Heeeee! I'm such a pretty bird! <3

A pride piece done by Shinkei-Shinto that I'm finally, belatedly uploading!

Still feels a bit weird to say it, but for those who weren't aware... I'm trans. Hi.

Not openly, since I'm a timid ball of anxiety living in the American Midwest, which is part of why it feels a little weird to describe myself that way... but it does feel like the appropriate label?

Back in summer of 2020 I finally got around to making a 'sona for myself after lurking on the periphery of furry things for some years. I roughed out two ideas; a whitetail buck that shared all my interests and was just a stand-in with no character of his own, and a classical unicorn that was a sort of a fantasy setting self-insert... and then roughed out a reindeer doe, an inflatable ewe, and a Deerling to round out my potential cast.

Forward to that fall, and it turned out I connected with the doe that ended up becoming Lus a lot more than the whitetail or classical unicorn. I'd played as female characters in video games for a while because given a character creator and zero judgement, I wanted to kick ass in a full-length dress, and I owned a few full-length dresses already... but in hindsight, Lus was sort of an "Oh" moment.

Initially I sort of... didn't address it? Lus was a doe, the gender of the character's owner was just not discussed and not important, and online was a space I could try out being a girl without judgement or baggage? I'm pretty sure people close to me knew anyway.

I went with 'genderfluid' as a label for a while, before sorta... realizing that while I wasn't disgusted by my masc side, I didn't particularly enjoy it either? It was easy and it was... fine, I guess. From there, some more things sorta fell into place? Like that I never had any interest in doing anything with my hair, clothes shopping was always like pulling teeth (unless I was secretly buying something I couldn't be seen in), and I've felt like a bit of an outsider in some male-dominated spaces? And then I finally broke a long-running bad habit I'd been trying for a while to do with the realization it would be unladylike. And then the motivation that made my resolution to exercise more finally stick was wanting to have a good baseline of health going into a transition, if/when that were to happen.

So... uh... yeah. Lus the character is not canonically trans, Lus the person behind the character/represented by the character is trans, and the only part of this gender mess that doesn't feel right is that I'm not great at pulling off a cute doe IRL. Yet.

Go like and leave kind comments on the artist's upload here!