As of 03/2026, this post has been reworked since time went by and some stuff made me really uncomfortable about it.
I probably won’t be able to make something great out of this but at least I tried!
I also took some time to add more content
— Aren’t I generous? :3

So the story started from a friend who asked:

What’s the thing that sparked you to become trans?
— A friend of mine over Discord

First of all, before everything, you don’t become trans, like being gay or whatever, you simply are but you need to discover yourself in order to know that.

It was quite complicated. I didn’t think about this since childhood like many others, I had too many problems on my plate to even think about that. I always had girl-ish manners, like crossing legs while sitting down, for me it’s natural.

I think the first realisation I could even be trans was around 2018-2019.

There was that period of my life where I started playing Final Fantasy XIV where I made the most generic character ever, since I didn’t care at all.
I was enticed into the game because I heard of Dalamud’s fall and heard that the dungeoning experience was quite good so I had to give it a try!

For context, I’m from a far right family which loved having every heir into the military like jobs (my father was an air force accountant, my homophobe uncle a cop…).
It was a strict family with a strict set of rules and no margins allowed for anything be it, going outside, which hair cut you want or even when do you wanna go sleep.

Back when I started playing ff14, I used to run a generic fem character “for trolling”. About four months in, I ended up remaking that char for a more personal one (this char is the one as my pfp).
At this time, I spent a lot of time on this game, like I was 24/7 on it when I could : back from high school -> ff14 -> sleep was my weekly schedule.

So would you say, beside fucking up your social life was it worth it?
Hell yeah it was! I started meeting people from all horizons and from many different countries!

I ended up playing in a friend group, which was the first time ever I got a “safe space”.

Thanks to this, I got more and more time playing with them, which, in turn allowed more time for myself, leaving outside all the accumulated trauma over my childhood and just be myself.

During that time, I could experiment with a body who gradually felt just… Mine? At some point I realized, I wasn’t <deadname>, I just became Cadenza Kestrel. It was me, nothing more, nothing less.

And by this precept, the “me” was Cadenza and the “character” was the person outside sitting on a dogshit chair, on their laptop.
That “character” was a facade, a mask made to not make waves in society.

Somehow, at some point, i ended up in my first gay relationship (or just relationship at this point, since I was afraid of womens till 18-19yo) where I got invited to try other things and get out of my comfort zone. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice!

That also was the first time when I discovered my sexuality, since my partner at that time kept saying “are you okay we are both mens in a relationship?” and at some point I got angry and said something along the lines of “You could be a frying pan, I couldn’t care less, I love people for who they are, not what they are.” Guess that made me bi/pan? I honestly don’t care, I still live by this precept on this day.

Back to the original topic, I was just… Happy. I was experimenting with clothes, with the fact that I was identified as fem and I was just… Happy.

At some point I started to wish for a reversal or something. I wasn’t aware of anything LGBT+ related, so I didn’t have the words for it.

I had a friend at some weekly nerd meetups (which was the only event that I attended downtown every week) that recently started hrt but I didn’t understand and didn’t want to try because I didn’t want to hurt her because of my family roots and education.

At some point, right before ShB release, I met again a friend who was here when I was dropping out of the game right before sastasha. I don’t recall clearly how it went but it was quite harsh and made me grasp the possibility of “being trans”, which is something that I didn’t plan, didn’t want because of my situation and the best I’d have wanted to is to put everything under a rug then forget it all happened So I stopped playing, tried my best to forget everything and try to fit into the mold

I wasn’t ready at that time, I was still in my family’s mind constuct of lies from a french far-right perspective with some kind of internalized LGBT-phobia, so naturally, I entered a phase of denial.

During that phase, I was trying my best to affirm myself “as a man”. I wasn’t even remembering the fact that I could be trans since I did my best to just take these thoughts and memories and bury them under the carpet and pray for the best (spoiler alert, it never ends well).

I tried, I did let my beard grow, got a girlfriend, started to get more clothes and some fancy ones (damn those overcoats were hot).

Eventually, along the years the shell started to crack, very slowly though.

