The connection between nostalgia-based media and transness sounds obvious when you first think about it: many trans people are nostalgic for the childhood they never quite got to have in some decade or another. Many of us are currently reliving various parts of the culture of past decades but doing it with the correct gender this time. But there's another connection that's less obvious. A lot of 80s-inspired music nowadays is based kind of on the actual music of the 80s but a lot of it is based on a 2020s construction of what the 80s represented. And that reminds me of something I experienced navigating cisgender spaces, which is that it's easier to be accepted as a "real woman" if I carry around a sort of shadow childhood built from bits and pieces of other people's childhoods and just ambient awareness of what it was like to be (accepted as) a girl in the 90s and 2000s.
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