CHAPTER NOTES: Suicide. Blood. Suicide by transphobia.

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This is not a dream. This is a memory.

Your big sister was so brave to come out to you. After weeks of experimenting with female forum avatars, female characters in video games, and female pronouns for herself, she knows what she wants. What she needs.

The world seems so much brighter for her, now.

You tell her you think she'll look good with long hair. You tell her that shaving her moustache off was an improvement (seriously, it was an improvement). You let her know that those high cheekbones of hers will come in handy so much in the future. Imagine never being misgendered, ever, you tell her. Always being called "ma'am" in stores.

Plus, she has girlish calves. She is going to look so good in knee-length skirts and long stockings.

It's no use for her to come out to her parents. She's not living with them anymore, anyway. And she works from home, so the awkwardness of coming out at work should hopefully be mitigated by that.

Friends, she guesses, can come later. She's not ready to announce this on her Tumblr yet. She insists that she's still in the experimental stage, doing this with new identities in places she's never been before.

There's just one more person she wants to come out to, right now.

Her girlfriend. The one bright spot in her life of betrayal, abuse, and trauma.

You sit in her desk chair and watch patiently, as she tells her girlfriend all this through online chat. In gushing, hopeful terms.

Her girlfriend replies:

I'm sorry, but I just don't think I could see myself with another girl.

You watch your big sister's face twist with agony and heartbreak.

Your codependent big sister, homeschooled her whole life, with abandonment issues and cripplingly low self-esteem.

Your suicidal big sister who attempted it last year, only to get kicked out of the house after she failed.

Your traumatized big sister who's never been on psychiatric medication, never done drugs or coffee or tea, feels guilty if she even masturbates, and has never had an internal source of validation in her entire life. Who would give her right arm for anyone she got attached to, who let her get close to them, even if they were using her.

Your heartbroken big sister who's laying slumped half on her bed, half on the floor, frozen and expressionless.

She's made her choice.

She places the knife in your hand.

She closes your fingers around it.

She shows you the right angle to enter from.

I want to die, you think. I don't want to do this. I can't do this. Not again.

But her pain is so intense. It's the final straw, in a lifetime of final straws.

You give her the only thing you have to give her. The only thing anyone can give her, anymore.

She gasps, her face frozen in a wordless scream, as your hands become coated with blood. Dripping onto the carpet.

Then she slumps backwards, her eyes still open. Unmoving. Unblinking. Unfeeling.

You are a monster.

---

For all that you were close to your big sister, it's your little sister that you were always inseparable from.

You and she would play outside and in online games all the time. Communicating without words, like you were on the same wavelength. So close and intimate, you could say the same thing at the same time when talking to someone else, without planning it in advance.

Lately she's been dejected.

She was so excited to make a new friend who was Japanese-[YOUR NATIONALITY]. She's always been into the culture, and this friend of hers loved sharing it with everyone. Posting it all over her Tumblr, explaining the intricacies of old children's anime from the 70's and newer TSF manga. Tearing this TV personality a new one for not knowing how to eat ramen but presuming to explain it anyway.

Criticizing new shows. Offering up pictures or excerpts that are self-evidently ridiculous, you guess. Making fun of non-native speakers of Japanese for trying to speak it. She also spends an alarming amount of time accusing people who like anime that she doesn't of supporting incest and child molestation.

You actually aren't so sure about this girl. She seems to spend an awful lot of time telling people what it's not okay to like. And it's like, she'll post one thing, and it'll get picked up by her friends, and pretty soon you've got reblogs that look like

IF YOU ARE WHITE YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO WEAR A KIMONO

IT👏IS👏CULTURAL👏APPROPRIATION👏

And then someone you've never heard of gets harassed off the internet.

You don't think that this relationship is very healthy for your little sister. Every couple of weeks, she climbs into bed and doesn't get out all day, except to take her meds really belatedly or use the bathroom. Sometimes you hear her banging her head on the wall.

When she finally opens up to you, it always turns out that this girl that she's friends with (or one of her friends) made fun of people who like the same things that she does.

Your little sister is going to therapy. She's on medication. She gets athletic activity and eats relatively well. She just completely shuts down and loses all will to live, when this happens.

You've never been this out of sync with her before.

You spend awhile talking to her, trying to get her to open up. She's autistic, so it's easier to do it in text.

You eventually get her to show you her stash of #goals pics, or "pictures of who I want to look like when I complete my gender transition into a girl."

Every one of them is an anime girl. Often with fox ears and tail. Often childish and playful. Always with the same expressionless face she shows the world.

Your sister's not good at talking about what she wants. She has trouble seeing things in terms of "like" or "dislike." Instead, she sees them in terms of what action they compel. "This person must be protected." "This person must be avoided." "This person must be loved."

These characters? In her #goals folder?

"I must become this person, or die trying."

