Trans Realization - The Event
15 January, 2022
This is a short peice about my original actual acknowledgement that I have gender dysphoria, but then how that changed my attitude into a strong denial of being trans. This was originally written up as a series of posts on Mastodon, with a little bit of further editing for here. Content warning: This document may have strong language, some topics of sexually explicit nature, as well as religious discussion and talk of depression and suicide.Since it came into conversation earlier today, been thinking about how I do just fanfiction in my head internally as like a testbed for ideas. It's been something I have done for a very long time, as just a long running continuious story feed, a perpetually growing internal fanfic. I just have it internally running whenever I'm idle, or lying in bed, and mostly instead of action it's a bunch of characters just in conversation with me. I plan out scenes for games and writing the same way, so I think it's an ADHD thing.
Thinking now, though, of the closest I got to admitting trans in the past. I'm gonna talk for a while about The Event.
One thing I realized as well, though, that a lot of my dysphoria was managed by compartmentalizing it. Fantasizing myself as a girl, especially when looking at porn. So it happened a lot in these running fanfics too. Through one magical means or another, I would imagine myself being transformed into a girl. Happened across many different stories, and in the big perpetual fanfic, it happened many, many times.
At the time, the big thing I was into was Touhou, so it was a Touhou fanfic. It had started in 2009, while I was unemployed, and walked by a condemed house in my neighborhood and had the random thought of 'there's a portal to Gensokyo in that house'. So I imagined going into it, coming out in the middle of the Tengu village, and for various reasons they couldn't just send me back. Eventually, I had made a deal with Yukari Yakumo to go back: she would send me back, as well as give me startup funding - with my mind going to that since at the time I was unemployed and trying to both find a job and work on gamedev - in exchange for 10 years later I would fake my death and then become her shikigami.
With a quick fast forward to the future, I returned to Gensokyo and became her shikigami. Specifically, my task was going around gathering missing artifacts from her home, Mayohiga (based on other non-Touhou legends of Mayohiga I had heard before that). And because that was involving magic items, I would run into some other ones too. A couple random times I'd been turned into a girl, swapping with others with one of these magic Objects for Yukari's amusement.
The Event, though, was the big main bulk plot of this story.
There were a LOT of different peices that were setup to The Event. I don't recall them all anymore, but they were all a step-by-step thing building one one off of the other. One of them was some future, based on a short comic I saw on Danbooru, where Chen had become a mafia don and Yukari and Ran had died. Then from there, a zombie apocalypse on the outside world. Then time traveling back to the present as Kanako tried to stage a full revolution in Gensokyo. Then some other stuff. I don't remember how long it all took place, but I think it was over about a year of different things, building up each peice that needed to be in place for The Event..
Over the course of the buildup to The Event, I had started integrating parts of Yukari into myself. Literally. As part of the Shikigami contract, I could channel her magic. In the future where she had died, her body was preserved, and I had several of her organs transplanted into my body, because that would generate her magic without her needing to be alive. Then once returning to the present, I was able to do it then without her, and led to a rift where the shikigami contract was cancelled, which then was necessary for something that I don't quite recall now, but it led to the next part of the story, which was the beginning of The Event itself.
For some reason I don't recall, I had traveled back in time to around the year 1300. And over the course of me being there, Yukari ended up with some terminal illness and died. Her death would have resulted in a massive time paradox, had it not been for what happened next. I touched the most notorious magic item I've ever created in all my fiction writing, a very clearly self-transphobic magic that I created around when it was very first suggested I was trans: the Journal
My oriignal writing of the Jounral, and the couple places I'd used it in stories so far since i made it, was that it just grabbed DNA at random from nearby people. My encounter of the Journal in this story, though, was particularly unusual, as I ended up making a meta ruling instead. Because over the course of time I had picked up all those transplant organs from Yukari, the Journal didn't have to scramble my DNA at random, because it already had what it needed. Instead it turned me directly into Yukari. So then, in my head in my imagination, I was then Yukari myself, living the next 700 years trying to as closely emulate her life as possible to not screw up the timeline and create a paradox.
Once I had caught up to the present, I had been able to ditch the acting like the old Yukari bit, and just then be myself living as Yukari from there.... Although I had pretty much run out of steam, not sure WHAT to do now being such a powerful character but living my own life. So I invoked a reset, using another magic item I had created for a different story. A malfunctioning Dreamshard meant the last thousand years had been a dream, and I returned to being myself in Gensokyo.
And then The Event happened.
This is where I nearly had cracked. Because then trying to go back to being myself again after living as Yukari was a really hard sell in my mind. Just to myself. I didn't want to accept that. And the story couldn't just continue, it came grinding to a screeching halt.
