Breakfast was the same as lunch had been with Julia/n carefully sorting and arranging their food to make sure no part of it touched the other. This involved quite a few plates, one plate with a short stack of pancakes, another with scrambled eggs, yet another with four slices of crispy bacon, a fourth plate held two slices of dry toast. There was also a large mug of black coffee and a glass of orange juice. As with lunch the day before and the Jules Special at the bonfire it was all eaten and drunk separately.
With breakfast done Julia/n first went to the storage room where the musical instruments were kept and met up with Ms Jones there. Together they took inventory of what instruments were available for loan and even found time to sit down and improvise together with Julia/n on the piano and Ms Jones on her cello. Music was the one place where Julia/n could let go of her obsession about structure and just let the notes flow freely, mostly on their own though as ensemble improvisation could often get complicated but with Ms Jones they had found a connection that allowed them to both follow and lead the progress of the music, almost without any other communication than through their instruments.
They played together for about twenty minutes before Julia/n had to move on to the next task they had set for themselves that morning. They borrowed a lap top from the administration office, which had several such lap tops for the junior councillors to borrow as they might need them for planning their schedules and/or preparing for group sessions.
Hatching! they wrote centred at the top of the page in bold letters and then took a deep breath. This was a story they had never told publicly before and knowing they would have to read it to a group of mostly strangers had them hesitating to start.
Hatching!
This is the term often used to describe the moment a person of any non-heteronormative gender but also by transgender people to describe the moment they realise their true gender as opposed to the gender they were assigned at birth. This is also often the moment when many take new names that better fit their true gender. Many also adjust their birthdays to the day of their hatching, especially transgender people and those of non-binary gender. I did too. My birthday is August 21, even if I will legally turn 18 a full four months before that date next year.
For myself I simply decided to add a /n to the name given to me by my parents. I was assigned female at birth, or AFAB, as the abbreviated term is that many non-binary people use to describe their physical gender. Those assigned male at birth use AMAB.
The story of my egg hatching on August 21, 2003 started long before that. It began long before that and if I am honest I couldn't tell you exactly when. I just knew ever since I was just a little
girl that I was not a little
girl at all. I just wasn't, at least not all of the time. I was never interested in the kind of things little girls are supposed to be interested in. This of course was perhaps also due to being neurodivergent. I was withdrawn, shy, uncomfortable around other people, and I still am, but not as much as I used to be.
From the moment my mom allowed me to pick my own clothes I stopped wearing dresses or skirts for a very long time and in the early stages of puberty I became depressed and started seeing a therapist. I talked a lot about how much I felt more like a boy than a girl and she recommended I should be put on puberty blockers, which she arranged to have prescribed for me. They stopped my breasts from growing but also made me taller than most girls at my school, even taller than some of the boys.
Julia/n went on for about a page and a half about going through puberty on puberty blockers and how their therapy changed from having been for depression to be about gender dysphoria, a term they only mentioned once to their parents because of how they in no uncertain terms told them that it was all just nonsense, told her that she was a girl and that was that. They had taken the name Julian with out the /n and when their parents refused to call them anything but Julia, without the n altogether they had run away to their much more understanding younger aunt who took them in and suggested to their parents that it was perhaps best that Julian lived with her instead of them. There would be far less drama that way.
What my therapist made me realise on that day, August 21, 2003, was that almost as much as I had talked about being a boy I had actually talked about how I still enjoyed certain things traditionally considered girly. I always wore earrings and mostly I wore some kind of make up as well, mostly like eyeliner but she had also noticed that I did from time to time wear lipstick as well, often a dark shade of purple. I must of course have been aware of this but it was the way she mentioned it, almost in passing: "That lipstick looks good on you," were her exact words and it made me think.
She asked me if I would be willing to try to wear a dress or a skirt, just for one day. I said no at first because it was a ridiculous idea but she insisted and told me to think of it as one final confirmation that I was a boy if I felt absolutely uncomfortable with it. I agreed and that afternoon when I got back home I borrowed one of my aunt's dresses, we were more or less the same size anyway, except the dress hung a bit loose on my chest.
I remember looking at myself in the mirror for a long long time wondering who that weird looking girl was looking back at me. And slowly it dawned on me that my first instinct wasn't to tear the dress off and never wear such a thing again but rather that with a bit of make up I kind of looked good in the dress. That exact moment was when my egg hatched. I had heard the term non-binary somewhere before, probably at my therapists and that was it. It was also then that I realised I was pansexual.
By the time they had finished their essay it was almost time for lunch and they realised how much they were looking forward to seeing Adrienne again, maybe show her the essay and let her read it.
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