Outline

It’s Rachael now, dammit (2019)

Transition (2016-2019)

That escalated quickly (2017)

Q1

January was a crazy month for me.

I had wanted to curl up and die ever since trans issues exploded with Caitlyn Jenner coming out. Even at this point, I think I identified as “a little trans but not trans enough”; I knew something was different about me, and I was sort of in denial about how serious it was.

It seemed like nobody quite “got” what being trans actually was, and all I could see were these two sides talking past each other. The conservatives were getting off to cringe compilations of college students with unnatural hair colors saying there were “twelve genders”, and in response their adversaries accused them of being insensitive ignorant bigots like always; often implicitly taking the side of the aforementioned blue-haired college SJW without modification.

It reminded me so much of the sensationalization of my own coming out in high school. There’s this sort of incredulity from a certain percentage of folks who find out. They really want to pick you apart; and you really don’t want to talk about how you used to masturbate in mom’s lingerie. People don’t treat you the same anymore, whether you tell them everything or pull back like I did. There’s a lot of conflation of terms with intersex people, “hermaphrodites”, drag queens and crossdressers… it was like they didn’t understand the sort of stuff I started to grasp within the first couple weeks of figuring out what I was. And that’s understandable, because it’s a niche subject; but, now you have to take on the somewhat condescending role of educating your friends about this new “transsexual” thing, just like when you have to educate them about ham radios, or Linux, or “spoofing the mac”, or any of your other special snowflakey bullshit. Nobody seemed to be listening to people like me, or what I saw as the classic transsexual advocates of the early 2000s. There was suddenly all this side-talk about what it is we really are, as if we weren’t in the room. And, nobody seemed to know the difference between a transsexual and a transvestite and a transgender person anymore. There’s this exhausting feeling of realizing neither liberals nor conservatives will ever understand you; but at least liberals are nice to you. Your life turns into a sort of joke, and a collection of quips and soundbites. It’s a dehumanizing experience.

So, I watch this tired old pattern unfold in the mid 2010s, where the two behemoths battle each other for control over society, while nobody seems to understand the small group of people who the fighting’s really about.

I was growing increasingly anxious at the election of Donald Trump. My earlier belief that he had adopted his present persona as a publicity stunt was yielding to the understanding that he seemed to be an honest to goodness modern day demagogue, with sketchy as fuck business dealings all over the place. It seemed his rise to power was fueled by anger about how there are now “12 genders” and you can “identify as” anything, and liberals want to take away your free speech and force you to use “pronouns”; when nobody on Antijen ever talked about there being more than two genders, and it’s a complete misunderstanding of the issue to think this is about pronouns or “identifying as” anything. It never even occurred to me that I could be “psychologically a girl inside” before I found the internet, and I was surprised at how warm and fuzzy being referred to as a woman by strangers made me feel.

In other words; the Republican complains about the blue-haired SJW who yells at the shop clerk for “assuming zer’s gender”; the Democrat scolds the Republican for being insensitive and the shop owner for not offering diversity training; and the transsexual just has a birth defect that makes them really like taking estrogen and wearing women’s clothing, and kind of just wants to be left alone. The “blue-haired SJW” is nothing more than a red (or perhaps, blue) herring; who would appear to be more properly described as a “product of the 21^st century”, and who would seem to lack the underlying medical condition shared by the trans men and women who comprised Aunty’s mailing list in decades past.

Perhaps the biggest upheaval of the 2010s was this sort of culture war between two factions of the transgender community.

One side was accused of harboring “transtrenders” who wore their gender identity as a fashion statement. They were branded by detractors as thinking themselves “too cute to be cis”; akin to the “college lesbian” trope of decades past.

The accusation levied against the other was that of gatekeeping; a sort of age-old dirty word in the transsexual community, traditionally used to refer to people like that endo who expects you not to show up to your appointment wearing jeans. They lobbed insults like “truescum” back at those who would accuse them of being “too cute” for their gender.

It reminded me of how I felt when Jacob said he met a pansexual who thinks there are twelve genders. Or, when I went to the last Debauchery in 2015 and there were suddenly a suspicious number of AFAB people with aggressive pronouns. I… kind of did think some of them were too cute to be cis. They certainly didn’t have the same “childhood crossdressing syndrome” I had growing up.

I really felt like everyone on both sides of the aisle was losing their goddamn minds, and lacked some sort of perspective I alone seemed to possess. For about a month, I fancied myself a blogger on a quixotic mission to restore sanity to the confused masses, as the seemingly lone tranny who actually remembers what the pre-2010 transgender community was like.

I started writing a couple of things, but I didn’t get far before I decided I needed to take a step back and absorb this “second wave” transgender community which I’d been mostly out of the loop on; particularly as I got the impression I was on the wrong side of history.

It was during this culture war, when the terminology shift between the words “transsexual” and “transgender” occurred. Transsexual became increasingly associated with the gatekeepy, true-scummy, “transmedicalist” position; though the archaic, non-politically charged meaning of the term hasn’t fallen entirely out of use as of 2024.

There’s an old joke in the trans community. I don’t know how old it is, but it’s certainly from well before my time.

Q: What’s the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual?

A: Two years.

A couple different interpretations could variously be ascribed to this quip.

That it takes about two years for hormones to really start working; and to make it through the gatekeeping of the traditional “real life test”.
That transvestism is really just a slippery slope to doing it 24/7; that, perhaps, a large number of “transvestites” just haven’t come to terms with how much they really want to be women yet.

