I started with all the obvious things, first.
I gave myself bigger tits, rounder hips, a bumpin’ butt, narrower shoulders, a bigger dick, a more rounded face, the whole shebang.
Only to find that it didn’t feel like it fit.
I looked more attractive, but also like I could be any random bimbo anywhere, minus the massive schlong. All that was really missing from the basic bitch brigade ensemble were fuller lips and blonde hair.
So I gave myself those as well, just to see how it felt.
I didn’t like it, frankly.
There were elements there that I appreciated, sure, but when taken in its entirety, it was kind of a massive turn off.
So I kept what was working for me, and tossed the rest.
The goal was still to maximally indulge my vanity, to be clear. I wasn’t even worrying about how I’d make the final product in reality yet.I just wanted to see where my whims would take me, when my desires were fully indulged.
I brought my cup size back down to something more reasonable. D cups, instead of the massif triple f’s I’d stapled to my chest . Still bigger than what I’d had, but not impossibly so. Though I left the horse sized staff downstairs alone, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit.
Then I brought my shoulders back out a little bit, just to check how I felt about those.
I brought my hips back in, but only a little bit. That felt better, though something about it was still off.
I made my recently acquired BBL tone itself back down to something that an actual human might have, albeit one that followed a very specific exercise regime.
While I was at it, I upped my muscle definition everywhere, just to see if the whole muscle mommy vibe did anything for me.
And I was somewhat surprised to find that it sort of did?
Like the full on roided up look wasn’t great, but just a couple steps back from that? Especially with the amount of body fat around my stomach and arms reduced to nothing so that I had a stupid amount of definition despite my curves? That worked.
I liked that. It made me look capable.
And besides, being in good shape would always be useful, assuming I went with this level of musculature in the flesh.
With my body somewhere that finally felt alright, if not perfect, I zoomed in on my face.
I’d given myself perfectly cherubic cheeks and a sharpened chin. The sort of thing that you’d see as attractive woman number two, in an rpg character creator. And while it was perfectly cute, it wasn’t my face.
So I turned it back to what it had been.
I still didn’t like what I saw, but, after getting to try out something else, I had a better idea of what I did want, I think.
And it wasn’t a perfectly average little chin and gently sloping jaw, or a diminutively cute button nose.
It was something sharper.
It was the same jawline, but with the fat from my cheeks slimmed back, slighty. It was the same chin, but set a little farther forward. It was my nose, but pointed up just so. It was the shape of my eyes, unaltered, still a little too wide open and angular to ever look calm and relaxed. It was my hair, cropped a little shorter, coming down just past my ears in a feathered bob cut.
It was…
Surprisingly masculine looking?
I mean, it still didn’t look anything like how I did when I’d been pretending to be a man. There was no scraggly neckbeard from forgetting to shave, no sharp cheekbones that looked like they wanted to cut their way through my skin due to neglectful eating habits, no casually buzzcut short hair that I got done at the same superclips chain every couple of weeks. No bloodshot sclera, from constant stress and unmedicated allergies.
But it didn’t look like the woman I had been, either. The one that had finally eaten enough to fill out a bit, but never exercised. The woman who’d gown her hair out as long as possible, getting the frayed ends trimmed religiously. The one that had used makeup to cover up acne scars and flaws, but not to ever make herself happy. The one who tended to look down a lot, and try not to make eye contact, so afraid that someone would call her out as a fraud, despite having been presenting as femme for years.
Instead… I saw the face of someone who was actually comfortable with what they presented. Someone who liked, or at least accepted what they were, instead of hyper compensating and shoving themselves into yet another box that they didn’t fit.
“God fucking damnit.” I whispered to myself, trying not to cry and failing utterly at doing so.
Was I not actually a girl?
I’d been pretty sure that I was before, but, maybe… Maybe I was just trying really hard to not be a boy?
That…
Might be more accurate than I ever would have liked to admit.
Being a boy, and worse yet, a man, had hurt.
A lot.
I tried to die, you know?
I didn’t, ultimately, but I still made the attempt.
