Second Born

This post is NSFW. For like 17 reasons. First of all, there's some masturbation talk. No real details, mind you, but the word does get bandied about a bit. There is discussion of various kinds of pornography. There is also a video embed that has music which simply must be heard to fully appreciate the video. And on top of everything else, it's gonna take a good while to slog through it all. Just wait until you get home or are on the bus with your Beats on or something. It's probably best enjoyed with some soothing something, whether it's a nice cocktail, or a bit of weed, or even just some hot chamomile tea. So yeah. Get home, get relaxed, and let Aunt Sera tell you a story.

Before I continue, I want to make a few things crystal clear. In the course of this post, I describe some things, in contrast with certain aspects of my own personal, self-directed internalized cultural definition of femininity, as "wrong." I am speaking only about and for myself and my own experience. I am not and never will intentionally try to define anyone else's femininity, or any other gender expressive traits. Also please try to remember that there are as many trans experiences as there are trans people, and while there are probably many trans people who can process my experience as similar to their own, there are probably many more for whom my story does not really resonate.

My story is tied pretty deeply into sexuality as well as gender, and this is not necessarily always the case for trans people, broadly. I don't see how it even could be the case for trans people who figured out their gender very young, before they even had any concept of sex or sexuality. My story is also one of nothing happening for a very long time, and then everything happening kind of all at once, in very rapid succession, which is nearly unheard-of. If you want to get to know a trans person, approach them the way you would anyone else that you want to get to know. Please keep in mind that this is as much a journal or diary as it is a blog, for me. I'm just leaving it out on the living room table for you to read.

A year ago today, my friend Kat took me out to get my first pair of women's shoes. The topic of cross-dressing had come up, and we'd decided that it would be fun to both go out "in drag," and just interact with the world as genders opposite our own. It was to be part one of several of building my Girl Outfit, singular, because I had no real spare money, and Kat had some, but not a lot. It was supposed to be for something silly to do.

Prior to that, I'd had deep and intimate conversations with Eva, one of the very kindest girls I've ever met. We were talking a lot about sex, but not in a potential partners kind of way; it was more of a broad conversation, learning about the kinds of ranges of preferred activities we each had. I suspect most people are not as vanilla as they seem outwardly, and we were no different.

Among my confessions was the fact that as my depression deepened, itself in direct proportion to how long it had been since I'd had a romantic relationship, my tastes in pornography had started to slide. I had progressed from watching straight porn for straight guys to watching trans girl porn. I don't remember actively seeking this kind of content out, so I'm guessing that I stumbled upon some by accident, and then couldn't look away. But something felt wrong about the trans girls, to me, and looking back, I think it was their highly masculine behaviors in sex.

The first several of these that I saw included a trans girl with a cis guy, usually getting head from him, or something like that. This had its appeal, but it felt wrong for me, it felt off. But then I started finding the other kind of trans girl porn (and in my brief experience, it seemed like there were only two types). The other kind of trans girl porn has the trans girl in roles more like the cis girls in common straight porn for straight guys. I reacted powerfully to this, but the shocking part to me was that I realized that I was identifying with the girl in these sequences. That I had no interest in imagining or recreating what the guys were getting in these scenes. I wanted what the girls were getting.

Continuing my mostly-accidental pornographic exploration, I took a detour into gay male porn, and learned pretty quickly that guys doing guys didn't really do anything for me. It didn't gross me out or anything, I just couldn't identify with anyone in any of what I saw, which confused me at the time. It makes perfect sense, now; there weren't any girls. I didn't think to look for lesbian porn. I ended up back at straight porn for straight guys, and discovered, to my temporal dismay, that I just could not identify with the guys in these things at all anymore. Not only did I actively not want to in the first place, even if I tried to find arousal in identifying with the male point of view, I could not.

I don't know that I necessarily ever had, but since I'd definitely never considered possibly identifying with the girls, identifying with the guys was where I had always ended up by default. Without any real thought. It was reflective of my entire life to that point. Never really feeling manly or masculine, but, being told that I was male by everything external to myself, never considering that I might be female. Or at least not male.

When I talked to Eva about these kinds of things, often in the context of my trying to understand what she, as a girl, sought out and enjoyed and preferred in sex in order to compare it to what I found myself now compelled to seek out, she did the greatest service any friend can ever do any other friend when they are told something that that person feels extremely self-conscious about. That she did it instinctively is part of what leaves her in such high regard with me, especially given her age. Like many of my friends from Everett Community College, she was 19 at the time.

