Robert looked around nervously before entering the small meeting room. Even though he didn’t actually think he was doing anything wrong, some part of his brain felt like people would somehow know that he was going to a campus trans group for what was probably the wrong reason. Admittedly Maya had said that allies were welcome, so maybe it was fine.

He was an ally, right? He definitely thought that trans people deserved rights, which seemed like it should be a low bar but somehow apparently wasn’t.

On the other hand, maybe he was being a creep and a “chaser”. Some people on Twitter seemed to think that cis men who were even just friends with multiple trans women were automatically creeps.

But he didn’t think he was, like, fetishizing anyone, right? He just thought Maya was cute. If she was a cis girl he would have had the exact same level of interest, probably. Hard to prove a counterfactual.

“Hey!” Maya said as he finally walked in. She was sitting in a small armchair. Besides the two of them, no one else was in the room.

“Hey,” Robert said. “Uh, is it just us?”

Maya shrugged. “People show up late pretty often. I usually wait ten minutes after the listed time to really start the meeting proper. I mean, it’s also possible no one else shows up. That happens once in a while. Anyway, we can just chat while we wait, I guess?”

“Sounds good,” Robert said. He swallowed. His mouth felt dry. His mind was blank for a moment before he managed to think of a single question.

“So, uh… how did you know you were trans? I mean, if that’s okay for me to ask. Feel free not to answer if it’s too personal or anything.”

“No, it’s a good question!” Maya said. “So… I think around the end of high school I was pretty unhappy, tended to avoid mirrors, didn’t really like the sound of my name, et cetera. I hadn’t really connected that to gender until I ran into some stuff online that said that, well, most cis men don’t frequently think about being a girl.”

“Huh,” Robert said. “I guess… I mean, I sure I’m just not well-informed and hopefully this isn’t, like, offensive but… I kind of got the impression that people just knew? That they had some kind of internal gender? I never fully understood that myself. I mean, I know how I feel, but I don’t have anything else to compare that to, you know? Like, assuming that most things aren’t inherently gendered, I can’t deduce an internal gender based on my interests or whatever. If that makes any sense.”

“Makes perfect sense to me!” Maya said. “To be honest with you, I don’t really know what people mean when they talk about an internal sense of gender either. Really, I just knew I wasn’t very happy and then I tried some things and they made me a little happier, and things continued from there. I don’t think there was some tapping into an internal truth so much as there was a slow migration in the direction that, based on me observing myself, seemed to make me happy.”

“Good to know,” Robert said. “I, uh… what kinds of things did you try? I mean, I’m… I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of seeing myself in the mirror or whatever, but I don’t really know if that has anything to do with gender. I guess it wouldn’t hurt for me to, like, try some stuff and see how I feel about it?”

“I think that’s a great idea!” Maya said. “I tried stuff like, I don’t know, getting friends to try out using different names and pronouns, getting new clothes. Stuff like that. And then later on hormones and stuff. I think some people see hormones as this big, irreversible decision, but they’re really not. If you start on hormones and then decide you don’t like it, you can just… stop. You can make a new decision every day to continue them or not. I found myself anxious at the idea of not taking them, so I guess I never really stopped. Except for that time when Kaiser absolutely fucked up my insurance so I couldn’t get any meds for a while.”

“Oh god, Kaiser,” Robert said. “Yeah, I’ve heard stories. I have friends who are twins and they somehow merged their accounts? Apparently they only identify people by last name and date of birth.”

“Wow, that’s incredible,” Maya said. “Truly just the worst.”

During the brief moment of silence that followed, another person entered the room.

“Oh, hey, Austen!” Maya said. “Take a seat!”

“Hey,” Robert said. “I’m Robert. Uh, any pronouns, I guess. Nice to meet you.”

Austen nodded, before saying, “He/him.”

Robert glanced over at Austen. He was relatively short, with black hair and nerd glasses. Robert really wasn’t sure if he was a questioning cis guy or a trans guy, but he was self-aware enough to not ask something like that.

He decided to stick to a safe topic of conversation. “So, uh, Austen. What major are you?”

“Math,” Austen said.

“What year are you?”

“Sophomore.”

Robert was starting to get the impression that this guy didn’t exactly talk a lot. He decided to try one more time. “Where are you from?”

“Don’t want to talk about it,” Austen said.

“O-okay. Sorry,” Robert said. He felt like he might have upset Austen, but it was a bit hard to tell.

There was another brief period of silence.

“Oh, hey, Juniper,” Maya said as another person entered the room.

“Hey! I have had the worst day,” Juniper said. “Oh hey, new blood. Juniper, they/them.” They offered their hand to Robert who hesitated for a moment before gingerly shaking it.

“What happened?” Maya asked.

Juniper groaned. “I just hate working at Starbucks. There’s this weird old white guy with an incredibly long beard who comes in and just orders ice in a cup every day and today my shift lead caught him jacking off in the bathroom.”

“Ew,” Maya said. “I guess maybe that’s the peril of offering free WiFi.”

“I don’t think he even had a phone or anything though,” Juniper said. “I dunno. I generally have tried to be nice to him because he might be homeless and mentally ill but today was just too much. Like, we explicitly ban masturbating in the bathrooms because we have to. Oh, and I didn’t even mention that he was wearing a Confederate flag shirt!”

“Yike,” Maya said. “No, you know what? I think that earned more than one. Yikes.”

“Anyway, sorry, we should probably talk about literally anything else,” Juniper said.

“Oh, I have flashcards with suggested topics! If no one has anything they want to talk about, that is. Does anyone have anything?” Maya asked.

There was a brief silence. “Alright, flashcards it is!” she said. She pulled a handful of index cards in a ziplock bag out of her backpack. “First topic: anyone have any good media suggestions with trans or nonbinary or gender-nonconforming characters?”

“I’m not sure if it’s what you’re looking for but I’ve read some webcomics with stuff like that?” Robert said. “It might be easier if I can just send the links.”

“Good idea!” Maya said. She pulled out her phone and started tapping at it. A moment later, she said “Alright! I made a shared Google doc for media suggestions that everyone on the mailing list should be able to edit. You probably got an email notification about it.”

Robert pulled out his phone and followed the link in the notification, then pasted in some links from his browser bookmarks. “Anyway, I think one of these has a nonbinary main character even though it’s not a super big part of the story, and another is focused on a trans girl, and the third one is about someone who wants to be a cute anime girl. Not one hundred percent sure either way if the last one has been canonically said to be trans or not though.”

Maya shrugged. “Eh, sounds pretty trans to me. I don’t necessarily care if the author agrees. Death of the author and whatnot. Also, I think I might have read that one, although it was a while ago. I feel like the downside of serialized webcomics as a format is that it can be hard to remember exactly where you left off when you want to catch up.”

“Yeah, I could see that,” Robert said. “I used to have an RSS feed set up and stuff but then the thing I was using got deprecated.”

“Aw, boo,” Maya said. “I’m against deprecation, especially of the self variety.”

“I always see people online who confuse that word with depreciation,” Juniper said. “One of those words that fanfic authors seem to be incapable of spelling, along with, like, cemetery and definitely.”

“Defiantly” Robert said, nodding.

Juniper laughed. “Oh, by the way, sorry, I don’t think I asked your name and pronouns.”

“Oh, uh, Robert. Any pronouns, I guess?”

Juniper squinted at him. “Are you equally fine with any and all pronouns, or do you have some you prefer over others? I know some people who are, like, he/they and they want people to try and use both equally.”

“I guess I hadn’t thought about it that much,” Robert said, feeling like he was repeating himself. “I mean… people usually just use he/him without asking, so I guess if you want to try others besides that it would be a new experience for me?”

“Sounds good!” Juniper said, nodding. “And yeah, I think this is a great safe space to try things like that out.”

“Safespace? That’s my favorite Marvel character!” Maya said.

Juniper groaned. “Please don’t remind me.”

