My friend Cassie is the one who introduces me to advocacy and activism topics. For example, she told me about intersectionality like this: “intersections are where the collisions happen”. Like if everyone was driving in their own lanes, it’d be fine, but it’s where lanes cross that changes the rules.
The thing is that intersections can be really neat places, because you can take unexpected turns.
She also keeps worrying about how I’m doing. I’m her “fake beard”, haha, because I can look like a boy around her and so people don’t harass her, but I’m not a boy. And she checks in on me every so often, like, asking me how I’m feeling and stuff.
I think I’m feeling like everybody, which is I feel everything. I’m happy, I’m confused, I’m upset, I’m curious, I’m afraid, I’m disgusted, I’m bored. But I’m not usually suffering and I think that’s what she’s afraid of, and she’s afraid I wouldn’t tell her. Which is fair, because I’ve kept one big secret from her.
The secret is that I’m a genie. Not like from Aladdin, although that’s where the name probably came from. People like me have weird gene expressions that give us powers. Somebody on TikTok took “gene” from that and turned it into “genie”.
The old people on the news get upset about that, because until then we were called “mutants”, and that feels dehumanizing. But if people aren’t people, it’s okay to control them, and figuring out how to control us is something those folks sure want to figure out. But “genie” stuck, thank god.
Cassie worries. And I feel bad about keeping her in the dark. But you know what? When I put on the costume and call myself Diesel Jenny, I have never, ever been more free to express myself. I picked what I wear. I accessorized it. I added practical stuff, things I learned would be useful out there. I traded stuff out when I found out how easily material rips, or how badly it chafes. But it’s mine. It’s me. My name, my costume, my soul for the world to see.
Every time Cassie tells someone, “it’s trans woman, not transwoman”, I add, “because Trans-Woman sounds like a superhero”. Honestly she’s getting sick of me saying it, but who cares? I think it’s funny. I’m trans and I’m a superhero.
As far as genie wishes go, I got a pretty good one. The stock standard answer to “what power would you want” for folks on my social feed is “shapeshifting”. I want to write about why shapeshifting would fucking suck.
First, the whole premise of the power goes against the wish-fulfillment it represents. “I can look like anyone”. Great, but you really want to look like just one person, you. So every time you change shape into someone else, you’re choosing not to be you. Every time you just look like your real self, you’re not using your power to its fullest. And honestly, what good is that?
Second, it’s impractical. I don’t mean like it’s wish-fulfillment, I think every superpower has to be, right? But, like, where do you go with it? Who can you save with it? Maybe you can make long stretchy arms to grab stuff, or turn into a big bouncy mat to catch people falling off a building. But I don’t think that’s what most people want when they say “shapeshifting”. They want to look like another human being. I guess if you’re going to be a spy or something, shapeshifting like that would be amazing. But I don’t want to be a spy. I hate keeping secrets as it is.
Third, I’d honestly be scared by the implications. I mean, I already am with my own powers. I guess that deserves some explanation.
What I have is what the Transhuman Capability Catalog calls “responsive bio-regeneration” and “limited electromagnetic manipulation”. Basically, I heal real fast - my body does a control-Z on things that happen to it, taking me back to baseline. This has both good and bad implications.
First, I can pop a few of my Chicklets and it takes, like dramatic effect within a minute. Yeah, it wears off within hours, and the boys are back in town. And holy shit, if I mix too much too fast, the mood swings. Oh my god the mood swings.
(It’s not - not good that it wears off, but it’s helpful. More on that soon.)
(Also, god I’m writing a bunch of lists here, aren’t I.)
Second, I can actually use this power to do some good. I can take bullets for people - and I have. Getting shot feels really weird, and watching my body, like, spit out bullets is really really intense. But it’s practical now. I know how to use it, now, and I’m getting better at it.
Third, while yeah, it sucks that the Mighty Undo Function means surgery isn’t a long-term solution for me, my powers are. If I figure this thing out, I can make myself change shape. Right? It has to work like that - it has to. Somehow my body knows what I look like, how I’m arranged and organized, somehow it knows what to put back in place. I just have to learn how to change that, and I’m my big beautiful self full time.
(scrolled up, reminded about “scared by implications”, right, sorry)
Anyway, the implications are: if I lose blood, if I lose tissue, if I lose more than that - it doesn’t matter. There’s a ripple of electricity around me, my tissue regrows, my skin covers it, tada, all new again.
Where did the matter come from for that?
