Lark (20s me): Mom!
Mom (Present me): What’s up, Lark? You look upset.
Lark: Yeah I’m upset! You started talking about relationships without me! Investigating the “we’re single” angle was my idea, after all.
Mom (laughing): I suppose that’s true. Let’s make up for lost time then. What’s on your mind?
Lark: Libra told me about how flirting has changed now that you live as a woman. I can only imagine how it would have changed things for me.
Mom: Hmm. I think there are two answers to this question — the real one and the fun one.
Lark (confused): I mean, it was a real question, so I guess I want the real answer?
Mom: Realistically, the aughts were a horrible time to be trans. Gay rights were still struggling and informed consent treatment didn’t exist, so you likely would have had to fake heterosexuality in order to transition at all. You might have felt pressure to date men and possibly even marry one. Even if you’d managed to find a woman you loved, you wouldn’t be allowed to marry her for years — at least not without moving to another state.
Lark (crestfallen): Oh.
Mom: Yeah. Things have come a long way in the last twenty years.
Lark: If that’s the environment I would have been working with, I’m not even sure how there can even *be* a fun answer.
Mom: The fun answer is what might have happened had you been born twenty-ish years later — In other words, if you were in your twenties today rather than back then.
Lark: Oh! So coming out as a trans girl in today’s social climate. And… Ignoring parental influence? I have a feeling that would have been negative no matter what year I hatched.
Mom: I’m sure you’re right, so sure… And ignoring the political climate too, while we’re at it. Let’s say your egg cracks as you’re graduating college, you transition and go full time soon after getting your first job, and encounter no institutional friction.
Lark: Okay. That sounds like the dream scenario, honestly. Do you think I’d manage to find a partner?
Mom: Just one?
Lark (blushing): W… Aa…?
Mom (amused): You look adorable!
Lark (embarrassed): Hey, don’t make fun!
Mom (smiling): I’m not! I think if we came out as a twenty-something these days, we’d find an easy kinship among other trans women and tumble backwards into a cute little transfem polycule.
Lark (confused): Polycule?
Mom: Loosely, a group of people who are all dating each other.
Lark: So I’d be seeing everyone at once? And they would be too? Sounds complicated.
Mom: It can be, from what I’ve heard. But the great thing about estrogen is it massively boosts our emotional capacity. Managing multiple intimate relationships doesn’t seem like such a stretch anymore, and as I told Libra, relating to other trans women on a potentially romantic level just sort of comes naturally once we grow out of our shell a little bit.
Lark (stunned): Multiple intimate relationships…
Mom: Sure, why not? You’d always suspected you were polyamorous, after all.
Lark: That’s true… Still, I imagine managing a set of relationships like that would kind of be a mess.
Mom: Oh sure, almost certainly. But it’d be a very fulfilling mess.
Lark (teasing): *You’re* a fulfilling mess.
Mom: Oh, that is *it* young lady.
(Lark gives a playful ‘eep!’ and runs off. I cross my arms and smirk for a moment before teleporting after her.)