Five.

A girl finds herself standing with her cousins, wondering what she will wear for dress-up at Nana and Pops’s house. The dazzling range of options is almost overwhelming. Who will she be today? Through the animal costumes and the police uniforms, something catches her eye. A stunning red dress—the kind women wear to fancy parties she’s seen on TV. That’s who she wants to be.

In it, she feels pretty. In all her five years, she’s never felt so happy. She wants the whole family to see how beautiful she looks. When the fashion show arrives, she knows everybody will see her as the princess she was born to be, even if her hair is a little short.

Instead, they laugh. A dozen voices bursting out at once (“it was just unexpected”), forever burned into the depths of her memory. Heart pounding, confusion overwhelming, she flees. As the tears gather behind her eyes and then stream down her face, she wishes only that she could stop existing.

Scarred. 

Traumatized. 

The girl locks herself away in a box, never to come out. The rules of this world have been made as clear as the glass cookie jar Pops keeps his Kingstons in. In this world, she is a boy. Boys don’t wear dresses, and boys most certainly do not secretly wish they were girls. 

The girl will never be a girl again.

Eleven.

What does gender matter when you’ve got a tumor (the size of a milk jug) trying to kill you? The girl doesn’t think about being a girl too often—she’s more concerned with the lines going in and out, the seizures, the 20% chance of not making it through. 

She doesn’t open the box with the girl inside. The girl that is begging to be let out. When the box is closed, it’s like she’s not even there.

She is a boy. She accepted that long ago because those are the rules of this world. She loves Pokémon and when asked whether she is a boy or a girl, chooses boy without thinking about it twice. She’s not allowed to be a girl. No point in fighting it.

There are moments of joy in the hospital. She’s always been daddy’s little girl boy, his oldest daughter son, his brave princess prince. They watch The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars together. They love the Richmond Tigers, although they aren’t very good (oh, they will be).

And if she loves The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and the Tigers so much, she must be a boy, because only boys like those things. Besides, she loves her dad more than anybody in the whole wide world. She wants to be just like him when she grows up. Doesn’t that make her a boy?

Never mind that she loves Hannah Montana and iCarly (don’t forget Totally Spies and Kim Possible) and sometimes wishes she could play the girl character in Pokémon because she’s cute, and she secretly kind of likes High School Musical even though it’s for girls, so she pretends to hate it until eventually she believes that she actually does hate it, even if she can’t identify why—and she doesn’t want to (because it’s for girls). She hates Harry Potter because that’s just The Lord of the Rings for girls, and she hates pop music because that’s for girls too.

There’s no way that she is a girl because that girl is locked securely in the box created six years earlier. And she is never getting out.


Twelve.

Okay, so maybe she gets out sometimes. Just to stretch her legs and grab a drink of water, but then it’s right back in the box, missy. She lets the girl out of the box for an hour or two, once every few months. Just a brief thought about how amazing it would be if she were a girl. Just normal thoughts that every boy surely has, because nobody actually wants to be a boy—right?

Sometimes she lets her imagination get the better of her. In the dead of night, when she foolishly thinks her parents are asleep, she’s up on the PSP searching on the internet for magic spells and potions that can somehow turn her into a girl.

She tries a few of the spells because she doesn’t want her body to change the way her dad said it would. She wants breasts and hips (but only when the girl in the box is out for her quarterly walk), not a deep voice and hair all over.

She mutters the words of the spells, hoping she’ll wake up in the morning in her actual body. Praying that she’ll be able to let the girl out of the box for more than just an hour or so every three months.

The box stays locked. Those are the rules, so she’d better get used to it.

Thirteen.

It’s her first year of high school and things are going well. By the end of the year, she’ll have her first girlfriend (although her girlfriend will think she’s her boyfriend) and the girl in the box is still stuck there. 

Everything is all swell until she has to take Dance for a term. Boys don’t like Dance because it’s for girls and so they complain about it—at least, that’s what she thinks. This isn’t just dislike, though. The girl has never been more distressed than when in Dance class. She’s always been one of those boys who just “doesn’t like dancing,” although that doesn’t really explain the complete mental breakdowns she has in her room after school throughout the term. 

Maybe she doesn’t like dancing because she’s gaining a bit of weight and is embarrassed about it. Or maybe, she would actually love to dance. Perhaps she’s just scared that if people see her enjoying it, they’ll see through the mask, see past the carefully crafted disguise that the world made clear nobody must ever see through (but really, she just hates dancing because it’s for girls).
She’s still gaining weight and sometimes it almost seems like she has the boobs she has always wanted, so she starts getting this weird reverse-dysphoria where the thing she always wanted is suddenly making her incredibly distressed because what if somebody sees and thinks that it is odd for a boy?

She never lets anybody see her chest; she always swims with a shirt on and she faces away from people when changing and she always adjusts her seat belt so that it sits on top of one breast, rather than falling in between and making them seem bigger. Because if anybody sees through the disguise and realizes that she is actually a girl, the moon will fall out of the sky and the Earth will explode into a million pieces like Death Stars I and II (but really, she’s just self-conscious because she is a bit overweight).


Fifteen.

Two years later, she moves to Victoria and starts at a new school for Year 10 (because her mum had another affair and her dad only agreed to stay with her if they started fresh, but she won’t find that out for a few more years). For the first few days she’s lonely because she is shy and introverted and doesn’t know how to make friends, so she just reads her Stephen King books alone. 

She tells herself she is happy to be alone, until on photo day, a girl approaches and asks if she wants to hang out with her friends (in a Drama activity, she would later give that girl a heartfelt note of gratitude that only a girl is capable of writing, and that girl would read it out to the whole class because she loved it so much).