The second interpretation always hinted that the hierarchy of the old guard “transgender umbrella” might be kind of bullshit; even when it did seem like there could be different types of us sometimes.

I was beginning to think this neo-transgender community might be the ultimate embodiment of the cynical reality conveyed by this joke; that perhaps, the only difference between the transsexual community and the transgender community was a couple decades. People who take hormones, get SRS and live as the “opposite sex” have often simply identified as “transgender” after the year 2015; avoiding the negative stigma both of being a “something-sexual” to laypeople, and of being gatekeepy truescum to folks in the community who might view “transsexual” as a sort of dog whistle.

The pinnacle of this culture war may’ve been when renowned trans man and baby boomer Buck Angel declared himself to be “transsexual, not transgender” on social media; sparking outrage from millennials and gen Z, who accused him of crimes ranging from transmedicalism to enbyphobia. At the time, I thought this was a problem of mutual incomprehension on the part of both sides. Now that I’m older, I’d like to think he knew what he was doing.

On Sunday, January 29^th, 2017, I cracked. I knew I had to do it. In a daze, I drove an aimless loop around Durham. I had reached… that point. I always wondered if I ever would. I always wondered if I would be a pot smoking subby boy forever. Most people have a plan for what their future will look like. I didn’t know. I couldn’t see anything there for a while.

The next couple weeks were a blur. I’d come home straight from work, sit in bed with my laptop, a writing surface and a ream of printer paper, and think there until I fell asleep. I was lost in a sort of web of ideas, writing down and following up on anything I could think of. I tried to consider everything. I played my own devil’s advocate. I later hole-punched the pages into a document I call “the Purple Book”.

I always wanted to do it, really; but, I just didn’t think I could stomach the gatekeeping and the hostility. My high school experience was bad enough. The idea of being held to some regimen where I couldn’t get meds without continuing an RLE where I very much didn’t pass was terrifying when I was younger; but if I could just take estrogen for shits and giggles and see how things go from there…

It was just too easy not to. You could just… get HRT on an informed consent basis now. And what was I, waiting to move to a more liberal city? I had already just moved to Chapel Hill. I wasn’t planning to get any younger or move to San Francisco, so this was kinda it.

By some point in March, I knew for sure that I wanted to call a doctor. I was too chicken shit for like a couple of weeks, but then I did it.

Orange health, maybe? They were pretty booked up. I was referred to Triangle Comprehensive Care, who was able to get me an appointment with Dr. Meier in three weeks.

Somewhere in the midst of this… epiphany… I kinda just started taking my spiro again. I still had it from high school. It expired in like 2010 or something, but I figured it was still good. I actually have one pill left or so, after using it multiple times as an emergency reserve over the years.

Q2

I went to my first appointment with Dr. Meier on Thursday, April 13^th. After briefly debating it, I decided to be completely honest about my medical history; just started taking DIY spiro again, history of cannabis use but recently quit and am now back on the path to transitioning like when I was younger. I was surprised to get a prescription the same day, but the fact that I was DIY probably greased the wheels a bit.

I booked an appointment for cryopreservation the same day. I had a hard time without being able to bring my Hitachi;¹ but I made it work… eventually. I stuffed a tube sock in my pocket so I at least wouldn’t have to “grip it”.

I was prescribed patches, I think out of Dr. Meier’s concern over my family history of heart disease. I put my first one on that night.

I told her I briefly took Zoloft in middle school and was diagnosed with “depression”, and she really wanted me to be in therapy because of that. I eventually started seeing a woman named Vickie Carter for counselling after folks kept badgering me about it. I do feel a little dumb for even bringing it up, because I know it was a bullshit diagnosis.

Various external forces were encouraging me to seek some sense of community and to create a support network or what the fuck ever, and so I started looking into groups at the local LGBT centers.

I think the first one I went to was TT, or the Trans Talk group. When I first arrived there was one other trans woman waiting at the table, occupying herself with a book of crosswords or Sudoku or something. I started to wonder if it would just be the two of us awkwardly sitting there, when a handful of other people trickled in.

I think Lauren wasn’t able to make it this time, but there were a couple faces that would become familiar.

Lauren

The usual group leader. An early transitioner, disowned by her parents and previously homeless, OG, cis-passing, truetrans as fuck (not that I’m gatekeeping anyone).

Samantha

A software developer who was a couple of years older than me and just getting started. She had already gotten laser and was about to go full-time, despite us having both just started HRT. We went on to become good friends. She often ran the group when Lauren couldn’t make it, and eventually took over once Lauren stepped down.

Michelle

The first person I met there. Quiet and didn’t talk much; I never got to know her very well.

Julie

An older transitioner but really cool. It seemed like she had one rough family situation after another in a prior life; she was also working as a developer or DBA or something.

There were two other people there who were non-binary; an AFAB genderfluid person, and an AMAB they/them. Neither of them were pursuing medical transition, save for the latter person getting hair removal on their face.

I never got to know the two enbies very well; they split off a separate non-binary group later that year.

Another group I started going to was facilitated by a transmasculine fellow named Rory. There were a few marked differences between Rory’s group and TT.

