Lighter Burns

Chapter 1

Trigger Warning for disturbing content. The feelings described don't blanketly apply to everyone with these experiences. Enjoy.

It started so innocently. Okinao Uraraka as a 4-year-old child in the lounge. He stares at the TV; Disney Channel, not Disney Junior. He loves Hannah Montana, it's his favourite show to binge after school. This channel is on every day from 4 until he falls asleep in front of it, the glow of the screen reverberating off his face. The protagonists are always his favourites, most tied in with token boy characters. He turns, seeing his father sitting on the couch behind him. Fake leather it is, a smell that invades his nostrils with an artillery assault. "I wanna be like her!" he points to the screen. Awaiting a response, none follows but a crackling sip of beer.

Okinao turns back to the TV, the frayed beginnings of fatigue settling through his body. His mind still buzzes with nervous energy but his body betrays that. He slumps onto his side, the carpet tickling his face. His eyes close, shapes and colours dance behind his eyelids. His working theory is that this is an alternate dimension, another world to explore and experience. Purples blues, his favourites.

~~~

The 8-year-old frowns deeply. Sex change? He knows what sex is, kind of. From his cousins and his father who hasn't yet learned how to work his TV controls. And who has a lewd poster of a well-known actress right there on the living room wall. "What's a sex change?" he asks the classmate who mentioned it, too much enthusiasm in his voice to feel casual.

The girl is more mature than he. This is a class for the intelligent, the creative and the capable. But Okinao is kept in a household sheltered from the world and most general knowledge. He has an abundance of knowledge in very specialised subjects. Just not in the broad world of socialisation and current developments.

The girl explains very briefly and with ignorant misinterpretation but  a lightbulb goes off in his head. The fragments of his personality start to piece together. All his drawings, he always imagined himself as a cute woman with long hair in a pastel pink evening dress plated at the hips. Standing in a skirt surrounded by living friends as a teenager in total pastel punk aesthetic. A mother. An awesome pro hero in a costume fitted to a female body.

I guess I can have a sex change when my parents die, he thinks. A morbid place to go, a thought he knows is inappropriate. But he doesn't think either parent would be supportive of such a thing, but its all he can imagine his future as.

He tries to picture himself as a man, gives up such a task. It's impossible.

~~~

"I'm a girl,"

The car screeches to a stop. His mother grips the steering wheel so hard her knuckles turn white before twitching as she rolls the car to the side of the road. Once again, it stops. This time with a deafening silence. "Why do you think that?"

The 11-year-old feels like crying. Tears well in his eyes, always so emotional. "I-I just am! I'm a girl! I don't feel like a boy, I don't want to be a boy!"

"You know I'll always support you but-"

But.

Confused and left stumbling without understanding or affirmation. Okinao wonders what 'support' his mother was talking about. So far nothing. She simply allows him to dress like himself. Herself. A girl. And that becomes her moral high ground and defence of 'support' if anything is criticised.

It doesn't matter if she deadnames her daughter. Constantly uses the wrong pronouns. All without effort or attempt to change. Perhaps she simply doesn't see her as that way. As a girl, her daughter. Whenever she asks about it, her mother gives a half-assed answer she assumes is supportive. Is in fact crushing. Transphobic.