Eva said that what I was fantasizing about "isn't bad or weird or anything."

And that was enough. It left the door open a crack, and I stopped trying to force it to stay shut. So when Kat asked about cross-dressing, I was excited, but on a primal level. I felt like I was about to discover something fundamental to who I was, and I didn't know what was going to happen. But that was about as close to feeling alive as I'd been, to that point. Not knowing what was going to happen next, but being really heavily invested in the outcome of something for the first time in my life. Genuinely invested, not just pretending to be because it was what people wanted to see. I was along for the ride, because the ride was producing emotions. I was doing it because I finally stopped feeling so completely dead inside.

Or undead, perhaps. I'd felt stuck for decades. Sentient, but not alive. My actual greatest fear for as long as I could remember, even while I realized intellectually that it had to be irrational, was that I would never die. The sense of utter stagnation in my life, combined with my lack of apparent signs of aging, teamed up to create this scenario, and it didn't feel that unrealistic. That I would be stuck, emotionally around 14 or so, while physically 739, and looking like I was 25.

I'd tried on some women's clothes before, but I never had any reaction to it. By itself, it hadn't moved me. It had been a joke. "Hey, Kat, I bet I can fit in your pants!" And she'd say, "let's see," and I'd try them on, parade around up and down the hall in mock-feminine runway model fashion, and we'd all have a laugh and maybe snap a few pics before moving on with life. I tried on one girlfriend's dress, and could not get my head around how she managed to pull it on, since she had pretty substantial breasts, and I had none to speak of, and it took me a good deal of time and effort to get into it. But I did, eventually, squeeze my way into the dress, and my friend Josh, a photographer, gave me posing directions while we got some shots. And again, it felt, at the time, like a send-up of modeling, like a funny game. It didn't actually trigger any deeper thought.

But then, I had been in a different place in my head at the time. With a girlfriend, my need for a constant feminine presence in my life was met. My distress at its absence was soothed. My focus was elsewhere. I remained depressed, but not quite as sharply. I turned my energies to acting (and now realize that part of my love for acting was that I could become someone other than who I assumed I was, back then). If I had spare time, I would hide in online games, role-playing the women I'd invented and whose lives I now know I'd wished I'd been living. I did play some other kinds of games, but really, most of it was massively multiplayer online role-playing games, like The Lord of the Rings Online, Champions Online, and Star Trek Online. I'd managed to avoid reality so thoroughly that I was not even aware of why I was really doing it.

Kat and I ended up at the Alderwood Mall J.C. Penney's, and she found me a pair of wedges by 9 & Co. She found herself a pair of Chucks, and was disappointed that the men's sizes didn't go down small enough to fit her. I pointed out that they were really the same exact shoe, so a plain one in a women's size would be the same as an off-the-scale small one in a men's size. She was still mildly dissatisfied.

When I first tried on the wedges in the store, I liked the way I felt. A lot. But I felt embarrassed, too. Intensely embarrassed. I imagined eyes and judgments on me that were probably not there. Kat bought our shoes, and we left. On the way home, I was so excited I could hardly stand it, but I wasn't sure what I was excited about. I was giddy, and I felt like that was supposed to mean I was happy, but I was so nervous at the same time, so scared, that I couldn't tell what I was really feeling. I couldn't tell what the primary emotion was. I was being flooded with them. This, after literal decades of not feeling a thing.

I remember laughing and telling Kat I was excited, and that I'd never in my life given a shit about a pair of shoes before, so it was a strange sensation for me.

After she'd dropped me off, I was alone at home for awhile. I tried on the shoes for real, not just for a few seconds in a department store. There I was, with hairy legs that had never known a razor, in my wedges, my brow furrowed, trying to figure out what was wrong with the picture. I decided I needed to shave my legs.

It was late summer by then, and I am constantly more cold than hot, so I figured nobody would ever see unless I wanted them to, since I was basically always in pants. Usually jeans. I thanked Costco that I had a gigantic pile of disposable razors, grabbed one, and headed for the shower.

I took my Gillette Men's Shave Gel (for Sensitive Skin) and slathered it all over my legs from about the knee down, and set in with the razor. I had no idea what I was doing, really. I was accustomed to shaving my face, and being able to see everything I was doing. I didn't consider this problem until my legs were already partially shaved in the shower. Even then, I probably didn't really consider it, because my brain felt like it was trying to process the discovery and knowledge of every beautiful thing that exists in the entire universe all at once, in every moment.