Rory’s group was significantly larger at first.
The demographics of Rory’s were more varied between 18-50+; whereas TT was skewed mostly toward millennials, and later zoomers.
Rory’s had a two-hour runtime, with heavier discussion and a circular seating pattern that made it feel a little like group therapy. TT only ran for sixty to ninety minutes, was usually less serious, and used a longtable seating layout that somehow made it feel different.
TT also met earlier, which often led to the group getting food or drinks afterward. Rory’s group ran from 8-10 on Wednesdays, eliminating any possibility of the now-hazy eyed dozen or two of us putting on any sort of an after party.

There was briefly this third group called “trans_irl”, run by a trans woman named Regina. This lacked any formal discussion at all, and was just trans people going out on the town sporadically.

There are other groups in the area; but I won’t bother to talk about them, because I’ve never been.

Q3

There were a lot of reasons I was thinking about buying a house.

You don’t accrue home equity every month as a renter.
Landlords were often nosy. I had stopped using cannabis for now, but was annoyed by the lack of privacy often afforded to rental properties; particularly at the complex I was presently living in, who would send maintenance in with 1-2 days notice to change the furnace filter, or replace the smoke detector batteries.
I was legitimately concerned at this point in my life by my future ability to “pass”, and how that might affect my ability to buy real property in the future.

I started taking the idea of getting a realtor more seriously as the year went on; and ultimately went on to buy a house.

#TODOThis doesn’t matter

I found myself unexpectedly in love with HRT at every turn. I shaved off my body hair, and it stopped growing in as thick. I smelled different, and my hair and skin was way less oily. It takes a while to grow breasts, but I was getting there.

The body hair. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, I’m never going to look that way again. I think I just let it get to my head when I was younger that “real men” didn’t shave their body hair, and it became part of my mask. Ugh.

I was surprised, maybe even a bit pleasantly, that my urge to look at porn evaporated after I started HRT. Don’t get me wrong; I was still into the exact same shit, and got off simply by fantasizing about it in my head. Based on my past experiences, I began to feel I’d unfairly characterized myself as a pervert when I was simply a young trans woman on testosterone. Any weird sex stuff surrounding women’s clothing had long since evaporated, and I felt immensely better.

Q4

#TODOProbably nothing important

The magic year (2018)

Q1

I closed on my house in late January or early February.

Around this time, Regina and Samantha started dating. This took me by surprise, as there had never been any crossover between the two respective groups. I think they met online or something.

#TODOIt doesn’t matter

Q2

In April, I left the house in something resembling girl mode for the first time. I went to Atomic Empire with a small group of us from the aforementioned group trans_irl; after which we went downtown for drinks, ending the night at Arcana. It felt good to finally have that out of the way.

This quickly became a habit. What started as one of my bigger fears soon became something I actually looked forward to doing after work, once it became obvious the vast majority of people don’t. Give. A fuck how you’re dressed in a modern American city.

I was in the car with a coworker one day after having come out at work, when he asked the most innocent question.

So, how are you planning to date after you transition?

I hadn’t really thought about this before. I never figured out how to date before I transitioned. My sexuality is pretty different from most guys, and I saw transition as something that could only help me in that regard. I think he was projecting normal male sexuality onto me; I figured this might be a common point of confusion.

Q3

I heard a group from the Triangle was driving up to the Philadelphia Trans Wellness Conference.² I had heard about it, and it was something that sounded cool to go to with other people someday.

The trip was headed up by Leslie, who I’d never met before; she has a difficult work schedule. Sarah Anderson was also instrumental in helping out; who I’d also never met because we were in different groups I suppose. She was actively involved with a different event, which I didn’t know about at the time because it was on Facebook and I am not.

The trip was a blast. We took two vans; Leslie’s minivan and a rental. We loaded most of our baggage into the minivan, with most folks riding in the other vehicle that looked like an unmarked church van. I volunteered to help drive, and took turns driving the minivan with another trans woman I’d never met. Maybe I’ll remember her name eventually.

After a day’s journey, we arrived at our AirBnB; a three-story loft in Philadelphia’s Gayborhood, about a fifteen-minute walk south of the convention center.

I made a lot of new friends. Sarah, Brittany, Stacey… I didn’t actually know any of the people on this trip, despite going to TT and Rory’s group regularly for the past year.

Stacey was an internet acquaintance of Samantha. Samantha messaged me, saying Stacey was at Philly and didn’t have anyone to hang out with. Our group sort of adopted her for much of the stay.

By the end of the conference, Brittany had developed a crush on Stacey, and they began a long-distance relationship with Stacey still living in Delaware.

One evening when we were back at our AirBnB playing cards,³ some of us started talking about how we first figured out we were trans. Brittany’s story went something like this.

I was laying in bed one evening, when the thought occurred to me: I think I might be transgender. It was really late, but I texted my best friend. My friend called me right away, and she found an online quiz and started asking me questions from it.

She went on to re-analyze elements of her prior life: how much she enjoyed going to school in drag one day, her history of bisexuality and fabulousness… ultimately landing at the realization that she was trans, and should pursue medical transition.

I didn’t bother to scrutinize Brittany’s story. It wasn’t Q1 2017 anymore. I didn’t like all the infighting that resulted from the explosion of trans issues in the 2010s. All that mattered to me was that we were all here, now; taking hormones, getting surgeries… doing the thing. I really wanted to believe that it was just our moment in history; that the world was always full of people like me who really wanted to do it, but society and medicine just wasn’t there yet.

The same woman and I drove the minivan back to Durham. It was just the two of us, so we had a lot of private time to ourselves.

