Chapter 2: Chapter 2: Back Home

Chapter 2: Back Home

 

Boymoding was an ethos. The idea is that you delay socially presenting as a woman, until your physical body is ready for the job. Like a cocoon, waiting for the butterfly to burst out. It wasn't a new concept to trans women, but as more attention was being brought onto them in the public eye, the more scrutiny they had to put onto themselves to not be targeted in kind. 

Sophia knew that hormones take a long time to cause any effects. It's not some overnight magical change like some cheap flash cartoon made by some sad repressed loser in their bedroom. You might get little A cups after a whole year of estrogen. You might get a B cup after 3 years - if you’re lucky. Other changes will be so subtle it might be impossible to notice. Like frogs in a boiling pot, they don't notice the water's starting to boil if you crank up the heat slowly enough, until they’re ready to croak. Most people have no idea what hormones even are or how they even work, outside of old middle school sex-ed classes that were more interested in talking about condoms and God than anything else, and talk-show podcasts that loved talking about xenoestrogens in the water turning amphibians gay. The people around a trans person won't realize anything at such a slow pace, even though Sophia now had two little bubbles of baby fat on her cheeks when she smiled now. All she had to do was make sure she didn’t smile too often, and nobody would be any the wiser. Not too difficult.

Sophia would have daytime nightmares of imagining a dude like Chad trying to transition. The nightmare creature, the very embodiment of the terrifying Transkenstein. Her entire life would be organized around not wanting to be a public spectacle, a national embarrassment, a laughing stock. Just like the ones you see on the news. 

She didn't really know what her long term plan was. She would tell her friends eventually, right? Of course she would. Maybe. Maybe. Perhaps they'll just figure it out themselves one day, in a glorious affirming revelation. "Wow Nicky! You're really looking like a Woman lately! You must be trans! We accept and love you as a Trans Woman, Sophia!". Yes, it's so definitely very likely. She's even had to decline some recent pool parties and beach trips. In her desire to stay close to her friends, she’d had to push them farther and farther away. If she didn't, they'd see her breasts, the breasts she loved and feared. And they'd reject her for it. Surely, absolutely, maybe, possibly.

Mark and John were her frogs in the pot. They saw each other almost every day, so they'd never be able to notice the very slow changes that Estrogen does to a male body over time. Her parents used to be frogs as well - but she moved away before much changes even started. If she visited them again, they'd surely notice the changes in an instant, like a brutal Before/After image in some plastic surgery daytime television show. She needed to avoid this at any cost. She needed to be very careful of who she met, who's seen her, and who may be tracking her physical appearance. Constant vigilance.

She knew if they ever found out, and they didn't approve, she'd be out on the streets. There was no way she could afford an actual apartment with a kitchen like this on her own. And renting a private room alone, as a tranny? Forget it. She'd have to go back to her parents. Her parents.

If the butterfly's not careful, she'd be gobbled up by the frogs, and her life would be over before she ever took flight.

"Hey hey heyyyy, I'm heeeere. I’m hooome," Sophia let slip in a sing-songy voice. She was still riding on her confused high from the date, of course.

"Yooo bro. Welcome, to the lair. The HQ!" Mark said, seemingly ignoring her melodic intonation.

"I know Mark. I live here. Is John here yet?"

"Yeah, in the kitchen."

A brisk man stood tall at a towering (mostly only to Sophia) 6’2, preparing avocado dip with muster. He was the type to wear long sleeves in warm weather. He loved the Smiths, and the Wu-Tang Clan. When he smiled, the world smiled with him. When he cried, the world cried at him.

"You're here. Help me with this,” he said without even looking up at her, focusing purely on mixing the bowl. He was a very direct and focused young man.

"That's a lotta dip for just three people. We’ll just get sick from all that! How did you even afford something like avocados lately?”

"Met a new friend. They're pretty well off. Come on, get mashing."

"Whoah, lucky..."