There was a wonderful trans comic written last year, that is this same idea: "Is It Strange To Feel Dysphoric After Coming Back From An Isekai?!" was published on Twitter so I have to link there for it: https://twitter.com/squipkechi/status/1531283951423471616/
And this dilemma was playing out in my head. I don't know when exactly this happened, I didn't write it anywhere, but based on the date of me telling something to a friend that happened later in the perpetual fanfic, it was either mid to late 2011, or very early 2012. So it had been a few years now since I just casually wove off the suggestion from Alice that I was trans with "nope, no gender dysphoria here". But that was thrown out the window, as this story played out. I had to admit it. I do have gender dysphoria...
But I CAN'T be trans.
Because that trauma that happened to me as a child prevented me from ever admitting any signs of being trans, even to myself. Because Cail - to use my analogy for my trauma from the eight months followup - still had his icy grip around my neck. I needed a way out of this problem. Something that would allow me to get out of this without breaking down and admitting I was trans.
So the solution, in the story, was splitting myself in two. Using some Gensokyo shenanigans to create a duplicate of myself without any of the memories from the Dreamshard that could continue being Yukari's shikigami, and then using the Journal again to turn back into a girl. I would return to being myself, the shikigami, and then the other me could fade into the background. Problem solved, right? Story can move on...
Except no.
This trauma had far too strong of a grip on my mind. And Cail was there to violate me yet again. The story did continue with me being a guy again, yes. But a guy where the attempts to remove the memories failed. I still had every memory of being Yukari for 700 years. Except instead of gender dysphoria, now from "my" perspective I had purged some kind of youkai from my head. Once the duplication happened, the dysphoria "went away". Or at least, that's what I told myself.
But it wasn't done there.
It twisted my other self, too. The girl version of me there in the background. Turned her into a very carefree and reckless youkai. I had been already framing over the course of this fanfic, ever since it started, that the reason Yukari is the aloof sleepy carefree woman that she is was basically just depression, which I had slowly been working on improving her to bring her out of it. And this girl me very quickly killed all of the progress I had made, returning her to how she was in the beginning.
So then it became an evil that had to be defeated. Which, eventually, I did. But I didn't kill it or destroy it, but reabsorbed it back into myself. I took over her memories of everything that happened since the split, reintegrating that part of myself without "restoring" the gender dysphoria. But the story was now reaching the endgame, getting more and more extreme, and this had tainted all of it. So I ended up having to do a full wipe again, and reset all the way back to my first entering Gensokyo, and writing a different path for my life instead of being a shikigami.
For a while, all of this was pretty ordinary, back to the usual sort of fare. In this second timeline for the fanfic, I ended up in a relation ship with Aya Shameimaru - who happened to be my favorite character of the entire Touhou cast - and living pretty much a normal life inside as a sorcerer. Or no, rather, as a witch, as I quickly called myself in this timeline as I also ended up in friend circle with the other magicians of the series. Perfectly normal for a guy to be called a witch, in historical contexts of course, nothing wrong with that, nope.
There was a few different transformations once more, since they just constantly litter themselves in there. I found the same magic item that the first timeline had Yukari using to body swap me for fun, and used it a few times with Aya to just role reverse. A couple curses here and there. Another actual appearance of the Journal, without me ever touching it though because I knew what it was and that I should never touch it, even though I "wasn't trans". But then there was another attempt to try and break through, with a magic that Patchouli had worked on for gender swapping, and asked me to try it and go with her to the outside world to a magician's retreat. Only Cail was already waiting this time. When the spell wore off during the retreat, I had to admit that I had some dysphoria... But from the transformation, not from turning back. Eventually, Patchouli shelved the spell as flawed.
A number of years passed in this second timeline, and I ended up doing another wipe. Not from running out of story, exactly, but I was more or less writing it in real time. A few things that happened in Gensokyo, and a few things in real life intermixing with actual stuff I do, with Aya also becoming a Pokemon Professor and traveling back to the US to attend and staff events as well. The reset was because I had the itching to try out a different idea, since the fanfic's first and foremost a sandbox testbed. It was something that actually seemed like in my head it would work for a major arc of one story I was wriing, so I wanted to try it out before actually writing it into a story. So this second wipe completely destroyed the world, as well as altering history so none of any of that ever happened. No Gensokyo, and only myself and Aya existed with memories previously. With that, it basically had been finished as a Touhou fanfic, but my interests were shifting anyway. The setting started with a few different sci-fi peices, from Star Trek and Stargate and the like, before I finally settled in the main bulk setting: FFXI and FFXIV, and making them real worlds that existed elsewhere in our galaxy, close to but not identical to the games in our world due to alien influnecs bringing the information from that world.
This is where Exelia came back into play. The Exelia who was a separate person in my writings had gone to Vana'diel, investigating the planet after the initial FFXI release and recognizing it to be in fact a call for help, and we went there with her sister to find and rescue her. This led into the next transformation, with me being sent back in time to Eorzea, at the Seventh Umbral Calamity, as in my headcanon the planets of Etheirys and Vana'diel are in the same solar system, and I made a joke when 1.0 shut down that Louisoix had sent everyone to Vana'diel. That's exactly what played out, being transported then back to ancient Vana'diel and helping with the intial settlement.
