Work Text:
The thing about Adrien Agreste was that he’d come out young. Like, you-watched-a-shitty-youtube-documentary-about-me young. Except there hadn’t been any shitty documentaries because his mom hadn’t let a camera near his face until he was ten and had spent two years begging to model. He supposed there were some pictures of him before then floating around, but if anyone remembered Gabriel Agreste’s daughter, they knew better than to mention it.
The thing with six year olds, though, is that they have a very limited vocabulary. And when all they know is utter hatred for being a girl, they use the process of elimination: I’m a boy. It was in this way that Adrien managed to be trans and have no recollection of questioning his gender.
They didn’t want to become an anti-trans sob story. A poor soul transitioned young and now regretting it. Partly because he didn’t regret it, and partly because he was very anti-anti-trans.
Ladybug was the first person he told. Their voice was soft, dwarfed by the sky above them. If being a girl had been like wearing a shirt too tight around the armpits, being a boy was like a pair of pants he couldn’t quite bend his legs in. Still functional, and worth wearing sometimes, but they’d rather be wearing pajamas.
They told Chloe next. She was the only person who regularly acknowledged that he was trans, and he respected that. She was also one of their oldest friends.
And so he slowly told people: their friends, their father, their teachers, their classmates.
Until they stood in their room, his phone propped on a bookshelf. They hoped they’d managed to navigate to the filming on the app he’d downloaded an hour ago. They tapped the red button.
“Hi. My name’s Adrien Agreste, and I’m genderqueer. Let me explain.”