Twice. Each time I got lucky and didn’t, but I was still suicidal for a long time. Then I got therapy, and antidepressants, and the help I needed to admit that I was trans.
But I think that I may have overcorrected a little bit.
I don’t think HRT was a mistake, to be clear. I liked having tits. I liked a lot of the ways that my body had changed with estradiol in my system.
But I’m not sure I liked all the other shit I’d stacked on top of that.
Stuff I chose for myself, sure, but… I dunno. I feel like I may have tried a little too hard to ‘pass’. To fit in, by whatever unrealistic metric.
Which sadly matched with a larger pattern of behavior, for me. As a pretty significantly neurodivergent individual, I had something of a natural inclination towards seeking structures and predictability.
I wanted my world to be simple. As part of that, I wanted to be simple. I wanted to be a very straightforward sort of creature, predictable to myself and comfortably following a set routines and rules.
It’s just that doing so to such an extreme degree had rarely made me actually happy. Politically, this meant that I went from a moderate democrat to a radicalized anarchist over the course of five years. I went from a disorganized and aimless man, to a well managed and structured woman.
Simple narratives. Simple extremes. Binary categories that made my organizationally fixated autistic brain go brrrrr.
But life repeatedly tended to drive home to me that things were more complicated than that, no matter how much I wanted the opposite.
And apparently, I’d been locking my experience and expression of gender in a box this whole time when what I needed was to step back from the whole paradigm.
Yeah, I’d traded one box for a nicer one, but both had made me feel claustrophobic in my own flesh.
Which, in my honest opinion, kind of fucking sucked.
I didn’t want to have to step outside of the box. I wanted something familiar, safe, and comfortable. And while being a woman wasn’t right, as I was rapidly realizing, it was at least familiar and safe.
Well, safe-ish. Sort of.
It had structure, at least. There were directions. Directions that were often contradictory, but directions nonetheless. From online lifestyle guides, fashion blogs, to discord servers full of trans women all sharing tips on how to present more successfully as female, there were directions everywhere.
And I’d eaten that shit up. Because of course I did. At the time, it was the closest thing I’d seen to salvation.
You wanna know what the really dumb part was?
I had nonbinary friends.
I hung out with people who decided that neither box worked for them, and had talked with them more than once about their experience of things. I’d known that was an option.
I just never let myself take it.
And now, looking at a face that was the nearest thing to perfectly me as I’d ever seen, I was forced to admit that I really should have.
I probably would have to, now, if I truly wanted to give myself a body that fit.
And I needed one of those.
So.
What were my new pronouns?
I just went with the basic bitch pick of they/them.
It felt ambiguous enough that I could imagine it meaning whatever I wanted it to mean, and that was perfect considering that I didn't fully know what I wanted yet.
Clearly not to just be a girl or a boy, but beyond that I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think I felt like I was precisely halfway between those poles, though.
I leaned femme, still. But there were masculine aspects of me that were apparently far more important to me than I’d ever realized, so I couldn’t really just call myself a girl with commitment issues.
Figuring this all out would take time, but for now I settled for having a face that was somewhere between a slightly effeminate man and a butch leaning tomboy. For having hair that was functionally pretty short, but still had room for a bit of flair in it.
For removing my makeup, because there was no reason for me to settle with imperfect skin anymore.
Then I went back down to my body and set about making myself a bit more indeterminately shaped.
Breasts and a butt that both popped enough to signal that I wasn’t cis-het man, but didn’t verge onto parody.
A hips to shoulder ratio that leaned far more towards what certain parts of the internet would call masculine, rather than feminine.
The sort of six pack you could shred carrots on.
Powerfully muscled thighs and calves. Arms that looked like a powerlifter’s, with just enough fat on them to soften out the edges.
I still kept the third leg, though. Can’t say I’m proud of exaggerating that part of my anatomy so much, but I couldn’t quite let it go.
I stepped back, and took a look at my new body.
It was pretty alright.
Definitely felt more like what I wanted to be, rather than what I thought I should be.
But it wasn’t perfect yet.
And yes, while I had enough experience battling my own dysphoria demons to know that actual perfection was impossible, I still felt like I could do better.
Why limit myself to looking human, after all?