been a question, but at least it was a victory.

When I first retold this on Twitter, I ended by quoting @maggiesmithpoet:

December 2018

I was comfortably out in most aspects of my life. I was out at work, out to my friends and family (including coming out a second time as a binary trans woman instead of non-binary), out on Twitter, and out to the government who had finally sent me an ID.

There was one place I hadn't dealt with yet: Facebook. Months earlier, I had deactivated my Facebook, because having two identities that different people know about is not something you can realistically do with Facebook. I would have been content to not reactivate it.

But, it turns out that deactivating really doesn't do much. Facebook was still showing the name on my deactivated account in lists of people. People were inviting my deadname to events sometimes, without me knowing. I had to reactivate just so I could have some say over what my identity was on Facebook.

The first thing I did after that was to remove a lot of Facebook friends who I couldn't trust, or couldn't remember if I could trust. I almost removed one name I didn't recognize at all, then had a realization just in time. I checked her profile. Yep, she was trans too.

Once I felt safe enough, I updated my name, pronouns, and profile photo, then quickly pasted in a simple text post I'd prepared, updating everyone on who I was and why I'd been gone.

As much as I dislike how I was forced into it, this was an effective way to let people from many different phases of my life know.

I got warm responses from people from many stages of my life. I got a private email from an older relative, who needed me to clear some things up because she'd learned about trans people in the 80s and I didn't fit what she'd learned. I think my follow-up helped.

It all went better than I expected, but Facebook was still not where I wanted to spend my time. I had better communities that were a lot better for who I was.

In my last meeting with my therapist before getting the letter I needed, they asked if I had good support networks, and I mentioned how I had communities that I could hang out in voice or text chat with and be myself and play video games--

"Oh good you're on Discord!"

This is not the only time I ended up verbosely describing Discord to a therapist instead of just saying "Discord". I get it now: Therapists know what Discord is. Knowing ways that people communicate is presumably part of the job.

I had options for Discord communities. There was the Necrodancer discord, which had always been extremely gender-inclusive. A few personal discords, including the one sylverfyre had invited me to.

Through these communities, I had decided to register for Games Done Quick, an event I'd been to two years before but wanted to do again properly. I'd even found a roommate.

And then a trans speedrunner Twitter mutual, Kat, who I only knew a little about, posted an open invite link to her Discord as well, so I tried it. It was a pretty nice place.

My workplace at the time was across from a piercing and tattoo studio with huge windows. I'd been looking at it all year and thinking "welp I certainly can't go there". But now I was out, and I could go there.

I walked out of a company holiday party and into the piercing studio.

I filled out a form (it asked for my preferred name and pronouns). I picked out some nice opal studs, a birthday present to myself. I waited, just a bit apprehensively, to get the completely basic piercing most people get in their teens if they get it at all.

The piercing was very quick and barely even hurt. Then I looked at myself in the mirror and the euphoria was immediate. I took a selfie when I got home, and I was happy with it, and I needed more people besides myself to see it.

So I posted it to the #selfies channel on the Discord I'd just joined, my first post in that channel. I'd say it got a good reaction.

December 2018

I hadn't written anything in my journal for a while. I didn't need it that much. I could be myself every day, and I had Discord. But over the holiday break I had thoughts bouncing around my head that I wrote down in one big journal entry.

Here are some fragments of it:

(I did not follow through on that particular crush, ever.)

December 2018

Kat started an #lgbtqia channel on her Discord, and I joined it, and one thing I asked was:

I had some basic questions (do you address all of them, or one, when talking to them?) and then some more personally-focused questions, and I got some basic answers from plural people who were there.

I don't have a dissociative identity (which some people who are plural do, and some don't). I don't think multiple narratives called "self" are required to understand my life most of the time. But I do recognize that multiple narratives are possible, and possibly useful.

There's no rule that says you need just one self, and that sometimes this idea helps me understand things.

I think this is the gray area between a single identity and plurality that I've heard called "median". I'm no expert on this. But if I understand it at all: the entire process of coming out was a distinctly median experience for me. It had to be.

I was two people named Robyn and [deadname], hoping to eventually be one person, but unable to be.

At times, Robyn and [deadname] socialized with different, overlapping groups of people, because different people knew them. You're changed by who you socialize with.

It was hard to sort out, early on. [Deadname] once ruined a date with the woman Robyn was dating, by showing up in her place.

When I was staring at the ceiling above my bed, missing social obligations, and wondering what I was doing, that was Robyn and [deadname] arguing over who gets to tell the story of my self.

