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lyckastar · 9 days ago

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This is going to be a little long so I'm sorry in advance for that. But I just wanted to say that I really just love your oc Davi because he hits me on a level i've never been quite brave enough to discuss with myself because of the era I was born in. When you posted that Morning After pic of River and Davi, I started tearing up because I realized Davi was trans. I'm tearing up just thinking about it. I don't know why seeing Davi hits me harder than any other transmasc, but he does.

For a little context, I'm older, I was born in the early 80s in the time of "girls wear pink dresses and play with dolls and grow up to be stay at home moms who spend all day tending to the house and hubby," and if you were lucky you got to be on a girl's softball team, but you had to take off the pants when you got home. Males were still expected to do all the stuff outside the house and do the disciplining inside the home, and don't you dare wear purple or have an earring in only your right ear or you're a (insert popular outdated slur word).

Growing up as the only daughter of three kids, a LOT was expected of me to grow up and be this perfect young lady and act like a mom and run the house when my mom wasn't home. But I was always that weird girl who only had friends who were boys, I was that weird girl whose only female friends were nerds, I was that weird girl who made friends with the flamboyant boys who everyone thought were gay (and I'm trying to explain this in in a way that reflects the 80s and 90s, thie disgust in my wording is not my opinion. I just want to make that clear). As I grew up, I was always very uncomfortable in girls' clothes because they showed my shape. I HATED my breasts and my cleavage when I was a teenager, so much that I begged my mom to let me get a breast reduction when I was 16 and that still felt too big. I started wearing my brother's clothes when I was 14 and since then I've always bought mens shoes, mens pants, and mens jackets; the only reason I didn't wear mostly mens shirts was because I couldn't find any where I grew up that didn't have the super high collars that felt like they were choking me all the time). I was never good at shaving, I was never good at makeup. Menstruation always felt like some battle wound I had to attend to, like an infected papercut. I hate my breasts being played with like hetero men like to play with breasts.

If this next part is TMI, I'm sorry, you don't have to respond or anything. I have memories of having an erection and having intercourse with women and those memories come with physical reminders of feeling. I don't know what else to call them but memories because I don't know that I could ever imagine something when I've never physically experienced it. Like, I can't imagine what it's like to be 6'6" like my brothers, I can't imagine what caviar tastes and feels like, I can't imagine racing on a race track. Yet I can perfectly imagine that.

Trying to grow up and live in a world that designates such strong gender-conforming rules made me the utter meaning of the world Displacement. It's very hard to connect with anything or anyone when you don't feel comfortable in your own skin. When you feel like you're being forced to wear someone else's skin.

I honestly don't know if I'm trans because I feel very much male while being stuck inside of a body with female reproductive system, yet at the same time I have incredibly strong gender envy over these absolutely iconic-looking beautiful women who have hourglass figures and perfect breasts. Non-binary for sure, but maybe even beyond that. I know I've never felt like I belong on this planet entirely for the fact alone that I'm allergic to so damn much of it, I literally feel alien, extra-terrestrial, like my genetics come from a different species. I related a LOT to Liara from Mass Effect with the whole non-binary aspect, asari aren't female that's just how their entire species brings new generations to life, but even then I couldn't be honest with myself because Liara looks humanly-female and therefore "lesbian" for the time Mass Effect came out. There's still a LOT I need to figure out about myself. It's very, very hard someitmes to break out of the deeply-embedded brainwashing that governed western countries especially the US for centuries.

But the reason I'm telling you this is because seeing Davi opened this whole floodgate of feelings and memories of myself that I've suppressed for a very long time. I think if maybe I had a safe place I could be myself growing up, I might have been brave enough to address these feelings and memories a lot sooner. But seeing Davi right now has broken the cage that all that was locked up in. Like, I'm crying right now even typing this. I don't know why Davi and no one else. But he's so beautiful and he's his true self and he's proud of it and someone who looks like River loves Davi so much. I realize I'm comparing real life to these fictional characters, but I resonate with Davi so much. He's so much I wish I could be.