Sophia had known John from the last year of college. Mark was just someone from work, but Mark and John became good friends, meeting through some League games Sophia was playing together with them online. She felt so proud that she was the vector in which these two guys became friends and formed a bond. They even hang out more often with each other than with her these days. Sophia usually preferred to stay home while they went out to the bar - she was a boymoder, after all. Boymoders don’t belong in public places. Boymoders don’t really belong anywhere at all. 

Sophia liked how tall he was. The fact that she was the shortest of the three meant something important to her. She felt blessed that she didn't grow any taller during puberty every single day. 

As she looked down at her short stature, she caught a bottle of vodka on the floor beside John’s feet. 

“Hey, what the fuck is that!”

“Hey, it’s empty! Calm your tits.”

“How did it get empty in the fiiiirst place? Be careful tonight okay? I’ll be checking!”

“Okay mom.”

Sophia is a complete teetotaler, a total straight edge. But not for any virtuous reasons. She's never had some past trauma, or some dead relative who fell victim to addiction. No, she was afraid of losing her inhibitions. Her vigilance. Who knows what she'd let slip, if the alcohol or weed opened up the dam? When she was young, her excuse was that it would trigger her asthma. Now, it was just that she "doesn't feel like it". Her virginity couldn't be soiled. She was afraid of what was lurking underneath her calm stoic male exterior. So she took pride in her fear, and labeled it Courage.

... Wait, did John say TITS!? It must have been just a joke...but just to be sure, she needed to check in a mirror to make sure there wasn't any wardrobe malfunctions concerning some precipitously paired points.

What did Chad see when he saw me? 

Sophia never believed she was the sort of person to deserve looking in the mirror. Someone of her status should know by default that she's hopeless, a lost cause. Her trying to fix up her hair or face in a public bathroom would actually be an insult to everyone else in the room - or at least, anyone unfortunate enough to have to witness the sight of someone like her. A pig like her shouldn't be narcissistic enough to bother trying to groom themselves. So she had to make sure absolutely nobody was in the bathroom before glancing at a mirror. It had to be her private locked box. Click.

It’s been almost a year on the pills. What’s changed? Has she ’grown’ at all? She still sorta just saw the same skinny skeleton she’d always seen in the mirror her whole life. Underweight, but not too underweight. Wiry, gangly, shrimpy. Rat-faced. Only now there were small breast growths on her chest where her flat lifeless nipples used to be. Little hills. Her years of showing off her ‘trap chest’ to guys on Omegle were over. They’ve just started crossing the border between SFW and NSFW. A real transformation beyond the physical, into the social meta itself. HRT changes more than just the body, but perception. If she'd posted her chest on some forum somewhere, the moderators would be forced to remove it, even though just a year ago that wouldn't have been necessary.

It's almost like magic...like in those reality-changing stories...

Sometimes she still felt like giving up. But even the tiniest of progressions give her motivation to continue, like an EXP bar in an MMO. Every mob counts. Did she really deserve to feel this excited? She’d never felt her brain feel so electrified before in her life. It’s like she was actually alive for the first time, working towards something real. 

Fuck. She just noticed her hair was actually kind of bad and frizzy. Did she forget that yellow hairspray stuff this time? Or was it the green one? Parts of it were already frizzing out, Fuck fuck fuck. She never had to worry about this stuff before when she was an unkempt teenager.

"Damn bro, your hair's lookin' nice today. Still not cutting it?"

Whoah, that was close. Mark had opened the door behind her. "Hey!! I thought I locked it!! And no no, not yet. I've never gotten to grow it out before, so I'm just taking advantage of it. I'm learning how to take care of it too! Well uh, not so much today, I guess," she said as she giggled a bit.

"Nahhh Nick, it's fine, it's fine. Just relax. It's just us tonight. Anyways c'mon, I really gotta use the fuckin' bathroom."

Nick. Nick. Nick.

Sophia. Sophia. Sophia. 

She liked the name Sophia. She'd been daydreaming and imagining if Mark and John would someday call her Sophia one day. She's used so many names online… Nicky. Nichole. Nina. Natasha. She even used Nianna once, which she was pretty sure wasn't even a real fucking name (to any Nianna's out there in the world, I apologize). She'd enter them into the Name bar in some anonymous chat site, wondering how it felt like to be called a female name, to be thought of as female, even if just on the other side of a pseudonymous screen. And…it felt nice. She liked Sophia. Maybe it was because of what Chad said. But maybe it was because it was wholly original, totally separate. It was braver. With Nicky, or Nichole, it would be as if she was compromising with the world. She'd done that enough, hadn't she? Can't at least just her fucking name be a little selfishly Hers?

She thought about what would happen if Mom saw her now. Sophia knew what she would say, word for word.

Dad was more mysterious, though. It was too risky to ever possibly ask and finally know for sure. Ignorance is more pleasant than a painful truth.

What the fuck would they think of the fact that she went on a date with a boy? With a man like Chad? Oh my god. She’s gay. Gay. Gay. Gay. Wait, she was a girl now… right? He was so handsome, suave. She felt more like a woman than she ever had before. She wanted something from him, and he was willing to give it. He was a Real Man. But she’s not sure if she really felt any kind of…’spark’. That’s what people were supposed to feel, right? That’s what the love songs talked about. She definitely felt physical elation. That’s what all the shitty romance dramas she's read were all about. So what was wrong with her? What was wrong with her? Was she still dead inside? Was she still broken?

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As they sat down on the couch, sandwiched in-between the two young men, and wondered how this scene must look like to outsiders. If she maybe looked like a young woman, who was clearly not a guy, living with two guys, who were clearly guys. Where did she really fit between the three of them? Could this be some kind of Otome game setup? Would she win the hearts of these two guys, suddenly seeing her as a vulnerable young woman? Would that prove she was a woman to the world?

As Mark turned on the movie, Sophia’s mind started to wander, and her roommates running commentary over the cringy intro scenes faded out into nothingness.

Maybe she wasn’t actually attracted to guys at all. Maybe all her fantasies were deranged and foolish, a vague desperate need to validate her starving womanhood. Maybe she’ll wake up one day with a fresh face, an invigorated desire for women like she definitely used to have as a teenager, a new burning need to be a Man, and leave all this gender shit behind her. She’s never been the best at making decisions anyways, so what if she regretted transitioning one day? Maybe it was safer to have done nothing at all, just waited around for the inevitable.

She'd read dozens of made-up stories of shy boy-turned-girls slowly transitioning, with their childhood best friend Real Man eventually starts seeing them as potential girlfriends, starts flirting with them, sharing sweet moments together, as their hearts go bubba-bubba. They "remove the boy" from the titular heroines by submitting to the man, by letting him fuck you like a girl, you finally set yourself free from your obligation to boyhood, to having to uphold being a man. It's right out of a cheesy Shoujo manga, a new girl experiencing teenage love, blossoming into a woman.

For a trans woman, it’s even more powerful - the validation of a male finding you just as sexy and desirable as any cis woman, means all the wasted traumatic years of having to grow up as a boy were finally overcome and undone, erased forever, along with all their scars. They’ve finally made it out to the other side. Excising their trauma out of them, with a hard dick. An erection can’t tell lies. 

But would never happen in real life, because there's no way a cis male could fall in love with a trans woman anyways. Such was a fantasy. This was a world that only existed in trans women’s collective dreams, invented and held onto to help keep them going. 

Maybe I'm just a trans lesbian. I just need to find the right girl. Maybe another trans girl, like all the others. T4T. I could quite my job or get into programming, not like there's any other jobs around that'd take a fucking tranny. That or a warehouse. Just as long as no customers ever have to see me, right? Ha. That’s what companies really care about.

But...the way Chad called her Sophia made her feel so nice…

"Bro, so, who do you think is gonna die first?" Mark said suddenly, although it seems he and John were already talking through the entire movie...and Sophia didn't notice at all. She didn't even know what was happening on the screen.

"They're all filthy deviants. They should all die equally," John confidently said, as he did.

"Uh, ah...yeah". Sophia just absentmindedly flicked through her phone more as she blanked out everything else around her, focusing again only on her endless constant train of thoughts.

"You're totally zonked out, Nick. Are you even paying atten-"

No no, she had to get Chad out of her head. She couldn't rely on that fantasy or that pathetic date, or imagine if things would be different if she was girlmoding for him instead. There was no way she could ever socially transition. Gender Dysphoria is about the body, after all. She wants to change her sex characteristics - gender is merely decoration. Like the difference between the chicken finger, and the dipping sauce. In Sophia's mind, it should be renamed to Sex Dysphoria. She still likes thinking about the word Trans-Sexual too. But that makes it sound a little dirty… Homosexual is fine for some reason, but not Transsexual? So the word was replaced at some point, she thought. Probably because of the prudish Americans. 

There's nothing in the brain that says you have to have a certain name, or like certain hobbies, or have certain favorite colors. If you could be cured by just changing the pronouns you used, then were you ever really afflicted by anything at all? If being trans could be cured by just wearing some nail polish or putting on a tie every so often, then nobody would ever have to get disowned for transitioning.

Well, some still would anyway. 

Sophia constantly told herself this mantra: Physical dysphoria is real dysphoria, social dysphoria is fake dysphoria. It kept her going when things got tough for her. Social’s the stuff for trenders, for fakers, for people jumping on the bandwagon to try and become a minority for social points. For bored girls in college to break away from cultural trappings of femininity by ‘coming out’ as ‘transgender’ by maybe styling their hair differently, or changing their pronouns on social media. The She/They’s of the world. They control the conversation and definitions by sheer numbers, because there will always be more cis people than trans people. Sophia felt that ‘being trans’ somehow got warped into how you want to express yourself socially, how you want to dress, how you want to be referred to as - not what changes you want for your physical, biologically sexed body. Not what requires actual medical attention, and money, and risk. Which is all that really matters in the world. 

It doesn't matter how scared she is to tell her parents. To tell her friends. To want to wear different clothes. To want to change her life. None of that matters. All that matters is her body.

If trans people “don’t believe in sex” as some people claimed, why would they be taking sex hormones to try and change their sex? Obviously they know it's real. How can they seek to change something they don’t believe is real? Sophia knows she couldn’t ever fully change her sex, and that’s what tears her up inside. But she can still change her body, and her gene expression, she can try as hard as she can to do as much as she can, and that’s what matters. That’s all that matters.

That's all that matters. 

"Whoops!" Mark suddenly grabbed the phone out of her hands, the one she wasn't even really looking at.

"HEY!! Wha?" It took Sophia a second to actually understand what was happening, as her brain shifted through the dimensions of her skull to the outside world, flowing like a rushing torrent.

"Ah! Give it back! I was just fidgeting with it!" she whined. There's nothing more terrifying to a trans woman than someone having potential access to her phone or computer, where their very souls are stored. 

She grabbed a hold of it, but - holy shit - he snapped it right back out without even trying. John then came in from the other side of her and pulled her back with a single arm.

Ah...Ah....!!

"Bro just go to bed if you're tired," Mark said.

"Ah! No, I liked hanging out! I was just uh, tired from that visit I had...before, earlier."

"Oh? Who was it?" John asked this time.

"Uh...an old friend. From high school. Yeah. But we didn't get along too well..."

"It's ok bro. Just rest on my shoulder bro," Mark offered his body up for her in a sort of jock-pretending-to-be-gay way.

"Ahaha. No no. I'll go to bed. Thanks thanks."

She really just wanted to get away from both of them right now. Her heart was still beating.  

Holy shit...They're so fucking strong. And with one hand!? How did I get so fucking weak!? Is that what Chad could've done to me? Is this what love is? Is that what sex is like? My heart's beating, so...

Maybe she should forget about relationships for now. And everything about girlmoding. It's all too complicated and scary. She just needs to focus on her body. She knows she can never be a girl, but at least she can be some kind of androgynous male-female creature thing with boobs. Maybe. That's all she cares about. That's all that matters.

'Mom'.

 

---

 

Mommy, is Nicky a girl's name?

"No. No it's not. You're a boy. It's Nick, not Nicky. Don't be silly. You're my wonderful handsome strong Nick."

Okay!

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