[Deadname] lost that argument, and as a result... stopped existing at some point? Got consumed by Robyn? It's a little terrifying if you think of these things too literally.

But that's kind of how philosophy is, right? Taking materialism literally is also terrifying, because it means you have zero selves, consciousness is fake, and nobody exists. Welp.

I can tell that [deadname] didn't want to win. He started this journal, yearning to meet Robyn, writing "I don't even know her name". (It feels bold to write "he" here, but as bold as it was for him to write "her" originally.)

He met her, and he saw a better version of himself, the self he had dreamed of. He saw their coexistence was a contradiction. So he worked hard to replace himself with her, with me.

He even commissioned a character design so that he could become her. This is a thing that happened, and some amount of plurality is the only way I can see to make sense of it.

But, wait. The character was Arborelia. She was called Elia, not Robyn.

At the end of the year, I still had two selves, Robyn and Elia. They lived mostly separate lives. Hardly anyone knew both of them.

Robyn was born in 1983. She's a slightly edited re-telling of [deadname]'s story. She once used they/them pronouns.

Elia was created fully-grown by an artist's pen in 2018, and gradually left the page to inhabit this body. She started her story fresh with the new people she met. She has never been anything but she/her, and I hope you can understand how freeing that is.

When I put this on Twitter in 2019, I said:

I hadn't fully come to this understanding in 2018. I was just starting to talk it through. For a while, I'd say things like "Elia is short for Robyn" as an attempt to make the two of me into an indivisible whole. Now I just think being indivisible is overrated.

Elia was about to go to Awesome Games Done Quick and meet her community in person. Robyn didn't go.

January 2019

I arrived at the hotel where AGDQ was. I'd been in contact with Deme, my roommate, and she was waiting for me in the lobby. There were all kinds of people to be introduced to.

I'd been to the same event two years before, as [deadname]. It wasn't bad, but aside from hanging out with the board game crowd, I mostly just faded into the background.

I could tell that this time was different.

I knew ahead of time I'd know some trans people here, but I hadn't realized how many trans people there would be who I didn't know! This was an event where being trans was not just accepted: it was a normal way to be.

I encountered someone I'd made friends with at AGDQ 2017 but then lost touch with. She was a volunteer checking badges. I got a wonderful double take from her, I caught her up on my name and stuff, and she gave me a hug.

That evening, when I walked past the hotel bar, Kat was there. "Hello friend", she said. "Let me buy you a drink."

I think it was Kat who told me about the ALttPR entrance shuffle co-op race that would be on Wednesday. It sounded like exactly my thing, but I wasn't sure how I would put together a team.

"How about you ask Zandra?" Kat suggested.

Oh right, how about I just go talk to an intimidatingly awesome streamer who might not even know me. Just walk right up to the author whose wonderful book I read on the way to AGDQ and ask her to play Zelda randomizer with me.

Which I did. I was Elia now, and I didn't have to have these inhibitions.

I asked Zandra when I found her amidst a crowd in the stream room. "Okay, sure," she said after just a moment. "Let's figure it out later."

Our third team member was someone I very vaguely knew online, who was cool with me and Zandra and rather good at the game. But we needed a fourth.

At another random gathering I asked Zandra if she had ideas for the fourth member of our team, and she said, "well, how about Kat?" That made sense. I asked.

Kat: "It sounds great but you know I don't really play this game, right?"
Me: "Can I teach you?"

No matter what, we were better off with a fourth member than without. The goal was for 3 people to finish. So my idea was that Kat could focus on scouting inconvenient locations and tracking and sharing information between the rest of us.

When I do entrance shuffle on stream, I have a diagram that I doodle on to track the randomized entrances.

With an unusual sense of motivation, I got my laptop and designed a paper version of the tracker that we could all look at, and got it printed at a nearby print shop.

Kat and I had arranged to hang out in the practice room. I would play an entrance shuffle seed and talk through what I was doing, and Kat would track using the thingy I made.

We stayed all afternoon. We did a practice run of ALttP randomizer, and also Kat played some random games, like she does

and
it was
wonderful

That evening we met up for the race and -- well, there was a complication. When we were supposed to set up in our team space, with CRTs we were assigned to, a different event was going on in the room, off schedule, a tournament that was running way too long. The room was overcrowded and several loud dudes, the entourage of a popular streamer, were extremely uncomfortably in the personal space of our team in particular, acting like we were furniture inconveniently scattered in their way.