Robert made a mental note to try and google whatever they were talking about after the meeting.

“Anyway, to get back on topic, any other media suggestions?” Maya asked. “We tend to have a lot of tangents,” she said as an aside to Robert.

“Those are the fun part!” Juniper said. “But, uh, yeah, some of this might be more general queer media but I have a visual novel suggestion.”

“If it’s Butterfly Soup I’ve already played it,” Robert said.

“Ah, never mind then,” Juniper said. “Same braincell.”

“I heard they’re working on a sequel,” Maya said. “Anyway, thanks to Simone from Polygon and her absolutely bizarre laugh for introducing me to that game. Absolute bicon.”

“I’ve mostly just watched BDG videos from them, to be honest,” Robert said. 

“Well, those are great too,” Maya said. “I don’t actually know if he’s bi or not but he for sure has the energy. And oops, we’re on another tangent. Anyway, feel free to add things to the media doc! But I think I’m going to move on to the next card.”

She pulled out another card and cleared her throat. “Does anyone have tips to try and prevent misgendering? Not to imply that it’s your fault or anything, and I don’t mean things about presentation or quote-unquote passing.”

“I’ve found it helpful to go places with friends and have them refer to me in the third person,” Juniper said. “I’ve tried things like pins and name tags but unfortunately a lot of people seem to ignore them.”

Maya sighed. “Yeah, I definitely feel that. Before I was on hormones for nine-ish months, I could not get people to gender me correctly. It didn’t really seem to matter what I wore or what I said. It really, really sucked.”

“That’s awful,” Robert said. He had a powerful urge to give her a hug, but he didn’t want to be weird. She probably didn’t want some weird dude she hardly knew touching her.

“At least it’s better now,” Maya said. “But unfortunately I guess that probably only works for people who want he/him or she/her pronouns and want to medically transition, which leaves out a lot of people.”

“This campus is pretty much the only place where people assume I’m a they/them, and I think it’s mostly because of the haircut and nose ring,” Juniper said. “When I used to have long hair people just assumed I was a she/her.”

“Yeahh…” Maya said. “Unfortunately I think even some people around here who recognize that nonbinary people exist have a weirdly narrow idea of what they look like.”

Juniper nodded. “Yeah, exactly. I’ve ended up just kind of going along with that so I at least get gendered correctly once in a while, but it’s not great that it feels like people might have to choose  between authentic expression versus what others expect their gender to look like.”

“In conclusion,” Maya said, “Gender is kind of weird and sometimes it’s bad, actually?”

“I kind of wish the concept of gender just didn’t exist,” Juniper said.

Maya made a face in response. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “I mean, I’m personally pretty attached to my gender. Anyway, next topic? Yeah, let’s go to the next topic. Uh, does anyone have tips for coming out to family and friends?”

For the first time in several minutes, Austen spoke up. “Don’t.”

There was an awkward silence.

“Any other suggestions?” Maya asked.

“I don’t have any personal experience with this, but if you’re worried about violence, I imagine coming out either via a letter or email might feel easier and be safer if they’re far away. And if you’re going to meet in person to discuss the subject it might be a good idea to do it in public or with friends there?” Robert said.

Maya nodded. “That makes a lot of sense. I know that starting out I found it really hard to even force the words out when talking about my gender, so writing things down was pretty helpful. It also lets you think about and tweak the wording a lot more than just saying stuff out loud. Anyway, next topic?”

Things continued on in approximately this vein until the meeting ended about an hour later. Robert hung back a bit until once again it was just him and Maya in the room.

“Hey,” she said upon glancing up after she finished packing up her backpack.

“Hey,” Robert said, anxiously scuffing at the linoleum tiles with the toe of one sneaker. “I, uh… would you want to, maybe, uh… hang out at some point?”

“Yeah!” Maya said. “You seem cool. Sounds fun. I have your email from the list so I can send you my number and stuff so we can make plans. I gotta head out but we can talk more later, ‘kay?”

“Sounds good!” Robert said. He waited for the door behind her before doing a big fist pump.