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In 2008, Dani Howell had quite a few thoughts about herself that may have been less than healthy.
She spent plenty of time ruminating over every detail of every conversation. She listened to every slur the other girls in her school had been calling her and internalized them. She took hours every morning straightening her thick, curly hair because she thought it made her look messy otherwise. She often considered herself less cool than all her other emo friends who had better, more niche music taste. She loved to spend hours and hours looking at pictures of pretty girls on Google images, and it was hard to tell exactly why she did it (attraction? Envy? She would stand firmly on the second). Worst of all, what she considered her dirtiest secret, she hated the look of her chest. Her whole body, really. Sometimes, she would wrap medical tape around herself to compress and hide her chest underneath her street clothes. She always wished she could get away with doing it under her uniform.
That being said, she also had a favorite YouTuber. AmazingPhil.
Dani absolutely loved AmazingPhil. She watched his videos and knew without a doubt that she found him attractive. He had the absolute craziest blue eyes that Dani had every seen, and his hair was really long. Phil was beautiful in way that you would usually only think a girl could be, and maybe that was why Dani found him so breathtaking. However, he wasn't a girl. He was just some emo twink that maybe was a bit gay, which meant that Dani could say, without a shadow of a doubt, that she was not a lesbian.
>•<
Dani crashed into her mattress the moment she stepped into her room after school, her bag getting dropped somewhere between the door and foot of the bed. She toed off her shoes quickly and went to her closet to find something to change into. There wasn't much variety in her wardrobe: black skinny jeans, various graphic t-shirts that were a size or two too small, and a couple black tops of different cuts and styles. With such limitations, she very quickly grabbed a sweater and the least tight pair of jeans in the closet and started to get changed in front of her mirror.
This had become something of a ritual for Dani. She forced herself to stare at herself while she changed and power through the sick feeling in her stomach. Her hands ran over her body—arms, legs, waist, hips—and let her mind fill with all those scary thoughts about how much she hated living in this shell of a body. She let herself sink her teeth into the image of her hips going straight down from her waist to her thigh, using her hands to pull her chest to the sides so she could visualize a flat chest. Ideally, she would find some way to remove all those awful curves off of her body. She'd get some surgery to cut off her hips so she could wear all that pretty stuff she loved without wanting to vomit. Dani didn't want to be a boy, really. She knew that for certain. If she did, she wouldn't be able to wear all the feminine clothes and makeup she wanted to. She was lucky to be a girl, she told herself as she picked her change of clothes back up.
Dani sat down at her desk and opened her computer. She went through all of her routine social media checks: MySpace, Facebook, and then, finally, YouTube. Ending her day with a long rabbithole of internet videos was her reward for having to deal with evil teenage girls all day.
These days, it was hard for Dani to find any video that particularly interested her. AmazingPhil hadn't posted in awhile; it had been longer than usual between videos. She was beginning to worry he had quit and she would have to either rewatch all his old videos until the end of time or just eventually let him go and find someone else to latch on to. Nevertheless, Dani was still checking his profile every day. This time, when she pressed enter on her search, her stomach dropped.
The AmazingPhil channel had changed usernames, rebranded to AmazingFi. Along with this, there was a new video for the first time in months titled My Coming Out Video.
Right. Of course. Dani clicked on it before she could psych herself out of it, her heartbeat in her ears.
"Hey guys! I know it's kind of been a while since I posted, and I think I owe you all a bit of an explanation in the form of a video blog," Phil's—Fi's—voice rang out from the laptop. "My name is Fiona. Or just Fi. I've taken a bit of a break, because… I'm transgender. I'm a girl."
The first thing Dani noticed, embarrassingly, was that she was starkly more attracted to Fi now. She wasn't quite sure what about her was more attractive now: Fi didn't look much different. A bit happier, maybe. Certainly brighter. Was she wearing makeup? Dani kept watching.
"I know a lot of you don't really know what that means. I mean, I didn't until a few months ago."
Dani knew what it meant. She knew all too well.
"More than likely, you have heard the term transsexual. There has been a deliberate shift away from that terminology, however, because it implies that someone is only trans when they have completed some surgery."
That made Dani think. Part of the reason she was so adament that she wasn't trans was because she knew she didn't want a sex change. Maybe…
"I've always known I was different from the other boys my age. My parents always supported all my more feminine interests. I think they probably thought I was gay for awhile. And, well…" Fi giggled, and that sound sent a pang of affection through Dani's chest. "I don't know what I am sexuality wise, honestly. Though, I am pretty sure I like girls. Genderqueers, too, probably. Maybe ten years down the line if this video blogging thing works out I'll have a better answer to that part and I can let you know. I sure hope that I do, though I don't have much faith in YouTube still being around in 2018. A girl can dream!" She giggled again. This one sounded so happy Dani had to wipe a tear away. "Sorry, it just feels too great to say that out loud. Anyway, yeah. I started taking Estrogen about three weeks ago. I take mine in the pill form, but you can also do it as an injection. I'm just a bit squeemish with needles I'm afraid. I don't really have anything else to say, I feel like I've been talking to you guys for ages. Just know that it is so so so worth it to live your truth. Bye bye!" Fi made some silly animal noise, and then the video ended.
Dani didn't realize she was crying so much until her room was quiet. She wiped frantically at her eyes so she could focus enough to make sense of everything, as well as trying to rid herself of the headache growing at her temples. Genderqueers, sexuality, surgery, different… It was so much for her to process. That first part, though, genderqueers… She wanted to know more. That sounded… Good. Right. More so than any other term she had found for how she was feeling.
>•<
An hour and about seventeen open tabs later, Dani both felt like she understood twice as much and half as much. Genderqueer felt pretty acccurate, sure. She knew she didn't feel like she was fully a girl. So, maybe they could try neutral pronouns. That didn't feel awful, but something inside them still didn't feel like that was quite right. They felt much more connected to the identity of boy than girl, once it came down to it. They could wear all the blouses and skirts they wanted, but the feeling was still there. After closing all their tabs, they went back to YouTube and typed a comment on Fi's video.
'i think its so cool that ur open like this :o ! after i watched i went a bit crazy with research…. i feel kind of like a mix of genderqueer and transgender?? is there a name for that?'
They hit send and exhaled slowly, slamming their computer shut and running a hand over their face. Dani decided that they would go get something to eat and just… Hope for a reply when they got back.
At some point in the thirty minutes it took Dani to make and eat a turkey sandwich, they did, in fact, get a reply.
'im glad this made you learn something abt urself :3 im not sure if theres really a name for that exactly??? maybe try presenting fully transgender for a bit and see how you feel ARF ;p"