When I was younger strange things started happening. People all around the world would randomly wake up with some strange superpower. Nobody knows how or why any of it happens, It just does. There is no pattern, no way to predict it, and, as far as anyone knows, no way to reverse it.

Every time you go to bed there is a small chance that you will wake up with some new life-changing ability.

Sometimes these powers are accompanied by a physical change too. Anything from a slight shift in eye color to a complete physical makeover is possible.

As time passed people came up with a name for the people with powers. Gifted. It's a kind of dumb name because a lot of people did not see their powers/transformation as a gift, but that's the name that everyone else adopted for them.

Obviously, in a society so pumped full of stories of superheroes and powers, some people were bound to end up as heroes and villains.

Pretty cheesy, I know, but that's just what happens when random people get gifted superpowers, they either believe they can do anything and commit crimes, or they believe that they can do anything and try to stop those crimes. Either way, both heroes and villains usually end up with some really unfortunate and problematic god complexes.

After the initial wave of chaos that followed those first transformations, things started to calm down. The Gifted started realizing that becoming a hero or villain is a damn good way to get killed in some horrific way. And the Heroes that remained started getting smarter in how they handled the villains that constantly threatened the general populace by calling in the hero that was most suited to take care of whatever specific issue. It was a pretty lame start to what would eventually become heroes leagues, but that didn't really matter, I'm just glad that they don't destroy entire cities when fighting villains anymore.

Gifts were also sort of strange and confusing. They could range from being able to throw paper airplanes with total accuracy to the whole superman package, flight, super-strength, near-invincibility.

Weirdly enough, the people with the most strange and niche gifts ended up being the best heroes. Say what you want about the paper airplane power, but The Paper Pilot was once the most successful and feared hero amongst villains. And the Superman knock-off got way too cocky for his own good and fought some powerful radiation-based villain. Turns out skin as hard as diamonds won't save you from the excessive amount of cancer that he got from that encounter.

Even if it seemed like a stereotypical comic book world, there were definitely things that didn't line up. There weren't many people gunning for world domination, most villains ended up being people pissed off at society as a whole and took it way too far, or someone paid off by some greedy company to steal from their competitors.

When I first learned about the Gifts that some people got I was confused and scared about what it meant for the world. But as time went on and things calmed down, those fears died and were replaced by something else, something that clawed away at the back of my mind and kept me up at night. I wasn't scared anymore, I was jealous.

It wasn't jealousy for the powers, I could care less about those, but the transformation that sometimes came with them. I knew something was wrong with me. I couldn't bear to look in the mirror half the time, I didn't look bad per se, but I didn't want to look how I did.

As I got older I realized exactly what it was: dysphoria, I wasn't supposed to be a boy.