Friday Update #21: The Mother of All Omelets (Patreon)

I don't actually like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance all that much. Call me a snob when it comes to my character action games, but I significantly prefer Devil May Cry 3, Devil May Cry 4, Ninja Gaiden Black, and Bayonetta.

Hey folks. Today, we are going to be taking a look into eggs and what it takes to break them (or at the very least scramble one). No, I'm not yolking.

Haha, anyways...

As it was first explained to me over a year ago by a poor soul who didn’t realize how easily a funny word could become pervasive in my lexicon, an "egg" (as it applies to the LGBTQ+ community) is "a trans girl who hasn't 'hatched' yet."

I've sort of lost count at this point, but re:Dreamer and its Discord server have been responsible for cracking at least a dozen of these eggs. Back in September, I started keeping track of messages from newly identified trans girls directly expressing some sort of sentiment directly blaming and/or thanking re:Dreamer for their change in their gender identity. I’m up to half a dozen just from that, but there have been about a dozen other girls who have come out in some way in the game's discord. Or at least, I think I'm at half a dozen. Gender is a murky monster shrouded in mystery.

Despite the efforts of several of the girls in the game's Discord server and my own recklessness, I remain confident I am a cis male, even after taking estrogen. I know that sounds completely fucking mental, but allow me to explain.

Back in late September, I had a murky deal with a certain feminizing loan shark and server regular: I could get an IKEA BLÅHAJ for free for my birthday on October 7 (this was around the time there was a panic that IKEA would be retiring the quintessential trans girl support shark and I figured this was my last chance to get the genuine meme), but I would have to try HRT with estrogen (no anti-androgens). Like a dumbass idiot, I thought "Hmm, this is going to be a good way to experience gender/body dysphoria that I can use as the basis for a more realistic experience for Zach!" so I agreed to the terms.

On October 16th, both the shark and hormones showed up. I took this photo at 2:57 PM.

At 3:06 PM, I popped a 2 mg Estrofem® pill and was locked in for one hell of a roller coaster with a very short brief high and an awful everything else.

Being a total idiot who did literally zero research, didn’t realize that hormones hit your body within minutes. I genuinely thought they functioned similarly to an antidepressant and took effect after a few days.

At 3:15 PM, I pieced together from the ongoing conversation (mostly people laughing that I just popped the pill, jokes about how big my breasts would be, that sort of stuff) that this pill was going to hit me very soon.

Less than a minute later (still at 3:15 PM), the estrogen did just that.

As you can see, this was a wild high. "Euphoria" doesn't quite do it justice.

As you can see, I had no idea the estrogen euphoria was an actual euphoria.

Less than 2 minutes later at 3:18 PM, the euphoria subsided. The roller coaster I had just locked myself aboard had risen to its highest point, and it was all downhill from here.

By 3:22 PM, I noticed that something was… off.

Some girls in the server were having doubts about what was going on with me. The glee about finally knocking Humpty Dumpty off of his wall was starting to give way to doubts.

3:24 PM was when the alarm bells in my brain should have made me realize that this was not going to be good, but I kept going.

This was 3:26 PM. On an unrelated note, I've been told I can be extremely dense.

At 3:34 PM, I wanted to test what arousal felt like with estrogen in my system. It was weird and different (I'll spare you some of the NSFW details).

At 3:40 PM, I started to want off of this ride. By this point, the attitude of the server had shifted from "this is fucking epic" to "he hasn't cracked yet?" to "uh oh."

Everyone was scrambling to get answers from me as it felt like my skeleton needed to be liberated like the Type-7 Particle Weapon from F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon is capable of doing. (By the way, F.E.A.R. 1 is great game. I replayed it recently and it still holds up as a fun as hell FPS, albeit you're basically Neo from The Matrix and are so powerful that the horror elements are secondary to the gunplay.)

I'm at least consistent with insisting I'm a cis male!

At 3:59 PM (less than an hour after taking this pill), I decided to lie down, thus ending the ride.

Honestly, the next week and a half was miserable. I was mopey and depressed as my body tried to reset its hormone levels, and I could barely get out of bed.

The girls in the server who would know more about HRT than I would aren't positive what happened, but the running theory seems to be that my higher-than-average testosterone levels (I'm not just saying that; I'm balding at 28 and have significant prostate health issues from my hormone levels) combined with the dopamine inhibitors I take for Parkinson's mixed together with the estrogen to produce an extremely strong negative reaction to it.

