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Before Sophia really knew what she meant, she knew it didn’t fit.
It meant dresses and long hair and no running and that’s not how you’re meant to act Sophia . And other things too. Periods and babies and falling in love and all that. She read about them in mom’s magazines with a sort of dread and a sort of hope that maybe the rules wouldn’t apply to her, that she wouldn’t have to go through that. They sounded - disgusting? Maybe. She tried the word on for size, saying it in empty rooms about things, and it wasn’t that or not only that. Just…not right. Not right at all.
Then there was puberty and she went from dresses and long hair to -
Weight on her chest she didn’t want. Bleeding somewhere she didn’t want to bleed and throwing up after that, god, why did it hurt so much? Her friends - she had those, right? - talking about makeup and outfits and maybe they had fun but the words were scrabbling and tearing because she didn’t want any of this and it was happening to her anyway and she hadn’t agreed to it.
She tried. She did. She tried to lean into it because she wasn’t broken , there wasn’t anything wrong with her. And that didn’t work. So she went the other way.
She cut her hair short, and mom said, “Oh, but Sophia, you had such lovely hair.”
She wore baggy, shapeless hoodies and sports bras and tried not to look in the mirror, and Steven bought her skirts for her birthday and grinned too widely when mom wasn’t looking.
She got big into track, into phys, and mom scolded her about it more than she ever said anything nice.
She triggered, eventually, and it didn’t help.
—
Her sister was the one who did it in the end. Three years old and a genius. Something to joke about later, how small and simple it was.
“Sophia! Sophia come play with me!” and she’d said yes because she wasn’t going to be like Terry about it. So she sat on the floor of her sister’s bedroom and looked at all the dolls mom had bought for her and she’d never really played with, and helped her sister make a tea party. It was very important, apparently, to put all the boys on one side and the girls on the other.
“No that one goes with the boys.”
Sophia started, looked at the doll in her hand - pink lace dress, but short hair. She could have sworn this one had longer hair before. “Uh, you sure?”
“Yep! She wasn’t getting along with the other princesses so now she’s a he.”
Oh. Right. So it was - could it be that simple? Was that a thing people could do? They could, couldn’t they? So - why not?
“Are you okay Sophia?”
“Yeah, yeah,” she replied. “Where should I put him again?”
—
Sophia knew she wasn’t smart. Not book smart, not the kind of smart you needed to be to figure out more about something like this. But she was determined - she always had been, ever since slipping out onto that roof with a shadow and a scarf and a baton.
And that afternoon with her sister had given her - an idea. Maybe. Some way of understanding why so much felt so wrong. So, she went to the library, because there was no way she’d look anything about this up at home, not with mom and Steven lurking around the place.
Found a computer well at the back of the room, the screen just to the wall.
Typed into the search bar with unsteady fingers:
Can a girl be a boy?
An explosion of results. Not all of them were useful. Clicked open Haven’s web-page about it because they were capes and closed it really quickly because they said it was impossible and sinful and evil. That wasn’t what she was looking for. A whole bunch of online stories about some cape from Portland called Leyline and half of them were…genderbent?
Was that a thing?
It was not a thing. But also it was, sort of. There was an actual name for it. Transgender. When ‘your birth sex did not correspond to your sense of identity and gender expression.’ So: you’re a boy but someone put you in a girl’s body. God must have been real drunk, she thought, and then laughed at herself.
Or himself? She felt around the edges of the word, of the self-description. He did this, not she did this. Did you hear, he won over Clarendon yesterday? It…fit? Wasn’t sure. Didn’t know how to be sure. Whatever the opposite of feeling for a missing tooth was, it was strange and foreign and not unpleasant and then Sophia was typing again.
How to be transgender?
Deleted it, retyped the words from the windowed page, clumsy but fitting all the same, How to transition from female to male?
Lots of options. Sophia had always been bad at languages, French at school was actual torture and stupid bullshit besides. But this was a whole new language he couldn’t help but dive into. Social transition and medical transition. Puberty blockers and hormones and surgery. Some cape stuff too. But that was expensive, no way to afford it, not yet, and no way the parents would let that happen, plus which getting all that as a teenager was stupid complicated. But there were other things. Voice training, binders, packers, birth control implants were a way to lighten periods, that would be good.
There were things Sophia could do. And Sophia had never been shy about getting things done.
He went and bought a pack of binders that evening.
—
It helped. More than he’d have thought and in a lot of ways. The pronoun didn’t come naturally. Sophia had spent so much time thinking about being a she that switching wasn’t a one step thing. Thought about they , instead, or others, but kept coming back.
It fit. It was weird at first, and it took time, but it fit.
He stored the kit with his cape stuff, in hidden lockboxes and abandoned apartments, mostly, but wore it to school and afterwards even so. People still called him Sophia - he’d decided Sam was a better name, after rotating through a half dozen, trying to figure the best in the privacy of his head - and said he was a girl (although a few times out shopping on his own the clerks saw he was a boy and that made him smile until it hurt) but just knowing that he wasn’t broken or wrong or going mad was worth so much. He was just a boy.
Got an implant about four months in, saved up a ton of money from caping, did it quietly at somewhere kind of shady and it was a wrenching, mortifying hour but afterwards the pain and the blood eased. Didn’t go away, not completely, but it was so much better.
There were communities of people online, too. Support groups, all anonymous. He spent tons of time on them, not really talking, not much, just lurking. It was a lot like being a cape. The hidden identity bit, sure, and he actually had some advice to give about that side of things. But also the practicalities of it. The little workarounds you came up with no money, the tricks of the trade; changing how you walked, how you talked, just a little bit, just subtly. All of them lifting each other up.
