I was in first grade when I began to dream of being a girl.

Most of the details of the first dream are now indistinct, but I remember well how it ended. 

Something I could not see or understand was chasing me. 

I desperately tried to escape it. And as I ran, trying to outmaneuver it, I found myself cornered. 

The thing that I felt but could not see caught me. And as it overtook me, and in the moments before waking, I felt my body begin to change. I knew what was happening as it happened instinctually. I was becoming a girl. And, even as I had tried to escape it, I still knew that I wanted it. More than anything else in the world.

And then I woke up, back to the shape I had gone to sleep with.  And while the dream was gone, the memory remained.

I had a tendency towards nightmares as a child. Faceless people stealing away my voice and dragging me away. Drowning underneath the sea with no hope of escape. Losing friends and family and being alone. 

But somehow, despite the chase and the fear, this had felt like a good dream.

I continued to dream of changing into a girl in the years that followed. Of looking like the other girls my age. I felt myself aching to feel at home in my own body. I never felt right looking at my own reflection and, in dreams, I would either see a twisted and distorted face looking back at me, or I would desperately try to will my features to match who I knew I truly wanted to be. Dreams were the only way I could see my true self.

But as I struggled with these dreams and the feelings they brought, I was terrified to tell anyone the truth. I spent decades of my life running from my desires, but... like it did all those years ago, no matter how much I tried to escape it, it was no use. I still felt wrong living as a male.

I hid from myself in dreams, but also games. Games had always offered me the escape that I desperately needed from the pain of my body and my assigned gender. There was something so comforting about being able to pull up a “Character Creation” screen in an RPG and carefully adjust my avatar until it finally looked the way I wanted to. The NPCs would refer to my character as “she” and “her”. Nobody cared what I, the person sitting in the chair, looked like. As far as the game was concerned, I was a girl.

Role-playing games with real people made it even better, if slightly more complicated. When I was playing an MMORPG, all the other players could see was the girl character representing me. People would refer to me as a girl. I could be seen as a girl. Maybe I felt like I was just pretending, but, again, nobody knew any different.

But, when my fellow players could see me sitting on the other end of the table, things were harder to explain.

When me and my friends sat down to play pen and paper RPGs with twenty-sided dice and all, I remember checking the box on my character sheet for the first time. Without a second of hesitation, I marked “Sex: F.” There was something fulfilling about the act. 

Whenever I would fill out forms in the real world, I was forced to put down that I was a male with a sense of shame. I would feel that brief wave of unease at going into the male restroom. But, here, sitting with the people I hoped I could trust, I could hedge my desires somewhat. “My character is a girl, so when other characters talk to her, they need to refer to her with the right pronouns.”

My friends were unsurprisingly confused, at first. Concerned. Weirded out. Sometimes outright hostile. But… they were still my friends, for better or worse. And I was still allowed to play with them.

Games were the only way I could get to express the feelings I otherwise had to have locked away. Games kept me sane when the crushing pain of the world became too much. Fantasy was my escape hatch for a world in which I didn’t fit.

Eventually fantasy gave way to reality. I was able to transition. I was finally able to live as the woman I always knew that I was. I learned that I had always been a woman from the start, and living as a man had been a fantasy all along.

But I never forgot those earlier years where I had to survive in realms of make-believe. And in this divide between truth and lies is where the following story takes place.

Zoey’s Story is in many ways my own. It will be familiar to other transgender people. It isn’t uniquely a transgender story, but it is a story about identity. About the divide between fiction and reality and how they shape one another. 

It is about finding the courage to be who you are and to face a world which, many times, refuses to accept it. It’s a story of pain, of struggle and of sorrow... but it is ultimately one of hope. Because that is the transgender experience, in a nutshell. We step out of the box that doesn’t fit us, in hope to find something better.

I wish all who read this story the best on their journey. You are real, you are valid and, above all else, you are loved.

-Katie

[Thank you to ZoeyStorm, Quasinym and MaximusPrime for their feedback in making this story possible.]