“Shit, man, I don’t know.”
That about encapsulates the feeling I had the first time that question was posed to me when I started up my first playthrough of Pokémon Crystal. No one had ever asked me that before. I never had to think about it, honestly. I just got told, “you’re a boy!” and went along with what my parents and society had laid out for me. But there was something to that question that I absolutely didn’t understand at the time, something that it placed in the back of my mind that never left.
“Am I a boy?” I remember picking “boy” after some contemplation, then immediately regretting that choice and restarting the game, choosing the female option this time. Then, a dialogue box pops up with the words, “You’ll face fun times and tough challenges,” which honestly might be the one sentence I’d go back in time and tell myself. Seeing that phrase, and knowing that this was my first experience in any world as a girl, was frightening. Would I have to pick different types of Pokémon than I did before? “Well,” I thought to myself, “It’s not like it matters whether a girl has a Cyndaquil or a boy has a Chikorita, plus no one can even see my game.” Then I chose Chikorita. I remember coming up with potential defenses for why I was playing as a female character, and why I chose the “girly” starter, but the people who cared about those choices weren’t the type of people to let me defend myself against that type of ridicule anyways. The day I finally brought my GameBoy to school with me to play it during recess instead of sitting there doing nothing like usual, some other kids decided to see what I was so interested in.
“Eww, why are you playing as a girl? Why did you choose that one? It’s lame, the fire one is way cooler.”
“Hey, everyone, he’s playing as a girl! How weird! How gaaaaayyyyy!”
This is the first time I can remember society deciding something that I did for myself as “weird.” Why did it even matter? They’re just pixels on a screen. I had made the wrong choice in their eyes, that much was clear. That made even more questions pop up. Why was I so much happier pretending to be a girl in a different world? Why don’t I fit in with the boys? Why is it that all of my choices seem so foreign to them? What is telling those boys to do those things that they do and why am I not getting the message? Why am I wrong? I didn’t know about trans people at the time. I didn’t know anyone besides me felt like this. So I did what I thought society expected of me for a long time. Longer than I should have. But I kept picking female characters whenever it was an option. “Oh, I just like the clothing options better, there’s more variety,” I would say. “Oh, I just like looking at female character models better than the weird dude option they always give you, you know?” That was true enough, it got people off my back for a while if the questions ever came up. But that one question, all the way back from 2001, stayed with me for years. “Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?” my brain would ask, seemingly at random. “Not now, this isn’t a character creation screen,” I would reply, almost without fail. Almost.
Once, years after the original Pokémon Crystal debacle (and several Pokémon games later), the question was too much for me to handle. This identity, this body, was wrong. I decided that my problems were with my American name. “Obviously, the reason I don’t feel like this fits me is because I should be going by my Korean name.” That name had a real meaning, not just to me but a real, literal meaning. A golden phoenix. In Western culture, something that had risen from the ashes and taken its life into its own hands. In Korea, the phoenix symbolizes a lot of things, all tying into themes of yin and yang, virtue and grace. This new identity was tied to that merged idea of a phoenix, taking the American culture I never fully felt a part of and the Korean culture I desperately missed. This half-measure helped me grow in a lot of ways, and even helped me connect to a lot of older Korean history that I never even knew about. Still, no matter how hard I tried, that question kept popping up, even when diving into research about my Korean name. Turns out, the Asian phoenix is typically portrayed as a female figure, which just added more questions instead of answering them. But I was in a new era. I could learn about why I feel like this from other people. I could find other people who felt like this.
"Am I a boy or a girl? I’m neither!” I decided, destroying the tiny levee of “manhood” that held back all of my questions about gender, accepting new they/them pronouns, and even changing my name again into a shortened version of my name, something that in my mind represented both my pride in being Korean and this new, genderless entity I had become. I knew about medical transition at that point, but I knew that it was difficult to access even the first steps of that. So I worked as hard as I could to accept that it wasn’t going to happen for me while still exploring the wide world of living under the nonbinary umbrella. I was finally starting to feel… happy? Content? But for some reason, even after I had “answered” that question, that answer still wasn’t good enough for me. I saw other nonbinary people who were fulfilled and euphoric in their gender, genders, or lack thereof, and I thought, “Why isn’t this working for me?” I had (and still have) a wonderful, understanding partner who helped and accepted me through everything. I was supported and accepted by my friends in real life and online. “I should be happy, why aren’t I?” I thought to myself. “If I’m not nonbinary, what the hell am I?”
“Well,” my brain prompted me a final time, “Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?”
