"That you were forced to hide yourself," he said. "I am angry because I understand that this is how you stayed safe. I am angry that you had to hide a part of yourself."
I was not prepared to have this conversation, but at the same time, I needed to. It had been a weight on my chest from the moment I came out of orientation and realized that there was nogoing back. I couldn't change my mind. I had to spend the rest of my life hiding every part of me because they would kill me for it.
It was illegal to be me.
Yet it was also safer in a strange and horrible way.
"This is a difficult thing for me to talk about," I said.
"I will listen," Durom said. "Speak, and I will hear your words."
I looked at his soft brown eyes, and I believed him. I'd only just met him, but there was forcefulness about him, a strength that was directed towards immediate action. As he looked at me, his hands on his knees, his shoulders relaxing, I knew that right now, his form of immediate action was to focus on me intently and listen to everything I had to say.
"My parents were always angry about how I dressed. I was actually excited to come to the school because I thought I could start fresh, I thought I could try out a new name, and everyone would see me as this new person, a person I wanted to be," I said. "I never thought of this as hiding myself; I just wanted to be comfortable. I thought magic was going to make that more possible, not less. Living like this, having to hide who I am, being unable to change in any direction..."
That was the worst part. I spent years hating the idea of who society thought I should be, who my parents wanted me to be. I hated the idea of being seen as less than just because of the way I was born. I spent years thinking about changing the body I'd been born into, but the results of what the mundane offered for those changes didn’t seem right for me, especially since they weren’t reversible.
I spent years trying on names and outfits, trying to find the me that felt best.
In one fell swoop, all those choices, all those options were taken away.
I realized that what I loved most was the choice itself.
"In one moment I was becoming the person I always wanted to be, and in the next I was hiding," I said. I gestured at my outfit, the one the school rules forbid someone like me from wearing, and in doing so, made it so I couldn't ever take it off. "This is just another costume I've been forced to wear because revealing the body underneath would sentence me to death."
It felt good to say that, all the words that I couldn't say to anyone else at the school.
I couldn't tell my fellow mundanes. I couldn't trust anyone.
"You can take it off," Durom said.
The seriousness of his tone was a juxtaposition against what he was proposing. The minotaur, who had taken out his dick and stroked it in front of me, was now proposing I strip naked for him, after I confessed to the heavy weight of fear I'd been carrying around from the moment I got through Orientation.
He was such a guy.
"You just want to see me naked," I laughed.
"Yes," Durom agreed. "But you can change in the washroom, and I will not see you in there."
"Change into what?" I said. "I have no clothes. Besides, it's not the style of these ones I object to, it's the fact that I didn't have any choice but to wear them."
That was the crux of the matter that I identified after coming to the school, at least for me. I wasn't the spokesperson for anyone other than me, and I knew that other people had different experiences with their own journeys. For me, it was the choice that was important. Style was an expression of the self, and this school labeled the exploration of self as illegal. I didn’t deserve death for simply having feelings about my own body.
Durom rubbed his chin.
"I didn't bring any extra clothing," he admitted. "I wash my own every night and hang it over the hearth to dry."
"Well then, I'm stuck like this," I said. “Because I’m not ready to strip in front of you.”
Those words were so easy to say because I already knew they wouldn’t offend him.
Durom wasn’t put off by my rejection or hesitancy.
He just rolled right along with it.
"No," he said. "My mate deserves options that will make him... him? That will make him happy."
I hadn't thought about pronouns in a long time. They were never the most important part of the equation for me, for one, because I couldn’t get my parents to use them, but also because my experience with my identity was more about my right to myself, to my body, to my self-expression. I appreciated it if other people wanted to modify their words for me and what they thought would make me comfortable, but the idea of trying to control the use of other people's language felt like the same thing as them trying to control what I wore or who I loved. For me, it was an expression of affection from those who cared about me, not a mandatory requirement for me to feel emotionally or mentally balanced.
