The Wonderful Queer Story of Racetrack Higgins

The Story of Racetrack Higgins

So, here, we get to see Race's backstory, explaining everything.

Enjoy! :)

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Warning: mentions of transphobia, dysphoria, and unsafe binding

Out of all of Racetrack's secrets, his biggest one is that he was not born a boy. 

He used to have a life before the newsies. It wasn't a wealthy one, but it was one of enough food and a roof over his head. And dresses. The bane of his existence. That was probably one of the first signs that he didn't feel like his assigned gender. 

So he tried to wear boy's clothes. He would scour neighborhoods and trashcans for old pieces of clothes for boys that no one wanted anymore. He was eight when he first tried dressing up as a boy.

And it felt right.

He couldn't let his family know. They wouldn't understand.

So he would sneak out and change into those clothes elsewhere. It felt exhilarating running through the streets as a boy. He wished it could have lasted forever. But alas, he had to come home at the end of the day, and put on the wretched dress.

When he was nine, it got too much. He couldn't go on trying to pretend to be the perfect daughter. He told his parents he wanted to be a boy, with a boy's name and boy's clothes. They said that he couldn't keep acting like this. That they could cure these thoughts. So they kept him in the house, in the dresses, absolutely miserable. Until he ran away to his grandparents'. They loved him unconditionally in a way that his parents couldn't. And so that's the way they lived. They were happy.

Until he lost both of them to old age when he was ten.

That's when he took to the streets. He lived nameless, and never wore dresses again. But it was still hard surviving on the streets alone.

When he was a little closer to age eleven than age ten, a boy a couple years older than him found him, a boy like him: a boy who wasn't actually a boy. A boy who gave himself the name of Jack Kelly.

Jack Kelly took him under his wing. He brought him to the Manhattan Newsie's Lodging House. Jack promised that he wouldn't tell his secret. He promised that here, he could live as a boy. 

However, some of those newsies figured out it time that he wasn't born a boy. They knew that Jack wasn't either. They didn't care, though. To them, these two were just boys like them, and would fight anyone who said otherwise.

Race had never felt so validated as he did then.

And the euphoria from living with a bunch of boys, as a boy...it was the best feeling ever.

He still didn't have a nickname yet.

It was when after a few months of selling newspapers, when he was eleven, that he found his way to Sheepshead Races in Brooklyn. He kept going back. 

Because of that, the newsies called him Racetrack.

Receiving that name, a name that fit him better than the one given to him by his parents, gave him euphoria like none other. It fit. It was him. Finally, after all these years, he felt accepted.

Race's mind has always worked differently from others as well. He can be extra hyper-active, his thoughts jump around all the time, and he has a hard time focusing--or focuses too much. As a newsie, he could live like that too. He was surrounded by people who finally understood him.

At age twelve, he learned to gamble. Jack wishes that he would have waited a couple years first.

But very soon it became harder for Race to live as a boy when his body was ready to start becoming a woman. And Race did not want that. At all. Dysphoria kicked in. Hard. It led to a lot of anxiety and sleepless nights. Jack helped him through all of it, having gone through, and going through, the same things himself.