She has never had friends that are girls before, and it feels incredible. Unfortunately, she’s also kinda gay so she kind of starts crushing on some of them, and because everybody thinks she’s a boy (including her), she’s worried about ruining her friendships. If she talks to them too much, they might think she is romantically interested in them (which is sometimes true, although more often it isn’t) and then they’ll think she’s just some overweight boy who is only friends with them because she wants to date them.

Even though they are the friendships she values the most, she finds them stunted by her own paranoia of being seen through the lens of toxic masculinity, and this will continue even into her adult life. And because of that, she’ll never be one of the girls.

Not as long as the girl stays locked in her box, where she is supposed to be.

Twenty.

Now she’s twenty and it’s supposed to be the happiest day of her life because she’s getting married to the girl of her dreams. And yeah, everybody thinks it’s crazy that they’re getting married so young, but when they explain that they’ve been together since they were fifteen and sixteen suddenly it’s not so strange. Sure, they haven’t finished developing into the people they’ll become (oh how true that is), but they figure they’ll just change together (call them Nostradamus). 

They’re getting married, but they don’t even realize that she’s a girl and they’re both lesbians (just a regular, cishet couple—white picket fence, three kids, and absolutely nothing out of the ordinary except a bestselling fantasy novel or two).

It’s supposed to be the happiest day of her life, even though it’s just them, the celebrant and the two witnesses—the bride(groom)’s brother and the (other) bride’s brother, all together on top of the Melbourne Star (the first couple ever married there), because she didn’t want her narcissistic, alcoholic mother to ruin the most special day of her life.

It’s supposed to be the happiest, most special day of her life.

But it isn’t.

And she doesn’t know why.

She doesn’t know why she can’t be happy (it’s because she’s not the one in the dress) and why it seems like her emotions are so dulled, and why she’s got this damned fog taking up all the space in her brain.

If she can’t be happy now, on the happiest day of her life, when will she be?

She’s not un-happy. She’s just not happy. She knows she should be happy.

Why can’t she just be happy?

Twenty-three.

“Oh, fuck. I think I’ve always wanted to be a girl.”

It takes some gradual steps, but she gets to the revelation eventually thanks to a lockdown or two. Sure, she’s been shaving her legs in the winter (because nobody will know) and wearing skirts around the house because her wife is totally fine with it (and also seems to be more attracted to her while she wears skirts for some reason), and secretly while her wife is out doing the shopping, she wears some of her dresses and is incredibly ashamed of it, even though she knows her wife wouldn’t care (but she’s been desperately trying to get her wife to dare her to wear them so it wouldn’t be weird).

And yeah, all her major D&D characters lately have been confident, sword-wielding, badass women who use magic to enhance their attacks and can lead a party effectively (even though all her male D&D characters are timid and can’t be the party leader to save their lives). 

Yes, she did write that fantasy novel from the first-person point of view of a teenage girl (that she was absolutely not living vicariously through), and despite the novel having some issues with its second draft, all of the twelve beta readers seemed to think that she read as a very realistic girl despite being written by a girl boy. 

And indeed, her favorite character in the book was the lesbian she introduced in the last act, somewhat based on her proud lesbian friend from uni who she thought was pretty much the coolest person ever for some reason, and in general she just thinks lesbians are neat (not because she is one or anything).

She’s pretty sure those are all normal things for a cisgender male because there is absolutely no way that she is a girl—her whole life, she has been told she is a boy, so she simply can’t be a girl.

And then her wife says she thinks she might be demisexual, and she seems so proud and happy to have uncovered a big part of her identity (even if she hasn’t figured out the lesbian part yet).

One night, she tells her wife that she might be genderfluid because sometimes she feels more like a girl (gasp!). Since her wife is probably bi (or so she thinks), she starts embracing that part of her she has hidden for the past eighteen years. 

Days later, she has a breakdown because she knows she isn’t genderfluid—she knows she’s a girl and she knows where this is going and if she keeps following this path, eventually she’ll have to admit it (and she doesn’t want to admit it because the world hates trans people and life is about to get so much harder).

But she keeps exploring. And a few days later, she finally realizes it.

She hears the voice. The one inside her, locked deep away since she swore she would never be a girl again. The girl in the box, screaming, begging to be let out.

So she opens the box. This time, it’s not just to stretch the legs and have a drink of water. Letting her out for this long is dangerous—it’s scary but exciting at the same time. She’s confused and being torn apart, pulled between the dark and the light (like Kylo Ren) because being trans really doesn’t work with her faith and what she’s been brought up to believe, and how could her religious family ever accept her?

She wonders if she really is a girl.

And one day, she finds a special website that promises to turn her into a girl. She reads the whole page, heart pounding away, and clicks through.

Ten hearts, loading one at a time.

Agonizingly slow.

When it’s done, she’ll be a girl. Not for one second does she consider whether that’s what she really wants. Of course it is. How could she ever want something more than this?

Her overactive, fantasy imagination starts wondering whether there really is some sort of magic in the world, hidden away on this random website. What if when the last heart loads, everything goes black, and when she opens her eyes, she’ll magically be a girl?

The page loads. She doesn’t even think about closing it.

“Congratulations. You’re a girl now.”

It’s done, just like that. She’s a girl now.

“Only a girl would have wanted to click that button. That means you’re a girl on the inside, through and through.”

As it turns out, she always was one.

-Jade Talon

Jade Talon is a queer writer based in Melbourne, Australia. After graduating from RMIT University with a Bachelor of Arts (Creative Writing) and discovering herself as a trans woman, she began experimenting with creative non-fiction as a way of exploring her relationship with gender. She also writes queer fantasy novels and is a founding member of The Conclave Cast, a podcast interviewing emerging fantasy authors. Find her on Twitter @jptalon7