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One of the best things Tim has discovered, about using his chameleon amulet, is the following: The shapeshifting allowed by the necklace doesn’t have many limits. Not only is he able to change his height, the colors of his eyes, hair and skin, he can get as specific with the changes as his imagination allows.
There’s an undercover job and Tim’s fabricating an identity, making Caroline Hill similar enough to himself in appearance that he can pass it off to Batman as not using the amulet. He imagines the girl he wants Caroline to be, and slips the amulet over his head.
The chill of the transformation runs over him and he looks in the mirror to see if the appearance will work.
He’d expected– he isn’t sure what he’d expected, some sort of shortcoming from the amulet, maybe, but as he looks in the mirror, the girl he’d imagined stares back at him. He really should’ve known better than to expect it to fail.
Tim’s tangentially aware of the fact the amulet can also slightly shift his clothing, but those changes get a little janky if he needs to change or if he needs to get the idea of clothes dirty, or the piece of clothing transforms as he takes it off. He prefers to use real clothes, thank you very much. He can afford to keep multiple sizing options in his closet.
He purposefully avoided from shifting sizes but his pants fit significantly looser around him, his shirt tighter around his chest.
He looks down, and sees a pair of boobs protruding from his chest. Next, he takes a quick glance under his clothes, and, lo and behold, his dick is gone.
He hadn’t realized before that his unconscious image of Caroline Hill, pretty girl in his size and with his deep under-eye luggage, had also included the concept of boobs and a pussy.
Huh.
He thought he’d mind it a bit more if his body had female typical sexual characteristics, but the change feels a little good, actually. His dick is gone, he has boobs, and he feels good.
Huh.
Maybe he’ll need to have a closer look at his gender identity sometime in the future.
It doesn’t take that long for Tim to take that closer look. He goes outside into the Gotham night as Caroline – a little bit more fine-tuned than she initially was, her chest a bit smaller, Tim’s own bits returned for familiarity’s sake – and, in a turn of events he shouldn’t find surprising, gets recognized as a woman.
The job goes as he’d expected, except for the fact that he doesn’t mind being called a woman’s name, doesn’t find getting referred to with she/her pronouns as distressing as he thought he would.
In fact, she thinks, she might want to hear it more often in the future, too.
Tim’s experimentation in gender is fairly simple. She uses Caroline Hill’s identity like she’d intended, going to clubs, getting friends, and having a ton of fun over a few weeks. She does the same with a male identity she fabricates just for the gender experimentation, so that she can try both sides of the binary.
On some days, Caroline Hill feels more correct than on others. The pronouns rub Tim the wrong way on some days, but scratch a very specific itch in a hard to reach place on others, and the dick he’d kept for familiarity feels wrong, even though it’s the same one he grew up with. Same goes for he/him pronouns and the male identity Tim also experiments with.
Some days he tries both, and neither really feels correct.
They make a new face, a new body, and introduce themselves as Max, they/them pronouns. They got dared to survive a week in Gotham by their friends.
It feels right more often than not, to be seen as nonbinary, even though they like gendered pronouns on some of the days, too.
Of course Tim knows about gender minorities, but somehow she hadn’t realized she was in one. She scrolls labels, reading definitions and testing the match, and finally lands on genderfluid as her identity.
Sometimes she feels like a girl, wants to be seen as Caroline Hill or Timothea Drake instead Timothy. Sometimes it’s the opposite. And sometimes Max, her nonbinary persona, feels the most right.
It’s a weird thing to realize, but she’s good at coming to terms with strange realizations about herself.
It hadn’t taken her long to accept faunoidism or becoming an orphan. She doesn’t think being genderfluid is much more of a difference in her identity than those.
They’re returning from patrol on Jason’s ride after getting an unfortunate hit to the head, when they, without even meaning to, correct Jason on their pronouns.
“RR got hit in the head. I think he has a concuss–”
“They,” he gets interrupted by Tim saying.
“Excuse me?” Jason asks.
“They have a concussion. Today’s a nonbinary day.”
“Okay. RR has a concussion. And uses they/them pronouns now.”
It’s as simple as that.
After they’ve arrived at the cave, and everyone’s injuries are taken care of, Jason keeping an eye on Tim because of their concussion, he asks, “You’re nonbinary?”
“Genderfluid,” Tim tells him.
“Okay. We’ll figure out an easy way for you to keep us updated about your daily pronouns that’s easy and comfortable for you.”
And it really is as simple as that.
Tim thinks about taking a different name, but eventually decides that he’s already used enough many names in his normal day-to-day life, in between Alvin and Mike, and various long-term undercover identities. Tim as a name isn’t uncomfortable to him, he realizes while his family is still getting used to the changes in his pronouns.
He doesn’t need to spring more changes on them, on top of the appearance changes he does to alleviate dysphoria.
Red Robin becomes nonbinary, if only for simplicity’s sake. Tim can’t wear his pronoun indicating bracelets, and he can’t do his typical physical changes because he needs to fit perfectly into his armor and suit. He’s almost always good with some good old gender neutral pronouns, so they’re the norm in the field, though mostly everyone’s avoiding using any pronouns for him at all, abbreviating Red Robin instead.
It suits him just fine.
And though someone (read: Bruce) might call using a chameleon amulet to ease gender dysphoria an abuse of his power, he thinks it’s okay to make himself look more feminine or androgynous, to match how he feels.
No one else needs to know he’s also getting rid of his dick most of the time, too.