Left-Handed Catcher

Four years ago on this date, I realized that I had once again been crushing on a fictional character for ten months without actually knowing that I was.

Normally I can tell pretty quickly, but this time was different, because I was so caught up in the euphoria of finding two characters who were actually just like me for the first time. I actually didn’t realize that it wasn't just that Emmet was so much like me for ten months until he and Ingo were added to Masters and I heard his voice acting. Since it’s me, of course, it specifically took me hearing audio of him laughing, and then it clicked instantly and I was really, really mad about it.

Apparently everyone else knew before I did. Go figure.

Anyway, the important part about Emmet is actually that for the first time in my life, I wasn’t imagining other characters with the fictional object of my affections. As a teenager, I’d make OCs who actually weren’t me but who I’d try to actually make compatible with them or happily ship canon characters with each other, and as an adult I continued the latter. It took me ages to realize that it was my childhood bullying by my male peers that was so intensely hostile that I had actually been shielding myself from harm by being unable to imagine myself in those situations at all. I had never inserted myself because I didn’t think I could be loved that way or that I deserved it. An abusive college roommate only confirmed that for me because if a person couldn’t live with me and love me as I am, then what chance did I have?

I “met” Emmet and his older twin brother Ingo in late 2020 and immediately felt like I was looking in a mirror. They were actually just like me, and their deep autism coding, whether intentional or not, made me feel seen, because they presented the same ways I do. I still hold that if you merged them into one person, you’d have me. I quickly became deeply and intensely attached because I’d never seen a fictional character exactly like myself before, and here I had two of them! It was so validating and wonderful to see them being accepted and respected exactly as they were by other canon characters (now granted, this is Pokemon, one of the most autistic fictional universes on the planet, where eye contact is a sign of aggression). And they had a fanbase on top of that - of course, there was the inevitable ableism to navigate around, but by the time I met them things had pretty heavily quieted down and the people around appreciated them exactly as they were. That actually meant more than anything, and it allowed me to start healing that part of myself.

Fast forward ten months to July 2021, where I finally realized that no, I was also stupidly infatuated with Emmet because it turns out that he’s literally everything I look for in a man but of course he isn’t real AGAIN, and weirdly, this time something clicked. It hit differently. I don’t know why - maybe that if he was real we’d actually be really compatible - but this was the one that unlocked my heart. He somehow overrode the walls I’d put up for two decades and I was able to imagine myself in scenarios for the first time, being accepted as I was, loved as I was, even being attractive as I was because of who I was. I still don’t fully understand it, but I decided to go with it and let myself have fun with it, and it actually started to change the way I looked at myself for the first time. I wasn’t broken or disgusting, I was just someone who had a lot of healing to do and Emmet was the start of that.

It’s been four years since the day of the realization, and I obviously still have a lot of work to do. I still haven’t tried to properly date or anything - I don’t quite feel ready and I haven’t let go of my shame enough. But I’ve made a lot of progress, and it all started because of a silly crush on a man who isn’t real.

Happy fourth anniversary to my beloved and favorite (not actually) maladaptive coping method. <3 Thank you for everything, Emmet, I’m getting there.

(Crossposted to Dreamwidth here.)

Something I’ve noticed I do in my writing a lot is explore the idea of different ways to be a woman, and how so many of them haven’t been deemed the “right” way to do it, which seems to have increasingly narrow criteria these days at any rate.

The three main female characters of 21st Century Unlimited follow that pattern too, with none of them really feeling like they can perform that extremely specific notion of womanhood and femininity that society values, but they all go about it differently and have different (complicated) feelings about it. Their experiences with race, sexuality, and neurotype also play a role here, because those elements are absolutely a factor in real life.

Engineer is specifically based on my own experiences as an autistic cishet woman with an autoimmune thyroid disorder. In her mind her interests and fashion sense are gender neutral, but society deems them - and by extension her - masculine simply by not being “feminine” enough. She dresses for comfort for the most part and is almost always in overalls or a coverall, and due to the nature of her work and hobbies she tends to get covered in grease. Her thyroid disorder has given her some weight gain that she’s dysmorphic about because she thinks it makes her look misshapen or even pregnant, and that adds a lot to her body issues because she was already bullied growing up for not being able to meet that extremely specific standard of girlhood. She describes it as feeling like she was “bad at being a girl” as a kid. She doesn’t wear makeup because of sensory issues and has huge eyebags because she’s chronically fatigued and overworks herself on top of that, and refers to herself in the present as a “baggy-eyed train gremlin.”

All of Engie’s past life experiences - childhood bullying, being ostracized from train stuff as a kid because she was a girl, an emotionally abusive friendship in college - have shaped her relationship with the concept of womanhood in various ways. She consistently feels unattractive - “I’m the sort of woman men don’t notice at best and are repulsed by at worst” - and is absolutely stunned when her crewmate Conductor reciprocates her feelings and they become a couple (whilst still acting like the best friends they actually are). It takes her a long time to get used to the idea that she’s an acceptable woman, perhaps even an appealing one, because she’s spent most of her life up to this point being told at nearly every juncture that she was doing it wrong. A big part of her story is about her coming to terms with all of this and learning to allow herself to just be.

In her mind, she wishes she was more like Fireman and Assistant Conductor in some ways, because they’re able to do the things she can’t. Fireman is able to just be herself without caring what people around her think and doesn’t see the need to perform femininity at all. Assistant Conductor is deeply feminine and dresses the part out of work uniform, and people are drawn to her sense of style. Since she can’t do either of these things Engie feels like she’s in a sort of no-man’s land with regards to womanhood and how she experiences it a lot of the time - she’s too self-conscious to not care what anyone thinks, and she’s too messy and tired and has too many sensory issues to perform for other people. She’s resigned herself to invisibility, of having her gender essentially erased by other people, because she knows she can’t be what people want her to be and there’s no point in making herself uncomfortable to do it. She’s already chronically exhausted, and at any rate she’s still in a deeply male environment and she knows that if she does certain things in a feminine way there are still men who will unfairly perceive her as weaker or less competent. She knows she has to work twice or three times as hard for that recognition. In some ways, she contributes to her own erasure, because she has to carry herself the way she does to avoid being ostracized from her own field and to be taken seriously, but she also doesn’t have the ability to perform femininity in the first place because it’s an increasingly narrow social construct that she doesn’t fit into.