This chick was OG, pre-Tumblr. We laughed about how much things have changed, and how you can’t say words like “transsexual” and “GG” anymore. After some initial caution, she opened up to me about two of her concerns.

She wasn’t so sure about all these “non-binary” people.
She didn’t think Brittany was really transsexual.

I talked to her about how my feelings had evolved over the last couple of years. This seemed to make her feel better.

Shortly before or after Philly, I started wading into the local BDSM scene again. I started to figure my real problem might’ve been my gender incongruence, and that maybe I should actually try being the rope bunny I always wanted to be; instead of trying to make things work as a subby boy, which it turns out isn’t really the same thing at all.

Somewhat inexplicably, Regina broke up with Samantha. Samantha seemed to have a hard time with this. Regina had recently met her family; it happened shortly after the three of us went out for drinks with Samantha’s brother, who flew helicopters for the Navy.

Sailor Jack

The four of us went to Arcana, where Samantha’s brother bought drinks for everyone and encouraged us to drink heavily.

So, Samantha’s brother. I guess everyone in the Navy’s a “sailor”, but that’s a bit of a misnomer because he’s really a helicopter pilot. He couldn’t tell us much about what he did, but I do remember him mentioning that it involved, of all things, UFOs.

In an extension of this conversation that seemed related to that last point, I remember us briefly talking about spiritual beliefs. I don’t really remember enough to say much more about it. We talked about lots of other inconsequential stuff, and got way too drunk.

We all slept at Samantha’s house. I was in no shape to go home, which was anticipated. Me, Regina and Samantha slept in Samantha’s room, while Samantha’s brother slept in the guest room.

Regina broke down crying in Samantha’s bathroom. Like, the floodgates. She hasn’t talked about most of what was going on with her with Samantha, yet. I remember she said she felt like she “didn’t belong anywhere”. There was a lot more going on than that, though. We were all very drunk.

I got sick, and was still throwing up and browning out in the bathroom the next morning. I felt like I was very dehydrated. The low alcohol tolerance seems to be a side effect of my medication, and it’s gotten me in trouble a couple other times; I’m guessing it’s the spironolactone, since that’s the one that gets metabolized by your liver (I think).

Regina and I weren’t able to drive until solidly mid-afternoon the next day. We had since procured some drinks and snacks to nurse our hangovers.

I went to Durham Pride in September; this was my first time going. My mother had never been to a pride parade before and really wanted to go, so I obliged. I had a decent enough time, but it’s always a drag going to something like that with your mom; she’s physically slow, can’t hold her bladder very well, wants to do things I don’t really care about, somehow makes me feel like a child and a caretaker all at the same time, and generally mom-blocks you from spending time with your actual friends.

Whatever. Pride was cool. Around this time, Susan also accompanied me to the LGBT center once or twice, and managed to become Facebook friends with Brittany. I didn’t exactly feel comfortable with this; Brittany wasn’t the sort of friend I’d “take home to mom”. My younger self would’ve protested loudly, but I gave fewer fucks now that I was older. It’s not like I’m dependent on Susan; if anything, it’s quite the opposite.

Q4

I had grown more confident leaving the house in girl mode, and did it every chance I got. I set a goal of going full time by the end of the year, and had a running joke of saying “December 31^st, 2018” to my new friends whenever it came up. It was starting to feel a little silly, as some of them started HRT after me and were already full-time.

Brittany’s long-distance relationship with Samantha’s friend Stacey continued. This morphed into a sort of love triangle, when Samantha and Brittany began seeing each other. This arrangement gradually shifted into a more equilaterally polyamorous structure over the following months.

Stacey made increasingly frequent trips to Durham, and quickly started making plans to move to the area. She was living in northern Delaware at the time, working for Amazon, and I think maybe even still living with her parents. She was hoping to transfer to a new Amazon warehouse that was opening in the area.

It’s Rachael now, dammit (2019)

Q1

I went full-time just before the new year and never looked back.

I really felt like I was getting my shit together, in 2019. I was starting to explore the BDSM scene again as myself, I had done the thing at work, I had all of these new friends… I felt like if I could actually get an intimate partner and get my career back on track, I’d be set.

By now, Brittany and Samantha had picked up that I was a kinkster. It wasn’t something I historically went out of my way to evangelize, but I had stopped going out of my way to hide it around friends; particularly in light of how pervasive the trope of the transfeminine tech worker as a submissive had become. It felt a bit like hiding that one was a gay hairdresser who liked roller derby.

I’m afraid I piqued Brittany’s interest when I took off an outer layer at Samantha’s house, inadvertently revealing marks from a day or two ago. Samantha already knew at that point, and we had actually gone to a thing together a few months prior.

I took Brittany to her first play party early in the year; it turns out she really likes needles. It’s fun to watch, but it’s not really my kink. She also really likes lemons for aftercare.⁴

Around this time, it was brought up in a conversation with Samantha that Stacey was plural. This meant that she had the feeling of having multiple parts, or perhaps crudely, “people” in her head. I thought this sounded pretty weird, but I’m open-minded. She always seemed cool.

Q2

I wanted to take more of a “divide and conquer” approach toward my intimate life, or lack thereof. I felt I was making no progress toward any sort of long term relationship, and started to think I needed to be way less persnickety and way more open-minded. I’ve never exactly felt like I was on the right side of the supply and demand curve for getting my sexual needs met. I chose to start thinking about the search for a sexual partner and the search for a nesting partner as two separate issues. I had long since given up on anything traditional or conventional, and mostly just wanted to be less lonely.

