c l a r a

(cn: piss, foot stuff)

It clicked for me about a month ago, years after it had become apparent to the people who knew me, but I’m not short-sighted and self-pitying enough to think that meant I’d wasted time or could’ve made the leap sooner. If I was less kind to myself I’d say ‘boy, I had the maps and I knew the landmarks so how’d I end up in the wilderness so long’ but I was sailing through fog, and you know what? When I saw that landmass looming in the distance, I sailed towards it.

I didn’t know totally what it meant, still don’t in fact. Last year I joked about being a cis boy dyke, and since then I’ve struck the 'cis’ and I’m shaky on the 'boy’ and the part that was a joke was the truest thing of all.  Am I a boy? Maybe. A woman? I don’t think so. A man? I truly fucking hope not. A good girl? Put a collar on me and we’ll see.

The thing about fog is that you can’t just step back and get a big picture view of everything. My instincts tell me that if I want to figure things out I should look at them at a remove, see where it fits into everything around it, map things out and move forward cautiously. That’s what I want to do, it’s what I’ve always done, but fog makes it impossible. You have to get in close if you want to see things, you can’t keep it at a distance.

I couldn’t move ahead and start hormones right away, not for a few months, for reasons I won’t get into here. Delays don’t sit well with me brain because I know my brain and I don’t trust it, I don’t trust it not to treat this like some other big rewarding involving project like learning Polish or playing Go, decide we’re too busy and it’s too scary and shove the whole thing into a mental oubliette to never see the light of day again. Sure, my friends call me Charlotte now and I’ve got she/her next to my Discord username, but I wanted something stronger, I wanted something that would cut into me.

I can’t remember the name of the first trans woman I knew as a person, rather than as a punchline to a cruel joke. It was on Tumblr and it must have been after 2015 because I remember she had an Undyne avatar, but maybe not, because surely Violet, the “boy” I’d been practically engaged to, had come out as trans at that point? Surely I knew Skeeter, that poor, vicious mess of a girl well enough by then? It must have been earlier than that, the ponies had turned me queer by 2013 at the latest.

No, no, the Undyne-avatar lady was the first time I saw someone I knew be openly *Marxist-Leninist*, she was just also trans.

Anyway I don’t know what it was, but even though I was rock-solid confident in being cis and a guy (a guy or a dude, it never bought me any joy to think of myself as a 'man’), something about trans women just really stuck with me. I found their stories compelling, I found their experiences interesting and oddly relatable, though I didn’t suffer dysphoria as I thought they described it. I made friends with some trans girls, some of my friends became trans girls, and suddenly most of my friends were trans girls. I burned at injustices done to them, I bought hormones for friends, donated to trans street medic projects, helped newly-cracked eggs get in touch with DIY medding sources, y'know, normal cis ally stuff.

Recently, I realized that I loved trans women. I fucking love them so much. I fucking love all of the varied and fractious transfemme communities that have allowed me to be a part of them, as nothing more than a cis guy who draws a lot of porn. I’m not going to say anything about Blahaj and Bridget and pink coding socks because I know the girl who fucking hates that silly terminally-online stereotype and I know the girl who *is* that silly terminally online stereotype and I love them both and love so many trans girls in all their aspects between and beyond those boundaries. I have never found myself so close to any group of people, so filled with admiration and wonder and love and lust for them, so overjoyed by their trust and friendship and confidence in me, so blessed to call myself a friend and contemporary, as I have of the trans women in my life.

I had accepted some time ago, with no pain and more than a little pride, that I would admire them but be apart from them, that my place would be as a welcome guest, that I would be among them but not one of them, and–

A crack has opened within me to let the light seep in.

I’m one of them. I really am one of them, they’re mine and I am theirs and I never want to let this go, this revelation is a gift that I’m barely beginning to comprehend and I can’t bear the thought that I might let it pass me by and slouch back into darkness.

So, I would bring a change upon myself, in a way that was small but could not be un-changed, a vow that could not be forgotten, only consciously recanted.

I cut out a lot of the idea before I brought it up, mostly out of time and expedience. I thought of a prayer to Inanna, but that felt like a clumsy thing to rush, and I decided I’d make a shrine to her only once I had the wisdom to pay Her proper respects. I liked the idea of getting caned or whipped in a purifying way first, but that felt too much like regular kink, just inspiration for another drawing. The idea of doing the ritual under psychedelics intrigued me but, well, I’ve never done anything but amphetamines and poppers before, and I didn’t want to dull the experience of either the ritual or the drugs by combining the two under my own inexperience - though, I did include poppers.

