Chapter Text
Calum balances the bottle of nail polish on the sofa next to him, praying it doesn’t tip over. Honestly, he should really learn to paint his nails at a table or in the bathroom instead of on an expensive upholstered piece of furniture, but he doesn’t. Ashton walks in the living room just as Calum’s putting the finishing touches on the second coat on his toes.
“Bro, I keep telling you not to paint your nails on the couch. Someday it’ll spill and there’s going to be a big black spot that we won’t be able to get rid of,” Ashton says, carefully picking up the open bottle of nail polish and setting it gingerly on the coffee table. Ashton then heads into the kitchen, presumably fixing himself something for lunch.
Calum feels kind of weird being called bro, honestly. He’s not sure what about it bothers him; it doesn’t always feel wrong. And he is technically a guy. He has a dick and everything. Of course, he knows not all guys have dicks and not all girls have vaginas, but...he’s not a girl. He’d know if he was a girl, wouldn’t he? He’d have figured it out by now. Or at least, he thinks he would have. There would have been some indication, surely. Yeah, he’s always liked to look pretty and maybe he might have tried on Mali’s dresses a couple times when he was a little kid but it’s not like anything jumps out at him and screams girl.
But then again, sometimes he does feel like a girl. Sometimes he looks in the mirror and his body just looks too hard, too masculine. On those days he doesn’t really know what to do. He knows he’s not a girl, and besides, everyone wishes they were the opposite sex sometimes, right? Though a little voice in the back of his head tells him he’s just lying to himself, that he’s weird, that he’s not really a boy but not really a girl. The thing is, he doesn’t even know if that’s a thing.
Today is one of the days where he does feel like a girl. He shaved his legs in the shower this morning and he’s wearing a loose T-shirt and his usual skinny jeans. But he looks down and his body just doesn’t look right, doesn’t feel right. He can’t bring himself to voice what feels wrong, even in his own head. He sighs. He checks to see if the polish on his toes has dried yet. It has. He stands up and heads into his bedroom, locking the door behind him and getting his laptop. He opens google and types in one word. Transgender.
There are a lot of results he has to wade through. He comes across an interesting term, though. Non-binary. He’s never heard that word before. He’s heard of guys who were born girls and girls who were born guys, but he has no clue what non-binary could mean. He clicks the link.
He finds a whole list of genders he never knew existed. Ones that aren’t strictly male or female. He comes across the term genderfluid. Apparently some people feel male, female, neither, or both, all at different times, or even at the same time. He feels like he’s found a part of him he didn’t even know was missing. He smiles dopily at the laptop screen for a bit before the panic sets in.
He knows now what he is, and it explains a lot. The feeling he has on the days he feels like a girl, the feeling that his body isn’t right? There’s a name for it: dysphoria. But along with that comes the knowledge that he is, technically, transgender. A lot of the search results were about transphobia and discrimination, and of course he’s not stupid, he’s seen the way people treat girls who were born boys (male to female, he reminds himself). And while he doesn’t exactly fit into that category, he’s close enough to worry what people are going to think. What people are going to say. What people are going to do. And it’s terrifying.
He begins crying, letting out all the emotions, all the things he hadn’t allowed himself to think because he was afraid of the conclusions he’d come to. He wonders how he’ll tell the others. His family. He decides not to worry about that right now. He finally calms down a bit and decides that, since he knows what this is now, what he is, he might as well look into it a bit more. He didn’t realize it was okay to use they as a singular pronoun. He thinks about that for a bit. Sometimes he feels like a they, other times like a she, other times like a he. He wonders if it would be too weird to change his pronouns day by day. He decides on they for now.
Calum looks into ways to deal with their dysphoria on their feminine days. They don’t want to do anything too noticeable when they’re in public, but anything will help. They come across an article on tucking, which they kind of had an idea of what it was, but they’ve obviously never actually tried it. They decide to try it. It ends frustratingly because their boxers are too loose and it just doesn’t feel right and it’s uncomfortable and the article assumes they already have panties to use and they just sit down and cry for a bit.
They pull on a pair of loose sweatpants and sit on their bed, arms around their knees, wondering what to do next. Obviously they’re going to have to come out at some point. If no one else, the other members of the band will notice something’s up with them. But right now, they’ve just figured it out themselves. They can’t tell anyone yet, not when it's still so new to them.
About another week passes. They’ve had a couple more feminine days since then, and have kind of figured out how to tuck, still thinking that it’d be better if they had something tighter to wear. They’ve had a couple neutral days as well. The neutral days are always the worst, they think. At least when they’re a girl they can do things to make them feel more like a girl, and when they’re a boy they don’t have to worry about any of the gender stuff for a bit, though it’s always at the back of their mind. But on their neither or both days, they just feel so confused. It’s not really physical dysphoria over their body, like on their girl days. It’s more like the feeling that everything is wrong. Like they don’t fit into any category.
They’ve been doing a bit of research online about coming out, too. Not that they think they’re ready for that. They don’t think the others will be upset, but they doubt they’ll understand fully. They order some makeup and a few pairs of panties online, hoping to alleviate some of the dysphoria they feel on their girl days. And they deal with their fears. They think of themselves as who they are now, not as a boy who just has weird thoughts sometimes. They’re not a girl nor a boy, and they’re learning to be okay with that.