<p>I stand by the fact that not every trans, non-binary, or queer person experiences gender through a negative lens. Dysphoria is not a requirement for being trans. It has to be the case that there be a positive way to experience gender, or transition would be simply an exercise in futility. There has to be a flip side. There has to be gender euphoria.</p>
<p>There has to be the little thrill of typing <code>morph female</code> and being able to interact with the world around you — even if that’s only in the instance of a furry text-base role-play game — as something other, something truer. There has to be that even when you still enjoy the body you’ve got.</p>
<p>There has to be some flip-side, right? There has to be a flip-side to the gender euphoria that I was feeling, and that was a slowly mounting dysphoria.</p>
<p>If we got here through any one part of the trail I mentioned, it was through Younes specifically, more than <em>just</em> furry or <em>just</em> self-harm, because with Younes, so much started to hit me in a very visceral, physical way. It was one thing for me play as a girl online, to touch on aspects of gender and fertility and even sexism. It was another to be confronted with the fact that maybe the body that I had wasn’t okay.</p>
<p>“I remember laying on the couch,” you said. “That awful, awful yellow couch, and [JD] getting playful, and then some little movement of his touched a nerve and I started crying because of the way that brushed up against me wasn’t in focus.”</p>
<p>“It brought to the forefront the fact that I didn’t align with myself,” you said. “That there was a lag in my proprioception, that I was falling behind myself.”</p>
<p>Are you looking at my finger, or the moon? Don’t dodge this. I’m pointing at the fact that you came at gender through furry, then through self-harm, and yet this quote, this realization of “oh, shit, I might actually be trans”, is all the way on the other side of that goofy map you make, and from there, you headed into talking about your dad.</p>
<p>Gender is woven throughout this entire project. Gender is woven throughout your entire life. You build a map of this site like a web, and it is gender that is helping to hold it together.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is identity that is holding it together.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Name a part of your identity that figures larger in your life than gender.</p>