Chapter 7: Chapter 7

1 Year Earlier

The moderator still isn’t handling the situation. Liuzixuan is spamming the front page with content and giving their own stories 5 star reviews. This is against the site’s rules. Devin is beginning to become very frustrated. After all, he’d invested a lot of time into this site and to see it not deal with obvious problems such as this is very disheartening.

It doesn’t help that the stories are very explicitly anti-LGBT+. Reviewers called this out and liuzixuan left responses showing that they are indeed very homophobic, transphobic, and racist in reality. At this point, Devin was in agreement with most others on the site that liuzixuan should just be banned entirely.

He’s still mad that the moderator isn’t doing anything.

***

As the clock hit 3:00 in the afternoon, Devin and Elise continued reading through “For a Girl”. The third chapter of it specifically, where Jack, or Stephanie at this point, was at “Girl School”.

Upon rereading this part it occurred to Devin that the story wasn’t exactly the most trans friendly one out there. That was the case with a lot of old Fictionmania stories, and also a lot of old Gender Benders in general. Explicitly trans characters were much more of an oddity back then, even if they’re more common now.

What really got to Devin was how none of the GB victims were ever presented with testosterone HRT to help them cope. For the supposed 5% of GB victims who never adapted to being women, this seems like a pretty easy solution. It works for transgender men in real life, but this story seems to be against that idea, as it doesn’t even consider it.

Not accounting for real life dysphoria is probably the biggest plot hole of a lot of gender bending fiction. Sometimes, the concept of dysphoria is brought up, but only when the character is explicitly coded as trans and is transformed into their preferred gender, like Shade. With these stories, it’s either “this character gets transformed”, or “this trans character gets their wish granted”. The idea of a man transforming into a woman, or vice versa, and experiencing dysphoria, is rarely done. Devin guessed that made sense, since that would likely be very uncomfortable to write about.

***

“How long is this chapter?” Elise asked.

“I think it’s like seventeen thousand words. Yeah, it’s the longest chapter by far.”

“Geez.”

***

“You know.” Devin started. “I kind of forgot that this story tried to tackle racial issues. It’s just, well, most of these kinds of stories never bring that stuff up, so it’s really interesting that this one does.”

“Is it done well?”

“I’m not in a place to answer that.”

***

“I mean, if you were a guy named Jack and you became a girl, why would you call yourself ‘Jackie’? It’s stupid and lazy.” Devin said.

“It’s the first thing I’d think of.” Elise responded.

“Well, I guess you just don’t have a very creative mind.”

Elise scoffed.

***

“Wait, they just sedate him!?” Elise exclaimed.

Devin furrowed his eyebrows. Elise was referring to the character, Jerome, or Jeri as she’s called later on. He wasn’t sure if he should correct her or not. In fact, Devin wasn’t sure if he would actually be correcting Elise at all, since it’s clear Jeri is one of the victims who never adapted to being a woman. So does that make her a man? She never considers going through testosterone hormonal therapy, or getting her breasts removed, or changing her name again. It was really unclear, and probably not worth thinking about.

“Yeah.” Devin replied.

“That feels so wrong.”

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“Yeah, this story is pretty problematic in a lot of ways. Parts of it haven’t really aged the best.”

***

It was 4:00 in the afternoon. Devin and Elise had just finished the third chapter of “For a Girl”. They were already about a third of the way through the story, even though they still technically had eleven chapters left. Considering how long the third chapter was, it made sense.

“Oh shit.” Elise said as she felt her phone vibrate.

“What is it?”

“My parents want me back. They say it’s important.”

“I thought you didn’t have anything important scheduled today.”

“I did too. Guess my parents had other things in mind.”

Devin sighed. “Well, uh, thank you for coming. Really. And I’m… I’m sorry about the whole mall thing. I know I wasted a lot of your time.”

Elise smiled. “It’s fine. I liked seeing you today. I haven’t seen you actually engage with me in a while. I like it when you talk about things you’re passionate about.”

Devin’s face reddened. “Oh… um… you're welcome?”

Elise laughed. “It’s a compliment dummy. No need to feel embarrassed about it. I liked reading that story. It was… interesting.”

Devin and Elise walked out of Devin’s room and into the driveway of the house, where Elise’s car was parked. Elise gave Devin a hug, which he soon reciprocated.

Before Elise was about to enter her car, she stopped and turned back to Devin.

“What’s your name?” She asked him.

Devin was a bit taken aback by the question. “What?”

“Your name. I mean, you probably call yourself something different than Devin… at least sometimes.”

Devin stared at Elise for a bit. He wasn’t sure if he should answer that question. He was reminded of a scene in “Of Heroes And Villains”, where Diane gets Shade to say her name is Kara. He then silently laughed at himself for immediately comparing his real life situation to a scene in an online story.

“Did you think of a name?” Elise asked.

Devin looked down. He obviously had thought of a name, but he hadn’t entirely accepted that the name belonged to him. “It didn’t, she isn’t me”, a part of his mind said. Besides, was Elise even someone he could trust? What if she turned out to not be as accepting as she seemed? But if he couldn’t trust her, then who else could he trust? And either way, she had already seen more than enough of this side of him. There was no going back now.

“Sierra.”

“Sierra? That’s a nice name.”

Elise walked back to Devin and hugged him again. She also gave him a kiss on the check. Within Devin, Sierra was squealing with delight. It was very hard for her to contain herself. To her, this was a confirmation that Elise and her had a real chance. Their relationship wasn’t over, and Elise didn’t completely hate her or think she was disgusting. After so many long months of being afraid that Elise was going to hate her, she could finally be relieved. She had a feeling that maybe things could actually work out. That maybe everything would be okay.

“I’ll be back tomorrow.” Elise said.

Sierra watched as Elise stepped into her car and drove away. There were a lot of things on her mind, and she wasn’t sure how to deal with it all, but for a moment she didn’t need to worry about any of that. She was a girl named Sierra, who had a beautiful girlfriend, and that was all that mattered.

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