I'm into my 40s, now, and my entire family is predominantly old-school Presbyterian (my grandpa was a Pastor his whole life), and unfortunately I live with my mother because I'm also autistic and I cannot hold a job longer than a couple months so it's hard to make enough money to live on my own. But that also unfortunately means I still can't be myself.

But Davi has given me away to start mentally opening up to myself, and hopefully I can start healing from all the brainwashing and feeling lost inside myself all the time.

So please don't stop sharing Davi. Ever.

So much love for you and Davi,

--Leo

Alright *cracks knuckles* I'm finally getting a chance to sit down and respond. First of all, I just wanna reiterate what an amazing ask/message this is to receive. My characters mean a lot to me, and knowing that others feel similarly really blows me away as someone who has a lot of anxiety about posting online. I'm so grateful that Davi was able to help you along your journey. So thank you for sharing. Truly <3 I grew up in the 2000s and I'll soon be in my 30s. And even though we're years apart, I can relate very much to the ways that you've described experiencing gender dysphoria in the 80s and 90s. So in response, I'd like to share a little (this totally didn't take me 10+ hours to write) bit about my own journey.

TW: for descriptions of dysphoria and internalized racism. - I'm Afro-Arab and I've spent pretty much my entire life in the MENA region. Most people reading that will already have a lot of loaded assumptions about what that means but I just want to state that people, the general public, are not a reflection of their government or the political/theocratic circumstances that are thrust upon them. I feel like we should appreciate that fact now more than ever. I've had to unlearn a lot of internalized hatred to reach a point where I can feel pride in my own intersectional identity.

As a child, there were no physical spaces that I could turn to when I began to feel that my body was somehow "wrong". I'm fairly sure that my dysphoria started long before I recognized my interest in both girls and boys. But what I could turn to were online spaces. And within those online spaces, I discovered the world of "role-play writing". So there I was, a confused little 12 year old Black girl, getting all worked up over Twilight fanfic and picturing myself in the body of perpetual sparkling boy, Edward Cullen (and then inventing my own sparkling boys who totally weren't Edward Cullen 2.0+++).

At a certain point, I landed on one character in particular that became my persona wherever I went. I'm no longer in those spaces and I no longer write under that character, but there really was nothing else that gave me quite the same amount of joy as getting to be a boy online.

But, and this was an important realization for me, I didn't just want to be a boy. I wanted to specifically be the beautiful white boy with blue eyes and dark hair that I could only be in an online space. My struggle with desirability politics wasn't just about not wanting to be perceived as a girl, but also encompassed my desire to escape my own Blackness.

Fast forward a few years and my younger self is having their eyes opened for the first time to the world of "video game character creation". Among the character creators that came to define these years of my life were: -Skyrim (jammed full of mods) -The Sims 3 (also jammed full of mods) -Dragons Dogma

I was studying art at the time and developing an intense love for portraiture. This was my other escape - my way of actualizing that love in ways that I could embody. Make hot character and get to run around as them = bliss.

But in hindsight, a few things became apparent that I've come to see as reflections of my feelings of "displacement", to borrow the word you used.

First and foremost is I rarely, if ever, made/drew characters who weren't white. It wasn't easy with how badly I was clawing to escape my body in real life, but I was so isolated and closed off from all other ways that a person could possibly exist, especially in a Black body, that my younger self simply couldn't see another way to be.

I'm older now and I've since developed close relationships with other Black people. With others in general. Loving people who both do and don't look like me and learning that I wasn't alone in feeling the way that I did helped me learn to love my own skin in turn.

It's something about myself that I no longer want to change.

The second reflection is that I've probably used those creators to make at least 100 skaterdude-looking boyish men. This is far from surprising - I've only ever really experienced gender envy from boyish men like Jim Hawkins in Treasure Planet and Elliot Page in Juno (which is very interesting to me given his own transition since then).