With the first stroke of that razor across my leg, I finally had my first glimpse of the depth of my own femininity. It was overwhelming, complete, and absolute. I felt beautiful and powerful for the first time in my life, and with those came the sense of feeling entirely female, and that feeling true and right. It flipped every switch in my head that had anything to do with gender, and it flipped them all at once. All of them. At the same time.

I became very powerfully sexually aroused, but I noticed that while I was feeling more erotically alive than I ever had even come close to feeling in my life, I had no erectile response. None. At all. And while a guy would've probably found that incredibly distressing, it filled me instead with joy. I could not describe it. I still can't, really. Ineffable happiness. I was giddy with it. But at the same time, I was so impossibly turned on that I was sure I was going to get back to the relative privacy of my bedroom, and masturbate more furiously than I ever had in my entire life.

When I got back to my room, I took my little naked self over to my bed, and sat down. I started smoothing lotion over my legs. I'd shaved basically my entire lower half. The expectation of sexually touching myself faded away as the desire to actually do it never materialized. I was left with this warmth that penetrated and radiated from the core of my being, still more deeply sexually aroused than I'd ever been, and still without the slightest reaction from my penis. It was vaguely similar to an afterglow, but vastly more powerful and expansive, and without any orgasm prior. And unlike an afterglow, it would not go away.

Lacking any proper panties, I pulled on a pair of spandex bike shorts I had left over from when I'd been in the Army. Then I put on the wedges and admired myself. Well. My legs, anyway. I took a few pictures, and I felt a rush of joy that was quickly followed by a rush of shame. I recognize this now as the death throes of the faux-masculine construct I'd been unwittingly hiding in for my entire life, but at the time, it was alien and terrifying.

But I knew I could share these pictures with Kat and Eva, at least, and they were, as you might have guessed, completely supportive. They asked gently probing questions, but they let me lead the discussion; they let me explore, while helping me feel safe and, above all else, not weird or awful. It is in no small part due to how they treated me that I do everything I can to give questioning people who come to me wondering whether they're trans the same kind of safe interpersonal space to figure it all out.

I spent the next two days in what felt like a nonstop and very intense full-sensory montage. I can't remember anything about that time. I know I was in classes at The Art Institute of Seattle, but all I really knew was that everything in my entire life that had always felt ineffably wrong, that had never made sense, now made perfect sense.

The ways that I described depression, for example. I would say things like, "I feel like an alien who's come to visit Earth, started wandering around a bit, and then forgot where he parked and now is just stuck here." Or, even better, "I feel like an ocean creature who lives and dies and spends his entire life in water, but on the surface, and can only see the sky." I had thought I was trying to talk about a sense of isolation, but I was wrong. I was trying to talk about knowing I was in the world, but feeling apart from it because some central lens crucial to understanding my life was missing. Or more accurately, factory-sealed with a lens cap on.

I looked at old songs I'd written, and wondered how in the hell I could not have known with easy certainty that I was a girl. That I always had been. How in the hell I could have ever framed the thought in my head as "I wish I was a girl," and not "I'm probably actually a girl." I know, now, that the biggest reason was that actual data on actual trans people just was not widely available for most of my life. I had the same reference points as nearly everyone else in the world; porn, and movies like The Silence of the Lambs.

I've never done porn, and I can't sew, so neither of these has any relevance to me. Caitlyn Jenner, while highly visible, has a very rare set of circumstances for anyone at all, never mind a trans woman. My net worth is probably negative, while hers is estimated to be around $100 million. Not much relevance to me there, either. Nor, I suspect, are any of those very relevant to most trans people. Although I'm sure many of us can sew quite well.

A large part of why I am now working to be as highly visible as possible with every boring detail of my life is to let everyone in the world see what my life is like as an actual trans woman. Not a sex object, or a terrifying character with alien desires and a penchant for murder and human skin footie pajamas. And a dog. Not the "I kissed a man!" girl-who-is-actually-a-guy of The Crying Game and/or Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Just another actual girl doing any-other-actual-girl things; laughing with friends, petting cats, going out to eat, staying in to cook, visiting a park, playing Cards Against Humanity, giving the neighbor horse some food, or just singing to herself while driving. Living.