I walked away from this experience with several goals met, including a few I hadn't been expecting to achieve:

• As planned, I gave myself gender/body dysphoria. This was a pyrrhic victory and I'm not sure it was worth the week and half of severe depression because the "realistic extreme self-body discomfort" I wanted to research can only be pushed so far as a written subject before it stops being hot and kinky and starts being depressing and horrific. I guess my challenge as a writer is putting the right lens on that subject and translating it to something that is simultaneously realistic and sexy, isn't it?
• I gained an incredible amount of respect for the hardships trans women endured with their initial gender identity not being the one they wanted. I had it explained to me that my dysphoria hit me all at once whereas trans girls come to their dysphoria over time, but it was nevertheless a hellish experience that speaks volumes of their courage for escaping, and there was no way I could have that experience explained to me because it's something you have to live through to understand.
• I was so depressed from lying in bed all day for a week and a half that I managed to have little energy to do more than think, but this led to some powerful breakthroughs in overcoming some obstacles I had with writer's block and coming up with new story ideas. I know this makes me sound like I don’t think about what I write (I simultaneously overthink and underthink everything) but these revelations were concrete things like specific lines of dialogue, specific plot beats, linking separate plot ideas together, and scene compositions. Because of this, I have a much firmer idea of where to take Britney's route for the next several updates.
• I reaffirmed my identity as a cis male (yet I doubt that certain people are going to take that at face value).

I'll state it again, but I am a cis male.

This fact has really irked a certain Student Transfer scenario dev (a trans girl) who was mad because she thought I was writing a better "trans woman wish fulfillment" story than she was even though my intention has never been to do such.

I've been on record for saying this, but I am dense enough that it genuinely never occurred to me that writing a gender bender visual novel with a very eggy MC that goes into gender bender trappings in a rigorously methodical and heavily grounded way (paraphrased from Natalie's review of re:Dreamer 0.8.1) that I would end up with an audience largely composed of trans girls. I didn't realize that my demographic wasn't fellow AGP-ers and was instead largely composed of trans girls until the server essentially became a trans girl hangout (or as someone said, "an accidentally created platonic harem of trans girls").

I think what makes it work is that I don't try to pander to this group. I've made a single concession which are the very occasional extra lines from the game when Zach's therapy answer is set to "Trans" and the Trans C.H.E.A.T.S. stat is set to 4 or 5 that I added in 0.8.8. From the changelog:

From the feedback from some players, I edited a few of Zach's behaviors towards Britney to be a bit more "trans girl-ish" should the Trans stats be higher or if Zach answered that he probably was a trans woman in denial during Ai's therapy session. Keisuke's route is later going to get the same treatment, but I really don't want to my gears back to his route and instead want to focus entirely on Britney's (at least until they have an equal amount of content).

These are somewhat simple things, like Zach wincing when Britney says "Ugh, you guys are all the same. Always thinking with your dicks." or Zach being much more receptive to trying unambiguously female activities (theorizing what he'd look like after Britney dresses him up in female clothes) and less receptive to being perceived as a male (slight disappointment that he still looks masculine on his date with Britney).

(For once, I didn't make a re:Dreamer meme here.)

Of course, all of this intent doesn't matter when the results show that I am a menace to the egg community and am out to crack as many eggs as it takes to finish this game (myself notwithstanding; I am either not an egg or I am an egg made of diamond or something similarly unbreakable/very hard to break).

That being said, I'm willing to tempt fate by riding The Eggbeater roller coaster again, under certain conditions.

As this article and this article show, there is a decent chance taking estrogen could be a form of treatment for my early-onset Parkinson's disease. I am currently on a very good Parlodel/Abilify mix, but dopamine receptor antagonists like Parlodel are intended for initial treatment. As the disease progresses, medication like this becomes less effective, so either those same medications are continued at heavier doses, or additional medications are added to the treatment.

For the low, low price of $3,000 in Patreon pledges per month, I'll discuss in detail with my doctors (when you have a fun atypical case of Parkinson's and live near a well-known medical school, you don't get a doctor, you get a team of doctors (provided you let them publish about your case)) what they think of me trying estrogen as a treatment. Of course, this would be combined with an antiandrogen of some kind (likely cyproterone acetate (cypro) or bicalutamide (bica) as I have heard the trans girls in the server bitch and moan about how awful spironolactone (spiro) can be). And hey, I can even reduce my risk of prostate cancer with this medication! (Although it's not that it's going to matter when I've been told that I'm not living past 55.)

Either way, if you (the collective of people reading this) throw $3,000 at this game per month, I'll at least try to take the titty skittle power combo.

Lastly, since we're on the subject of gender as it relates to me, and because the main character of re:Dreamer is totally my self-insert /s, I'll share something I posted in the discord server a while back:

There's some confusion with how to refer to the main character of re:Dreamer and it's been bothering me for a while. Broadly, Zach is the person, and Zoey is the body (e.g., Zach is a weirdo, Zoey has H-Cups). I'm very much of the mind that unless it's Ai fucking with him, Zach presenting himself as a girl because he isn't disguising himself and he can't explain why a babe like him is named Zach, Zach disassociating his own identity to deal with something better, or deciding that he wants to be Zoey, calling him Zoey is wrong. He's going to eventually accept himself as Zoey in Keisuke's route and use feminine pronouns afterwards, be forced into using that name early on in Rich's route and start using it subconsciously, and decide who he wants to be in Britney's route, but until that happens, he defaults as Zach. Forcing him to be in a body he doesn't want to be in is the point of the game, but the identity is something he (largely) must decide for himself.

And speaking of Zach, TiltSHIFT has finished most of the work for the next step of the Zach-to-Zoey transformation CG set.

That, as well as the next big chunk of Britney content, will be going up in the 0.9.2 update on Friday, November 12.

Until next time!