At the same time, I was cautiously optimistic about how things might be different now that I was living life as a woman. I hoped I had found (or maybe rediscovered) the special sauce, whose absence had held me back since I’d first ventured into the kink scene some eight years ago.

It felt like the world was my oyster; again, finally, for maybe the first time since I graduated from college. I started taking the idea of looking for a new job more seriously.

I had pivoted away from any aspirations of starting a “side project”. I was content with being a middle class, workaday tech person with a steady supply of sex and snuggles from somewhere. I was nearing age 30; I never really had the energy level to do much of anything cool in addition to working a full-time job, and I needed to pick my battles when it came to life goals. A lot of my friends had been married, or even divorced with children before figuring out they were trans.

Q3

After the time I had last year, I was excited to return to Philly again this summer. The group had a bit of a different feel, though.

Sarah couldn’t make it because of work.
Pretty different crowd; not very much overlap from last year.
Fewer people overall (though the conference itself had grown).
Cliquier feel somehow. Brittany and Stacey were back along with Samantha, but the three of them being a triad meant that they usually kept to themselves.
The AirBnB was closer, at least.

New attendees included Persephone, Stephanie, and a handful of other people who aren’t relevant to this story. I didn’t really know any of these people, except for Leslie from last year and the aforementioned triad.

Persephone

Typically, one gets to know somebody better as time goes on. This rule holds true for most everyone I’ve met, with one exception. And that, is Persephone Laura Hoffman.

Persephone is an unusual person, and I feel I uniquely need to forward-declare attributes about this individual, in no particular order.

Thrives on novelty.
Rides around on an electric unicycle.
Energetic; charismatic; a mover and shaker; craves the inner circle; if not a natural-born leader, at least a natural-born filler of power vacuums. Whether she has the personality of Steve Jobs or Jim Jones depends on who you ask.
Started a Discord server for trans people in central North Carolina this same year, which rapidly grew into a several hundred-person community.
Was dating Jade at the time, from Steven Miller’s group. #TODOExplain
Anxious, paranoid, high-strung; a control freak. Mountains from molehills.
Her mom has schizophrenia.
Her full name is Persephone; she used to go by “Percy”, but has since decided she doesn’t like this shortened form of her name. The longer form hasn’t caught on so much.
Really into Buddhist shit; though her spiritual beliefs ultimately seem idiosyncratic and esoteric.
She has BPD. This checks out; though I’ve never really struggled to have a decent, casual relationship with this person.
I might’ve seen her at TT once or twice, but didn’t really know who she was before Philly 2019.

I could tell throughout the conference that Persephone was trying to brown nose her way into Samantha, Brittany and Stacey’s triad. This trend would continue.

I was at our AirBnB with a small group of us one afternoon, when Percy had a conversation with another attendee that eventually grew heated. It mostly went over my head; but, the other person kept insisting that Persephone must or should know something, and Percy kept denying and stonewalling. I got the impression Persephone was a member of some organization, which required strict confidentiality or rules of engagement that this other fellow clearly wasn’t following. I didn’t think much of it.

Several hours later, in the same room but with a different group of people, Persephone volunteered some information about the earlier commotion for the couple of us who were there. There were a few peculiarities regarding Percy’s discussion with us.

She made it very clear that the following discussion was not in response to any question; and in fact, could not be, for some reason.
The conversation proceeded to involve, among other elements… the Freemasons? The earlier stuff with Tommy and Heather was entirely out-of-mind today.
Stephanie mentioned she had an uncle who was a Freemason; but, they never talked about it.
She said that there’s some piece of very important knowledge, without which society as we know it could. Not. Exist. There was some nitpicking from others about whether the big secret was necessary for literal life itself, or mere civilization. Her answer was vague, but suggested the truth was closer to the latter.
There was something most people know who know about this stuff, but she couldn’t say what. She made it sound a little silly that she couldn’t say what, but rules were rules.
I think she said that some people are just different in some way, concerning the last bullet point. I later interpreted this statement to be about people like Heather, though it was off my radar at the time. It was as if “the Freemasons” told the special people they were special; but, you didn’t actually have to join “the Freemasons” to learn, because lots of groups also know, I guess?
There was some rule for talking to these Freemason people, that I think mirrored the one Heather and her friend taught me all those years ago. Again, totally off my radar, what a ditz I am…

I came away with the impression that, whatever Persephone knew sounded cool, but that it also didn’t concern me.

It turned out Stacey wasn’t the only one who was plural. I learned that Persephone, Stephanie, and now Brittany identify with this phenomenon. They were all going to a workshop put on by this fellow who was trans and plural; along with Samantha, I think. I had better things to do during the time slot.

Their group had this sort of after-event that evening, a reasonable walk south of the convention center where they were able to secure a room upstairs at the Philadelphia LGBT center. I didn’t have better things to do this evening (and was actually a bit disappointed I hadn’t been able to spend much time with my friends), so I tagged along. I figured Samantha would be there at least.

This was an unexpectedly large group; especially for it being a pretty weird and ancillary thing to the purpose of the actual con, and for this being the follow-up discussion after party to the aforementioned weird and ancillary thing.

I had a talk with Persephone during all of this; which may’ve been the first one-on-one discussion I had with her. I didn’t really know what to make of all of it. A few things piqued my interest, though.

