#fontlife

I got this fantastic note in the mail, and I've been waiting for the right opportunity to respond, but just so it doesn't rot in my inbox here's the letter. I'm really touched by it, thank you for writing this! I'm glad I've been such a positive influence :D

Hi there Gwen, there are lots of things i'd like to say and i don't really know how or where to start, so this may (certainly) all come out very sloppy;  but i'll try my best.

I descovered touhou last Summer and got ridiculously into it over the last 6 month; found MotK when looking for info about ZUN's first visit to USA.

On a side Note, very impressive work with the scroll and thanks to all of you for giving our beloved Kannushi a proper welcome! It felt heartwarming as all you did summed perfectly my sympathy and respect for him even though i wasn't there; and hopefully this motivates him to come back in USA (and to us here in France :-3 ).

Now, while around on MotK i saw Helvetica on every thread and tought "Damn this guy is doing good job!".

Then yesterday, i read somewhere you talking about "lab reports" so i was like "Yay, another science enthousiast who loves Touhou!". Wanting to know more, i came to your Tumblr, read just the introduction and when i found out about you being a transgirl i immediately felt very uneasy and weirded out... it's hard to explain, it was like feeling dirty for having been associated with a trans and having one been associated with something i love (touhou) as well.

It kept bugging me the rest of the evening and after thinking for it after a while, lying in my bed, i realised it had nothing to do with you or your Gender but that i was simply being revolted at myself for feeling like this about you. I've always tough of myself as a -relatively- intelligent and well educated guy; or at the very least, as someone understanding and open-minded. So for some reason, i had always -ASSUMED- i whouldn't be bothered at all by a Gay/Trans/whatever person but without having ever to deal with one personnaly, i had always tought i whould be Worth better, be smarter than all those idiots that go around in the street and whould treat peoples like you as criminals, and i was suddenly discovering that i was wrong. Even though as i said before, you had initially struck me as someone very intelligent and interesting, i couldn't help but feel repulsed no matter how much i didn't want to feel that way and knew very well that there was no reason to feel that way.

i didn't sleep much last night; but when i woke up, i was curious to know more about you and your story so i started looking around the Tumblr, and i ended up spending most of the day reading it. You Really write very well.

All i want to say is that i honestly very touched and impressed by your courage, honesty and perseverence, really. I had never immagined how much painful and difficult even simple things can be for persons like you, tough now i at least i have some idea of it; i think.

I didn't pull punches in the first part of my rant; hopefully i haven't offended you too much, altought this sort of dirty revulsion is honestly how i've felt, much like i am also being honest now when i tell you that all of this is gone and that i now feel only immence respect for you and any others like you, and that you seem to me like one of the most genuinely kind person i have ever met anywhere.

What you wrote here have made me realize i had préjudices where i tought i hadn't, forced me to confront them and in just a few hours (Well, that was quick all things concidered!) have flipped them over like a pancake.

So long story short, even tough we never spoke, you just helped me become a better and more understanding person, and hopefully if i ever meet a trans in real life i will know better how to avoid hurting that person, and i wanted to write you this to thank you for it.

I'm a very shy guy in real life and don't really have any friends. Being someone generally curious about everything, i am an uber-nerd about many random and disconnected subjects, animals, space, video games, weapons, history, planes, scuba diving, paleontology.... And as a result, wherever i'm at or whoever i'm with, i feel permanently like i never really belong here, shouldn't be doing this, have nothing in common with these peoples, am an imposter in the group, that my presence here annoy everyone. I'm becoming more and more shut-in.

Interestingly, what you wrote in "The feeling of disgust and revulsion" feels extremely close to how i feel on my bad days, even though i'm not Trans or Gay, it's more, in my case, instead of a disgust with my orientation or my body (even tought i don't like my body physically as well), like a hate and revulsion against me and my personnality in general, my incapacity to engage with anyone, talk to anyone, build up motivation to do anything. I just lay on my bed for days, doing nothing, thinking about nothing...

Given how hard it can be for me when that happens, someone who, let's be honest, doesn't really have any real problems; i can only immagine how it must be for you and peoples like you when it's "one of those periods".

It seems that things haven't been doing well for you lately with your family, you have all my best wishes and hopes that things will be up eventually.

At the end of the day, i'm just a random dude on the internet, i'm not gonna try to pretend i know you or your parents, or how your father feel. But what i can tell you for myself, from the point of view of a Heterosexual male, is that the uneasy feeling i got originally was not, in the end, orientated against you but was actually about myself.

i thought a lot about this , and here is how i think it went down for me:

When we see a transgender person, i think, it initially, fundamentally disturbs our set codes of how we identify the other Gender, and by extension, our own. I don't know if i'm being clear here, but i'll try to put it this way: as a guy, i have always found girls sexy; now if i see a fellow guy, someone i immediately identify as "a Buddy", "a Bro", dressed as a girl, posing as a girl, acting and speaking and identifying herself as one, there is something about this that fundamentally challenge how i defined "guys", "girls" and how i fit myself in all this:

"If this guy can be a girl, does that mean girls can be guys? does that mean i can be a girl? does that mean i should love guys? girls? both? if girls can be guys and guys can be girls, is there any difference between them at all then?... "

"what does that all makes of me....?"