I envy your successes
Your pretty face
I envy you your gender
Your empty space
'Cause mine isn't so simple
It's not supposed to be
People tell me what I've got
Inside me
But I'll be young forever
And I'll fail when I can

It was as if I knew it all when I wrote those lyrics in 2002. And yet I didn't. I wouldn't figure it out for more than another decade. And when I did, it felt like I'd been working on a massive mathematical proof for my entire life, knowing that it was getting further and further from where it should have been going, but not knowing why; and then seeing something that reminded me of the fundamental structure of the proof, and going back to check it, and realizing that I'd added 39 when I was supposed to raise to the 39th power. I watched decades of nonsense fall into place and click and fit like it had been designed to all along.

My guards on every little thing, even my mannerisms, all fell away. I'd never moved or acted in a particularly masculine way, but I'd gone out of my way to mask my natural movements, I realized. And when I moved in ways that felt natural and right to me, not restrained or imagined, I felt at home in my own skin. I felt how simple and joyful life could be. How ordinary and wonderful.

My eating habits changed of their own accord. I immediately went from my old style of not eating until I was ravenous, then gorging myself until I couldn't move, getting awful heartburn, and repeating ad infinitum to noticing when I was hungry, and then eating something light, usually a salad, until I felt no-longer-hungry, rather than full. I didn't even realize I was doing that until a couple weeks had gone by.

The depression that had defined my entire world for as long as I could remember vanished. It lifted like a morning fog in the sunlight. I had such incredible clarity. I could see everything. I could see eternity. I could see the ineffable. And it was beautiful.

I started telling more friends, starting with the closest. I tried to reach out to my friend Brandy, from The Art Institute, about it. But I was still very scared of judgment and rejection, and when Brandy, having no idea what I was on about, told me she'd definitely make fun of me if I showed her the first shoes I'd ever been excited about in my life, I balked. I thought she was probably just joking around with me (she was), but I couldn't risk it at the time.

Shortly before I realized I was a girl, I just started swapping people's genders for my own amusement. I decided that everyone needed a boy name and a girl name. I decided mine was Sarah, which was odd, because I'd never been particularly enamored of it. But it felt like my name. I think even then, when I was, I thought, playing a silly game that meant nothing, I was just about ready to shed my skin, and I really was just that clueless about it. (Remember this if we end up being close friends, and you are boggled by my intelligence coupled with my absolute inability to understand some few select things that seem really basic and fundamental to you.)

Brandy, I had decided, needed a name that was almost elegant, but also somewhat brutish. I settled on Helmut, which she protested but played along with. She was one of the last people I actually told individually after I'd figured out I was a girl. But she was the first person to call me Sera in public spaces like our school, and it thrilled me even though I thought that was just because people were playing my stupid game. She would shout down the hall to me, "Sarah!" and I'd hear my name, and smile and turn to see what she wanted.

In our chats, I would sometimes initiate the game state by addressing her as Helmut, or, affectionately, mumu. And she would play along. I was a girl, and she was a guy. We'd use the right pronouns for that being the case. Even though it was still just a game to her at the time, it was so incredibly valuable to me to have those kinds of interactions. Because the characters we were playing were still us. We just had different names and genders than what people would have expected if they saw us. And it was fine.

Around the time I was having that chat with Brandy, another of my close friends whom I'd come out to said that she was pretty sure the VA covered GRS for veterans. I did a bit of research, and learned that there was coverage for HRT and mental health, but nothing else trans-specific at that time. I called the VA Puget Sound Medical Center. They told me to just come into the ER to be seen, and after I'd been assured that that was protocol even for non-emergent care, I went down that Friday, my day off of school, four days after I'd first been struck by the realization that I might possibly have misunderstood my gender for my entire life.

I chatted with a social worker who interviewed me for about an hour. Well before our time was up, though, she seemed less interested in the whether-or-not of my gender, and more curious about how I was processing it all. I did not have to work to convince her of the truth of what I was saying. It was apparent in how overwhelmingly joyful I was, contrasted with my very vivid and matter-of-fact discussion of just how bad my depression had been, at its worst. I was referred to see a clinical psychologist in the Mental Health Primary Care clinic, scheduled for August 29, 2014.

My girl friends were all very excited for me, and I soon found myself buried in clothes that I could hardly understand, along with so much makeup that I still haven't gotten around to experimenting with all of it. Chandra had given me several paper Target bags full of clothes, including some underwear. Of all those, a single set of three panties fit me, and I could not find more until I went with her to Aerie the following spring.

