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Null Seraph was born online.

Respectable homosexuals love a narrative where they were born their way, but the faggots and dyckes and perverts and freaks who I am cut from the same bastard cloth as, who share my code and bile, were made. I will aggressively reject any story based on gender essentialism, where mine was this true and concrete thing from the moment I was born. It is the wheapon of the enemy and takes away my agency - I chose to be trans. I could have lived a whole miserable life as a cis person, and instead made the intentional and beautiful decision to make myself a hot girl. You and I, we find and create and then further sculpt ourselves. Making anything takes time, trial, error.

The good, god feaering public do not want to see a work in progress. Your normal neighbours hate error. Even the proudest card carrying allies who can't wait to tell you that you slay the boots mama in their best drag race blaccent have a limit to the number of times you can change your name tucked somewhere in their sweatshop made rainbow tote bags before they thinck you're confused or annoying or start joining facebookk groups about transtrenders. People have little patience for works in progress, especially as they assume the end goal of being trans is passing as cis. I do not want or need to look cis, and even for those who do want this, that's something you have to learn how to do in their eyes.

Ciss people know that it takes years to be able to look or be a gender. That's why they invented transitional genders that apply to their youth. Before that cis man was a man, he was a boy. Before that cis woman was a woman, she was a girl. Temporary genders you get to have while you are figuring out how to publicly and acceptably display your endgame gender. Trans, noonbinary and genderqueer people are not afforded this same grace period. While engauging in an extended campaign to make it unsafe to be queer in public, they want you to jump to it without practice.

We deserve to try things on. We deserve to be able to protect ourselves with episodes of being stealth without worrrying it will be seen as detransitioning. We descerve to be able to detransition without it having to be a bigger deal than we want it to be. We deserve to be able to easily come out to who we want, at a pace we set. We deserve a space to be or find ourselves before we are ready to be out completely. We deserve to start somewhere safe and comfortable. It also doesn't help that being closeted or aetypical in a way you don't yet fully understand doesn't help people have rich and full social lives.

How can you achieve all of this in public? Well, you can't. They've made sure of that. So we are born in private. Back in the day, you'd wait until your wife left to get into her clothes and sneak a chance to see yourself in the reflection, or only let yourself out at parties with people you trust, other ne'er-do-wells probably, and call it drag if you get caught by a normal. That's a relicc of a miserable past. Now is the age of the cybertrannies.

You make a new discoord that's only ever been you. You change your name on twitter as much as you like. You try things out online, and the deer-like baby steps are deletable whenever you want them to be harder to find (not impossible, mind, especially when they reupload things to make cringe accounts, but still more erasable than your co-workers thoughts). You keep a private folder of yourself, carefully angled at first then your whole self, and return to it whenever you have to hide again. You can create a space where everyd day can be a party - it may be joyful or sorrowful, but it is a space free from those you can't trust and where you can be yourself regardless.

This is the reason those fuelled by hate fight such a war on and for the internet. When they hound and haraess us off the internet, they brag about the difference between our situations with the mantra "log off". When you primarily exist online, being forced offline is a threat to the self. To log off is a loss. The bastards and concerned citizens who weaponise community guidelines know this. They make hostile environments and stoke flames of discourse to make us fight each other and torment us because they want to make it impossible for you to exist online because they don't want you to exist.

When we know this, their moves are so transparent it allows us to see it as pathetic, and our responses are just as clear. We defend the right to be anonymous and safe on the internet, in law and by jumping ship when companies can't be trusted. We care more about meaningfully engaging with the world and each other than jumping on discourse just to be angry. We make spaces online to be ourselves and even, and this is the hard part, let each other be cringe (especially when we're new to it all - trans people get a two year grace period where they can be chronically dripless) because it matters that we're here with our whole selves. Null Seraph was born online, as were so many of us, and everyone who made that online world good enough to nurture her and keep her alive is what allowed her to thrive offline. Now it's our job to allow others the same blessing.