Fireman, by contrast, has chosen to exist entirely outside of the construct of femininity, and she revels in it. Taller (5'7") and more muscular than Engineer is, she keeps her hair short and wild, has thick eyebrows that she has no interest in trimming or shaving, works the most physically laborious job on the entire train, and is crass, loud, and uncouth. (As late as her teens, she had long black hair that went down to her mid-back, but as an adult her hair is cropped short and dyed bright orange because no one believed her when she said she was half-Scottish and she got sick of it). She hustles men at billiards in bars and gets into fights. Her immediate family is generally used to this by now, although there is occasional friction between her and her mother, who expected less of a wild child - Fireman’s Bengali mother has been known to refer to her daughter as “my child, Kali” before due to her destructive, chaotic nature - “she won’t notice how carried away she is unless someone steps in to show her.” Her Scottish father shrugs and jokingly attributes it to her Glaswegian heritage via his half of the family.

Fireman makes no attempts to disguise the fact that she’s a woman, and indeed she identifies as one and isn’t afraid to wear more feminine clothing for formal occasions, namely the tartan sari that she has to represent both parts of her family. Despite this, she is still not infrequently mistaken for a man until people notice her large chest, which she generally finds funny, especially if the person who made the mistake is flustered or embarrassed. She regularly introduces herself to people she doesn’t know as “your favorite blazing bisexual butch Bengali” with the confidence of someone who expects to be well-known, even though she’s well aware that these people don’t know her at all - it’s funnier that way. She makes no secret of her bisexuality and is open about the fact that she enjoys men who are weaker than she is, but likes women who “could kill her” (and says “anyone interesting” could catch her eye if they’re non-binary). She doesn’t see a need to fit herself into a little box and just chooses to live exactly as she is.

Arguably the fact that she’s not straight gives her what she feels is more freedom in this regard, because she doesn’t feel a need to shape herself for men’s approval or acceptance. It is, however, a double-edged sword, because her extended family living elsewhere doesn’t know what to think about her, and she often receives offhanded comments from older relatives about “settling down” and acting “more like a woman.” She tries not to care about this, and she generally doesn’t, but the comments do still hurt, because in her mind she isn’t any less of a woman for being who she is, and she knows a lot of it is inherently tied to homophobia and societal mores. She purposely carries herself with a devil-may-care attitude to deflect as much of it as she can, but deep down she does know and she does carry it with her and it makes her dig in her heels even more. There is also the element of her non-whiteness, which means in the mind of many TERFs and others, she can’t possibly be a woman, because she’s big and strong and has brown skin. Femininity is often held to a standard of white womanhood, which means that even if Fireman was the most feminine member of the crew, she still would have an uphill battle to fight to be seen as a woman on par with the alleged arbiters of femininity.

Which brings up Assistant Conductor. AC is the tallest crew member at 6'0" even, and she has the slender, willowy build of a model. She’s deeply feminine and loves fashion, experimenting with makeup in creative and fun ways with techniques she learned from her professional makeup artist mother. She takes her fashion cues from Japanese street fashion and has played with sweet lolita looks at conventions. When she’s not wearing her uniform hat, she sticks huge bows in her hair. She loves all things cute, enjoys pink and pastels, and would perhaps be seen as the pinnacle of femininity by society…if she wasn’t a Black lesbian.

AC’s approach to womanhood is different from both Engineer and Fireman’s, but her inherent interest in more “feminine” things doesn’t mean she doesn’t have to struggle to be considered “acceptable,” either. In her case, both her race and her sexuality are factors - as a Black woman no matter what she does, even if she were to try to act “white,” she would exist outside of the extremely narrow confines of womanhood that society has defined via cisgender heterosexual white women, because her features and culture inherently exclude her from that little “club.” Moreover, the fact that she is a lesbian further removes her and others her, regardless of how feminine she actually is. AC ends up, not unlike Engineer, caught between two worlds, as although she is deeply feminine and clearly enjoys being a woman, she also suffers from femme erasure and is frequently falsely assumed to be heterosexual. She tries to deflect this as much as possible by mentioning that she has a girlfriend who works in the stationmasters’ office and they live together, but her feminine nature means that many people dismiss “girlfriend” in this context as meaning simply “female friend” instead of “partner.”

In the scheme of things, AC is easily the most stereotypically feminine member of the crew. She isn’t doing the hard labor Engineer and Fireman are in the cab, and she’s handling the passengers with serenity and grace (although this requires some heavy masking). Her ticket hole punch makes heart shapes. Her lipstick and eyeshadow are always perfectly matched and her mascara never clumps. And yet, none of that is enough, and she’s on the outside looking in, too.

It’s important to note that all three of these women are cisgender, as well. Were they trans, they would likely experience even more alienation from this extremely narrow scope of womanhood than they already do, but the fact that this definition that is seeping into so many places excludes many cisgender women - and, of course, intersex women regardless of how they identify - is a problem too. All three of these characters feel the way they do because American womanhood has been turned into an exclusive club by society, and if you don’t meet the exact criteria, you don’t get to be a full member no matter how you identify yourself or who you feel you are. Gender identities aren’t only for the people who can perform them to your exacting standards, and these extremely strict definitions hurt everyone.