Even though we don't nessesarily realise it, i think because of this, we -perceive- transgirls and transguys as a threat to our own gender and sexual préférences, because it puts everything we tought we knew about this, and wich is a large part of our identity back into question. we see it as a  threat to us, we fear it.

And because we feel it as a problem, a threat to our identity, so peoples respond to it as any living organism react when they are scared: with either avoidance (disgust) or agressivity.

I know you wrote many times how you feel ravaged when someone misgenders you; i'm not trying to defend or justificate the behaviour of peoples who mistreated you in any way.

What i'm trying to say here is, next time someone mistreats you, i'd like you to remember that, from the point of view of a non-transexual, i don't believe it's actually hate or dismay against you personally, because that person disapproves your looks or your choices, or your personnality, it's only a reaction of self defence because they don't understand why someone who is physically a man could be sincerely thinking of herself as a girl; and because we all have it hardwired in our brains to fear what we don't understand, it's survival instinct; trying to preserve our own identity.

I don't feel uneasy at all anymore thanks to you, and think differently of male and female identity now as well. Because you have forced me to challenge this fear, and i understand you a little better now and why you have always tought of yourself as a girl.

And i think your parents will come to understand it as well, i'm convinced confronting them on it by openly posing as yourself will turn out to be the right thing on the long run, it was for me at least. What you did takes, in my opinion, a kind of courage that is a whole order of magnitude above the kind of movie hero courage of running headlong into an ennemy army like an inconscient, because you are confronting those you love, and realise the risks. It may take more time for them because You are their daughter, they know you personally, and care more than a random on the internet.

At any rate, you seem to write like they always more or less knew about it; but avoided the subject; so if they didn't love you, they whould have thrown away long ago, they are just being distant now because they don't know yet from wich angle to look at it. You should tell them some of the things you wrote here if you haven't yet.

Well here you go, congratulations for your courage; and congratulations if you are still reading this!

As you can see, i tend to make up for being shy in real life by being WAY too talketive on the interenet :-P

Oh, and there are 2 things i wanted to ask you, but you don't have to answer if you don't want to:

1) How did your chose your name? you wrote that you held for a while on it in hope your parents whould give you one, so did Gwen just came to you like this, or is there some reason or meaning behind it?

2) Could you write more about your undergraduate work and centers of interest in science?  Particle physics? seems like cool stuff! and you've barely spoken about this here! i grew up wanting to be a scientist too and was always fascinated by animals; i'm currently masters student in taxonomy at the Pierre and Marie curie university in paris put plan to branch out in behaviourial anatomy or ecology, i'd like to work with sharks or birds of prey! :-3

As far as my name goes, I've went through a laundry list of names before I finally settled on Gwendolyn. I definitely didn't want to use the feminine form of my birth name. I would get teased relentlessly by being called it whenever I acted too girly, so there was a lot of bad memories attached. I started with Amber, then was Rachel, then Paige, then Melody, then finally settled on Gwen.

Why Gwen? Because it sounded cool :V I did have a kind of girl crush for a long time on Lady Guinevere, and I loved the shortened version Gwen. I didn't want to go with Guinevere because I have an aunt named Jennifer and that was a bit weird. Other than that, really it came down to my roommate forcing me to finally settle on a name. Before that nobody really used it so it kind of floated to whatever I was into at the time.

As for my undergraduate work, it's kind of boring right now. I'm finishing up my sophomore year and I haven't started my major stuff yet. This semester is really interesting though as I managed to squeeze my way into the nanotech version of the first year engineering course. Our big lab project is to build a lab-on-a-chip assembly to test the amount of fluorescent chemical present in a test sample. I'm REALLY excited about this. Also I'm taking ballet! It's really really fun but really really hard D: I love it to pieces though so hopefully I'll get better :(

Last semester was mostly uneventful. I did have a really awesome sociolinguistics class, focusing on sex and gender in language. It was extremely fascinating to find out the differences between men's language and women's language. It gave me a lot of introspection of my own gender. For our final paper I ended up writing about sex and gender in cosplay, and how cosplay is not unlike gender. I might post it on here later for people to read.

As far as my aspirations, I'm definitely still set to work towards a doctorate of some kind, whether physics or electrical engineering or some sort of science. Since being back in school it's rekindled a love of discovery and a thirst for knowledge that has been neglected for a very long time.