Things I write and draw

Summary: Lee is used to winning his Gobstones matches, and he thinks he can come out ahead in the game of life. If only things were as simple as when he first met Tobias at that pub in Cokeworth. In a perfect world, he sure as hell wouldn’t be pregnant and learning his way around a Muggle kitchen, but it’s 1959, and he is all bones and weary mind, weighed down by the flesh that doesn’t feel like his own.

Notes: This was written for the HP Trans Fest to the following prompt: Who would have thought it would be a game of Gobstones that got Character A to realise they were trans? (Also inspired by: Character A is a trans man and is pregnant. It's hard, but so worth it.)

Lee’s story was a hard story to tell and yet it was worth telling. In it (cross-generational impact of bigotry and xenophobia aside), I wanted to explore one trans man's survival in a gender-binary society of the 1950-1990s U.K.

While the Muggle world had Michael Dillon as a hidden trailblazer, someone born into the life of Lee Prince around the same time would have had no awareness of other trans men and would have had to reconstruct his identity from crumbs of belonging and gender euphoria. Overall, I wanted to portray the deepest of closets and the survival techniques that emerge from such a brainwashed existence.

I also wanted to explore the complexity of flawed human relationships and commitments and the stories people tell themselves (Tobias and Lee) to feel good about their lives, and how often such narratives deviate from the fairytale versions of happy endings.

In a sense, this story is the polar opposite of the mpreg trope and is probably the only 'mpreg' story I'll ever write. It's also as close to body horror as I will probably ever get to portraying. In addition, it pits culture clash against the conflict of unacknowledged gender dysphoria, which basically leaves Lee confused and uncertain for a couple decades of his life.

Many liberties were taken with Gobstones as a game and Jareth the Goblin King, the master of contact juggling, approves of all such deviations from canon.