i've seen a lot of trans narratives in terms of killing their old self, murdering the self that was constructed for the world, killing the False so that the Truth may live. and i've seen many trans narratives lean back towards the Old once they carved the space to explore, approaching cautiously the gender they once ran from to scavenge the pieces they liked from the shell.
i've also seen many plural systems express this in a different way: you killed the AGAB, and the AGAB came back. turns out they weren't entirely fake, just contextually limiting.
the AGAB self often ends up cast aside, or worse, a corpse, abandoned for a flashier New that leaves what Was in the dust behind. and they're often angry that they had to be killed so that someone else might live, now that they have had the space carved to truly Feel.
to exist pre-transition, to exist in that identity haze, is oppressive to both sides of that coin. neither side has the space to explore, but one side makes it easier to fawn for others into reducing your needs, and that fawning is what holds us back.
but at the same time, it's not their fault, is it? your sense of self was traumatized into a mould more convenient for those Outside instead of being allowed to form and develop naturally. it's not the fault of the one shoved tightly into the mould that the mould restrained you.
i've often described my pre-transition self as being "more mirror than person" by the time i broke out of that. i describe it as breaking the mirror, flowery language that, while symbolic, disguises what it truly was:
i murdered him so that i could grow beyond him.
At the end of march, one of us wrote in a journal of ours:
there's large swathes of system states that we forbid regardless. We have particular genders we think would complicate the system in untenable ways, so we pull away from them. This is generally not hard to do, because it's not even a case of fear. we just don't like it. It's almost automatic.
There's also states of being, people who could come into being, people we could become, people we are that are ever so tantalizing, that we feel dark longings towards, but would be incredibly self-destructive or destructive to those we care about. We simultaneously want these states, but don't want the consequences. These are much harder to resist
This was written by one who was in a position of deep control at the time, steering the ship out of necessity. but even she hadn't really read the words she'd written and truly stopped to think what it meant was going on.
it was some weeks later that we all came to understand the meaning of those words that she didn't understand while writing them, when one of those more aggressive ones forced her into submission and made us all realize that perhaps these "states" were something more than simply an attractor to pull away from. and all that that aggressive one wanted was to go on a night walk and listen to some music...
so there was sort of a feeling of. well. what are we really holding back. what are we really holding back? and a number of selves came by who we have seen very little of since, who made clear that they did not necessarily particularly want to be a dominant force, or even terribly recurrent, but there was an amount of space for them that was necessary and they were going go take that space whether anyone wanted them to or not. and so we decided we wanted them to.
and it was only after all that, that one eve someone came by who had warm feelings for our old so-called "dead" name. a soft (boy?) who enjoyed solitude, still evenings, a long ambient drone as the sun fell down over the horizon. who was never pained by that identity. who had fond memories. it feels strange that it took so many years to get to this point. they were not particularly annoyed by anything. or pained. or upset. rather it seemed as though they'd just been... gone all this time. they weren't even entirely sure what "plurality" meant and needed it explained to them.
since then it has been with a cautious optimistic trepidation that some of us have opened ourselves up to meaningfully engaging with gender that we'd held ourselves back from. some of the more active recurrent folks have found that they've got feelings they'd been leaving out out of convenience. even while we've known ourselves as enbies this whole time, there's been an exclusion zone, rarely entered.
we haven't see them sense but, it was certainly an unexpected shift in perspective. and one we had been running from without letting ourselves think long enough to realize we were running from it. that desire to hold back all those peoples who would make things... complicated... if they were around more often, is not an experience we've uniquely endured. but we've not seen many talk about it.
