Author Notes - The follow-up to the stuff with Clyde's dads is starting now! Up to and including a reveal that very well may get me into hot water, but at this point I don't really care. All I'm gonna say is that I want you to ignore the fact that Clyde is probably just adopted.

CHAPTER EIGHT - NOT ALONE

It took a couple of weeks after Halloween for Lynn to remember that meeting in the first place. The sugar high from her candy haul kept her distracted from it. Once she (and her sisters) had depleted the supply, Lynn finally calmed down enough for her discussion with Harold to come back to her.

So, when Lincoln went to go visit his new best friend that weekend, Lynn tagged along. Her parents and brother weren't sure why, but they weren't going to stop her. Just like before, she plopped down on the couch and ate some delicious cookies. Lincoln and Clyde were busy playing 'Ace Savvy' in the (pristine) backyard, so she didn't have to worry about them.

'How are these cookies so good?' Lynn asked. 'Seriously. I mean, my dad's a great cook, but these are awesome!'

While Harold supervised the boys outside, Howard sat down next to Lynn. It gave her an opportunity to meet Clyde's other dad, which she didn't really the first time around. He was a bit more like the men-dating men that she had seen on television, but minus that lisp and the bizarre inflections.

'Well, if you want to know,' He replied. 'You'll have to ask our little angel. He's the one who baked them!'

Lynn's jaw dropped. 'Noooo. He's, like, five! How does he bake so well?'

'Okay, so my husband helped, but still. It runs in my Hare-Bear's family!'

Lynn gulped down another cookie, this time in a single bite. They tasted so good, that she was almost willing to put on a few extra pounds for them. Almost.

'Hey, uh…' She said, tapping her hands together. 'W-When I was here last time, you said that you and, um, Harold were treated kinda badly by people.'

Howard frowned and sighed. 'We've heard a lot of horrible words. I've even heard some people say that we shouldn't be allowed to have Clyde together!'

'What?! I mean, I barely know you guys, but you seem like great dads! Just because you're both guys, doesn't mean you're gonna be any worse at this parenting thing.'

That brought a smile to his face. 'You don't realise how happy it makes me to hear those words.'

Which brought Lynn to the real reason she had dropped by their place. She looked to the floor and wrung her hands out, unsure of how to approach a conversation like this. There was a reason why she had come out to so few people, one of whom was by complete accident.

'L-Listen, Mr McBride,' She said. 'There's something that… I have to tell you. A-And I don't know how you're going to take it. But-'

She flinched. Howard had placed his hand over hers, scooping it up and holding it in a comforting embrace. When she looked up into his eyes, she saw nothing but warmth and reassurance.

'You can tell us anything,' He said. 'Like we said, we've been through a lot of mistreatment in our lives. I don't want the same thing to happen to you.' He paused. 'It's something that your family accepts, right?'

'Of course they do! B-But it isn't something I've admitted to a lot of people. So, uh, you should be happy I'm letting you know this.'

'Go ahead, Lynn. I won't judge. I promise.'

Lynn took a deep breath, and went about this the best way she could think of - she unlatched her ponytail extension and lay it on the table. Howard seemed a little surprised by this, but not shocked or upset. It gave Lynn the confidence to continue.

'See, I'm a girl,' She said. 'And you knew that. But, when I was born… my family didn't know that. My whole family thought I was a boy. I thought that too. But I learnt that I wasn't a boy. I'm really a girl. When I look into the mirror without this ponytail thing, all I see is a boy. Not me. I need this ponytail to see myself as a girl.'

She closed her eyes, and readied herself for any sort of response. It seemed unlikely that these kindly men could possibly respond badly, but she didn't want to put her hopes too high. Imagine her surprise when Howard gave her a hug. Which she did not ask for.

'You don't have to worry about not being accepted here,' He said. 'As far as we're all aware, you're the only girl on this block right now. We don't care what people thought you were when you were born. If you say that you're a girl, we're going to believe you.'

'So… you understand what I'm talking about?' Lynn asked. 'You know what I mean?'

'More than you could ever realise. I hope you'll let me tell Harold this, because he's got quite the interesting story to tell you.'

'... Should I be worried? Because usually, an 'interesting story' means I should be worried.'

'Oh! No no no no. Trust me. You'll love it!'

It didn't take too long for Lincoln and Clyde to come back indoors to play some video games in the living room. Since they didn't need to be supervised as much, both of Clyde's dads were able to give Lynn their attention. She finished explaining herself to Harold, hoping he'd be as accepting of it as Howard once. It was quite the relief when he smiled back at her.

In fact, he laughed. Not a cruel laugh, of course. A very jolly one, with a small hint of pleasant surprise.

'Wow!' He said. 'I… Well, this is an interesting coincidence.'

Lynn cocked her head. 'Coincidence? What do ya mean?'

'You see, I… You know what? This might be easier to explain if I showed you some old photos. Come on!'

He brought her into his bedroom, with her being super cautious the whole time. Though the McBrides had proven themselves trustworthy, she was always going to be a little paranoid over people who weren't in her immediate family. All those 'stranger danger' lessons may have had something to do with it.

'Alright,' She said, hopping onto the bed. 'What are you gonna show me?'

Harold opened up a drawer. 'Nothing much. Just a photo album! A pretty old one, too. Just photos of Howie and me when we were younger, before we met. And my photos are, uh, a little interesting.'

He sat down next to her and opened the book up to one of the earlier pages. The photos were very clearly a little old, by at least a few decades, with faded colours and blurry edges. Not too blurry that Lynn couldn't tell what she was looking at, though.

Harold pointed to one photo, depicting two people and their child. 'They're my parents. Philip and Lillian.'

Lynn peered closer at the child in the photo. It was a young girl, about Lynn's age too. And she looked strangely familiar.

'So… who's that?' She asked. 'The kid, I mean. Is she, like, a sister or something?'

'Nope,' Harold said. 'And that child may look like a girl, but he isn't one. That's because that kid was me.'

'Oh, so you… WHAT?!'

She looked at the 'girl' in the photo once again. Between the frilly dress and poofy pigtails, he looked like a rather stereotypical girl. She looked at Harold, and then at the picture again. The kid in the photo did look a lot like him.

'WAIT!' Lynn yelled, throwing her arms up. 'So you… and her… not really a 'her'...'

'Uh, that's right,' Harold said. 'When I was a kid, everyone thought I was a girl. They called me by a girl's name, and wanted me to wear dresses all the time. Now, I think dresses are fine, but I didn't like having them forced on me. Took me a while to figure out why.'

'So, you were like me? Just, you know, reversed?'

'More-or-less, yes. For the most part, I was happy. But there were times in my life where I knew something was wrong. And yet, I couldn't tell what. People like me weren't so well known at the time. And those who were? They were all like you: girls who were told they were boys. For years, I didn't realise that there were also boys who were told they were girls. So, I spent most of my life not really knowing what was wrong.'

Lynn leaned up against his arm and looked up at him with big twinkling eyes. It was almost like she was being read a bedtime story.

'What was that like?' She asked.

'In hindsight, we should've known,' Harold said. 'I remember that I hated it whenever my parents made me be more… feminine. Of course, guys can like dolls and make-up and other things, but it wasn't right for me. One day, I even cut my hair short. It felt good, I remember that. But my parents weren't so happy about it.'

'When did you realise that you were really a guy?'

Harold paused to think about it. 'It must've been… not too long before Clyde was born, actually. I, uh, was pregnant with him at the time.'

'... Oh.'

Lynn wasn't entirely aware of what that meant, but had a pretty good idea. She could only imagine how awkward that must've been at the time.

'I moved out of my parents' home,' Harold said. 'And, one day, I decided to cut my hair short again. Some stranger on the street told me I would look prettier if I grew my hair out. He said it made me look like a man,' He chuckled. 'He thought that was an insult. But it helped me realise something. So, not too long after that, I decided that I wanted to be a man instead of a woman. One of the best decisions I ever made.'

'So, uh… how did your parents feel about it?' Lynn asked. 'I-If that isn't too personal.'

Harold sighed, thinking back on the words his parents said to him the day he came out of them. Of course, he had long moved out of the house, so it didn't really matter what they thought at that point. But still…

'This is… sick, Marilyn. You- no, I'm not going to call you 'Harold' now. Marilyn is the name I gave you and that's the name you have!'

'How could you take my lovely daughter away from me?!'

He winced just thinking about those words. When he glanced down at Lynn, she was staring up at him with anticipation oozing from every pore.

'They… weren't happy about it,' He said.

'Oh,' Lynn said, frowning. 'Why not? You're still you, aren't you? If anything, you're more you!'

'Well, my father thought that 'changing your gender' was wrong. And my mother was upset that I, apparently, took her daughter away.'

'But… you weren't her daughter to begin with. You were always her son! Isn't that how this works?'

'That wasn't how my parents saw it. You'd think that at least my father would've liked having a son, but I guess not.'

Lynn thought about her own parents for a moment, and how they embraced her. For just a split second, she imagined her own father reacting like they had. Shouting at her for 'taking away' his beloved son. She could only think about it for a moment.

'Don't worry about it,' Harold said. 'I've cut them out of my life.'

'But they're your parents! Y-You can't do that,' Lynn said.

'Usually, you shouldn't. But for some people, they have to get away from their parents. It's a sad fact of life, but it's true. If it makes you feel better, I'm a lot happier that way.'

'So, uh, if you were having a kid, you were probably with someone. Was that, erm, Howard, or…?'

Harold skipped a few pages in the album until he arrived at one where he was a young adult. By that point in his life, he still looked like what most people would've called a 'woman', even if he didn't look that different to how he did now. Lynn couldn't help but notice, as he flipped through the pages, that his parents all but vanished from these photos.

There was another man in the photo, someone who looked nothing like Howard.

'That man right there is, biologically speaking, Clyde's father,' Harold explained. 'He was my partner before I met Howard.'

'Oh,' Lynn said, not entirely sure what that first sentence meant. 'You, uh, hadn't changed yet. How did he feel about you, uh, being a man?'

Harold laughed. 'He took it really well! It was a shock at first, but he knew I did it because it would make me happy. We only broke up because he was interested in women alone, and I wasn't one to him anymore. Give him credit, he tried to make it work. He doesn't hold it against me though. In fact, we still play tennis together every other weekend!'

There were a lot of photos of Harold and this man together, both smiling. Even when Harold had cut his hair short and was on his way to looking more like himself. Almost as if he could read Lynn's mind and know exactly what she was about to ask next, he turned the page a few more times until they arrived at photos with Howard.

It was the happiest Harold had looked in any of those photos.

'When I met Howard,' He said. 'I was starting to transition. He was so helpful and accepting that I chose a name that sounded a lot like his: Harold. I didn't realise I'd eventually marry him, but with Clyde on the way, well… he just couldn't help it.'

Across the photos on this single page, Lynn could see Harold's process. The most notable thing was when his chest was flattened significantly. One photo even depicted him with his shirt off, revealing two (very impressive) scars. To Lynn, it was the equivalent of her getting the hair extension. It was a seemingly small thing that did wonders for his appearance.

'Woah…' Lynn said. 'My dad told me that there were a lotta people like me. But I didn't think I'd actually meet one of them!'

'We are a small percentage of the population,' Harold said. 'But there's still millions of us out there. And Royal Woods has a lot of unusual families. Like yours! Eight daughters and one son… that's a lotta kids. And a really uneven ratio. There's also the Fox Quintuplets. I didn't even know that you could have five kids at once like that! And I swear, twins are just a liiittle more common here.'

'Do you think there could be even more people like us in Royal Woods?'

'Well, Royal Woods has about twenty-thousand people. There's gotta be at least a few more. A couple dozen, even!'

'More important question… do you have more cookies?'

Lynn may not have realised it, but she wasn't the only one who felt a lot better after this little discussion. Harold, too, found that it helped him out immensely.

'Marilyn! Just put the dress on!'

Marilyn hated being a child. All day and all night, he had to deal with loud demands from his parents who wanted him to be a girl. And if there was one thing Marilyn hated most of all, it was people calling him a girl. He didn't know why, though, seeing as he was a girl. Or so everyone claimed.

Who could expect a nine-year-old to know all the answers to something like this?

He… him… Marilyn liked those words. They suited him a lot better than 'she' and 'her' did. But he didn't let anyone know that. If people got mad at him for refusing to wear dresses, then he had no idea how they'd react.

He sat on the couch, fuming, with his arms crossed. Maybe it was behaviour best left to people half his age, but he didn't care.

'What kind of behaviour is this from a sweet young lady?' His father asked, like he did on so many other days.

Marilyn let out a huff in response. Of course, all the boys got to behave a little rough and get away with it. They could literally wrestle each other in the mud, and how did the adults respond? 'Oh, boys will be boys'. Now, Marilyn didn't want to mud wrestle, or anything like that. But he just wished that he had the same freedom that the boys had.

'Boy'... now why did that sound nicer than 'girl'?

Of course, he got into the dress eventually, as much as he hated it. 'Tomboy', his parents called him. After all, it wasn't too weird for a girl to hate wearing dresses, as long as she grew up more 'feminine'. Apparently.

He'd spend every day looking into the mirror, wondering why he hated his own reflection. Hoping that he could cut his hair short one day without his parents there to get mad at him. Harbouring a strange jealousy towards boys that he couldn't understand.

But it was alright. No matter how much it absolutely destroyed him from the inside. After all, this was just normal girl stuff, right? Every girl spent every waking moment of her life wishing that she was a boy, right?

Because he was a girl. And there was nothing he could do about it.

So why did it hurt so much to think that?

Author Notes - So there's a lot to unpack here. I wanted Lynn to have another trans person who related to her plights. I think the main question on everyone's mind is... why Harold specifically? He wasn't chosen at random.

The main deal was that I wanted this other trans person to be a trans man, so the FtM side gets a bit of rep in a story mostly focused on MtF issues. He had to be someone who appeared occasionally in Lynn's life, and I wanted him to be black because trans people in media tend to always be white for some reason. In fact, I was tempted to have Clyde be FtM, but I switched to Harold for one reason: to show that people who don't realise they're trans until adulthood exist and are perfectly valid.

The flashback scene referred to Harold as 'Marilyn' only as a narrative choice to demonstrate a point. He wouldn't find a new name for himself for a couple decades, and he doesn't realise that he actually is a dude yet. For the love of god, do NOT refer to a trans person by their previous name. We call that 'deadnaming', and there's rarely (if ever) a good reason to do it. I couldn't bring myself to go the extra mile and refer to him with she/her pronouns, but obviously don't misgender people either.