books/ask/content/so-very-trans.tex

\cleardoublepage
\begin{quote}
\itshape\Large
How does the drastic mutability of one's form on the System interact with being trans? How has this affected the language cladists use to discuss gender? What does it mean to be trans in a world in which your sex can be modified on a whim to accomodate your needs?
\end{quote}

\cleardoublepage

\subsection*{To Deny The End, Is To Deny All Beginnings}
% CERES — probably needs edits

How, indeed, do we define transness at all? Do pronouns precede the flesh? Does being trans require the body to change, or the mind? Does what one's body or identity was before uploading define what it is after?

By the ``traditional'' definition, a dated concept even by the time we uploaded, I am transmasculine, because the root of our clade was mostly a cis woman and I am masculine. It might be argued that most of my stanza is one way or another, since most of us use he/him pronouns. I changed my physical appearance, my clothes, my mannerisms, my everything. I am defined by what Michelle Hadje mostly was not. Some used to define transgender as a struggle, against the body, against societal expectations, against laws political or religious, against a role foisted upon us.

But it cost me nothing. If there is any remnant of a previous feminine self on me or in me, it was a conscious choice to keep. One can change everything about themselves at a whim, and the only obstacle is the memory of one's self. There are no rules, no fretting over surgeries, wardrobes, paperwork, no pressure against change.

It seems to me, then, that the \emph{concept} of transgender must change, not just the language we use to speak of it. Asked about its gender, one of my distant cocladists irritatingly yet predictably answered \emph{``You are asking the wrong question}''. Loathe as I am to admit such, Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled was right. What gender means and is to the Ode clade alone varies wildly, never mind the trends of Lagrange or Castor or Pollux overall. We cannot define ``trans'' as an identity on changing gender alone any more, or to do so is not useful in the present.

I spent weeks thinking on Dear's answer, and if the question of someone's gender was the wrong one, what \emph{should} I be asking? I came up with an idea: I put out into the System an anonymous survey, asking a variety of questions on gender and personal history, with an offer of a generous amount of rep for participating. The response was immense, and I had to rope a few friends and cocladists to help me collate the findings.

The results were varied, but two trends stuck out to me: 1. A great deal of furry or non-human respondents specified species or classification as a gender, such as ``my gender is wolf'' or ``I identify as a catgirl'', ``I am a machine'' etc. One entry, which I cannot decide if it is satire but \emph{must} mention, said ``I identify as a forklift and I will only date those who are forklift certified.'' For many of these respondents, there was no line between species and gender at all, or terms were oft-conflated, and they spoke about changing species with the same language and framing as transitioning genders. Throughout the 20th century onward, gender was discussed frequently in terms of roles, and is not species a role? Does it not come with expectations? Require performance? It should not have surprised me, but it did. 2. Regardless of species or gender or any number of factors, an astounding number of respondents who had transitioned in some form or another \emph{did not think of themselves or identify as trans}. The pattern was largest in those who uploaded and cited dysphoria as a motivation, but the data was present in every demographic. In the vast majority of these cases, the individual in question forked until they had an appearance they were comfortable with, then settled into their life, never going back or changing all that much. More than a few seemed unfamiliar with terms such as trans or cis at all.

I was unsure what to make of my findings. I had sought out to find a question, but only found the answers to it. \emph{Why ask questions, when the answers will not help?} An answer, be it simple or complex, is not on its own enough for one to divine the question asked. I needed a shift in perspective, some other angle to view, to find the edge pieces of the puzzle. After days of thinking and overthinking, I finally thought to ask others. Just as I had been set upon this path by dear old Dear, I needed the perspective of someone else to point me to the trail again.

Among those who helped me with the survey was a badger from another clade named Jack, an investigative journalist who had aided me with research in the past. I asked if either of these trends were as surprising for him. He told me they made sense, since they both applied to his clade.

Naturally this excited me. ``How so?''

``Well, your clade's half humans and half skunks, right?''

``I do not have exact percentages, but–''

He raised a paw. ``Hey, this ain't rocket science, pal. Let's say half of you got stripes, half of you don't, give or take a fox or two. And like you said, it's complicated. Your clade clearly has some feelings on species, and I'm guessing your root instance couldn't make up their mind about it?''

It is a difficult subject matter at the best of times, but I did not want to digress too far. I told him, ``It might be more accurate to say she was of two minds about.''

He smiled affably. ``Plurality problems, say no more, say no more, I get it.''

``Plurality?'' I asked him. Even then I did not understand the word or the way it, too, changed radically within the System. I understand it now, and I wonder how my cocladists think about the term and how, at least I feel, it applies to us Odists.

He frowned with concern, studying me. He must have seen that concern mirrored in me, and quickly returned to the matter at hand. Or, well, paw, in his case, as he gesticulated with it. ``Enh, fuhgeddaboudit. Not important. What I'm getting at, my man, is that part of your and your clade's identities \emph{is} that conflict. It's affected all of you greatly, no matter where you end up.''

``And how does this relate to your clade?'' I asked.

He grinned, and leaned back on the table covered in survey results, crossing one leg over the other. ``Not a single member of my clade was ever human.''

``So your Root Instance switched at the first fork?''

He nodded his head and waggled a claw up and down at us. ``There's the first thing you're missing, my friend. I pick my words carefully. What did I say?''

I frowned. ``You said your clade does not contain any humans.''

``My \emph{exact} words were \emph{Not a single member of my clade was ever human.} We were not human before uploading, either.''

``That is not possible,'' I said.

``If you will allow me a bit of conjecture here without digging too deep, I would guess that your root instance was a furry before uploading, and had some experience with being their fursona in Sims before uploading? And, if I may, being online as an animal and offline as a human contributed to their troubles over species identity?'' I doubt I concealed the rising panic in me very well, because immediately he threw up both paws. ``I can see I have hit a nerve, and I'm being reductive with the Odists here. It's a lot more than that and I don't know the half of it, but I'm trying to keep it easy. My point is, those experiences and differences in Proprioception can mess with your self-image, especially if those `animal' sensations feel more natural than your `human' ones. I'm sure you see where this is going.''

And I did. His clade had no attachments to the feelings and shape of the human body, and that predated their upload. As long as those feelings had existed, they had never thought of themselves as `human', and in the infinite mutability of the System, they never had to be one again. What did it matter to anyone if they had looked human externally before? The odds of running into anyone from pre-upload days are incredibly low without active coordination beforehand, and if, as with Jack's clade, they had changed species and names in their first hours sys-side, they would be impossible to recognize anyway. Why carry such a useless distinction with you?

``Attaboy, atttaboy! He's gettin' it! And for my Clade, those good good animal feels came up before we ever touched a sim. I can chase them back as far as our memories go phys-side. Hell, when I try to remember how I looked back then, I can't even remember what the `human' body looked like. I don't look like I do now in those memories, but I am 100\% grade-A prime cut badger, baybee, you love to see it. Asked around the Clade and they all say the same. They can't remember us being human-shaped. If the System won't let us forget anything, that should tell you how far back this all goes.''

I stepped over next to him, and looked out over all the surveys. Most of us had viewed them on tablets or screens, but Jack told me he had picked up the habit of physical paper from one of his cocladists, one who worked as an archivist. He said fighting with the pages and having to interact with them directly helped him spot trends, catch patterns as they emerged. I did not understand how he meant that when the survey started. I was close to getting it in that moment. The question, too, that I was seeking grew closer. I could taste it, smell it.

I said to him, ``Part of me thought that the framing of `I always knew' was too reductive, a stereotype, something made easy and palatable for those who are not queer. We definitely knew a few people phys-side who said as much. Reframing it with species makes me realize I in turn reduced it. If that is how any individual sees themselves, who am I to question it? How can anyone?''

He nodded. ``Feel like you're closer to finding your question?''

I scowled. ``Oh, absolutely fucking not.''

He laughed, and clapped a paw on my shoulder. ``Well, can't win 'em all, kid.'' He waved an arm out over the table. ``We got ourselves a banquet of food for thought and we gotta sit down and digest.''

We sorted responses for a while, and he smiled every time he caught me looking at him. After a while, the focus shifted from organizing by data points alone, and instead we began to group responses by what was most compelling in them. I felt in so many ways a fool. Some questions were really only redundancies, others useless, and I could feel the weight of the questions that needed to be in their place. I thought about what my responses would have been, but the silence of the room crept under my skin and I had to break it back out.

``Did you fill out the survey?'' I asked him.

He shook his head. ``I passed it around my clade, and one of these'' ---he held up a survey response--- ``is definitely a cocladist of mine, she's hard to miss, but enh.''

I dropped my stack of results, half of them missing the lip of the table and scattering to the floor. ``What the fuck do you mean, `enh'?''

He shrugged. ``Enh, I mean enh. I got plenty of rep, I didn't have much to say.''

``Oh, bullshit. You are not the coy type, that is an Odist thing.'' Why was I so angry? Why did this matter to me? I know now, but in the moment a part of me stood removed from all of this, a phantom fork not really there in the dark corners of the room, spectating, and he could not understand my sudden ire.''Why, Mr.~Haveck? Why did you not fill it out?''

He wheeled around on me. ``Don't call me Mr.~Haveck again. Don't you dare. Call me Jack, or if you must, call me Haveck, but if you throw those two letters in front again I will walk out.''

I stepped closer to him. Jack is not a tall badger, but my having almost a foot and a half on him meant nothing. When you chase stories the way he does, someone taking a swing is expected. He will not swing back or defend himself physically, but his pacifism makes him like stone. Still, I could not let this go. ``Answer the question, Jack.''

``Why's it such a big fuckin' deal if I didn't?''

``You literally never shut up. You have made a living out of having something to say. I only know you because you talk so much. You spent this whole afternoon explaining shit to me. Your choice of species is goddamn perfect because like any good journalist you badger the \emph{shit} out of anyone who will listen and most of the people who will not. You \emph{talk}, you \emph{rant}, you \emph{pontificate}, you \emph{lecture}, and you \emph{state the facts}.'' I was shaking. ``You-You-You put on this whole fucking persona, the New York accent, the Spider Jersualem glasses, the whole Columbo routine. You are a walking 20th century stereotype, a century neither of us ever fucking lived in, but despite all those layers of bullshit you live in you are \emph{the most honest person I know.} You never hold back, `you tell it like it is' and everything you do, even upholding this stupid fucking schtick, is so profoundly \emph{genuine} in a way I have never known any other person to be. It is why I like you. Why I want you around all the time. Why I \emph{wanted} you here, why I asked you for help. I nearly bankrupted myself for this- this--'' I knocked more papers off the table. ``--this shit that did not actually tell me anything without you here. It is all useless. Useless!''

I flipped the table over.

I cannot change the past, and I cannot forget it. It burns a little ember in the back of my head sometimes, and it hurts to speak of openly, but it is here for the same reason everything else is. It is a part of the narrative.

Jack took a few steps back in surprise. ``Fucking hell, Denny–''

``Denny? \emph{Denny}? Oh, Mister Haveck is a step too fucking far, but you are going to call me \emph{Denny?}''

It might hurt Jack to read this, too, because in that moment he did the most aggressive thing I have ever seen him do before or since. Even then, he did not do it to hurt me, but to bring me to his level and pull me out of myself. He grabbed both collars of my zip-up sweater, yanked me down to his level and forced me to stare him in the eye. His face curled into the kind of angry snarl only badgers are capable of.

``Shut the fuck up and listen to me. Do you have any idea what your clade has put me through? \emph{Any} idea? Because you're right, I can't shut the fuck up, especially when I see someone behind the scenes messing with things. Before I met you, before I even knew you were one of them, all my interactions were with the Eighth Stanza. They, and that megalomaniacal son of a bitch Jonas they work with, did not and do not like me very much. They couldn't extort me, couldn't bribe or persuade me, and they couldn't force me to quit. And do you know what happens to people like that? I lost count of how many assassination attempts there were. They even got a fork or two. Wanna know the last one I remember? I watched my cocladist Miranda, a Lynx who got all of her muscle mass the hard way instead of forking, \emph{throw a killer through a plate glass window with one arm.} I never found out if he fell all 30 stories before quitting but they stopped trying to kill me after that. I hated all Odists for a long time, even though most of you don't deserve it, and if I hadn't met you I still would. If I hadn't been walkin' public sims looking for a decent slice of actual proper New York pizza and stumbled into a cute guy, I'd have a grudge against you couldn't \emph{fit} inside a sim. You. You got me, pal. Here's this fella, and he's thin and human, not normally my type, but he's tall and he has messy hair and he's really interested in the \emph{actual} history of the System, which makes up for it. He convinced me that maybe I had the Odists wrong, that maybe I'm missing the Ode for the Stanza, and maybe just Jonas is the one who wanted me dead. I'm not so hard headed I can't admit when I'm wrong, I ain't no fucking saint.''

