Discovering Myself in “Krazy Kat”
How reading a century-old comic strip uncovered my genderfluidity
When the standard transgender narrative is “I’ve always known I was trans,” it can be hard to admit that you didn’t really know who you were until adulthood. But that’s exactly what happened to me.
See, I’ve kinda known I was different ever since I was a kid, but none of the identities I encountered over the years seemed to fit. “Tomboy” was just a different (and very specific) way of being female, and I’d been given the impression that being trans meant that I had to feel 100% like the “opposite” gender 100% of the time. But that’s not who I am.
Even the media I consumed turned up nothing I could relate to. The closest I got was the video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with Sheik, a man who aids Link on a large portion of his quest. Just before Link’s final battle Sheik reveals himself to have been Princess Zelda all along, hiding herself from the villain, Ganon.
A trans male friend of mine who also loves the Zelda series relates to Sheik (and is frustrated with how the character’s appearance has been increasingly feminized in other games over the years), but that story never quite fit me.
I thought you could be either Sheik or Zelda, never…
