trans people: what fictional works helped you self-realize?

so a topic im sort of interested in recently. i think it's common--not just common, *fundamentally human*--for people to be inspired by stories. in particular, for trans people, who overwhelmingly exist in a world that tries to deny us existence, stories can be especially important as a canvas to imagine alternate life possibilities upon. so if you feel this describes you, what does it look like for you? and what stories inspired you?

(im not trying to be overly limiting here, if you are not trans but feel you have a similar story to share, please feel free.)

anyway, i'm sure i'm leaving out a ton, but like...

orlando - the blockbuster video rental era was a wild time where your grandmother could pick an essentially random movie when youre like 8 and it turns out to be the movie where tilda swinton plays a male character, who gets a sex change operation, and spends the rest of the movie as a now immortal and ageless woman. a truly baroque work, and, well, unforgettable is probably the word, lol.

final fantasy 4 - rydia. "wow, she disappeared and came back as a cool, magical lady! i wish i could do that too!"

azumanga daioh - i was an awkward teen on the internet who liked earthbound and shoujo ai and my girlfriend, who was also the first trans girl i ever met, showed me this, which felt like a glimpse into a life i would much rather have been living. a few years later, i went to a con, and another girl, who i met on an azudai forum, drew me a post-it-note pencil picture of kaorin and sakaki as a nurse assistant and veterinarian. and i kept it with me all the time and i was like, ok, this is the plan, this is what i want to do with my grown up life.

paper mario: the thousand year door - haha, it's just sort of remarkable when you find out something is conceptually possible to other people. you know? it's not just that vivian was the best and most amazing character in a game full of great character writing, it was... that the idea of her was possible. that this was something that the general public was theoretically capable of intelligently parsing.

grimgrimoire - understanding myself as a lesbian was really central to understanding my relationship with gender. this game about a lesbian witch overcoming the forces of time and space to save her homunculus wife really helped, in this regard. also, do you like my avatar?

homestuck!!! surprisingly enough - so i feel like maybe some context here is lost in the fog of debate. you just. did not fucking get female characters like you got in homestuck. it was. such a *moment*. the way they are like. not only interesting dynamic characters but movers of the story, of the world. equals with no difference, if not often betters. like, do i have to list their names?? sing the tale of their meritorious deeds? i don't have to tell you what you already know, but. it really felt like the dawning of a new era. in my life, and in the world. it really seemed like the tide was shifting, that old ideas and orthodoxies were dying away. (it was nice to have been optimistic.) and i think it was these distinctive, memorable characters and dynamic, emotionally intense stories about cyclical change and infinite possibility and hellbent sacrifice, featuring a bunch of extremely gay characters and cool women, that. well, it really encouraged me. i could also say a lot about calliope herself, and... what it meant to me to see a character who, was hurting like i was hurting back then, regardless of what the author intended for this character. you find what you need to get you through life. the ideas, concepts, frameworks, symbols, exemplars we glean for ourselves from stories and from pieces of our environment, all of those things that are guideposts towards a better life. no matter how ridiculous it is that i like... had to thread things together using bits of acquired knowledge and from patchworks of myth and storytelling, in order to understand myself, it's fine because it was what i needed and it worked. im not sure if i can fully describe the feeling of completeness i now live with, having been transitioned for some time. no matter what happens, i can say that i truly lived. and this was a catalyst for me.

honorable mentions:

-paradise kiss

-one piece

-twin peaks

-kids in the hall

-tangent alert! it is actually kind of funny, upon reflection, how few of the formative works i am thinking of actually address trans topics at all? holy shit. i guess there just weren't/aren't a lot of portrayals of this stuff at all, and even a lot of the ones i can remember are compromised. i mean really one piece's treatment of lgbt characters is sort of egregious and pastiched, but it felt so well-meaning as a teen that i cant help but recall it fondly. kids in the hall has nothing do to with trans topics, but it just has unbelievably naturalistic drag, which like, i dont know how to put this, made it feel like it was possible to do something like that and not become inherently a caricatured figure. but like honestly, what else was there available except "interpreting the idea of being a trans woman from things that are not about trans women". hey, by the way, did you know that i can just keep typing as much as i want into this list entry and make the post as long as i want and no one can stop me? it's cheaper than therapy! heh. heheh. lets see. seriously though, who was writing about trans women back then? what portrayals of our stories did we have? you had grant morrison and neil gaiman writing what in retrospect looks like intentional slander, you had warren ellis who couldn't write about transsexuals at all (sorry for outdated terminology.) without portraying us as wacky half-aliens. uh, the world according to garp, that's slander, rocky horror is for straight people, rent is for straight people, hourou musuko is terrible, shimanami tasogare lasted for like 3 chapters. i didnt know about star trek ds9 so i couldnt have known about jadzia dax. i didn't know about hunter x hunter, so i couldn't have known about alluka. kill six billion demons didnt exist yet. and there are some scattered indie works about us and some are quite good but basically almost everything else that isnt a hateful south park/family guy style caricature falls into this middling range of like, "questionable content" tier media where trans people are acknowledged but in a context so tepid as to make us even more alien to the audience which, given that it draws from the well of Society, is surely composed of drooling fuckwits. sorry, that sounded so accusatory, like, lets rewind for a second here. jeph jacques, let me say, im not particularly interested in your webcomic but i think that what you did was so bold given the climate at the time that i think you deserve the ally medal for excellent service in making troglodytes angry. and so with a dearth of widely known stories, with a *denial of access to the public mythos* you have to, alone, growing up, piece things together from like incomplete broken fragments like "oh everyone thought faris from FF5 was a boy but she was ACTUALLY a girl!..." and "oh i heard that some of the sailor scouts in the later seasons are BOYS that turn into GIRLS!!" and "whoa did you know that dark souls 2 has a gender coffin??" and. what comes of it is a personalized, hypercontextual bricolage story that's known and understood and interpretable only by you, which is i guess the concept that made me want to start this thread in the first place. like, the trans story, it is not a major motion picture for general audiences that everyone holds in a sort of breathtaken awe and reverence and quotes all the time, it is not a hit breakthrough international manga series, it is not a thing bingewatched. at most, it is, as stated previous, an indie hit. small, brilliant but easily eclipsed. i want so badly for the tide to shift!! i want people to know trans people's hearts, and for this world to learn the kindness and strength of spirit that it takes to embrace what is different instead of destroy. i want people to understand our story so that, political parties in all nations stop trying to compete to see who can publicly defame, threaten, and oppress us more actively. i'm so sorry, seriously i feel like it's, almost like, literally rude of me to act this way? to like start what is ostensibly a normal thread in this nice forum and then to just get so hung up on the topic i'm talking about that i start writing a gigantic non sequitur run-on paragraph that crescendoes in what is basically a plea for clemency from the universe itself, a desperate star-wish that maybe in the eleventh hour, human decency and compassion for trans people might prevail?

-oh shit, i totally forgot about rocko's modern life! gotta give props to the crew who made that one happen, honestly pretty cool and well handled.