@ics @Mendie_Taoma In our case, the question of "What if I'm trans?" had been buzzing around our head since around November/December 2019.
Around the same time, we'd played or were playing co-op games of Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Stardew Valley with our wife (#MyReason) as girl / woman characters, which was totally normal cis guy behaviour 😅
By March 2020, we were working entirely remotely from home. Then lockdown happened too.
Before then, our mental bandwidth was constantly taken up by the noise and distraction of others in the office, as well as having to put up with neurotypical expectations. Without this to exhaust our mind, there was space to question whether this was something.
We procrastinated heavily at first. It was too big a question to start to answer. The most we did at first really was let our hair grow out for about 6 months, before chickening out and shaving it off.
That was the last time we shaved the hair on our head.
Meanwhile, looking back at our YouTube search history, we were continuing or had just started watching like Steven Universe and The Owl House (totally normal cishet series), we continued always choosing a fem character in games, and we watched videos about SARS-CoV-2.
Around the beginning of 2021, we were still not taking any active action, just letting our hair grow out. It looks like we were playing a lot of Minecraft (1.16.x) at the time and watching Minecraft music collab videos by ZAMination and other creators (e.g., Skeleton Rap; Zombie Girl; Just Monika etc.).
Something near the end of 2020 or beginning of 2021, our team leader went on prolonged sick leave. We knew he'd been struggling with energy for a while, but tests hadn't found anything then as far as we knew.
Sometime in March 2021, we and our colleagues in the same department at work were called into a meeting. We had no idea what it was about, and when they first mentioned our team leader's name, we thought maybe he'd been fired or something. We didn't expect what then happened.
The head of department attempted to give us an update on our team leader without bursting into tears, failing entirely. He had died. Not just that, but it was due to them finding an aggressive, late-stage cancer of some kind, which somehow none of the previous tests had identified. They'd tried to treat him with chemotherapy as soon it was discovered, if we recall correctly, but it had only quickened the end.
It wasn't just a shock to us: it broke something in us. He'd seemed a bit low energy but otherwise okay just a short while back, and suddenly he was no more, just like that. No time for goodbyes. No time to let him know how much we all liked him, irrespective of him being a bit bumbling at times.
Our thoughts around this time are a jumbled mess. All we can recall is that it made us realise that our life could end just that suddenly too, without us ever being brave enough to answer the question that we'd been procrastinating finding an answer for.
On 3rd April 2021, we watched Abigail Thorn's coming out video, and associated videos.
On 4th April 2021, we apparently searched YouTube for "trans coming out" videos.
Sometime after that, we booked a phone appointment to talk with a GP about our gender identity, scheduled for 23rd April 2021. This was followed by an in-person appointment on 6th May 2021 to fill out forms to be referred to an NHS gender clinic.
The rest, as they say, is history, and a tale for another time.
#EggCracking #trans #transgender #NonBinary
SleepyCatten