His grip loosened a minute, then tightened, pulling me closer. The snarl faded to a scowl, but his eyes were full of tears. ``And maybe, just maybe, the reason I started to fall for this new kind of Odist is because I sympathized. Maybe I've got a down-tree instance. Maybe she's a raccoon, but she'd slip into your Eighth Stanza like a glove. Maybe everything I am and everything I do is to not be the monster that she is. Maybe I've dedicated my whole life to being honest and spreading the truth because I can't handle that plurality aside, when we forked after uploading, my origin is from indside of her. So maybe--'' the snarl crept back ``--maybe when I see the survey collecting what could be a dangerous amount of information about people, I get a bit nervous. Maybe it's bad memories from phys-side. Maybe there's some doubt I can't shake even when my gut says to trust you. Maybe I'm afraid he's been working for the others this whole time and I'm a goddamn fool. But even then, \emph{even then}, I joined this project because I like you too, bud, and I needed to know what you were up to. I figured I could give you the answers in person. I \emph{figured} that if something was up and I needed to protect my neck again, I'd catch wind here. And when you start getting pushy about my answers, I keep my cards to my chest. Dodge. Deflect. Walk you around the block a few times. I've got a monster in my clade, and she's made me fucking paranoid. And now, I've fucked up the first chance I've had at a good relationship because I've shattered your saintly fuckin' vision of me. I am a \emph{master} of bein' dishonest, Deny All Beginnings, a \emph{professional} liar. It's in my core because of who I forked from, it's just that I have a choice never to be that person again and it's the only thing that keeps me from quitting for good when I wake up every morning.''

He let go of me, not even shoving me back, just dropping his arms in defeat. ``I should leave.''

``Yeah, maybe you should. This whole fucking survey was a fucking mistake.''

``I'll see myself out.'' He said.

It may seem pointless to include this. That I have lost the thread of what you asked me about. That in dredging up an anecdote to make a point I have lost myself in the emotions of that memory. I have not told you everything. I have not been honest about what my relationship to Jack was or is. I left out our discussions on sexuality, on polyamory, on what journalism or history is in the System. I could have paraphrased him after the argument, and left whatever feelings we have for each other out of this. I moonlight as an editor now and again, it would not be difficult.

I include this event because it, and what happened next, changed me. It became a part of me, as I let someone else into my life and into my gender. Perhaps it is not as irreducible as it seems to me, but in that way Jack and his whole clade affect others, I found myself then inside of a story, and I am so intertwined now I struggle to perceive myself from the outside of it. What language I use, how I speak of gender and transness, is informed by this, and I am powerless against it. It is part of the narrative, and the narrative is everything.

When Jack turned to leave, I went to do something petty. He had left his leather jacket on a chair. He could have forked a new one, but for reasons I still do not understand, I wanted one last jab before he was gone. I thought to grab it, to toss it to him and say something cutting and witty, leave some salt in the wounds we verbally opened on each other, to make both of us more bitter. What I did instead was tangle my legs in the overturned table, fall, and dash my skull on one of the many filing cabinets in the room. Both of us for a moment forgot we were in the System, I think, because I panicked at the wetness on my face and Jack rushed to me like a medic. He made sure I was stable, checked the gash over my forehead, and somewhere around him summoning a rag to wipe up the blood we both remembered that I was not at any risk of bleeding out. He collapsed near me, willed two iced tea lemonade cans into existence, and handed me one. We were quiet for a while, and the image of him then comes to my mind unbidden often, back against a cabinet, one knee up, head down, staring into the can. He turned his paw back and forth, and the dim light of the room made the metal dance and shine. Jack's not a thin badger, by any means, but in that moment all his clothes seemed too big for him, like a little kid trying on his dad's clothes. He did not look up when he started speaking.

