I had a friend around a decade ago who I met through shared nerd shit interests and we ended up bonding over that and our slightly absurdist senses of humor. It helped that we could snark to each other about the people in our nerd social circles, too. There was a solid four years where this guy was basically my best friend.
That chapter of my life closed with a bizarre incident that now makes perfect sense. I was moving out of that city to start a job and had already cleaned out my apartment, but still had some lingering business in town to finish so I was staying with him. On my last night before going, we ended up having a long, meandering conversation about our pasts. I remember him telling me how he'd never really felt that masculine growing up, how he'd try to be more manly by growing a beard and picking up stereotypically masculine hobbies but he felt like kind of a fraud. I was kind of surprised, since he'd never mentioned anything like that before, but I told him I thought he was a fine guy and had never thought of him as being deficient. I remember saying something like, "Even if you're not a macho man, you're still a man, right? So it's fine." The conversation petered out after that and we called it a night, and I left the next morning after an amicable goodbye.
After I rolled out of town, I reached back to him a couple of times but got an uncharacteristically frosty reception from him. The last exchange we ever had ended with me asking him, "Is everything alright?" and he just never replied to me. I was upset at the time because the guy had been a really close friend and to get a cold shoulder from him out of nowhere was shocking, but I eventually decided that it was because he'd always been kind of weird and socially awkward and maybe this was a way for him to just let the friendship end instead of slowly dying over time as we moved on separate life paths.
Something came up not too long ago that got me thinking about him, so I did a casual search to see what he was up to these days and he was gone. No hits for anything under his name at all. That wasn't a huge shocker to me, since he'd always had a small social media footprint, but he had a fairly unique last name, so I searched for that and eventually found his troon identity. To his credit, he's making an actual effort to try to pass, and given his build and height and naturally fine facial features you could probably mistake him for a homely woman at range, but he does not pass in the pictures I saw.
I thought about reaching out, but ultimately decided not to. In retrospect, that final conversation was probably him feeling me out to see if I was going to support him transitioning and I guess he decided I wouldn't - in my defense, this was 2014, "I don't feel like I'm a manly man" didn't auto-flag as troon shit to me yet. I took what he said at face value and tried to cheer him up in the way I knew how. It stung a little bit to know that he was willing to cut me off after not even having the respect to be forthright with me, but I guess not every relationship means the same thing to the parties in it, or maybe he'd already been poisoned by the cult.
Either way, I hope - unironically - that the guy is happy now.
