#cogiati

Whenever I place the date I first began to question my gender, I say it was around 2002 or when I was twelve years old. I remember reading certain story arcs in EGS around that same time. But it could have very well been before that when I was perhaps ten or eleven. I remember being deeply unhappy as a boy. I would imagine transforming into a girl inside a cocoon. I would play Mario Party by myself as Princess Peach, mimicking her voice. I convinced my male friends to make female characters so I could play as a woman. I looked up what hormones would do to my body and how bottom surgery worked.

I also took the COGIATI.

You can still take the COGIATI today. (I’m not going to post the link, you can google it). It’s essentially a gatekeeping tool: a test to see whether you’re transgender. The first time I took it, I think I got slightly female. Then I kept taking it, and I would consistently get the “neither male nor female” response. The problem was, the test would ask things about how you felt about math, remember people’s names, and finding directions. These questions were sprinkled alongside some things about thoughts about gender and genitals. But they really had no business being on the test, and they were there to measure how male or female someone stereotypically thought or acted.

Since I didn’t get glaringly YOU ARE FEMALE results, I began to question my questioning. I also was attracted to women, and I didn’t hate my genitals. You see kids, back in the days of 2002, there were no trans lesbian stories for me to relate to, nor were there stories about trans women keeping the genitals they were born with unless they were sex workers. Eventually, I convinced myself that my desire to be a woman was a sexual fetish. Every so often in the back of my head, I would think to myself that there was something more, that I was repressing some aspect of myself.

Of course what I was repressing was THE FACT THAT I WAS TRANSGENDER. Now, here I am fifteen years later, peeking out of my egg, seriously questioning myself again.

Lately, I have been feeling anxious about everything transitioning will do to me. How it will affect my life. It makes me question my desire to transition and the wisdom of coming out. There are some very important people in my life who are smart and caring, but unfortunately outspokenly transphobic. Part of me wonders if they have a point and that I’m just not cut out to be a transwoman.

It’s this random internet quiz that claims it’ll tell you if you should transition or not. Really though the Combined Gender Identity And Transsexuality Inventory just tests how well you match up with random gender stereotypes that I guess Jennifer Diane Reitz buys into. It used to be kinda popular, but it’s thankfully mostly been forgotten and left behind with shit like Susan’s Place.

COGIATI Is The Worst Classic Text Adventure Game #Retrogaming #90snostalgia

So I know it’s been ages since I’ve done a video game review on here, despite promising I would be more proactive in that regard. So today’s game is a classic from the mid 1990s.  It appears to be some sort of text adventure created by the same designer that made the classic Apogee game BOPPIN.

The game is called COGIATI (which is probably one of those nonsense magic words like XYZZY or PLUGH).…