me: [furiously chugging a can of monster to try to complete my bingo card before i get kicked off the coolest parts of the internet]

the show exists in my memory as a sort of hazy, half-remembered, incomprehensible series of images. much like a dream that fades from your memory as soon as you wake up

omg, estradiol trifluoride is a terrifying concept

superb commitment to the bit to mock up the text as a screenshot of a pdf and spoof the cover of "Ignition!"

hahahaha, how can you know that you're trans if the world you grew up in worked overtime to convince you that trans people aren't real. that anyone who purported to be trans was either a disgusting sexual predator (every daytime talk show & comedy of the '80s & '90s) or a straight up serial killer ("Silence of the Lambs," "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," etc.)

i remember being stunned. i'd never even considered that such a thing was possible! but reading this description of a character who had changed her gender—complete with vaguely described futuristic procedures to give her a body that matched—was both shocking and amazing to me

imagine a future world where we can be whoever we want to be! where the technology exists to let our bodies match our minds! how glorious it would be!

maybe if i lived in that world—i quietly thought to myself, deeply embarrassed and ashamed to voice this thought even in the privacy of my own mind—maybe i could have that procedure. if only i had been lucky enough to live in that fictional scifi world maybe i could become a beautiful woman too

but it was impossible

it was only fiction

that doesn't happen in real life

i told myself to bury these thoughts, that it was shameful to think such things. i never revealed these thoughts to anyone. even as a child i recognized the need to guard against revealing myself to a society eager to humiliate and abuse those it regarded as deviants. as Isabel Fall put it,

the tiny part of my brain capable of thinking like an adult: "when is the last time you had a meal? or drank some water?" me: "i ate an apple last night and had eight tortilla chips for lunch"