I used to have a brother. Or maybe that isn't how I should think about it. I don't know. Rachel often corrects me for not properly thinking about her gender. I guess the whole thing is just confusing for me.
When I was 14 one of my family chores was to do laundry, and I started noticing occasionally that I would find pairs of my brother's pants together with my sister's underwear, like they had clearly been worn together. I thought it was weird and couldn't understand why my sister had been wearing his pants. I never imagined it was actually the other way around.
Then I heard through my sister that he was gay and liked wearing her underwear. I wasn't shocked about him being gay, but the underwear thing seemed a bit odd. I knew it would really freak me out if he was wearing mine, and it was strange that my sister didn't seem to care. After that, they started almost sharing. I would see him in her clothes from time to time and it was a little creepy. He also started dating this guy that was a few years older than him and I had to accept that he was going to have boyfriends.
My mother was surprisingly accepting and didn't have a problem with him wearing girls clothes. Over the next year it just got worse and worse. He started growing his hair longer and styling it in a feminine way. He started wearing make-up. He gradually replaced all his clothes with girls clothes and even started wearing bras. I remember going to the beach with him and being embarrassed because he was wearing a bikini top and shorts.
His senior year in high school he really started openly dressing like a girl. I was in the same school as him and it was embarrassing to be the sister of the guy who wore girls clothes. Near the end of the school year he told us that after graduation he wanted to start living as a girl full time. He asked us to think of him as a female.
My mother and sister were all in favor, but it was a really weird adjustment that I just reluctantly went along with. He was dating this guy who also happily went along with it. It seemed weird to me that they were in a gay relationship that suddenly would become a straight relationship.
One day I had a brother, the next day I had a sister.
She started taking hormones and over the next year or so developed a very feminine body. It was like seeing a different person. At this point her hair was almost shoulder length and she had dyed it blond. I often see men who try to transition into women and it just looks like a guy playing dress-up, but Rachel really did seem to turn into a woman.
Just over a year ago, she had surgery and had her penis removed. It almost seemed like a technicality because at that point she was so very much a woman that outwardly the surgery changed nothing. I'm sure it mattered to her though.
She and her boyfriend got married. They seem like a very normal couple and no one that meets them for the first time ever thinks that she was born male.
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