I managed to leave thinking that I might find relevance in this community. While I considered the effect of peer pressure, I ultimately decided that I needed to descent down this rabbit hole.

If Persephone had anyone single “thing”, it was this Discord server of hers. It was inspired by her then-girlfriend Jade’s server, though much more elaborate. She had set up lots of crazy automation and shit with bots, which would assign you to different sub-communities based on roles or tags, or whatever Discord calls them. It actually reminded me of a simpler version of my idea for a web application I had since given up on.

She had sub-communities for all sorts of things. Politics, food, medical discussion (in which the handful of actual professionals had special flair after being vetted), mysticism and magic; and yes, even these strange new plural folks.

I don’t know that I want to get too into this, but… it’s a whole subculture, alright? They have parts in their head, they report a feeling of switching between these parts… folks with particularly bad trauma apparently experience full-blown amnesia between these switches, but folks with less severe versions of this ostensibly only have a bit of memory fuzziness, or even no memory problems at all.

I soon learned the latter community had its own variation of the too-cute vs truescum debate. This phenomenon of having “people living in one’s head”, multiple streams of consciousness or however you might describe that, is classically associated with intense, prolonged psychological trauma at a young age. Some of these newer folks argued that this same state can exist in someone much more healthy, either by accident or on purpose. Neologisms like “traumagenic” and “endogenic” to describe these two camps had been coined; with occasional infighting between these two groups, but a seemingly modern consensus that people could be whatever and should play nice. The extreme end of the former group comprised dissociative disorders, or what the general public might label “multiple personality disorder.”

My friend group gradually started to change. A couple of weeks after Philly, a bunch of us went to Cocoa Cinnamon; me, Persephone, maybe Stephanie and a few others who don’t matter. It came up in conversation that Persephone had been into ham radio. This never happens;⁵ neither of us were really involved with the hobby anymore. I was starting to think I had an unusual amount in common with this person.

I went to Persephone’s apartment for the first time not long after this, along with Stephanie. We ended up on her balcony at some point in the evening; and it is here that I really draw the line at shit having gotten weird.

Persephone had this notebook of somebody’s (maybe Stephanie?); and she was doing… magic stuff with it, I guess? She had this little book in a plastic bag; which I suppose needed to be… cleansed? Of some harmful energy or voodoo, perhaps? I don’t remember really. It’s been a while. I think it might’ve been somebody’s journal from a rough point in their life, or maybe something relating to an ex. It doesn’t matter.

Persephone sat the bag with the notebook out on the porch, and poured a ring of salt around it. I think it had been soaking in some liquid prior to this; hence the plastic baggie. I didn’t understand what was happening at all. Stephanie seemed to, at least somewhat.

I had questions, somewhere along the lines of “what the fuck is that supposed to do exactly?”

What do you believe in?

Well, I’m an atheist.

Persephone proceeded to somewhat belittle me for my spiritual beliefs, or lack thereof. Not in any serious way; but she seemed to know things I didn’t, and she seemed very confident in that. Given the amount we appeared to have in common up to this point, I was very curious what the devil makes her think a ring of salt could ever be anything but salty.

Stephanie left, and I chose to stay a little while longer. She talked enthusiastically about the power of merely believing in things. That the power gets amplified, the more people there are who believe. I tried to keep an open mind, though I struggled to grasp at any real substance to what she was trying to say. At the same time, it sounded like there were other things she couldn’t tell me, analogous to her kitchen discussion in Philly last month.

As we returned to the couch, and I remained skeptical, Persephone made a slight change of subject.

You wanna know what Freemasons do?

Wait, Freemasonry? My preacher tried to get me into that when I was a younger.

She seemed a little thrown off by that last part; but, the conversation continued.

You wanna know the truth about UFOs, Rachael? You wanna meet space aliens? I have friends, you know…

“Uhhh… UFOs?”, I replied incredulously. I didn’t know what to think of this person anymore. Once again, I’m not thinking about Heather and Maureen right now. I do think I mentioned Tommy, though.

It was getting late, and I left not long after this. I wasn’t sure what to think of my new friend.

As the year went on, I started carting off more trans people to Tomfoolery than just Brittany. I remember in September, there were a lot of trans people, and they didn’t even all fit in my car. Brittany, Samantha, Persephone, Stephanie, April… I guessed the stereotype about trans women and BDSM exists for a reason.

It was here that I was propositioned by April, a trans woman who I’d first met at TT earlier in the year. I forget exactly what happened. I think she said she had a crush on me or something, then I messaged her a couple days later and we hit it off.

April and I were both bottoms, which made it unlikely she alone could fill the role of a sexual partner. I hoped I might at least get somewhere on the nesting partner front, and wanted to keep an open mind. Applying linear extrapolation, I might not get another chance at this until my mid to late thirties.

April was married to a woman⁶ named Diana.⁷ This bore little concern; polyamory was thoroughly normalized to me after my on and off years in the kink scene.

Durham Pride later in the month led to a conundrum. Me, April, Diana… we were all queer, and we were all going to Pride. My mom wanted to go again too; which begs the question, how do I handle that?

