someone asked on my other blog what being transgender means to that character, so i thought iād write about it here too.
unlike aurora, whose transition is relatively straightforward ā male to female ā wolfgang is a nonbinary individual, meaning their gender dysphoria is fluid and inconsistent. it's less "today i feel like a man and yesterday i felt like a woman!" because... what exactly does it mean to "feel" like a woman or whatever, i hate that shit, and it's definitely not "today i dressed like a girl and tomorrow i'll dress like a boy" because presentation is part of gender roles. it's more specifically feeling a disconnect between their brain's mapped index of their body and their physical sex characteristics, which can range from mild to severe and which varies over time. this can make actually identifying their dysphoria tricky; how do you tell if you donāt feel dysphoric because your gender matches your assigned sex at that particular moment, or because youāre just not having a particularly dysphoric day? answer: itās fucking hard.
wolfgang is designated male at birth, meaning a doctor looked at them, saw a penis, and went āthatās a boy,ā so their parents raised them as a boy. or tried to, anyway. generally speaking wolfgang desires a body mostly free of primary sex characteristics and male secondary sex characteristics. unfortunately it is basically impossible to find a doctor willing to do sex reassignment surgery to give you barbie doll crotch, and anyway that would not really be a ācureā to their dysphoria since itās fluid anyway; essentially they are always going to feel uncomfortable in a body that will never quite match what their brain expects it to. thatās not to say that they hate their bodyĀ or anything, just particular aspects of it are kind of unpleasant.Ā part of the reason for their intimacy issues is that drawing attention to their sexual organs makes them dysphoric. they take androgen blockers that restrict their body's production of testosterone, which does things like reduce their production of body hair and redistribute the fat on their body, but don't take supplemental estrogen, which is uh, actually not great for you. if they had to choose, though, they would much rather be female than male; the dysphoria they experience from male sex characteristics is way worse than female ones, though tbh that may be a case of the grass being greener on the other side.
wolfgang is not actually aware that theyĀ ācountā as transgender at this time, their understanding of the term transgender is people designated one sex who want to transition to the opposite sex, they donāt really know that being nonbinary is like... a thing and theyāre not alone in this, they kind of just think theyāre some sort of freak. :\ i am super interested in having them discuss gender with other trans characters but theyāre super hard to find and tbh iām picky i hate it!!! when people use cis men for trans women etc.
in terms of presentation they are femme-leaning, which is largely a consequence of feminine gender traits being othered in our culture; personally they consider their look androgynous but long hair and feminine features donāt read as such to most people; i have some Thoughts on how androgyny in western culture usually means like super skinny (white) people with largelyĀ āmasculineā-coded features like short hair, flat chests, etc. and also like, how genderedĀ long hair is, it is insane that people will say someone is androgynous just because itās an otherwise totally masculine dude who happens to have long hair. i super want to stress that gender presentationĀ is different from gender itself. wearing a dress or having long hair doesnāt make you a girl any more than putting on a pair of pants makes you a boy.















