So it seemed like a good idea at the time. A brilliant one, even. 

The problem: I needed some way to talk about my feelings with someone. My feelings about… about trans people. Not about being trans, not when I so clearly wasn’t, but something about the subject was fucking me up and I felt like if I wanted to understand Cerise and the tangled mess of emotions I had about her and our relationship, I needed to figure out how she was feeling so I could help her, so I could see who I needed to be for her sake.

But how was I going to do that? Particularly with some kind of plausible deniability?

C’mon, I wasn’t oblivious. I knew that ‘Oh, so could I get some advice for my friend who thinks they’re trans?’ wouldn’t cut it. 

I needed the right circumstances where I could raise the issue, but if pressed, turn around and deflect through in a way that was believable. Which also meant that I needed the perfect someone to talk to. I needed a person who I could trust to honestly engage with the subject, but who also knew me well enough to understand on some level that this was an elaborate joke, and not real.

And that’s why earlier today, I talked Jenn into trying out a practice session of her acting as my therapist. She was unenthusiastic, but I convinced her by saying it was an excellent way for her to put her Psychology class studies to good use.

And so that’s how I ended up in this situation, pacing back and forth in the small space of her bedroom, so nervous that I felt like I was about to explode.

“This really doesn’t have the right vibes at all,” I said. “Don’t you have a pair of glasses to wear or something?”

Jenn stared at me. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You know, so you look smart.”

Her lips formed a thin line. “You’re really just asking for me to throw a pen at you, aren’t you.”

“On that note, how about a notepad? Shouldn’t you be taking notes?”

She let out an exaggerated sigh, and turned in her chair to get a pencil and paper from her desk. “Satisfied?”

“No.” I waved my hands in vague shapes in the air. “What about one of those couch things? How am I supposed to be properly therapized without a couch to recline upon?”

“You can sit on my bed.”

“Mmm.”

“In fact, please sit down, your pacing is making me anxious.”

My face twisted up in a frown.

She rolled her eyes. “Okay, I know you’re just being shitty because you’re nervous—”

“Am not,” I snapped.

“But I’m just trying to help here. Work with me?”

I let out some more grumbling noises, but did as she asked.

“So,” I said.

She nodded. “So.”

A long moment passed, my leg bouncing with unspent energy. With agonizing slowness, Jenn looked over the first page of the notepad, then flipped through to a blank page later on.

Finally, she was the one to break the silence by clearing her throat. “I assume that since you wanted to do this, you had something in particular you wanted to talk about.”

“You’re supposed to ask me questions!“ I said, immediately springing back to my feet again. “You’re not even trying to do a good job.”

“Sit! Down!” she snapped, and my body moved in accordance even before I could think about it. She took a deep breath. “Okay. Here’s my question: Was there something in particular you wanted to talk about?”

“That’s not fair,” I whined.

“Too bad. Talk.”

“Fine.” 

I paused, trying to think through exactly what I wanted to say and how. Then, when that failed, I just went ahead and said the first thing that came to mind. 

“What would you say if I told you I was trans?”

Jenn looked at me levelly, no apparent reaction on her face as she studied me. “Okay. What name and pronouns would you like me to use for you?”

“Ha!” I said, pointing at her. “See? I’m not trans, but you’d just accept it if I said that I was? You are a shitty therapist.”

She just kept staring at me, her expression unreadable. My righteous fury drained out. 

I was expecting her to snap back with something witty, and we’d get in an argument again, and I’d be back on more solid ground. Maybe then we could veer around into the topics I wanted to discuss, but, like, obliquely. But she hadn’t taken the bait. Shit.

“Why do you say you’re not trans?” she said calmly.

I blinked. “I mean. Isn’t that obvious?”

“Is it?”

“Yes!”

Jenn’s pencil tapped lightly against her pad. Casting around for something else to distract myself, I grabbed some kind of stuffed sloth thing from atop her pillows and held it in my lap. 

When I looked up, Jenn was still just looking at me.

“What?” I said.

“Okay.” A slight smile crossed her face, and that chilled my blood even more than her staring had. “Prove it.”

“What?”

“Prove to me that you’re not trans. That should be easy, right?”

“Well, of course.”

Silence stretched out.

“So…?” she said.

I frowned at her. “Look, I’ve gone over this time and time again in my own head, and there’s just no real, convincing evidence that I’m trans. If I was, I’d just know.”

“I see,” she said. “But that’s also not what I asked. Perhaps I was unclear. I didn’t ask for evidence that you’re trans. I asked you to prove that you were cis.” She paused for a moment. “And when I say ‘cis,’” she said, “I mean someone who’s—”

“I know what ‘cis’ means.”

“Ah.” She wrote something down on her notepad.

“Wait, what was that? Just because I know the definitions of ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ doesn’t mean anything. I’m just a well-educated person in modern society!”

“Mm-hmm.”

I needed a way to shut her up. I thought quickly, dredging up the first thing to come to mind. And it was a certain unpleasant thing that often seemed to be stuck there. “I mean… my body,” I said. “I have, you know… Um. A male body. People look at me and see a guy.”

Jenn smiled at me in an unnerving way. “Yeah, so funny thing about that: that’s pretty standard for trans women before they transition. Almost definitionally so.”

Shit.

“But I’m not like… um. Trans women. I’m used to it, to being seen as a guy.”

“You are? You’re cool with people asking, ‘Can I help you, sir?’ You appreciate if someone says that you’re a pretty handsome dude? You smile when Avery calls you ‘bro?’ None of that feels wrong or disconcerting sometimes?”

“Um. Yeah, totally.”

“Right,” she said, making another note on her pad. “That’s why you’re squeezing my stuffie so tightly that I think that Lorien’s head is going to pop off. And, by the way, if that does happen, I will absolutely force you to help me sew it back on.”

I relaxed my deathgrip on the fuzzy sloth thing. “Is that hard?”

“Beats me. Why, do you want an excuse to learn to sew?”

“No. Shut up.”

She pursed her lips. “Just trying to test some hypotheses. I didn’t mean to make you upset.”

“I’m not upset. You’re upset.”

One of her eyebrows raised, and my face grew hot.

“Look, you’re just weirding me out, okay?” I said. “Maybe sometimes that feels off, or, like, I don’t know how to feel about being called ‘handsome,’ but that’s because I don’t look like that, not because I’m…” I let out a frustrated noise. “Ugh. I’m trying to say that I’m used to people calling me a guy. It’s fine.”

“But there’s something interesting about what you said,” she continued. “Twice now, actually. You didn’t say that you liked being called a guy. You just said you were used to it. If you were called ‘she’ and ‘her’ and ‘pretty’ more often, what’s to say you wouldn’t be just as used to that, too?”

My blush deepened. “No one would call me that. Unless I asked. And then they’d think I was weird for wanting them to.”

Jenn rolled her eyes. “First of all, I think you’d be surprised. But we’re getting off the point. Other people thinking things about you has nothing to do with whether you’re trans or not. And you were going to prove that you’re cis, remember? Because that’s easy.”

“No,” I said, not willing to concede the point too easily. “How I’m perceived is entirely relevant. I look like this… I look like a guy and I always will. No matter what I do. I’m pretty certain I’m just stuck this way, and that affects me and how I see myself, not solely how other people see me.”

“Bullshit,” Jenn said, surprisingly fiercely. “That’s defeatist bullshit and you should know it. If you wanted to, you could change yourself and your presentation in so many different ways that could make you happier.” Her eyes dipped down towards my fingernails, and I quickly hid them behind the stuffed animal in my lap. “I’m totally confident that if you wanted to and put in the effort, other people would perceive you as female. But you should also know that what you look like doesn’t make a difference. Even a trans person who doesn’t physically transition or change their presentation for whatever reason is still trans. They may just be closeted, for instance.”

“You’re saying I’m in the closet?”

“I’m just speaking in hypotheticals.”

Fuck. Okay. Hypothetically, that… seemed like it made sense. And she didn’t look like she was going to back down. 

I needed a different approach. I bit my lip, gazing off to the side and trying to call something to mind. There were so many arguments. Right? But as I tried to think through and find the best one, they suddenly all seemed a lot murkier and hard to grasp.

“Hobbies?” I muttered to myself. “No, just because I like anime or computer games doesn’t really confirm anything. Girls can like masculine activities.”

“That’s fair,” Jenn chimed in. “Even though some interests are gender-coded, that doesn’t mean anything in particular. Like the way you’re weirdly obsessed with Twinkle Witch Academy.”

“Yeah, exactly.” I blinked. “Wait.”

“Hmmm?”

“That’s— it’s a good show!”

She giggled. I’m pretty certain therapists aren’t supposed to laugh at their patients.

“Okay,” I said, ready to deploy the big guns. “I’m definitely cis because I didn’t know from an early age or think about this until, like, recently. If it was really something that bothered me, I would have figured it out a long time ago. So obviously I’m just tricking myself, like, interpreting depression as something more than it is because at least it’s an easy answer.”

“Out of curiosity, when did you actually start looking into what it means to be transgender?” She shot me a glance when I immediately opened my mouth to protest. “Don’t tell me you haven’t. There’s no way you’ll convince me of that.”

“Fine,” I grumbled. “I guess… fairly recently?”

“And why was that?”

I narrowed my eyes, evaluating exactly what I wanted to tell her. Something close to the truth felt fine. “I met a trans person and wanted to understand what she was going through, so I could… Well, so I could be supportive?”

“That makes sense. Though it only makes me more suspicious that underneath your spiky exterior lurks a soft and gooey center.”

“So?” I said, my cheeks growing warm. “I can be nice too. If I want to.”

“No doubt.” She tapped her pencil against her chin. “But I’m just asking because I wanted to make sure I understood the timeline. This is when you started thinking obsessively about gender and such?”

“I guess, maybe. And I— I wouldn’t say ‘obsessively.’ Just ‘occasionally.’”

“Mmm. Does ‘occasionally’ mean more or less often than ‘daily?’”

“I’m not going to answer that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Either way, just to be clear: you first started thinking about the possibility of being trans yourself around the time that you met someone else and realized that being trans was a real possibility for them?”

“Y-yes, but that’s coincidental. That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Sure it doesn’t,” Jenn said. She marked something down on the notepad again and my eye twitched.

“Okay, hold on here,” I said, straightening up. “I’ve had enough of this. This is fucking rigged.”

“How?”

“Because there are no answers. There’s no way for me to prove I’m cis and you know it! At least not anything that you wouldn’t poke holes in with your… your… logic and words.”

“My friend,” Jenn said, “there are any number of actual answers that I’d accept as proof.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

Jenn smiled in a way that was worrying. “You could tell that you feel comfortable in your body.”

“No one feels comfortable in their body,” I shot back.

“Sure, keep telling yourself that,” she said. “Or, hey, even easier. You could just tell me that you’re cis.”

I blinked. “What? I’ve been saying that this whole time!”

Jenn’s grin deepened. “No, you haven’t. You have never said that, in fact. You were very interested in saying what you were not and what you couldn’t be, but you never specifically and affirmatively said what you were.”

“Witches and your twisty words,” I muttered.

“So, if you want to convince me, you can tell me that you’re a boy.” She smirked. “Like, with a straight face and in a convincing manner.”

I swallowed. “Um.”

She leaned back in her chair, appraising me. “You know, whenever you feel ready.”

I squeezed the stuffed animal, as I thought through the implications of what she was saying. You know. To check for hidden traps. She was being so typically crafty that I knew there had to be some kind of secret catch. I had to be careful. I mean, why bother going through the pain and hassle of saying that I was a man if she was only going to turn around and find some way to twist it to prove that I was actually trans? I wouldn’t put it past her. 

But this seemed to be on the level. I just needed to say it, then. Okay. Sure.

“I’m… I’m a…”

Wait, what did I want to say? Boy? That felt a little infantilizing. Man? Ugh. That’s very ‘I’m a man’s man, time to go cut down a tree.’ I can’t take that seriously. And guy was just so casual, and wasn’t that used in a gender neutral way sometimes, like ‘Hey, guys!’ I could maybe say that word, but then she’d obviously call me out on it not counting so what was the point? Honestly, none of those felt right. Ugh.

You know what? This whole thing was just nonsense. For some reason, I was having a lot harder time proving I was cis than I thought I would. I mean, I had thought about the trans side of things a lot, and I already knew that I couldn’t be trans, so then wouldn’t the reverse just obviously be true? But when I tried to put that into words, it didn’t work out. I came out saying arguments that even I could immediately see were full of holes.