Option	Sucky part
Don’t tell Susan	Feel shitty for hiding our relationship. I’m always hiding my relationships…
Tell her	Tell her I’m poly? We’ve been dating for less than a month!
Ignore	I’ll be nervous something awkward will happen. She’s always complaining about how I never tell her anything…

I chose the second option. She’d been asking increasingly difficult questions as I grew older. “Are you going to give me a grandchild?⁸” “Are you dating anyone?” “Why don’t you ever tell me anything?” “Are you sure you’re not dating anyone?” “You can tell me anything…”

I would try explaining that I really, really, was not on the path to securing a long-term relationship at the moment. And once I was, it would take considerable additional time to begin a relationship and grow it to the point of “taking someone home to meet mom”. She never seemed to understand this; and often suggested there shouldn’t even be such a delay if I were to start dating.

Ugh. I hoped by giving her a glimpse of my private life, she’d understand me more. She didn’t seem to have all that many negative feelings about Brittany, Stacey and Samantha’s situation that she kept learning uncomfortable details about through Facebook; and frankly, I didn’t care if she did. I was tired of her asking, and I figured she could fuck off if she didn’t like my “lifestyle choices”.

Telling Susan ultimately proved to be a bit pointless; it was a huge event, we rode separately, and she only saw April and Diana for a moment anyway. She’s never voiced any outward disappointment over this particular lifestyle choice, but I could tell she wasn’t thrilled. It might’ve been the biggest giveaway that she’s rarely honest about her feelings. She always says she just wants me to be happy, but I don’t think she means it. I think she has this fantasy in her head of getting to be the quirky mother-in-law in my budding affluent suburban family or something, and she doesn’t understand how far removed that is from the actual reality of my life.

I had a job interview at Avalon, where Josh worked. I already had a rough phone interview with them a couple months prior where I could hear myself not keeping my pitch and resonance up with a one-second delay, making it very difficult to complete the interview. Josh stuck his neck out trying to get them to take me seriously, which seemed to have worked.

I didn’t feel like I nailed it quite as well as my interviews with Kevin and Synapse, but I got the job. I was nervous about interviewing for a job in girl mode for the first time, I still wasn’t a hundred percent confident in my appearance at that point, and my real world experience was mostly embedded programming and IT-type work, not high-level SQL-backed applications. I felt like I had no trouble getting up to speed though, and I’d probably do a lot better at a “CS”-type interview now that I’m older.

Not long after I told Susan about April and Diana, Susan showed one of her more blatant signs that she would never be a reasonable… mother-in-law, or whatever equivalent title might be afforded in my unconventional relationship structure.

I remember driving down the road, when I got a call from Susan. I answered the phone to her sobbing; she was afraid April and Diana were going to replace her or something. I didn’t know what to make of this. Does she not… want me to see other people? She basically made me promise I still “needed her”. And all the while I thought, I obviously haven’t needed this woman since I left for college. She provides me little to no real support; emotionally, monetarily or intellectually. Sure, she pines to be part of my emotional life; but I’ve historically regretted letting her in. I would later re-discover this fact.

Q4

My relationship situation escalated, incredibly fast.

We had already shifted toward calling ourselves a triad by the time of Durham Pride. I don’t remember if I ever mentioned this to Susan; I really wanted to keep it as simple as possible for the time being.

AJ was the first change in status quo. She was a trans woman in the community, who had a really bad fight with her long term partner and needed a place to stay. April and…

Okay; I feel bad that I’ve kept doing this, but I wanted to convey the proper chronology.

Diana was queer, and had been questioning their gender identity to the point of now going by Drew and using they/them pronouns. So, it’s Drew. Not…

AJ needed a place to stay, and April and Drew offered their spare bedroom/office area for the purpose.

AJ was dating a trans woman named Crystal.

Crystal

I was already vaguely acquainted with Crystal, who started going to TT a few months back. She was actually one of these plural folks. As was now Drew. And even April and AJ a little bit.

Huh.

Crystal actually claimed to have full-blown Dissociative Identity Disorder; a real case of people living in her head. I learned over time she had a difficult childhood; she’d been sexually assaulted by a neighbor, and basically had to raise her younger brother due to her parent’s negligence. She was a senior developer at the time, but was struggling with her job on account of her condition, and in the process of filing for disability to work through it. It was difficult to believe she was a real person.

Crystal had an apartment in Raleigh, where as a single occupant she’d been placed with a fellow who happened to be a neo-Nazi. This understandably concerned her, which led to both Crystal and AJ essentially making April and Drew’s house their temporary residence for the time being.

Crystal and AJ were quickly absorbed into our increasingly amorphous polycule, a five-person structure we began ironically referring to as “the coven”. I never told Susan about Crystal and AJ.

I started my new job at Avalon around the first of November.

I felt like I finally had my shit together. I had a job somewhere I might be able to make a name for myself, and I had good insurance that would cover SRS if I wanted that, which I did. And, I had this new relationship situation. That’s like the whole, uh… Maslow’s⁹ hierarchy, right?

I felt a little silly for only having just started a 401k at my new job. I hadn’t really been saving for retirement after I took my little detour to run away to Chapel Hill and fix computers; and, I could’ve gotten one through DataCorp, but there was no matching so I was less enthousiastic about that versus paying off my student loans quickly. (I’m still not sure that’s the smartest calculus though, now that I’m older.)

We struggled, to say the least, with sexual compatibility. The thing about me is, I’m incredibly subby. I briefly thought I could be a switch because of some fantasies I had as I grew older, but this turned out to be very mild and unsubstantial. I’m really, really, a bottom, who could maybe sheepishly top someone I was really close to.