A teammate made the wise decision to leave the room for a while.

Kat and I held our ground. It was important for me to stay there, for hours of delay while the conflicting events were (badly) worked out, despite everything, because I remembered my experience from 2017.

At AGDQ 2017, I would sign up for things, they'd get moved or rescheduled, and I wouldn't find out, because I was nobody.

I was paranoid that if too many of us left, despite that bring a really good idea in the circumstances, they'd just start without us.

The other event finally finished, and some dude was brashly celebrating inches from me, and I shouted over the cheering to ask him to back off, and it turned out to be the popular streamer himself. He didn't take it well.

And then we got to do the race. It was great. We finished last. It was fun as heck.

It was late when we were done. I headed back to my room, where my roommate Deme commented on some Twitter drama about GDQ, which turned out to be, y'know, us. Some unreasonable bitchy randos had disrespected everyone's favorite guy, Twitter said, because they wanted to play some Zelda game.

With Deme's help, I refrained from commenting. I didn't make myself a target of angry gamers. I went to sleep.

While gamers on Twitter threatened retribution against... whoever, I did my best to tune it out and hung out with Kat. I even joined her on the GDQ back couch for a run.

In the evening, I took her aside to the bar so I could buy her a drink in return. And there, I asked her, as casually as possible, how her poly dating experience was going and what I should know about asking out someone who's poly.

Kat tells me, looking back, that she was just dying to know who it was. "It'll go great," she said. "You're really cute."

In my mind: oh wow, oh no, do I tell her I'm into her right now, what if it ruins everything, she has two girlfriends and one of them is RIGHT HERE, how much of a disaster am I, oh no

She offered to talk more over lunch, and as we worked out a plan, it turned into dinner Friday night.

In the morning, I met one of my Twitch heroes, and tried to get involved in a particular GDQ-related Discord community he was in, and, well, that didn't work out.

No fault of his, he was nice and welcoming. But the cold reception I got from others who were around was... familiar.

"Don't scroll back in the discord and get offended," someone said.

I hadn't been planning to get offended, but, faced with that self-fulfilling stereotype, I simply left.

I went to the GDQ audience and texted Kat.

I talked through this with her, and I got nervous about the ramen restaurant we were going to -- the same group that had just sorta shut me out had been planning dinner there at the same time. Could we maybe go somewhere else, I suggested, to avoid awkwardness?

And she replied with something startlingly wise: "Do not let people scare you out of your spaces."

The ramen plan was still on.

Before dinner, she joined me in the audience. We watched the FF4 Free Enterprise race, which Deme and others we knew were in. Kat explained to me what was going on in FF4FE the best she could.

Me: Is this going to be a date?
Kat: I wonder who the lucky girl is

That night, we got seated (not particularly near the other group) at the ramen restaurant.

"So," I told Kat, "I think you're really cute." Dinner just kept getting better from there.

On the way back, after some comically gay hesitation, we held hands.

Private space is hard to come by at GDQ. But Kat knew that Deme was at dinner with FF4FE folks, so the room was ours for a bit.

Kat messaged Netara and asked them to warn us when the FF4FE group was coming back from dinner.

It was a good plan and it's funny how it didn't work. Deme walked in on us in a state of some undress anyway, when she went ahead of the group to retrieve something from the room before Netara could warn us.

Eventually we stopped monopolizing the room, got our clothes on, and went to the FF4FE afterparty as a couple.

We cancelled plans to play Root with friends of ours in the board game room. It sounded like an amazing game, but we just couldn't dedicate the limited hours we had left together to a board game.

There were the formalities, like working things out with her other girlfriend she was staying with. And then there was the conundrum of where we would be able to spend our last night at GDQ.

We ended up in my room again, making sure to be quiet. We didn't want to disturb Deme, who we assumed correctly would be fine with Kat being there, but we just didn't want to wake her up. She actually turned out to be sleeping like a rock and utterly un-disturbable.

We talked quietly about the future of us, our plans after GDQ. Kat whispered something and I misheard her.

"Oh wow, well," I whispered back, "this is really sudden, but I love you too."

Oh gosh. I really wasn't supposed to say it yet. But it was true.

We frantically backpedaled through the conversation, I found out what she'd really said, and we laughed it off and held each other tighter.

January 2020

You may know the rest of the story with Kat. As I was finishing up the thread where I originally posted all this, I wrote:

That day, I had just given her a framed commissioned picture of us, and an engagement ring.