Around 2022, with the expansion of free trial from 2 weeks/lv30 to lv 60 without restrictions on playtime (I’m sure you know the pasta), my best friend wanted to start to play. I was reluctant to do so because of how it ended last time and how would they react if they were to know what happened…

I hesitated for a long time to recreate a character and forget what happened. In the end I didn’t have the courage ‘cause it would mean erasing 1400hrs of gameplay made in a single year. It was to note that these friends weren’t aware of what happened in 2018, I disappeared from my friend circle for a whole year because of this game.

So, we came back to this game, we played, it made me comfortable again to play as Cadenza. And again, without me noticing, the egg was starting to slowly crack.

By some random coincidence we ended up in a big queer FC with a lot of people from different horizons.
I had a really fun time, it was also where I started that accursed static but that’s another subject.

That also gave me a lot of time and space to think about “these people” (I really hate this term) and how they live more freely compared to cis/het people. So I talked with them, trying to know them, how it is different from what I was told since my childhood. That was when I started rejecting everything that my parents tried to indoctrinate into me.

After that, we played Destiny 2. It was some “normal gameplay”, where I played a fem robot but what struck me the most was a question I asked my friend group at that time without even thinking about it: “Guys, would it be weird for me to bear the trans banner? I’m not but I feel like we should support the cause”.

Of course these people reacted against it but it stayed stuck in my mind.

At that time, my twitter timeline was starting to fill with transgender people without really knowing why. It was both trans support content like how to do laser at home safely or trans content creators (or even some ppl I followed who comes out).

Later, I moved out, around spring 2023.

Around a month later, one of my homies’s egg cracked so she announced to us she was starting a transition. I felt happy for her! She’s awesome and I always admired her since I met her in high school, so of course I was happy for her!

As a side effect, it made me start thinking again about questioning my own gender but not entirely, it was more like lazy thinking coated in denial. Around a trimester later I told someone I was feeling “something along the lines of gender fluidity but can’t put a word on it, it’s weird”.

Later, my homie, after an evening of talking, said while leaving “you’re gonna hate me, but I’m sending you a link, you should probably read it”. That link was https://genderdysphoria.fyi/

At first, I was like “oh, cool! Some reading so I could understand her better!” And I started reading it avidly, and read everything in 48hrs (my sleep took a deep hit because of this).

It was all fun and games until a specific passage came up:

Many trans people have no idea how much pain they are in until they find small bits of relief. Cosplay, stage acting, drag, role playing games, video games; small little forays into a different gender than they have lived as. They find that it feels just a little bit more comfortable. They’ll make up excuses for why (“If I’m gonna be looking at this character’s ass, it might as well be a girl’s ass.”), they’ll try to convince themselves it’s all just for fun, or an artistic expression. They might tell themselves that the bits of joy they feel at hearing a different pronoun are just novelty. But soon they find themselves looking for reasons to get that more often. More and more frequently they’re role playing characters of a different sex, building more costumes, buying more clothes, performing more often. You find yourself wanting to do that all the time, because it just feels better than your real life, and being “you” starts to hurt. Eventually, the old you becomes the costume.
— https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en/euphoria

And at this point, I was Oh. and I felt that in one single paragraph, everything that I tried to hide so hard went back in my face at full-force.

Afterwards, I spent a few months experimenting with myself, trying to paint my nails, trying to change my air, thinking about other things. Then, there was that evening.

I was playing ff14, again, then I broke down out of nowhere.

I’ve never been a writer, but I started writing at that time, I kept a journal for a while, now I barely write anymore. In that journal I wrote what I was feeling that particular day.

That first entry was just an image (with the caption “Y tho”) and the head title was “Why am I like this? Why can’t I be “normal” for once?

I had to re-read it today to synthetize things, most of it has been written here, then there’s things that I rediscovered, like the fact that at 14-15yo, I went for a hot chocolate at a friend’s home and we were debating about “what is normal” and that I felt like I didn’t belong in society. I was definitely too young to have a real answer/opinion but the facts are still here.

On this day, it was official, I am Astrid Cadenza Kestrel. (on a funny note, it makes a TCP flag :^) That was on 2023-09-27 🏳️‍⚧️

After nearly a year, I can safely say that accepting these feelings and starting to become myself was the best choice in my life!

PS: There’s a reason for this banner, smh the text isn’t shown on the post banner but if you open it on a new tab, you’ll see a bit of text adding more sense to the picture