Kat came over and started helping me sort through it all. She would have me try things on, and help me to understand what was fitting the way it was supposed to, and what was not. I was happy to see her take the few things that fit her, but not me. She pushed me gently, offering to do my hair and maybe some makeup, so we could take pictures along the way and capture the moment. You know, in case I ever started a blog or anything.

What you see here is a girl who is 39 years old and has just found out she has actually been a girl her whole life, and not a guy, as she'd always just assumed. This expression is the face of absolute joy with shades of absolute uncertainty, and Kat read it perfectly. There was nothing too intimate or embarrassing for her to help me understand, and she patiently helped me build my first few outfits, while easily and unabashedly dipping into quick tutorials on things like how to properly roll a sock for the most natural looking bra stuffer possible. For a sock.

I started throwing names about, but I kept coming back to Sarah. I thought of all the great puns and pop culture references I could make with the freedom to create any name I liked. I toyed with an old X-Men reference, I built names to give me saucy initials, I could've used a throwaway gag from Family Guy, all sorts of fun. But still, for a first name, I was almost immediately settled into what I would've spelled at the time as "Sarah." I bounced some ideas off of my friend Dan from Class Voice at Everett Community College.

By midnight, with Dan's encouragement to be really completely true to myself with my new name, I had settled into Seranine Elisabeth Elliot. I vowed to keep it a secret from just about everybody until I'd had it legally changed. But the decision was made, just nine days after I'd first suspected that I was a girl in the first place. The very next day, I reached out to my older brother and his wife, and found resounding acceptance. He said, "I'm glad you told us- we're both happy for you. It's great that you can find what you need to be happy!"

As my psych appointment to hopefully get diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria neared, I vacillated between certainty that I'd get the diagnosis required to start any kind of transition care, and certainty that I wouldn't be diagnosed, that I'd be laughed out of the clinic, that I'd have an enormous struggle before me to even be acknowledged as who I was. I poured all of this worry into trying to put together an outfit.

I went with a little black dress I'd gotten from Hailee, along with my wedges, still my only women's shoes at the time, and one of my old men's button-down shirts, a red silk blend that someone had suggested I tie off near the line of my ribcage. For a good while after, this was the only outfit in which I'd feel truly confident in the expression of my femininity. I'd done the best I could on my makeup, and it seemed to work well enough. Even at the VA hospital, which I would guess is among the more conservative spaces that close to Seattle, I got no ill treatment from anyone, just a bit of staring once I'd gotten to the actual clinic.

I suppose I may have been bursting with such nervous energy that my high-powered grin disarmed people before they could register the comparative oddity of what they were seeing. Or maybe enough of the people around me that day lived in or close enough to Seattle that they just weren't shocked. I remember a few uncomfortable lingering stares while I was actually waiting to be called in, but even these people at least knew well enough to not say anything.

I'm sure I spoke very quickly when I actually got in to see Dr. Santerre. He was an excellent listener, which was par for the course with my experience in seeing DoD psychologists. He largely let me take the lead and just talk, only asking for a clarification now and again, and, towards the end, making sure he had a qualifying factor for each criterion. I remained on the edge of my seat because his demeanor was so serene that I could not tell whether he found my story absurd and boring, or so straightforward that I was more or less doing his job for him.

"Well," he said, "this seems pretty cut-and-dry. Let's get these documents squared away before we run out of time." He filled out the first form, my WA DOT gender marker change form, but had to refer me to my primary care doctor for the other one, a form letter for changing gender marker in most other arenas (such as the VA itself, and the Social Security Administration).

Though it took a few weeks to hear back, I was soon scheduled to see endocrinology to start HRT. I had been assured that, barring any sort of rare blood disorder, I would almost certainly start with a prescription on my first appointment with them. It was scheduled for October 24, 2014.

Other things happened more immediately. I was ecstatic, and the first person I thought to call was Jenn. After six increasingly-difficult years together, we'd finally separated, and we had both been in such pain over it that our common wish to remain friends was constantly strained, and often felt as though one or both of us might abandon it entirely. We had agreed that if nothing else, she would always be welcome to visit with my kids, whom she'd helped raise during almost every visit I had with them after separating from their mother.

Our last several conversations had been strained, even though we'd gotten better about avoiding anything really touchy. Her new boyfriend did not like me one bit, even insisting that he come along when I managed to convince Jenn to come help me pill all the cats to worm them because he was convinced that "help me worm my cats" was some kind of sex code. This was why I later decided not to offer her my rice cooker.