Alice, Emily and Lily - not their real names but you get the picture - were very good about it. They told me it was a cute idea, and we met up at Emily’s ground-floor studio flat on Sunday night. We’d have been playing board games anyway, and they even seemed a little excited by the idea, even if they weren’t buzzing from anticipation like me.

I’d only worn the clothes once since I’d bought them - black tights, a knee-length straight skirt, a black blouse - but my heart didn’t pound like that the first time I put them on. I shaved my face upwards and against the grain, my skin still annoyingly stubble-grey, but that would show much less in the candlelight.

When I stepped out of Emily’s bathroom the girls had already set things up, candles and all. They were sitting on chairs in a semi-circle, backlit by flickering orange candlelight. As I approached they got stage giggles; I did too, it felt infectious.

Once the giggles had cleared, Alice, in the middle, asked me to state my name and purpose.

'My name is Sophie, and I am here to recieve communion.’

'Very well,’ said Alice, and pointed to a spot between their chairs marked in white tape. I knelt there, a bowl of water to one side and a small bag at the other.

I turned to Lily, bowed my head, and asked her if I could wash her feet. She nodded, and I took the bowl and wash cloth and gently cleaned her feet with warm water. Once they were clean and free of sweat and sock lint, I bent down to dry them with my hair. She nodded her approval, and I asked Emily if I could do the same for her. Likewise I cleaned her feet and likewise dried them with my hair. Alice did not get her feet out, for me nor anyone, and instead allowed me to lick her shiny black boots, which only had the faintest hint of grit to them.

Once I had performed the ablutions, the girls daubed me. Alice held my jaw firm in one hand as she applied mascara to each of my lashes with the other, Emily let me rest my chin on her fingertip as she painted my lips a vibrant red, and Lily stroked my hair as she marked my cheeks with blush. They cooed and called me pretty, and Lily’s blush felt superfluous.

I presented each of them with a gift: An Adventure Time tarot deck for Lily, a sharpening stone for Emily, a guide to mushrooms for Alice. They accepted the gifts, and gave me gifts in return: a simple black choker from Lily, a bottle of amyl nitrite from Emily, a stack of trans zines from Alice. My voice cracked a little as I thanked them, and cracked a little more after they watched me take a few long, heady hits from the poppers bottle.

Alice asked me if I was ready to recieve communion; I begged her, please, yes.

She took a blister pack of 2mg estradiol and popped out a single blue pill. I knelt and looked up at her, eyes open, heart thumping, mouth wide.

She placed the tiny pill on my tongue and said, 'Sophie, this bread is your flesh, which is given to you.’

Then, she stood up, unzipped her jeans, pulled her limp cock out of her underwear and pushed it between my lips, which I wrapped tight around it.

'Sophie, this wine is your blood, drink this in rememberance of yourself.’

It took her a moment to start pissing, and her urine immediately washed the pill down my throat. It tasted fucking disgusting, almost as salty as seawater with that weird, almost chemical aftertaste. It turned my stomach, and I felt euphoric as I sucked it down.

After that they praised me and called me a girl and a faggot and a whore, and I kept sucking Alice’s cock until Emily wanted a blowjob too, and from there it turned into regular lesbian sex, Lily’s chastity cage clinking fruitlessly against mine as Emily went around biting us both and Alice had me lick her armpit clean of sweat, fingering and kissing and pinching until we all got tired enough to start watching movies in Emily’s bed.

I got up and fetched drinks and sandwiches for everyone and something happened between aftercare, the aftermath of a religious service, and an after-action report. They all kept calling me a pretty girl, which I *really* liked, and Alice asked me how the whole thing had turned out, if I felt anything had changed, and I had to eat two salami and cucumber sandwiches before I could figure out my answer.

Something had changed, but the change had happened months ago, and it had taken communion for me to see it. It didn’t clear up my questions or reveal hidden knowledge, I don’t know if I’m a she/her boy or a he/him girl, I don’t know if I’m actually a woman or just not at all a man, I don’t know if this is a thing I’ve become or if I’ve been this all along and it’s taken this long to discover it. I don’t even know if I’ve really settled on Sophie.

All I got from communion, from this sacred connection of love and knowledge from other trans girls to me, was surety in the things I already kinda knew: