Chapter Text
Raj Koothrappali has three brothers and two sisters.
Raj’s sister Priya also has three brothers and two sisters. She thinks she has four brothers, one of whom occasionally dresses oddly, and one sister, but she’s wrong.
Solve for x? Simple. X in this case is the second X chromosome that Raj’s brain got and body didn’t. It’s an easy enough equation on paper. The trouble is the real-life application of the theory.
“You cosplay as a girl a lot,” Howard casually remarks one night when they’re flipping through comics at the Comic Center. “How come?”
“I’m bucking the trend, dude.”
“You’re really not, you know. Heaps of guys dress as girls. It’s not original anymore.”
Raj shrugs uncomfortably. “At least I rock it.”
“True, true.” Howard drops it there. Raj is relieved.
The relief fades when the realization sinks in: it’s not playing.
Ironically enough, it’s Raj’s birthday.
Every time Raj gets home from a con and has to take her costume off she feels like she’s peeling away her real skin to put a fake one on.
Every time Raj goes to work, covered in layers of shirts and vests, she watches other women walking around in skirts and heels, and some days when her thoughts are churning particularly quickly she goes into the (wrong) bathroom, locks herself in a stall, and tries not to cry too loudly. At least she can pretend her eyes are red from too much squinting into telescopes.
Every time Raj can spend a few hours at home, lounging in the sari she had to pretend that she was buying for her mother and playing video games or just watching television, she starts to feel almost all right.
In the end the internet tells her where she needs to go, the steps it will take to make her outside match her inside.
Her palms are sweating and she can barely breathe, her stupid bulky man-clothes constrict her chest, but she’s too scared to wear the sari out of her apartment yet. She has to run back inside once anyway to pee one more time before she can get going.
Her new therapist ushers her into the small office, shows her to a seat, and says, “So, what brings you here?” as though she hadn’t already filled out a questionnaire that the therapist has sitting right there on her desk.
Raj picks at a loose thread on her vest and says, “I’m a woman.”
Getting her chest and legs waxed is easily accomplished; they’re in California, after all, where you’re the strange one if you don’t get something waxed or plucked or trimmed or tucked on a regular basis, and her waxer never asks questions, not even as the days get shorter and cooler.
It’s the tiny dark dots of beard stubble that frustrate her the most. She leans in close to the mirror every morning, scrapes with the razor until it hurts, and gets her skin smooth for a little while, but by evening those little dots are back again and she just wants to sandpaper them away.
Her therapist, the one she’s seeing when everyone else thinks she’s at Pilates, talks about laser hair removal. Raj takes a look at the price list and wonders aloud whether taking her chances down at Leonard’s lab mightn’t be worth it.
“Are you out to Leonard and your other friends yet?” her therapist asks, as she has asked every week for seven weeks.
Raj looks down at her hands and starts picking the temporary decals off her fingernails. It’s all the answer she can currently give.
“You know that technically I can’t start you on HRT until you start presenting full-time as a woman, right?”
Raj gives her an even stare. “You know that I have friends in the pharmacology department, right?”
Her therapist objects strenuously to being thus blackmailed, but ends up writing the prescription anyway.
HRT. MTF. SRS. LHR. AAB. RLE. DSM. FFS. It’s like swimming in a sea of alphabet soup and some days it’s unbearable and some days it’s all the promises in the world condensed into three little letters. Raj has online friends like her who can sympathize and understand about all the barriers on the way to making their outsides match their insides, who know all about those sets of three little letters.
Hey Rajya, don’t you ever think about picking a name that’s further away from your slave name? Danielle asks.
I did. I thought about it a lot. I still do. But Rajya means “hopeful”. It comes from Arabic originally.
That is so cool!
They’ve all read a lot of naming websites. Raj is now pretty sure she can reel off the meanings and origins of the names of everyone she knows. Maybe if they’re ever short on conversational topics one day she can bring up how Leonard, Howard, and Bernadette’s names all partly share an origin, although if she has to say that it’s the Germanic “hard” she can imagine the conversation devolving courtesy of Howard and, just, no.
Karla sends her a private message titled *hugs* that’s all about her own choice of name and how it’s not so different from her birth name either and how she totally gets what Raj is doing.
Some of the women start calling her “Hope”, and Raj doesn’t mind that. Not as a nickname, anyway. She’s adamant about sticking with Rajya, though. She’s not transitioning from being Indian, after all.
So how did you come out to your friends? she finally asks on chat one day, and is flooded with a barrage of responses, some negative, some positive, all different.
The best way, in the end, seems to be to just do it.
“I’m really pleased that you’re making this step.”
Raj crosses her legs at the knee and fiddles with the hem of her long, flowing skirt. “I’m still nervous.”
Her therapist makes a note of this on her omnipresent notepad and then smiles. “Judging from what you’ve told me about your friends, it sounds like you won’t have much to worry about.”
“Are you kidding me? Sheldon gets angry if he has to eat the wrong cereal for breakfast, let alone finding out one of his friends isn’t actually a guy.”
Her therapist raises an eyebrow. “Did you just compare yourself to cereal?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Well, you can’t have your entire support network consist of online friends when you’re presenting full-time in public.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that. I’m not ‘presenting’ anything. This is who I am.”
Her therapist gives her another eyebrow raise for that. “Rajya, you told me yourself that you got teased as a child for being a nerd—”
“—as a child. And last Wednesday. Yes.”
“—so you know that it helps to have people to turn to for support.”
Raj looks down at her hands. She can’t stop doing it when she’s nervous. She looks at how her fingernails are too wide and square and, although her fingers are sort of long, they still look mannish.
“I’m afraid they won’t support me,” she says quietly.
“I know. Believe me, I know.”
“Then how can you be so damn happy that I’m taking this step?” Raj snaps.
Her therapist looks out the window for a moment. The office is two floors up and overlooks a currently empty park; lackluster rain drizzles from the grey sky onto a playset surrounded by weeds.
“Because I’ve seen what can happen when people don’t,” she says at last.