Threw my #hashtag #coffee cup away before we remembered to get our #starbucks #whitegirl #besties #selfie #lol

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Mar 27, 2015 at 3:54pm PDT

When she answered the phone, I stumbled around for a few seconds with "uhhhh, I don't know how to say this, exactly," and such. But before long, I'd blurted out that I was just now coming from my appointment with the VA Mental Health Primary Care clinic, and had been formally diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria.

Jenn immediately congratulated me on this discovery, saying that I sounded happier than she'd ever heard me in her life. She asked to hear the story, so I told her an extremely condensed version of it. A version you're probably wishing I'd written right now, instead of all this. Her first two questions were, "do you have pepper spray?" which confused me at the time, and "did you seriously have no idea?" to which I replied, "no... wait, what?"

She pointed out that one of the first things I'd done when I moved out to Washington to be with her was try one of her dresses on, and she seemed skeptical when I poo-pooed that. But even so, she was immediately very supportive, and, like my evaporated depression, everything awful between us seemed to disappear. We sometimes still apologize to each other, and the response is pretty much always the same. "It's okay." She has since become probably my very closest ally and supporter, and I am just speechless with gratitude.

I went to the courthouse in Arlington straightaway, and scheduled a hearing date for my legal name change. It was set for September 3, 2014. I went home, and made a post on my personal Facebook page, in the form of a light-hearted FAQ.

After a weekend that included my first girly haircut ever, I went to my morning courthouse appearance with MJ, who got up very early to drive up to Arlington from Everett just to do my makeup and come with me. Countless gestures like this from all the girls I knew were just filling me to bursting with gratitude. At the courthouse, nobody really gave me a second look, which was a great relief. I was told to wait in the actual courtroom, and was the first order of business, as I'd been told I might be. Name changes are typically rubber-stamp affairs, so after a few basic and kind of absurd questions, the order was given, and I was sent back outside to wait for my certified copy. MJ and I were on our way back to the house by 9 A.M.

Although I'd started going to school wearing panties and a camisole under my "guy clothes" almost immediately once I suspected I might actually be a girl, by September 10, 2014, one month to the day from the start of my revelation, I was out full-time. I had left the house one last time dressed out-of-type, just the day before. That was the very last time I ever dressed or carried myself as outwardly masculine, and setting down that burden was one of the greatest reliefs of my life.

In the year since I discovered who I've really been all along, I have changed so much. I've changed in the way a flower blooms. And with the beauty of my personal truth becoming plain to everyone around me, along with the joy I am very often overflowing with, incredible things have gone my way.

I've made new friends and reconnected with old ones, including my first wife, whom I'd not been in contact with for nearly 15 years. I made amends with one friend from my L.A. tech days over damage I had not realized I'd done. I made friends with a parent of a trans kid who'd committed suicide, and we have expressed such gratitude to each other over this relationship. I've been interviewed three times for videos that were not mine, I've been an extra in my friend's digital short, I've been paid to model, I've been asked to speak before classes, I've been invited to join some incredible local musicians onstage (during a Third Eye Blind tribute show at the Royal Room), I've been extended permanent discounts at some Seattle stores, had food and weed and easy conversation all bestowed freely upon me, just for being so completely and unashamedly myself that people usually feel happier than not around me.

If all of that wasn't enough, I met an absolutely amazing woman who has become a tremendously positive force in my life in just the three short months since we met. I've yet to write my own posts dedicated to Kim, but they shall surely come. And the reason I met her was a confluence of wills; she had decided she would deliberately seek out trans women, after being so deeply and viscerally struck by Leelah Alcorn's suicide, after being primally disgusted with how awfully she had heard we were usually treated in the dating scene, and I had decided, the day we met in person for the first time (just a day after our first interaction ever, and without knowing when or whether we'd chat again, never mind actually meet), that I was going to just kill the afternoon bumming around Seattle. I was going to stay out, instead of just going home and playing video games and hoping I would die whenever I had a free moment to consider anything but the game, the way I'd always done before, when I was through with my errands. I decided I was going to stay out and drive around and sing and be happy. And be seen being happy. I went all over the city, taking selfies by various minor landmarks and in front of some of my favorite businesses.

And because of this conflux, I was still sitting around in Seattle, just gazing out with a smile at Green Lake from my car, when I got a message from her asking if I'd like to play pinball with her soon. It was a beautiful day, because I had decided it would be. And it all made perfect, joyous sense. Of course it did. How could it not? I'd finally been born.