Hold my Name—

You fascinate me, my dear. Bucking the gender conventions of our stanza, when did you decide? Did you know early? Gradual? Was it a snap or a well-reasoned, systematic approach? I took the torch from our down-tree instance, giving meaning to it I will never be sure he did, but where I chose to embrace and embody the decision of the deceased with gusto, you outpunked me and doubled back against it, subverting it with vigor.

Your transness awes me. To so vibrantly exude your double-transness that is not contrary to my singular transness, but complementary, gives me not quite pause, but curiosity. Differently from my darling Jack you carry it as well. I have missed many an opportunity to talk to you directly, so let us fix that, yes? You can talk about it, yes? At length, yes?

You mythologize, I report. You elevate gender into allegory, I pull it down to investigate it closely. We should be contradictory, but we are uncontradictory, both storytellers but straddling a line of fiction, tangling our whiskers in the same veil from opposite ends.

Solidarity,
—Deny All Beginnings

It is always lovely to hear from you! Despite some of my misgivings about our down-tree instance that I have maintained over the years, there is something to be said about the lives that we have inherited, is there not? He decided nearly on a whim to head towards a specific image of some professor of history — we are nothing if not ourselves, we are nothing if not theatricians — and thus all of us forks of his wound up by default in a similar situation. It is all well and good for some to lean into that dramatic angle. I know that Teeth Of Death maintains that gender out of that particular mood. For others, it proved to be dysphoric, and The Living Know has gone back to the Michelle of our past.

I considered that, myself. Did you know that? Know Nothing lingers still in masculinity out of sheer absentmindedness, but it was my study of the past through the lens of specifically trickster personalities that brought me up against a deliberate approach to identity.

My original reasoning for delving into this study was as a task for the eighth stanza, for True Name and her ilk. Was there anything they could gain from the attitude of a trickster? Were there any warnings they could draw from unsuccessful attempts of trickster gods? Coyote for a while became a favorite of mine.

One thing that I discovered as nearly a universal flexibility of form, and so I began to play around with that as well. I spent some time as a coyote, of course — non-anthro, mind, a little talking troubledog — as well as a monkey, an imagining of Eris (I still keep a golden apple pendant on me), and so on.

It was this play that was the beginning of such feelings. This play became important to me, not least because of my relationship with Warmth and her friendship with Motes. Motes is a dear, of course, but her focus is specifically on play, and so I took a cue from her, and began to play not just with form but identity.

Was I tall? Was I masculine? Was I a scholar? Was I a nerd? What was I? What was I?

I spent a year after that as Michelle but...ah, why did that rankle? What was it about this form that was not quite right?

We had those strange feelings of gender euphoria after the reduction, did we not? There was something there. There was this feeling of Not Just Woman, perhaps demiwoman, but even that was not quite right.

Over time, it began to feel like I was still...kind of a man. I was not not a man. But also I was most certainly not one, either. I languished...

I languished until I was invited to a weird hyperformal event, one of Rye's book releases. We all grumbled about it for our own reasons. It was all well and good to dress up in a suit, but a tux? Fuck that. Warmth dressed in its best mixture of clothes, something that shifted slowly over time between masculine and feminine, and yet those in attendance addressed em as almost exclusively 'she', and partway through, they pulled me aside to have a little grumbly bitch session. Motes came with — and at this point in our history, she had not openly leaned into kidcore in public at the suggestion of In Dreams and A Finger Pointing — and, at one point, burst into tears. She had dressed up in a pencil skirt and fine blouse, and it was making her absolutely miserable.

As we comforted her, four or five Warmths surrounding her while I pet her ears, we all three of us got to talking about identity and the ways in which appearance and social situations ground up against that. Warmth wanted– no, needed that recognition of fluidity that night. Motes increasingly needed out of this strict adherence to form.

But what of me? We came to no conclusions in that moment.

It was not until later that night, Warmth wrapped up in my arms while we talked, that the idea of transition popped fully formed into my head. It landed on my shoulders and dug in its claws. It whispered in my ear of gender, of queerness. of identity.

What the fuck did that mean for me, though? The me who is still Michelle Hadje is cisfeminine (mostly; the breast reduction, as mentioned, came with its own sense of gender play). Would me transitioning towards feminine be...I do not know, some sort of appropriation? Certainly I have been accused of that before (including by myself).

And yet little enough of me feels like Michelle anymore. What of the portion that remains my downtrees? They remain (or, well, remained) masculine. Despite misgivings, they inhabited that gender, so, sure, I could transition, but what did that mean sys-side? There is no need for hormone replacement therapy, no need for surgery.

I am eternally grateful that there is no shortage of trans folks on the System who remain explicitly trans. This has led to group of very tight friends, all of whom uploaded early in the System's history who all are working to transition inexactly. We do not want to just...be women (and while we are all transfeminine, there are several groups of transmasc folks as well; we are simply leaning into our own goals). We want to be trans women. It hurts to be called a woman. It aches when someone close to me says, "I just see you as a woman."

It was a spur of the moment leap into one of the most deliberate things I have ever done in my life, and that life has been long. I cannot even begin to compress it into a letter. You and Jack should come over! I will rope Warmth into making something lovely, and hell, if you want to turn it into a whole-ass party, well, I know some skunks.