``The truth is, Denn---Deny All Beginnings, is that I also didn't answer the survey because I'm not sure. When it comes to species? Sure, that was cut and dry, no problems there. That part is so simple. Sexuality, too, that's an easy one for me, not my thing really, y'all have fun with it, I'm good. But gender is\ldots not easy.''

He looked up, but not at me, out into the distance, beyond the far wall of the room and well past anywhere I could follow. Some chunk of history caught his eye and his voice softened. ``It's\ldots our plurality, how we were as headmates, that was one thing phys-side. How we ended up forking and spreading out sys-side was real, \emph{real} different, and reshaped all of us. Jane, my down-tree instance, cut the line and forked out as soon as we had the rep. She hated being part of us, and finally got her wish of a body of her own. She hated anything masculine about herself. She hated how she hadn't had much say in our appearance or wardrobe phys-side. She hated any part of herself that reminded her of her father. I wish the System would let me forget it; it's like holding a ball of hot metal. When she had gamed the System for enough rep, she forked hard, pushing as much of what she hated about herself into it, and bada bing, bada boom, baby, I finally exist in the flesh. She gave me a huge pile of reputation, bounced me out of her sim, and didn't speak to anyone in the clade for 50 years or so.''

He shook his head. ``I don't hate her for it. I can't, I was her up until the split. And hell, some small mercy, she also pushed into me the parts of herself that liked what was masculine about us, that liked our father, that loved our clade and wasn't afraid to live up to all those high hopes certain people had for us. The reason I hate her is she became a fuckin' politician, playing spymaster, all this cloak and dagger bullshit with no morals, but hey, that's irrelevant. I'm getting sidetracked. She needed to do it. And she carried me with her up until she forked me, which hurt her just as much. She couldn't embrace or redefine masculinity like so much of the rest of our clade did.''

He looked down into the can again, swirling it slowly. ``I'm happy with who I am now, but Jane's resentment lingers like a ghoul. It eats at me, man. It really does. Makes me doubt myself.''

I finally found my voice again. ``You know, I do not know why he did it.''

Jack finally looked at me.

I shrugged. ``My down-tree instance. The\ldots root of the stanza if you will.'' I was waving a hand in front of me. Even that early I picked Jack's habits and he started to pick up mine. So it goes. ``All of us in the Stanza started with he/him pronouns, and most of us still use them, save Hold My Name Beneath Your Tongue And Know, who I am now realizing that I should have talked to in the first place. Shit. Shit shit shit.'' I shook my head. ``Anyway, my down-tree instance chose to fork with he/him pronouns. The hell of it is, I have his memories, I can conjure him into my head or make a fork like him, but I cannot understand why he did it.''

``Not at all?'' Jack asked.

``No,'' I told him. ``It felt like the right thing to do in the moment, but it was instinct. A gut reaction. `This is what I need to do' but no reason, no goal, no motive. He just did.''

``Denny, if there's one thing I've learned chasing the truth above all else, it's that a feeling is enough. So many people talk a big game about facts and logic and all that shit, but any sort of reasoning that doesn't account for emotions is bullshit.''

``No, and I get that, Jack, I do, but\ldots why? Why did he feel that way? Why did he do what he did? I am not my down-tree instance any more. We had some things in common, but when I go back to those memories, I see them with my eyes and not through his. I think about how I feel and what is important to me, and I cannot align it to his feelings at all.''

I looked down, and discovered what Jack found so appealing about staring into the can. The light that hit the tea inside reflected onto the inner walls of the can, shimmering. The liquid was murky, and there was a soft froth of bubbles along the edges. Here was my own reflecting pool, in a single serving. I let my thoughts sink down into the tea and swirled the can, washing them. Let some sweetness and some flavor give them a light bit of color. I pulled them out again, somehow with them clearer instead of the shade of the liquid.

