I liked death metal before I knew I was a woman. For most of my life I would have phrased that differently and said I liked death metal before I was a woman, because I thought womanhood was something that would begin later, after coming out, after estrogen, after changing my name and asking people to call me she. The longer I live with myself, the less that version holds together. I did not arrive one day and become somebody new. I was already the person who liked death metal, D&D, computers, horror, video games, tattoos, bad jokes, and guitars loud enough to make sensible people leave the room. I just had the wrong idea about what any of those things were supposed to tell me.
For a long time I treated the shape of my life as evidence. I did not have the childhood story I thought a trans woman was supposed to have, and I was not secretly rejecting everything masculine while yearning for dresses and makeup. I grew up in pits. I played in death metal bands. I liked writing software, rolling dice, staying up too late gaming, watching horror, arguing about anime, and listening to vocals that sound like somebody opened a portal directly into a septic tank in Hell. I liked those things sincerely. They were never a disguise, and I do not need to rewrite them now as secret signs of femininity to make my transition make sense.
The trap was subtler than believing women could not like those things, because I knew perfectly well that they could. What I had absorbed was a narrower idea of what being trans was supposed to feel like from the inside. I kept comparing myself to an imagined trans woman who had always known, who had spent childhood rejecting boyhood, and whose interests and presentation had apparently been filing supporting documentation the entire time. My own life did not look like that. I could notice that being a boy seemed harder for me than it appeared to be for other boys, or circle around to the thought that maybe there was something to this, and then dismiss it because I was not rejecting the rest of my life. I liked my interests. I liked my friends. I had built a life around things that genuinely belonged to me, and for years I mistook that continuity for a reason the gender question could not be real.
Eventually the obvious answer was sitting in front of me: interests do not have genders, people do. Death metal is not a boy interest any more than perfume is a girl interest. D&D does not know my pronouns. A computer does not become confused when a woman writes code on it, and a blast beat remains a blast beat regardless of who is grinning like an idiot while listening to it. I had been asking those things to tell me who I was when all they had ever been telling me was what I liked.
Once I stopped trying to read gender into everything I enjoyed, the continuity became much easier to see. I still solve problems like an engineer, including the apparently unavoidable urge to turn my own endocrine system into a black-box experiment if given enough blood tests and a spreadsheet. I still love horror, games, death metal, and Serial Experiments: Lain more than whatever anime somebody is about to recommend to me. I still swear too much, make questionable decisions, get tattoos, cook for my family, and become irrationally interested in whatever project has taken over my brain this week. None of that needed replacing. I had simply spent years misunderstanding the person doing it.
Transition also gave me room to discover things I had either ignored, dismissed, or never bothered trying before. I like perfume because I enjoy catching my own scent and thinking, “Fuck, I smell good”. I have opinions about bras I never expected to have, including a firm belief that lace peeking intentionally over the neckline of a tank top is part of the outfit. I am waiting on a lace-front wig matched to my natural hair colour because my hairline is not interested in cooperating and, as I have come to believe, what Mother Nature does not provide, we hack. I am absurdly delighted by my own small boobs. I shave an unreasonable amount of my body because smooth skin makes me happy. These things did not replace death metal, gaming, computers, or anything else that was already mine, they just became part of the same life.
Death Metal and Girl Shit came out of that realization. Some of the girl shit is stereotypically feminine because I happen to enjoy it, but I am not trying to make death metal feminine by listening to it as a woman. I stopped treating femininity as the admission price for womanhood. Girl shit is simply shit a girl is doing, and in my case that can mean shaving most of my body while Allegaeon’s Ossuary Lens is loud enough that I am growling along with it, hanging five bras to dry beside Cannibal Corpse, In Flames, White Zombie, and Gojira tanks, or putting on perfume, a padded bra, a death metal shirt, and enough attitude to make the whole combination feel exactly right.
I do not feel any need to reconcile black lace and blast beats anymore because there was never a contradiction between them. I do not have to feminize the things I loved before transition so they can be safely carried across the border into womanhood, or invent a story in which I only liked them because I was trying to be masculine. They were already mine. The same person who loved them then loves them now; I just no longer assume that person must therefore have been a man.
I spent years trying to prove or disprove myself with details that could never answer the question. Old memories, fantasies, friendships, clothes, hobbies, and every stray thought I could drag into the courtroom became evidence to interrogate. If I liked something feminine, maybe that meant I was trans. If I liked something masculine, maybe it meant I was not. If I did not hate every second of being treated as a man, maybe I was inventing the whole thing. If I imagined being a woman and then buried the thought because it scared the shit out of me, maybe that was nothing too. When you desperately want certainty and are equally terrified of what certainty might require, almost any evidence can be made to support postponing the decision.
Eventually I stopped treating myself like a case I was trying to win and started estrogen with an escape hatch still firmly installed in my head. If I was wrong, I could stop. Framing it that way let me experience the decision instead of demanding that I solve it in advance; I could change one thing, observe the result, and decide whether I wanted to continue. A couple of months later there was a shortage of patches and the possibility that I might lose access for a while gave me a fucking panic attack. The shortage did not settle every philosophical question about gender, but it exposed something I had not admitted yet: I still had the option to stop, and I no longer wanted it.
Looking back, I can trace the same person through all of it. The kid who loved D&D was me. The teenager who loved heavy music was me. The adult who wrote software, fell in love, raised children, made a found family, got tattooed, played games, cooked dinner, and occasionally made an absolute mess of things was me. I do not have to declare any of those earlier versions fake to make room for Natasha. I did not become a new person so much as stop misclassifying the old one, and once I understood that, the past stopped looking like a collection of contradictions I needed to explain away.
This belongs first in the collection because everything else I want to write rests on the same premise: I only know how one transition feels from the inside, mine. This is not a guide to being transgender, and I do not want to replace one narrow story about what a woman is with another narrow story about what a trans woman is supposed to be. Another woman may have known when she was four or may not figure it out until she is sixty-four. She may love makeup or hate it, rebuild engines, sew dresses, play hockey, collect Warhammer armies, grow orchids, scream into a microphone over a double-kick drum, or do absolutely none of those things.
I am writing this because there may be another scared woman somewhere doing what I did, turning every harmless preference into evidence for or against herself and waiting for some detail of her personality to grant permission to ask a question it cannot answer. She may like things she has been told are too masculine, or look at other women and decide she does not resemble them enough to count. I wish somebody had told me earlier that I did not have to throw away the person I already was in order to discover that she was a woman. I did not stop liking boy things when I transitioned because they were never boy things in the first place. They were my things, and they still are. Some of them have blast beats, some of them have lace, and a surprising number of them have both.
