Over the past few years of my life there has been something of a strange phenomenon that I keep observing. I'm not sure if it's a real "thing" or not, but it goes like this:
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There is someone I know/know of. Most often, a friend I have known online for years. In terms of physical location, we are usually nowhere near each other.
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We are both trans.
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Somehow we discover that, despite being currently geographically separated, we grew up in the same place.
I don't just mean the same state, or the same general region of something. I mean, like, literally a collection of three small towns that are so close together that the boarders between them blur. An area where if you were living in town A, you necessarily visit B and C regularly.
One of my most cherished friends, whom I have known since the early Livejournal days and continued to interact with regularly for more than a decade afterward, once mentioned that she was visiting her parents. And when we got to discussing where that was, I was floored, because it was like 10 minutes away from where my parents still live, and I grew up. It took us over 10 years to figure that out.
This has happened to me not once, not twice, but three times directly. More if you count the bizzare times I've caught wind from various online creators I follow that they are from the region as well (through their videos, mostly. I'm still kinda gobsmacked from the time one particular creator inserted footage from around her town and I knew exactly where it was).
Part of why this continues to baffle me is, well - that region is absolutely nothing special. There's very little of note to put it on the map, and that was even more true when I was growing up. The joke when I was growing up was that people drove through the area, they didn't stop - there wasn't much reason to. Almost everyone I went to school with wanted nothing more than to get out (though I suspect that has more to do with growing up, than the region itself. It's not bad, but younger folks sure do find it boring there).
The bigger thing that strikes me is that so many people in that area at that time, particularly roughly near my age, were trans. Back then I didn't even know it was a thing. I certainly didn't know any trans folks growing up, or even know of them. But we were all there! We were all there feeling the same thing, probably wondering if we were the only people on the planet feeling that way! We weren't as alone as we thought we were.
I wish I had known then. Both that they were there, too, and even more fully that I had known about myself.
I'm not saying that I grew up in a Nexus of trans-ness or anything. But what I am saying is, I wonder how many other people I passed by in those days, both of us completely oblivious to the fact that we were similar in ways we didn't realize. Like, when I was playing Samurai Showdown at the local Q-zar, waiting to get utterly whooped, I wasn't the only one having these feelings, was I? How many more people were there around the LGS table playing magic, who were like me back then?
The world's a big and scary place. But it's also pretty small.