He still patrolled, of course. As Shadow Stalker. Shadow Stalker was definitely a girl, but he didn’t actually mind that much. Minded a bit, sure, but the cape and the mask weren’t who he was, just a tool with rep to scare people. Who he actually was, was Sam, who was the best on the women’s track team and better than most of the boys too; who spent two hours a night on chat rooms talking to friends he’d probably never meet and learning things nobody else would tell him; who played with his sister and got called sir in grocery stores.
So when some girl called Emma he saved tried to get him to bully some other girl in high school, he told her to fuck off. Way more important things to do. Besides, he knew what being alone felt like and fucking hated it. What was the point of making someone helpless feel bad when there was a city full of Nazis to beat up?
—
Went too far, eventually. Hurt someone who deserved it too much. Wards or juvie, and obviously picked Wards because he wasn’t an idiot. The other Wards - maybe were. Different people, different backgrounds. Clockblocker, stupid name but not much more stupid than Dennis, kept staring at him when he thought Sam couldn’t see, like he was doing maths in his head.
Vista, Missy, was the only girl. Only other girl, as Triumph put it. She was - more serious than the others gave her credit for, because she was so much younger. Sam and her shared a changing room and sparred sometimes and he didn’t think much of it until she walked in on him at the wrong time. When he was swapping his binder over.
She stopped, dead, the door clicking shut behind her.
Sam looked at her. She looked at Sam.
Please, he thought, let her think this is some kind of sports bra design or something, come on.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“What?”
“That’s a binder,” she said, and fuck’s sake of course she’d recognise it, the one person who stood a half-decent chance of ever seeing him wearing one. “So I’m guessing, uh, I’m guessing you’re trans? Sorry. I’ve read about this and I don’t really know…it’s fine! I mean, it’s fine if you are obviously.” She did that thing she hated doing, when she got embarrassed and started babbling a little bit and then more and it was honestly insufferable.
“Yeah,” he replied, shortly. “It’s Sam.”
Missy smiled, wide and open and genuine. “It’s good to meet you, Sam.”
“Please don’t tell - “ he choked on the words, on the sheer indignity of it, bitter like anything.
“I won’t. I promise.”
—
It was weird after that. Missy smiled at him a lot. It was a part of himself he hadn’t planned on revealing to anyone, not since joining the Wards - plan was always to scrape by closeted until college, until somewhere safe and different to be more public about it, not ideal at all but he was used to making difficult choices if he had to.
She sat down next to him at the console, one day, no one else on base. They both spent a lot of time there. Her family situation was probably more fucked than his.
“Have you thought about joining the Protectorate LGBTQ+ Affinity Group?” she asked.
He looked at her. “The what now?”
“It’s like, a support network for queer capes inside the Protectorate and stuff. They do talks. Resources and things.”
“Already in some of those,” he said. Then. “How come you know so much about this?”
“I’m bi,” Missy replied, without missing a beat, a challenging look in her eye.
He shrugged. “Fair enough.”
“Also, I helped the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force with their new operational guidance for Wards a few months back.”
That was a very Missy thing to do. “Trust the PRT to make being nice to us sound like invading a country.”
She laughed. “You’re telling me?”
—
Meeting Victoria was a bit of an experience. Meeting Panacea was…more than that.
Solution at a touch, maybe. He knew she had a waiting list half a continent long, he knew he’d have to get Missy to ask Dean to ask Vicky and he didn’t want to do that but - still. No cost, no time, nothing like that. Just had to go and ask, go and say and hope.
“You’re moping,” announced Missy, walking right into his room without knocking; that’s how he knew it was her.
“No I’m not,” he said, still sitting on his bed.
“Yes, you are.” She warped space to sit in his chair with a single step, rolling it round to face him. “Here, cookies.” Threw a pack right at his face; he just about caught them in time. Then. “This is about Amy, isn’t it?”
A long pause. “Yeah,” he said. Then. “You don’t think they’ll laugh at me?”
“What, Victoria and Amy? Pretty sure they won’t.”
He waved the words away. “I mean, sure, maybe. Thanks for that. But - “ Sighed, explosively. “I don’t know. All of my friends online go through all sorts of shit and here I am, Panacea there for the asking. Would I really - I mean, would it be right?” And, unspoken, ‘am I ready?’ That was more of it, he thought, and didn’t say. Having that happen would mean telling everyone in the Wards, in the Protectorate, at least. By definition. Maybe he could get away with it at school, but probably not. Nevermind what family would think.
Of course Missy saw that. A gentle hand on his arm.
“If you don’t want to do it, that’s fine, you know. Surgery and stuff. Not now or not ever. As long as you’re yourself, nothing else matters.”
He sniffed. Steven’s voice in his head told him it was weak and he told that voice to shut up. “When did you get so wise?”
She nabbed one of the cookies, crunched down, said blase, “I got that off Alexandria’s episode of Sesame Street.”
He grinned. “Jerk.”
“Come on Sam, use your big boy words.”
“Fuck off Missy.”
“You know you love me.”
And, he replied quietly, “Yeah, I do.”
—
They were getting a new Ward, so Carlos had them all in costume, ready to meet them and unmask. Armsmaster escorted her through the door, a girl - at least, Sam thought she was a girl, it was important to ask these things - with long hair trailing out the back of black chitin armour.
“Hi everyone,” she said, uncertainly, taking off her mask. “I’m Taylor. I’m, um, looking forward to working with you all.”
Missy unmasked easily, first, stepped forward and shook her hand. “I’m Missy. Nice to meet you, Taylor. It’ll be good to have another girl on the team.” She turned and smiled at Sam. “Shadow Stalker doesn’t count.”