And now she… she was convinced that I was trans, wasn’t she? God, at this point, she was gonna think that no matter what I said.

How did I feel about that?

She wasn’t being shitty about it. She seemed… fine with it? Supportive even? I mean, I figured that she wouldn’t be transphobic or whatever. But I guess I expected her to see it as ridiculous, to immediately realize that this had to be me messing with her, in a twisted joke kind of way. But she had taken it seriously. Over the past couple of weeks or so, somehow the two of us had settled into a kind of soft bickering that I begrudgingly really appreciated, but… when it came to this, there wasn’t even that. She was being unnervingly nice. Not using it as a way to tease me, but not being condescending or pitying either. Which wasn’t fair. How was I supposed to react if I couldn’t be jokingly mad at her? It was just like she had immediately accepted it and moved on, and only seemed frustrated that I wasn’t willing to admit it directly. 

She had barely even reacted when I told her! Now that was annoying. You drop some really big bombshell like this on a friend and they’re supposed to be shocked. She had accepted it like it wasn’t surprising at all, which made me feel particularly weird. What even was the point if I didn’t get a reaction? Ugh. Come on!

“I’m here to help you with your stupid psychology and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now,” I said, crossing my arms.

Jenn let out a choked laugh and almost fell out of her chair. “So that’s your answer?”

Oh, right, she had been expecting me to say something else, but whatever, I had gotten sidetracked.

“I’m just saying, maybe a real friend wouldn’t be making all these decisions about how someone else identifies. That’s rude.”

“Hmm. Do you want a friend, or do you want a therapist?”

I frowned. Okay, fair. But also maybe that was a way out of this mess. I felt like I had gotten in over my head. “Let’s say friend, right now,” I said.

“Okay.” Jenn scooted her chair forward, reaching out with one hand to rest it on my shoulder and squeeze it gently. “Hey, friend. I want you to know that you are who you want to be.”

“Thank you,” I sniffed. “Was that so hard?”

“And I’m glad to call you whatever you like, and / or use whatever pronouns make you happy.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Wait.”

“What? Do you want me to use pronouns that don’t make you happy?”

“No…”

“Perfect,” she said. “Then we’re in agreement.”

“But, um. Hold on a sec.”

“You’re right. We should be clear.” She smiled at me. “What name and pronouns would you like me to use for you?”

I gaped at her.

Jenn shrugged. “This is my bud Greg and he—”

I did a full body shiver. “No. Shut up. Jesus.”

“They? She? Something more bespoke?”

Disaster. My face was bright red and I was suddenly feeling very overheated. “I… I…”

“We could try out different ones and then see whichever you like best. No pressure. I mean, it might help to also get Avery’s help, and you know he’d be super supportive.”

I stood up, very suddenly, and Jenn leaned back in alarm. “I don’t have any control over you or the very silly things that you do,” I said imperiously. “Do whatever you want, I don’t even care.” And then I marched back out of the room, trying to ignore the noise of her suppressing a laugh.

Jesus. Why did I think this was a good idea?

Then I realized I was still tightly squeezing her fuzzy stuffed animal thing. Shit. My dramatic exit was tarnished by having to march back in, to set it firmly down on her bed.

Now she was laughing out loud. “It ruins the effect if you have to immediately flounce back in.”

“I am not flouncing,” I insisted.

“Sure thing, sweetie. You’re welcome to borrow Lorien, though, if you need a friend to hug.”

“I’ll get my own stuffed animals, thank you very much,” I said coldly.

I stormed out again, and tried to be particularly stompy, not flouncy, as I went down the stairs. 

The absolute nerve of her. I had clearly made a huge mistake in talking to her. She was too smart for her own good, that’s why she had left me so confused.

Avery walked out of the kitchen to see what the commotion was. He was still holding a bowl of cornflakes, apparently eating that as an evening snack.

“Everything okay?” he asked, and then took another bite.

I narrowed my eyes as I looked at him. “Avery, what would you say if I told you was transgender?”

His eyes grew as round as saucers and he choked on a mouthful of cereal.

“Thank you,” I said, watching in satisfaction as he coughed so hard that he doubled over and spilled milk all over his shirt. “That’s the reaction I was looking for.”