Some time ago, I told myself I was going to make more female characters, I was going to play as them, and I was going to enjoy it. This was an extension of my desire to diversify the range of characters I was creating. With how detailed and flexible new character creators were getting (but never flexible enough to add more body types…but that’s a whole other can of worms), I took it as a challenge to show my personal growth - to prove that I wasn’t “stuck”. Despite my efforts, I found myself feeling extremely upset - both because nothing I made was giving me the same feeling that playing as a man did, and because I didn't want to accept that playing as a woman was what was stopping me from being able to find my bliss (I was upset in a way that I can only describe as fictional character-induced dysphoria).

I loved playing as a man, but there were aspects about playing as a woman that I was missing. Makeup, for one. As a portrait artist, I love the colors and the shapes and the way it can completely change the way a face looks. It’s an artform. But I never put two and two together and simply…put makeup on a man…Back then I didn’t recognize that I was recycling my internalized misogyny through my feelings about what men can and can't do. And I didn’t recognize that it made me see them as not men.

It was my own upsetness and dissatisfaction that eventually resulted in me deciding, fuck it. If I want to put vampy matte lipstick on this hot specimen then there’s no real harm in it. And for once I was very right to do so.

Davi certainly isn’t any less of a man because he enjoys makeup. He and other transmasc characters I’ve created helped me see what initially led me to call myself nonbinary. Hesitation. I believed that I couldn’t call myself transmasc because it wouldn’t be possible for my physical appearance to reflect my inner world.

But this, just like all these other aspects of my journey that I've described, took time to work through. I didn’t fall back on being nonbinary. My gender identity is irreducible and I no longer see myself as having settled for "the middle" because of feeling like I wouldn’t make a good enough man, or feeling afraid because of how I would be treated as a Black man. I still have a lot of non-visible bindings around me that are holding me back, but I know that these ones at least have loosened, if only in my own head.

And now, making soft, fashionable transmen and transmasc characters in video games, who are comfortable with their joint femininity and masculinity, has become my saving grace and my current source of gender euphoria.

When I mentioned realizing how much of my transing experience has been performed "through the video game [and online] characters that I've gotten attached to over the years", I want to clarify that it wasn't until quite recently that I actually made this realization.

One of my favorite passages from Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism comes to mind:

"With the early avatar of LuvPunk12, I cloaked myself in the skin of the digital, politicking via my baby gender play, traveling without a passport, taking up space, amplifying my queer blackness. This experience of machinic mutiny was foundational to me, and gave me the courage to let go of the ambivalence that comes with fear of fossilizing in formation inherent to the upheavals of adolescence. I found family and faith in the future with these interventions, shaping my personal visions of a self that could be truly empowered in being self-defined, a futurity that social decorum regularly discouraged for a queer Black body."

I ended up using this passage in my MFA thesis because of how intensely it spoke to me. I was already building up towards it at the time but I do feel that finding these writings helped me make the decision to finally come out as nonbinary to my closest loved ones.

The origin of my other online tag that I use in art spaces (@lainswardrobe) is meant to be a testament to my place in The Closet and the ways that I've redecorated and refitted it to make it my own - to turn it into a wardrobe, essentially. And in it is my collection of media that have helped me come to terms with the person I've always been. The person I've known myself to be since childhood, in fact.

I may not look that way to anyone who sees me out and about irl (minus a few signs here and there because of the way society perceives the way we perform our gender roles) but my transness is real, even if it only exists online. It's realer now more than ever. And I just want to be the one to say, from one stuck person to another, so is yours.

So...that's it! I think that's everything I have to say and it was even bigger wall of text so now you don’t have to feel bad about the length of yours <3

Please accept this vp of Panam/Davi/River as a humble tax for making you read through all of this. And for being a fighter. -Ren