This piece is the first of ten short stories. I will share these periodically across my platforms, including WordPress, Substack, Wattpad, and other publishing spaces. Each story in this series stands alone, but together they form a broader examination of the systems that shape us. These works are released intentionally over time, allowing space for reflection rather than consumption. This series blends literary fiction with social commentary. Here I spend time focusing on lived experience, psychological impact, and the long shadow of decisions made for us. New entries will be published as they are completed.
Blurb
The story follows Aaron, who was born a healthy biological girl. Just to be immediately assigned a male identity by her parents and doctors. In this society, a child’s body is treated as a “public object” to be shaped and corrected by others. When Aaron reaches puberty, described as a “blood-red warning siren,” he is placed on hormone blockers to prevent him from developing into a woman.
Anonymous Aaron
Aaron was born on an uneventful morning. The air carried the smells of lemon disinfectant and rain-soaked Las Vegas asphalt. A healthy baby girl, the doctor would have said. He would have been pleased with the symmetry of her limbs, the steady thump of her heart, and the decibel her shriek could reach. Her mother cried, and her father laughed too loud. They chose the name Aaron respectfully. Names were not meant to make sense in this world until later in life. So Aaron, the healthy boy, was born, though boy was already a stretch.
They wrapped him in a blue blanket and told him he was perfect, at least for the time being.
The photos would later show a calm baby, eyes open, unfocused, already tuned into something deeper beyond the love in the room. Aaron would never remember the warmth of that blanket or the way hands passed him around like proof of success. What stayed, buried deep and wordless, was the first lesson of his life. His body was a public object. It would be shaped, discussed, corrected, and inevitably made into what they wanted it to be.
Puberty arrived like a blood-red warning siren.
A single pimple at first, angry and bright on his chin. Then another. Leg hair darkening, spreading in thin lines that felt illicit, something to hide. His chest stayed flat, his voice stayed level, until one red drip from between his legs met the cotton lamb chop character briefs he still wore. The signs were enough.
The nurse smiled too hard when she called Aaron’s name. His parents sat straighter.
The first dose of hormone blockers came in a white room that smelled faintly of lemon, eerily similar to the day of his birth. Aaron was told this was kindness. A pause button. A gift. A way to prevent him from becoming something unacceptable. His mother squeezed his hand and asked if he was excited. His father nodded as if excitement were mandatory, like consent was already signed.
Aaron said yes, of course.
Inside his head, there was only stillness. No sense of rescue. No feeling of alignment. Just the quiet knowledge that nothing about his body had ever felt wrong until the world began insisting that it was. He liked the way his legs carried him. He liked the way he played with makeup in secret. Likewise, he liked the softness of himself, unaltered and intact.
But liking it was dangerous, not allowed, even illegal.
He learned quickly to perform relief. To thank doctors. To rehearse lines about dysphoria he did not feel. Silence became survival. Every unspoken thought was folded smaller and smaller until it fit behind his ribs, where breasts would never be allowed to bud. The world always called Aaron, him, and he did not correct them. At first, he did not even understand the concept of not being transgender. Correcting meant punishment.
Time skipped forward the way it does when nothing belongs to you.
At seventeen, Aaron’s mother drove him to the spa where they checked in the night before his eighteenth birthday. The building was all soft lighting and stone floors. Water murmured behind the walls like something alive. It was dubbed a “wellness retreat.” Aaron was handed a robe, a schedule, and congratulations on becoming a man. He barely managed not to scoff at the final “gift”.
The bed was too clean. The sheets were tucked tight enough to trap him.
He lay awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to his breath. Tomorrow his female body would be permanently altered. Tomorrow the performance would become irreversible. He thought about the acne that never got worse, and the leg hair that never spread the way it wanted to. He thought about the mirror, about how familiar his reflection still was, and mourned how briefly he had been allowed to know the her he felt he was meant to be.
Excitement would be painted painfully on his face in the morning.
For now, horror sat quietly with him in the dark.
He pressed his hand to his chest, feeling the steady beat that had been praised at birth, never once defective, never once confused.
And in the silence of his mind, he finally admitted what he had always known.
He was cisgender.
He was a girl being forced to become a man in a world where refusing transition was the only unforgivable thing.
The anesthesiologist walked him through counting backward from one hundred.
One hundred.
Ninety-nine.
Ninety-eight.
Ninety-seven.
Aaron drifted off just as he pictured himself in a dress for the first time.
Before you leave-
Thank you for reading this first story in the series. I hope Aaron’s journey gave you pause, stirred thought, or echoed something within your experience. More stories will be released periodically across WordPress, Substack, Wattpad, and other platforms. These will each explore the pressures that shape us. Follow along, and check back soon to continue the series. There is more to come.
Comment below and tell me what you think about my first short story. How would you feel if you lived in Aaron’s world? Does this make you view body autonomy a little differently?
Consider sharing with someone you think would enjoy reading my first short thriller in my upcoming free-to-read collection, “The Scars of Fitting In: A Collection of Short Psychological Thrillers.“
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