I’m not getting any thinner (fuck, I wish, I’m like 6’1" and I really gotta tell you, petite would be neat). It’s not coming from existing tissues. And I’m not, like, ravenously hungry afterward.
So where’s my body getting this stuff?
What’s with the electricity?
You want to talk about causes of dysphoria, I have to tell you, watching a hole in your hand close itself up like magic is good - unscheduled holes in your body are bad, friends - but boy oh boy does it make me want to sit down for a few minutes and not think about anything.
Anyway, that’s the implications part, we’re done with this thread digression. Be Kind, Rewind.
Not everyone gets the obvious but useless option of shapeshifting. Not everyone got my thing, as blessed/cursed as it is. Some trans heroes get flight, or duck-kinesis or something. Some turn villain. Some turn hero. Some don’t want it at all.
Nobody gets the cards we wanted. But we play those cards as best we can, right?
So the upside of being a superhero is all those things.
The downside is the secrets.
My mom died when I was something like 4 or 5 years old, I think? I don’t remember the year. I just remember bits and pieces of it. The memories are weird, like an over-exposed picture on your phone, like some kind of photo-manipulation app got to them.
Like it wasn’t real. Still doesn’t feel real.
We lost her because we live in this hollowed-out alien UFO that crash-landed twenty years ago, after these fuckers invaded. We called them the Zeta - tenth letter of the Greek alphabet, because they were the tenth alien race we’d encountered by then.
We lost her because we decided to live here - we, collectively, hundreds of specialists at first, then thousands of support personnel, then millions of scientists and researchers and industrialists, taco truck owners, barbers, plumbers. We lived here despite this being a fantastically dangerous place to live. It’s all alien technology, and we still don’t understand a fraction of it.
We lost her in a freak accident.
I hate people who ask me, “was it worth it?” They say, “we’re learning to cure cancer here”. I mean true, we’ve already beaten some kinds of cancer just with the bioscience we uncovered. That’s great. But no, there’s nothing worth losing your parents for.
But we lose them and we move on.
Dad doesn’t want me to transition until I’m a legal adult. I talked to him about this once, and it got so heated and stressful, and he was crying, and I was crying, that I decided I never wanted to talk to him about it again.
The thing is, my dad does so much good for people. He’s wealthy, and he’s using that wealth to make the city safer, to find uses for what people find, and to get those uses into the hands of as many people as possible. Arkwright Meditech is going to save millions of lives. Just on a selfish note, it’ll probably help thousands of kids medically transition safer and faster.
My dad explains that he needs me. It goes like this. A ton of the people doing the work right now are young - like in their 20’s young. They’re from all around the world - Zeta City is an international project. They’re naturally inclined not to trust older white male American dudes like him. That’s where I come in. I’m his ambassador to the folks who might not trust him, but might learn to by trusting me.
These people need folks like my dad to get their stuff funded - they’re scientists on the fringe of their fields, they’re specialists, they have no idea how cutthroat and weird it can be to get their research turned into something useful. I’ve seen how hard it is, how much regulation there is. My god, it is brutal. It’s like it’s literally against the law to do good things for my people.
And my dad is shielding them from all this nonsense. He’s taking care of the governments and the paperwork and the compliance issues, stuff they don’t even imagine would be a problem for them. I’ve talked to some of them about it, and they just honestly had no idea.
I think this is why he wants me to be a boy to these folks. There’s still this bullshit about males being better. Some of the folks who work here come from cultures where that’s pretty well ingrained. My dad didn’t say this is why. I’m kind of reading into it.
But why the fuck else would he object to me living like I want to?
I can’t understand it.
But I can work around him, by doing this superhero thing.
I don’t tell Cassie either. I know - or I think I know - or I’m afraid I know - what would happen there.
She’d ask me to do activist stuff as a superhero. She’d want me to do my thing in the service of the issues she’s so passionate about. And I’m afraid that if I didn’t, or didn’t do it as zealously as she wanted, she’d get angry. And I’m afraid I’d eventually lose her as a friend if I couldn’t keep up with her expectations.
I’ve heard how she talks about other heroes. I know she can get pretty intense.
I wish everyone would just be okay with me being who I want to be. I wish I could just tie all these worlds together and everyone would be chill. And I wish I didn’t feel like I had to compromise.
For me, being a hero isn’t putting on a mask. It’s taking one off. And honestly, it’s the best feeling I’ve ever felt. Now the challenge is pushing that joy into the rest of my life.