April and I ultimately never really… did… much. I’ve never wanted to take the initiative to do much of anything other than snuzzle my partner and make funny noises. I’ve never really felt like I would be a starfish in bed or anything. It was like we were waiting for each other to go at a four way stop. This was essentially the same problem I had with Erika when we tried fooling around.

I guess I’ve always just wanted someone to, you know… fuck me. And, I keep doing what I feel like is the most obvious thing to look for rough, kinky, reasonably safe sex in my current body, and it’s always eluded me. It’s no wonder I’ve had complicated feelings about feminists, who complain about drowning in the ocean while I’m dying of thirst in the desert.

There was a lot going on with me at the time.

I (and everyone else, it seemed) had been thinking of myself as a system of parts for a while now. I didn’t think it was anything serious. This plural stuff did seem correlated with being transgender for some reason, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. It’s crazy I guess, being trans.

Ugh

I have this weird childhood memory. And I didn’t talk about it earlier, because it doesn’t belong back there. It belongs right here.

I have this memory of being very young, between three and five years old or so. I rode with my mom kind of far away, to Fayetteville I think. We arrived at a town house I don’t think I’d been to before or since; that stands out in my mind, since town homes aren’t a very common housing format in rural Bladen County.

I remember finding my way upstairs with an older fellow. Based on my memory, I don’t think I could tell you if he was in his teens, twenties, or maybe even early thirties. Everyone over the age of twelve is just kind of a grown-up when you’re that age.

Anyway, things started happening upstairs, and this fellow wanted me to lick his penis. I, at this age thought this was nasty. He was very insistent. He said he’d lick mine if I licked his. I did not find this argument persuasive. It did happen eventually. It’s actually the last thing I remember happening.

That’s it. It’s just this weird memory fragment. It usually doesn’t feel like anything. It’s like a puzzle piece of an owl’s head in a box of 499 pieces of the Egyptian pyramids of something. I don’t know what to do with it or where it even fits in with my life; but it’s in the box.

This dissonance came to a head #TODOphrasing

This… issue reached a climax #TODOphrasing again

My sex life, or lack thereof, is defined by a handful of noteworthy attributes.

I have a huge lifelong interest in BDSM.
I have a similarly huge forced oral kink.
I wouldn’t rate myself as anything more than an 80/20 switch.
I invariably freeze up during sexual encounters, often unexpectedly; as if I’m missing the DLLs or something.

I’ve variously blamed my problems on a number of different things over the years; that it’s my gender identity, that I’m a submissive man and it’s hard to find tops compatible with that… It wasn’t until this point in my life that the problem felt like

Dick

It’s here. I’ve always wanted it, right? What’s wrong? I gave April an old fashioned, but I’m not sure I was entirely in my body when I was doing it. What’s missing? Is there something missing? April’s not having any trouble fucking. Or Brittany or Samantha, AJ… maybe Crystal a bit sometimes; but there’s a lot going on her, and she still gets it on. Hell, most of those people have been married. What do I, think it’s my gender identity still? It’s something else. It has to be. Why don’t I want to do this thing I’ve always wanted to do whenever I finally get the chance to do it?

It started to feel like it was this. Something happened to me a long time ago, and I probably needed to get to the bottom of it.

Alright, folks. It’s Q4 of 2019. My new polycule has expanded alarmingly fast, I just started a new job, I think I’ve uncovered latent sexual trauma… what else am I forgetting?

Oh, right. UFOs.

It felt like Crystal and AJ had been living at April and Drew’s house (“the cottage”) for a year, but it was really only four to six weeks. The two of them rented an apartment nearby in north Durham, and we’d often migrate between these two locales, the cottage and the apartment.

Crystal had this old, long term partner named Josh.

(Crystal’s) Josh

Is a trans guy, and is plural if you’d believe it… At the beginning of their relationship, Josh was trans and Crystal was plural. Or, maybe I’ve got it backwards. Anyway, They both apparently found each other, and they both turned out to be both of these things.

Crystal and Josh. They decided to see other people, I guess? But they still really seemed to like each other.

Josh had moved to Texas. I forget the details, but it sounded like he was in an abusive relationship that he needed to get out of. There was a kid involved, and there were questions about how to handle that.

Anyway, that isn’t important. Josh was in town for Christmas, and I got to spend some time with this guy.

I met them at the apartment after having spent Christmas with Susan, and I don’t think I’d been there long before Josh says

I’m looking for someone who knows the truth about UFOs.

After a moment of thinking “uhh…” to myself, I didn’t even stop to think before blurting out

Wait, UFOs? Don’t Freemasons know about that stuff?

To which Josh replied

Can I ask how you know that?

Oh, I have this friend Heather. From… Vega, I think. Vega, Lyra…

It was now that I did start to think about what I just said. Isn’t this stuff kinda private? How private? Is it okay to talk about it casually? So I asked.

No, you’re fine. We just want to know where you’re learning about this stuff from.

That’s… cool, I figured. It reminded me of what happened with Maureen at the saucer all those years ago, when she started talking about Freemasons and UFOs and somebody else at the table needed to know how she knew. I instinctively did the same thing as Maureen, and told him I had an acquaintance from Vega. I guessed that’s just… their process, or whatever.

When I inquired further, it sounded like he was maybe looking for a therapist who knew about that stuff. I never thought about that being a need before, but I guess there are therapists for everyone.

Huh.