``I guess I was expecting it to\ldots I do not know, mean more to him? The more I think about it, it is a moment more than any other, even picking my line in the Ode, that defined who I became and what I am now. A decision made by some stranger, a man I barely ever was and now decidedly am not. How could it mean so little to him? And \emph{did} it mean so little to him? Have I changed so much that I cannot recognize his emotions? Maybe I am giving him too little credit, pushing this expectation that we should have dropped to our knees, tears in our eyes, lifting our new hands towards heaven, as antennae, broadcasting love to a world and a creator that let me become what I am? It should have meant more, it does mean more, but I project onto the past the sentiment of the present and punish it for not knowing the future. I never thought to ask him. I did not myself realize the importance of it, and by the time I did, it was too late.'' The cut on my forehead had stopped bleeding some time ago, but the sensation of wetness remained. Somewhere I had begun crying.

``Too late? Are you not on speaking terms or something? I can try to talk to him, get him to--''

I shut my eyes and leaned my head back against the cabinet. The tears cut rivers down the soft hills of my cheekbones. ``Jack, what does the name Qoheleth mean to you?''

My eyes stayed shut, but I know what he did. The mind does such an amazing job of filling in visuals when it knows the subject so well. I know Jack frowned. I know he tilted his head to the side as he said, ``What \emph{does} that name mean to me? It's familiar\ldots{}'' I know the endless catalog of his mind found it, and when it did his face softened, and he looked down. I know how his snout moved around the soft \emph{oh} that escaped him. I know the pity that filled his eyes. I know his paw came close to my shoulder, and I know he feared to touch me, unsure of where he stood after everything that had happened only a handful of minutes before. I know he slowly pulled his paw back. I know that now he never hesitates, because there are no barriers like that between us anymore.

``I was there, Jack. When it happened. I have nightmares about it still. Some of them I am the one up at the podium, or the assassin comes for me instead. I cannot stop reliving it. It is not like the deaths Michelle remembers, it is so \emph{visceral} and so much more real here. He is gone. No forks, no miracles, no ghosts. He spoke of the dangers of permanence, and he was right, because I cannot now ever get that closure from him.'' I threw up my hands. ``Am I just stuck with that forever? Hopeless before a question I cannot ask and stuck without answers even if I could.''

``I don't mean to be indelicate, but it seems to me that you found your own meaning in his choice. What could he possibly have told you that you haven't already figured out better yourself?'' He asked, and took a swig of his tea.

``I need to know if I am allowed to call myself trans or not.''

Jack spit his drink everywhere.

I opened my eyes at that. ``I need to know why he forked the way he did, so I can know if--''

``Are you serious right now?''

``He never called himself transgender to my knowledge!''

Jack started looking around. ``This is a prank. This is a prank, right? Where's the camera? Are you wearing a wire?''

I sat up straight. ``Jack, I am being serious right now!''

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ``Jesus Mother Mary and Joseph, I am going to be the first person in the history of the System to have an honest to god aneurysm. I can feel the clot forming in real time, it's incredible.''

``What if he did not do it for–''

The badger dragged his paws down his face. ``We're settling this right the fuck now. You are a man, yes?''

``Am I?''

He glared daggers at me. ``Do. You. Identify. As. Masculine.''

``You know I do.''

``And your root instance, ah, what's her name?''

I squirmed a little. ``Michelle. Or Sasha. Kind of both? Michelle.''

``Is Michelle a cis woman?''

``I mean she was not \emph{not} cis\ldots{}''

``Fucking Odists, I swear to christ. For the sake of the argument, she was cis enough.''

``Okay.''

``She was a cis woman, you came from her, you are not a woman, ergo, you are transmasculine by the bare minimum of standard measures. If that is not enough, I will draw up a document, have it notarized, and give you a framed copy for your goddamned living room.''

I squinted at him. He waved it off. ``Listen, you would not believe the amount of `functional small town government' sims there are out there. Weirdly a very universal desire of mankind.''

We laughed, and Jack summoned up another can for himself. I sighed. ``I still would have liked to hear his thoughts about all of this.''

Jack nodded. He leaned towards me, raising his can. ``To Qoheleth.''

