Chapter Text
Mike stared at his body and then down at the red dress in his hands. Tina had worn it not long ago on one of their dates. She had been beautiful, elegant and so very feminine. Mike had long ago realized that he wasn't dating Tina for the right reasons, but still here he was, clutching her dress in his hands, thinking about how beautiful and feminine she looked in it and not wanting her but wanting to be - Mike knew the truth. He just couldn't admit it out loud - not even to himself. He could not admit the ugly truth that would change everything he knew about himself and his world.
He held the dress to his chest, his waist, imagining how he would look wearing it. "I want to be a girl," he mumbled aloud, the closest he had ever come to admitting to his gender identity. Still, he wanted to be a girl, he wasn't brave enough to say yet that he was a girl and would greatly prefer to think it terms of she, her, those forbidden female pronouns. He smoothed the fabric against his chest, the chest of a boy.
He couldn't help cry. Tears filled up his eyes and he curled into himself, hunched over slightly. "This is so fucked up." Mike had always realized that something was wrong with him. He had always identified with the feminine, the identity of being a woman and all the gender constructs around that idea. He read a lot as a kid and easily identified with the female protagonists, he felt sympathy and a complete draw towards the identity of being a girl. He had issues with his genitals, a strange regard, a hatred for them that he couldn't explain. He could not voice what he was or who he was and he hated that.
At first, he had thought he might just be gay and even used that to explain off the strangeness. He had spent a lot of time around Matt and had found the other boy unbelievably attractive. The "maybe I'm gay" revelation had been quite a relief actually, though he knew most people in his life wouldn't be okay with that. At least it made sense to be gay. He knew gay guys, like Kurt, and it was insanely normal despite being taboo in the area.
Wishing so hard to be female wasn't normal.
Mike sighed, wiping his tears. "Why does she get this and I can't have it?" Mike asked softly. He'd always had an unfortunate habit of talking to himself. “She’s the perfect girl and I just have serious problems.”
"Mike," came Tina's voice, soft, shocked.
Mike turned around to find himself face to face with his girlfriend. She was staring at him with a confused look on her face and the shock that registered in her eyes told him that she had been there the whole time. He dropped the dress to the floor, looked down at his body and then back up at the girl. “Tina,” he whispered, shaking his head a little bit. This was not happening. His issues were not going to come to light right now, not in front of the girlfriend that he loved and adored.
“Mike, did you just hold up my dress and say ‘I want to be a girl?’”
Mike turned to face Tina and could see that she didn’t understand much better than he did. “How long have you been standing in the door there?” he asked, shaking his head a little bit and trying not to think about what this was going to lead into. She was going to break up with him, totally denounce him as a freak and probably get scared and tell the rest of the people close to him.
“Awhile,” Tina said softly.
She slowly walked around him and sat down on her bed. She looked up at him with a look that mingled confusion, concern, fear and worry all at once. She gestured with her head, tilting it slightly and patting the bed next to her. Mike slowly walked toward the bed and sat down, looking Tina in the eye for only a second before a red hot blush started to heat up his cheeks.
“Talk,” she said quietly.
“What am I supposed to talk about?” Mike asked, panicking as the discomfort and realization that Tina knew really sunk in. “You heard pretty much the whole story Tina. I…I wish that I was a girl, sometimes, all the time. It’s something that I’ve learned to keep shut about for a really long time now and I’m really sorry you had to see and hear that.”
Tina frowned and did not respond. He looked into her eyes and could see nothing that indicated emotion. She was blank and he didn’t blame her. Tina was trying to figure herself out, how she felt about the horrible bombshell that he had dropped on her. Guilt overtook every other emotion he felt. Mike could feel the tears that he was trying to fight, battling to make their way up to the surface. He willed himself not to cry, because it would make this so much worse.
“Mike, you were holding up one of my dresses and crying because you wanted to be a girl.”
Her words were stating the very obvious, but they made it impossible to hold those tears in. Mike shut his eyes but they slipped right past the barriers he had put up. It was true. He was a pathetic person, a guy unsatisfied with his body, his life and the identity that had been thrust upon him the second that he was born. What kind of boy was that dissatisfied with who he was?
He opened his mouth to tell her that he didn’t know what to say to her, but instead a confession came pouring out of him.
“I don’t know what to tell you that you haven’t already heard, exactly. I mean, I’ve always wanted to be a girl. I’ve always identified with girls. It’s been easy enough to keep quiet though, since nobody talks to the awkward Asian guy. I don’t really feel like a boy and never have. I mean, I never wore dresses or anything – Hell, I remember trying when I was really little and freaking my mother out so bad. I just don’t really know what my problem is. I…there’s nothing I can do about it, so it was a lot better than nobody knew. At first I thought I was gay, because I was attracted to some guys, but not all guys, and I really like girls too. I mean, I like you, so it’s not a gay thing. It’s just been bugging me a lot more since you and I started dating.”
