Lies, Deceptions, And Misunderstandings

36. Discoveries

Taylor tossed and turned. He tried to get back to sleep, but couldn't get the dream out of his head.

What bothered him the most was the fact that the details of the dream, the ones that didn't actually happen in real life, didn't gross him out as much as they intrigued him, even kinda excited him and he didn't know why.

He knew, as a guy, these thoughts should have bothered him more than they did, and that, that's what bothered him.

Unable to sleep, Taylor got up and slipped down the hallway to the living room. He turned on the small laptop on the desk across the room. Once he had the browser up he stared at the screen trying to decide how to word what he wanted to search.

Boys who dress up like girls

He typed the words into the omnibar at the top of the screen and pressed enter. The screen immediately filled with search results and he clicked on the first one.

At the top of the page was a photo of a girl in a sparkly purple dress who looked to be five or six, sitting in a chair getting her toenails painted by a nail tech while an adult lady next to her, probably her mom, watched, while getting her own toes done.

Taylor began to read the article and found that the girl's name was Ariel but up until a year ago she had been known as Eric.

The article went on to talk about how she had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria at the tender age of five.

After reading the article, Taylor returned to the search page and clicked on images. There he found photos of a bunch of girls of various ages. After clicking on some and reading about them on the attached pages, Taylor began to discover that several of them were boys who were only dressed that way because they were participating in a mock beauty contest called a womanless pageant, but then there were others with something called gender dysphoria.

Taylor searched the term gender dysphoria and learned that it was the distress a person experiences due to a mismatch between their personal sense of their own gender, and their sex assigned at birth. 

He paused for a moment and thought about Astrid. Kaylee had said she was a trans girl. Was being a trans girl and having gender dysphoria the same thing, he wondered.

Trans girl

Taylor typed in the words and the photos populated the page. Many of the photos were the same ones again, but there were also photos of several beautiful runway models as well.

After a couple minutes Taylor had found that trans girls were indeed the same. He learned that transgender girls were said to suffer from gender dysphoria. He also learned that many of them knew from a very young age they didn't want to go through life as a boy/man, but some of them didn't discover until later, when they began to have thoughts about wanting to try on girls clothes and then began to wonder what life would be like had they had been born a girl.

Some of these girls had not only developed a curiosity about girls clothing but had become obsessed, stealing girls things, and dressing in them every chance they could, before eventually the desire became so strong they had to come out to those closest to them and began living as a girl.

On one page Taylor came across some before and after photos. One set of those photos was of a boy about five or six years old, in a baseball uniform and holding a bat on one shoulder. The photo next to it was of an eleven or twelve year old girl in a pretty pastel colored knee length dress flared out by layers of sheer material, turned down lace ankle socks, shiny black patent leather shoes and an Easter basket in her white lace gloved hands. Her shoulder length wavy red hair was held away from her face by a wide white head band.

Taylor immediately thought, fake, that's not really the same person. Can't be. But, then he looked closer. The eyes were the same and the hair color matched. The smiles were very similar, as were the freckles, even though the girl had more than the boy, all of his freckles were in the same place as ones on the girl's face.

Taylor paused and stared at the two photos more. He was mesmerized by how pretty of a girl the boy had become. He clicked on one of the photos and text appeared below that was an excerpt from an interview with the mom of the boy/girl in the photos.

She explained how Jerry had never really been a happy person until he started trying on his sister's clothes, got caught, told them he didn't want to grow up to be a man, and a therapist eventually diagnosed her with gender dysphoria.

Taylor began to think about everything that had happened to him since that afternoon when Craig met Carissa and how his thoughts and feelings had began to change. Not only was he becoming a little comfortable with the change, unlike at first, he realized he was even beginning to like pretending to be a girl. He began thinking about how his life had been full of new experiences and overall he seemed to be happier since he had been living as a girl.

Does this mean I have gender dysphoria, he wondered.

By now, the sun was starting to crack the horizon and Taylor knew Carissa would be up soon, so he exited out of the browser, closed the laptop, and returned to bed, where he lay, deep in thought about all he had learned online and what this could possibly mean for him.

He know he had no choice but to continue to present as a girl if he wanted to continue playing on the football team without issues. He also knew he was loving the attention he was getting from everyone for being such a good football player and even more so, a badass football playing girl.

Then there was the issue of Johnny and what to do about it. The more he thought about the situation, the more he began to realize he liked the attention he was getting and it really didn't bother him that much that it was from a guy.

Taylor told himself that if he continued to do what he was currently doing and didn't do anything to give away his secret, he could continue to have these new experiences with Johnny.

A smile spread across his face, but then he got a visual in his mind of an unapproving Craig. Craig's face said he was upset, hurt, and disappointed with Taylor for what he had seen occurring between Taylor and Johnny in Taylor's earlier dream.