Transmasculine Gothic

• You walk into the men’s room. Some cis dude is taking a shit in the only stall. You walk away and come back. He is still there. You eventually give up and use a different bathroom. The next time you return, he is still in the stall. He is always there.

• You start testosterone, eager to see your hips vanish. Over time, you get exactly what you wished for. Your hips shrink and shrink and shrink, and soon they become concave. Waist-training corset enthusiasts envy your hourglass figure. Eventually, your body becomes a chest floating over a pair of legs, unconnected by pesky hips. You bask in your gender euphoria.

• You do not start testosterone. It is not the right choice for you. You watch as the trans men around you go on HRT one by one and slowly begin to change. Their arms get bigger and more muscular. Their legs become thick, like tree trunks. Dark hair sprouts all over their bodies, covering their skin in fur. Their shoulders hunch. They begin grunting and beating their chests in a masculine fashion. They have become what they were always meant to be: apes. Literal apes. You assist your brethren in foraging and finding food. They are hungry. They are always hungry.

• Your testosterone is making you horny. As you continue your HRT, two spots on your forehead begin tingling periodically. One day, you wake up to find two little knobs on opposite sides of your forehead. One of them is twice as big as the other one. The awkwardness of second puberty is really getting to you. You can’t wait until both horns are fully grown in and symmetrical.

• You go into the men’s section to buy new clothes. You’ve only just come out to yourself. You are nervous and wondering if you really belong here. There’s whispering in the underwear aisle. You draw closer with a growing sense of dread. “Pick me,” a pack of black, grey, and red boxers says. “No, me,” says a two-pack of expensive trunks. “You belong here just as much as any other guy,” a pack of white cotton jock straps says. You take the jock straps with a surprised smile, and when you wear them, they whisper words of comfort to you every time you’re misgendered.

• You go into the women’s section to buy new clothes, because fuck gender roles. After finding a couple of cute tops, you stop by the makeup section to stock up on eyeliner. It’s a mess. The underpaid, undertrained employees tried the best they could, but the eyeliner sticks got out. They’re flapping around on wings so sharp they could kill a man. Fortunately, you know what to do. You’ve been training all your life for such situations. You place a rare picture of Pete Wentz wearing no eyeliner into a cage, and the sticks fly in and attack him voraciously. You shut the cage with a shudder. The manager arrives too late to actually help with the problem, right as the employees have just started unenthusiastically cleaning up the mess. He offers you free eyeliner as thanks. Seeing poor smudged, shredded Pete in the cage, you decline and take some haunted mascara instead.

• A poltergeist lives in your house. He’s usually a nuisance, knocking over furniture and misplacing your binder and spinning your packer in the air while making helicopter noises. After top surgery, you arrive home doped up on pain meds and dreading his presence. The house is suspiciously quiet for a week. You think that he must be planning something as you negligently reach up into the cabinet for a dish. Suddenly an invisible hand presses down on your arm and forces it down to your side while the other one pulls down the dish for you. It settles gently down onto the counter with a clink. He continues to reach for things for you over the next couple of months, so you don’t raise your arms and hurt yourself. His normal antics don’t resume until after you’ve fully recovered.

• You get a hysterectomy. Once separated from you, your uterus develops sentience and escapes the hospital. For weeks, it slowly crawls to your house, finally clambering into your bed one night and whispering in your ear, demanding to know why you have forsaken it. You wake with a start to its tortured whispers, as it somehow manages to look at you forlornly with its eyeless face. You seize it and throw it out of the window. The next day you install a security system and barricade the window. You know it will come back someday. You sharpen your stakes in preparation.

(I wanted to post something silly this time around. This is based on the Regional Gothic memes, with additional influences from Welcome to Night Vale and Chuck Tingle’s Facebook page.)