He stopped for one second, but that one second was long enough for Tina to speak up. “Why since we started dating?” she asked.
It was all on the table so Mike figured he may as well tell her what he was feeling. “You’re kind of the perfect girl,” he muttered low. “I mean, I never really spent much time around girls before high school, except my own family members. You’re a girl who comes from an Asian family, is gracious and beautiful, comfortable in her own skin and who reinvents herself and her identity all the time without being fake or dishonest to who you are. I admire you so much Tina. I…I want to be you. If I was the girl you are…”
Tina shook her head at him. “Mike, I just don’t get this…” she said, shaking her head from side to side, her hair falling into her face. He instinctively reached over and brushed it out of her eyes. She looked confused, so confused. “I mean, you’re a guy and it’s not like you’re a girly boy or anything like that. You've always been pretty male."
Mike nodded at the assessment. It was true. He had never done anything to outwardly show his inner-girl, except for moment’s like the one that Tina had unfortunately stumbled upon, when he was in private. It wasn’t that Mike was a self-loathing person, either. He didn’t like certain parts of his body, the lack of breasts, the penis, but – he liked what he could do with his body. He liked that he was a good dancer, skilled, talented and well liked but at the same time he wasn’t one of the graceful female dancers he spent time with. He wasn’t his ideal.
Also, his parents would kill him if he ever let his inner-girl come out. His father had given him a very hard time when glee finally gave him the courage to dance in public. Dancing was something that girls did, simply put. His parents expectations as far as their young son was exactly why Mike had joined football, kept up a masculine physical appearance through working out a lot and such.
Tina shook her head again and again, like she was trying to erase what he was telling her. “Mike, do you love me?” she asked. “I mean, if you’re…a girl, do you love me?”
Mike looked up. Her question almost went straight over his head, in favor of her other statement. She had identified Mike as a girl. It was overpowering, hearing someone call him a girl. He was not expecting that. “Tina, I…” he said, his mouth closing as soon as he had opened it. Could he be a girl, even though he had those things he hated? Could he be a female even though his birth certificate said that he was male? Could Mike Chang be more than a boy who wished he was a girl?
“It’s a simple question Mike. Do you love me like you said you did?”
Mike stopped his rapid fire thoughts, forcefully and thought about her question. Did he love her? Yes. Oh god yes. When he had told Tina he loved her, while making out on the couch in her living room last week, he had meant it. He loved her. He liked kissing her, he liked being close to her. Was it sexual? He wasn’t sure. It could have been, if sexual things weren’t so freaking scary to him.
“I do love you Tina,” he said insistently. “I love you so much. You’re so sweet and I was so happy when we…you know, got together. I just…”
She looked down at her hands and then reached over and took one of his in hers, scooting closer. “You’re just a girl.”
There it was again. Tina called him a girl. His heart leapt up into his throat.
“Do you think I’m a…” he asked, but he found that it was still hard to say.
Tina looked up at him, her eyes full of tears. “I mean, yeah. Yes. I studied transgender issues last year for a project, went through some online forums and met a transman in California through one of them. I really got interested in learning more. I think that if you’re feeling like a girl Mike then you must be…”
She looked at him, her eyebrows narrowed as if she was confused. “I can’t say I’m not confused,” she admitted. “I’ve always known you as the boy that I love, the boy that I was so…so very sexually attracted to. Is this why you freaked out every time we got – close to being intimate?”
Mike nodded slowly. It wasn’t that Tina wasn’t gorgeous, but sex made him so unconfident himself. He didn’t like his body. He didn’t like that the sexual responses he had were so very male.
Tina sighed. “I thought I was the only girl in the world with a boyfriend who didn’t want sex,” she said, and he realized she was crying too, real tears. He had made Tina cry. He felt guilt start to choke him up, but tried to ignore it. “Little did I know he was my girlfriend. Oh my god this is like some kind of joke.”
Mike started crying. He didn’t know why but he started crying. Tina was angry at him for not being who she expected, but Tina was acknowledging him as a girl. He was a girl. He closed his eyes and just sighed with relief that someone had said it.
He was a girl.
She was a girl.
Tina looked at Mike and there was a moment of consideration in her pretty eyes. She had always loved Tina’s eyes and the deep, soulful expressions in them. “Mike, you know that you are a girl right?” she asked. “I mean, I don’t like this. I don’t like the feeling that I’m losing my boyfriend but if you feel this way, it’s not because you’re some freaky girl-boy hybrid or a boy who wants to be a girl. You are a girl.”
She was a girl. It was a revelation that brought her to tears. She sobbed, holding Tina close to her.