Only that's not entirely all of what happened. To mirror my actual XIV experience, instead I was sent two years before the Calamity, as just a fresh adventurer. As Exelia. And then lack of interest led to just quitting, hanging around Ul'dah, getting into a relationship with another adventurer, getting pregnant, having a miscarriage, and yep, thanks to my dysphoria about not being able to have kids to begin with, that ended up leading to me being depressed for a while. Then finally a couple months before the Calmaity - which is where I came back to the game before it's shutdown - pulling out of the funk and going around to explore, eventually running into Louisoix who recognized the spell on me and gave me a Fantasia to turn back into myself. Only then I forgot all of that, which is where I thought I woke up on that day of the Calamity.
But from there there was a split, because also in this crazy story, an entire backup of the world of Etheirys had been taken, intended to restore it with terraforming technology after the moon hit and the ice age that the dust caught up had settled. Only when a dragon emerged instead, that plan was postponed. Instead, finally, it was installed on another planet some ways away, to make a second Etheirys. And since this backup occured before I had turned back, then there was another me on that world as Exelia. This one still had no memories of before, but also, due to the unique nature of not being a person born there, had no family or anyting that the Ascians could exploit, so she became the Warrior of Light.
From there is when the next attack from Cail occured. Sometime later, I'm not sure when but before the release of Stormblood - as I had written an entirely different liberation of Ala Mhigo before that - the youkai from the first timeline appeared yet again. But now she took a new form, a Primal version of Exelia. It seemed an ordinary Primal at first, only she had information from my world. She was something else.
I'm not sure exactly when it happened in relation to this part of the story, but when I was reviewing my dreams for the first article I wrote, I do have a dream that i found that I actually dreamed that I had cracked. I had zero memory of this dream when I read it after I cracked. I almost couldn't believe it was actually genuine, even though it was written in exactly the style of how I log my dreams... But it makes sense to be around this. That Primal of my Warrior of Light turned out to not be a Primal at all. She was the same original version of me when I admitted that dysphoria. Only now twisted by Cail to be even more evil.
She had originally been reabsorbed back into myself, but one of the last things that was done in that first timeline was a creation of a bunch of shards of Gensokyo, as a bunch of Trials for myself to go through to prepare what finally happened to reset the timeline. They should have been erased with time rolling back, but many of them survived. And she had managed to survive by splitting back off again into one of the shards, a shard that was itself based on FFXIV, and from there becoming a pseudo-primal.
So after a fierce war with this "primal", where she could actually temper the army onto her side because she had actual primal powers, she ended up being finally defeated and imprisoned by my allies to figure out what she really was. But after some time, eventually she escaped. I myself went off doing something else. And then Exelia started having an existential crisis, in part due to her Esteem - as Exelia had picked up the Dark Knight class once first entering Ishgard - began to have a ton of self doubts, beleiving that the primal version is the endgame of herself and because of the evil that she had become. Unsure of what to do, Exelia left Etheirys altogether for a while, traveling along with her static using the Stargate network I had built around the galaxy.
On one of the planets she stopped at, that primal appeared yet again. Except now she had become even more evil, and had taken on Slenderman-like qualities after her defeat. She captured Exelia, forced Esteem out, and intended to use her as bait to flush me out to try and kill me. Luckily, with some help of my own, and the help of Exelia's Esteem, we were able to defeat it and kill it ourselves.
And that's as far as I had seen it, so far. It definitely didn't stop my fantasizing about turning into a woman, but by then I had been so badly beaten into submission that I guess he was satisfied for now. I had been really starting to have a lot more of a problem trying to admit that I wasn't trans, as around this same time had been when I turned into a Miqo'te in-game and the familial resemblence and the gender euphoria from how people were treating me was making it much harder. But it was near an iron-clad arument now. Multiple conversations happened where someone questioned my weird behaviors, and whether I was trans, and I could bold-faced admit that for anyone else it was signs of being trans, but not me, I was on the cis line of the divide.
But an antagonist hadn't appeared yet from there. More transformations continued to happen, finding weirder and weirder was to adapt me into being a girl but also "still cis" in real life, so Cail never made an appearance. And despite how unstable I became with the sudden way I cracked due to my entire persona breaking apart, in a certain way that was probably actually good. Because Cail existed and fed off of me from that initial trauma when I was eleven. And it was right from the initial suggestion that I might be trans, that I couldn't recognize was that because I had no memories of when I was a kid. Which suddenly all came quickly back when I read over those medical records.
Other things worked its way into this third act of the story too, including a visit to the universe of Star Trek at one point earlier. Then later on, when I had come up with yet another> time I had transformed into a woman, Q ended up traveling into our universe at one point, and teasing me about it, and I had to argue with Q that "no Q I'm NOT trans"...
Which would be an actually not at all out of character thing for Q to do if he actually DID exist, just pull shenanigans by intruding in someone else's own imagination of him!