That kind of alarms you. So does her self-injury. You find out she doesn't just do it when one of these incidents happens; she also does it while studying Japanese. A lot. Sometimes every single time that she gets a word wrong, in quizzes.

You ask her why. She says that she'll never, ever be as good as a native speaker, and she'll always be open to mock or make fun of. No one in Japan will ever accept her. Not as a friend, and certainly not as an equal.

You begin to understand what is going on.

You ask your little sister if it's okay to try to reach out to this girl online that she's friends with, and ask her to tone it down a little. Be a little more sensitive. Respect your sister's efforts a little more, like by not replying to her in English when she replies to a Japanese-language post in Japanese.

Your little sister gives her permission.

When you write the letter, you use the word "dysphoria" to describe how your little sister feels about all of this. It seems like an unusual place for it, but well ... you call it like you see it.

Her friend's response is a five-page public Tumblr post in eerily measured language, about how [YOUR LITTLE SISTER'S ETHNICITY] people who try to say they're Japanese, in any way, are colonialists. They're appropriating the culture. They're butchering the language. They're a huge problem that's plaguing the Japanese-[YOUR NATIONALITY] community, taking time away from people whose needs are more urgent because they're minorities.

Even worse, some of them are appropriating transgender identity and language, claiming to experience dysphoria about their ethnicity when that simply can't happen. It's scientifically impossible.

These motherfuckers need to be called out whenever they show up, her friend says.

They need to be cancelled.

You haven't read the response yet when your sister texts you from upstairs, asking you to make her some kitsune udon.

You just got home from work, so you text her back and say it'll be about twenty minutes. Is that okay? you ask.

Yes, she says.

You remember the time she stopped eating for two days, after her friend made fun of people for enjoying the wrong kind of food. You really hope her increased appetite is a good sign.

You bring the noodles up to her room, and knock on the door.

No response.

You turn the handle. It isn't locked.

You push the door open and

Your little sister is fucking dead.

She is hanging from the ceiling lamp. There's a damp spot on the carpet underneath her.

You will never forget the look on her face.

You clean everything up, including the spilled noodles. Wordless. Expressionless.

You delete your Tumblr account.

You don't feel anything.

---

Moving on from heartbreak is hard. Especially when there's no one there to do it with anymore.

You find not just empty distraction, but genuine solace, in Final Fantasy XIV Online. It's one of those online games where you make your own character. It's also made in Japan by a Japanese company.

That's like, a sign of quality, right?

You're so tired of Western fantasy. All those men with football linebacker shoulders and shoulderpads. All those women with broken spines and impossibly curvy figures, dancing nekkid on top of mailboxes in Ironforge. And they're men and women of the same species, supposedly.

Movies and games are even worse. You bought Mass Effect for the yuri, dammit. Instead, the whole game is a third-person shooter. Everything is a shooter of some kind. And all of the movies are superheroes, and all of the heroes are guys.

It seems you have had the misfortune of being born into a society that is allergic to cuteness. And girls.

Being able to make your own character in FFXIV was a revelation. You chose the one that felt most "right," out of the options they gave you, and ended up with a female Mi'qote Keeper of the Moon.

Meaning, a catgirl with Asian-coded facial features.

Somehow, out of all the choices available, that one just felt most like "you." Like you were looking through a mirror, that showed you what you could be. It wasn't perfect, you would have preferred fox ears, but it was like ... "Is this really me?"

"Am I actually allowed to be this? I can just go out there like this and no one will think that it's weird?"

"There's no way. There's just no way."

But there was.

It takes you awhile to realize what those feelings mean. To think back on your little sister's death, and the things that she told you before then. And the fact that you were someone that they made sense to.

You're miffed at yourself, for being like this. You're stubborn. You don't want to admit it to anyone, least of all yourself. Because there's nothing you can do about it, right? Maybe someone in Thailand will give you eyelid surgery, but there's still like, skeletal structure. Skin tanning versus burning. The smell of your sweat. And why the hell are you even thinking of all this stuff, anyway?!

What kind of freak are you?

You have these huge backs and forths with yourself every night, until you finally can't argue anymore. You are literally the kind of freak who'd give anything to be an anime girl for one day. And that specific part of being an anime girl is really important to you.

The night you come out to your LGBTQ+ Free Company, which is basically your clan or guild in FFXIV, you light candles in your makeshift shrine to Tamamo-no-Mae. The historical one, not the Fate one. And you beg the patron saint of outsiders who just want to be Japanese girls, to please give you the words to make someone understand.

Anyone.

But no one does.

And as you look down at the highway, from the overpass, you think maybe you were wrong about this all along. And your little sister's friend was right.

You think it's better to have a world without you in it, than one that demeans and denies rights to transgender people by comparing them to you.

You, who are just playing pretend.

You pretend to step off the side.

The curb hitting your face is real.