``To Qoheleth,'' I answered.

``To he who died in the pursuit of Truth,'' he said solemnly.

``To he who died for daring to speak up,'' I answered.

A clinking of cans. The taste of citrus and tea. A few more tears. A hug. An offer of a hand, one man pulling the other to his feet. A righting of a table. A scooping of papers. A lingering question.

``Do you think it is healthy, Jack?''

He paused for a moment, a stack of answers in his hand, but did not look at me. ``Healthy?''

``All these people, not acknowledging that they are Trans, that they chose to change themselves?''

``Well, \emph{Deny All Beginnings}, you tell me.''

``Qoheleth talked about how our inability to forget was driving our clade crazy. It does not feel right to act like what we came from does not shape us if we cannot let it go, either.''

He set the folder down, and turned to me. ``I don't know if it's \emph{healthy} or morally \emph{right}, but it's what people \emph{do}. The System is really amazing in that way, you get so much more say in what the narrative of your life is. I was `human' at some point, but I never feel the need to acknowledge it, because I feel it bears so little on the story of me.'' He began to unbutton his shirt. ``Do you think I'm transmasc?''

I nodded. ``If my coming from Michelle makes me trans, and you came from Jane, it only makes sense.''

He undid the last buttons. ``Well, true, but there's a wrinkle I don't think you know. Jane herself is transfeminine. Our root instance is too. When we uploaded, we had been transitioning for the better part of 2 decades. Does that change your answer?''

I chewed my tongue a moment, but my thoughts coalesced quickly into a simple chain of logic. I shook my head. ``Why should it?''

He opened his shirt. On his chest, there were top surgery scars. ``Going against the grain twice made me who I am. Jane hides her transness from the daylight, much as she holds it dear. There's no physical trace of it on her anywhere.'' He tapped the scar on his left with a paw. ``I keep it close to my heart, but I wear my heart on my sleeve. It's the same reason my cocladist Miranda built a gym for herself. It's the same reason I suggested using paper to look at the results. The process affects the end goal. It's not just about how the story ends, it's about how we tell it. What makes us trans isn't just the end result, it's–''

``–the narrative.'' I said.

He laughed, and buttoned up his shirt. ``I'd say that this was all a hell of a long way around to get to the point, but uh\ldots.''

I smiled. ``Thanks, Jack.''

He walked past me to grab his jacket. ``Hey, well, you know me.'' He spun it around himself, sliding his arms into it effortlessly. ``Always a sucker for a good story.'' He tugged on it to straighten the collar. ``And god only knows every last one of you Odists is a novel the size of a cinder block, fuckin' A. Catch you around, Denny boy.''

He walked around the table, and just as he reached the door, he forked. One of him went through the door grinning. The other turned on his heels to face me. ``Just, ah, one more thing, Mr.~Deny All Beginnings.''

I raised an eyebrow at him.

``Would you be free for dinner this friday night?''

\begin{verse}
I ask you this: \\
What is it to Deny something? \\
Denial is a weighted word,  \\
One we see too oft as negative. \\
To Deny can be an act of power \\
To Deny an enemy a victory \\
To Deny we are bound to the past \\
I came from Michelle, \\
but I Deny that I am her \\
I came from Qoheleth \\
but I Deny he made me \\
I am an Odist true \\
but I Deny my clade defines me \\
I began as human \\
but I Deny I am bound to my species \\
To Deny the End \\
Is to Deny All Beginnings \\
but should I Deny what happened in between?

I ask you this: \\
is transness a Denial? \\
is that a Denial in itself? \\
Do you Deny All Beginnings? \\
or do you Deny that they define you? \\
Do you Deny the body? \\
Or do you Deny that you are beholden to its shape? \\
Do you Deny the narrative? \\
Or do you Deny that transness is just a Denial?
\end{verse}

Perhaps I no longer speak well for the rest of my clade when it comes to matters of gender. Perhaps the way Jack's clade conducts themselves has altered my narrative irrevocably. In the end, it does not change anything.

My name is To Deny The End Is To Deny All Beginnings, and I am so very, \emph{very} trans.

Now if you will excuse me, I have another date with a badger.