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\begin{quote}
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Hold My Name: you have mentioned how Michelle ``had her own gender-play'' in the form of a breast reduction. What does this tell us about her particular gender experience phys-side? How does it relate to her orientation or her string of unsuccessful relationships? How are these things reflected or subverted in the Odists?
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\subsection*{Hold My Name Beneath Your Tongue And Know}
% Skunks

Michelle had a long string of unfruitful, short, abusive, and otherwise quite boring relationships back phys-side. She (for I do not call myself her anymore; she was her own person, just as I am) struggled with that, and that was actually the origin of her picking a skunk as her fursona. She said that she liked the aposematic stripes. ``Stay away,'' they said. ``I am not for you to bother.''

Similarly, at one point she started to question just how much of her body was involved in how she was treated by her partners. She liked it okay, to be clear. She was chubby. She was short. She was cute! I remember her thinking that. There were times that she wished she was skinnier, yes, but most of the time? She felt okay.

Still, when she did worry about her body, it was particularly in how it played into her interactions with romance. She liked being cute, and wanted to be seen as cute, but did not particularly like the way that that played out for her. After a bit, she sought out a reduction. It was not expensive, nor was it difficult to achieve: a consult, a counseling session, and then a surgery, all in the span of a month.

The end result was not quite what she expected. It was not just that she was relieved of back pain—though she was—nor that she was treated differently with regards to her body—though that was also true—but that she was \emph{happier.} She did not experience gender dysphoria, in other words, but after this change, she experienced gender euphoria. It was then that she cut her hair shorter and changed the way that she dressed. It was then that she decided to stick with skunk, owning it as a view of herself rather than simply as a response to some dick in a furry sim that she then met in person.

All of us in her clade have carried over that euphoria in some form or another. Perhaps it is in the ways in which they look. Perhaps it is in the pronouns that they use (several use ey/em pronouns as another little tribute). We are all queer, in our own ways, and for some of us more than others, that queerness surrounds gender. I am a nonbinary trans woman. E.W. is a man. Dear's answer to the question of ``What is your gender?'' is ``You are asking the wrong question'' and Warmth would only laugh wildly in your face.
