You could well be right! For myself, I'm actually very happy to leave both options open. It's like the end of The Sopranos, we can only really go on what we've got in front of us.
Tony could be a former massive drug user and drug dealer, and trying to cover it up, or (considering this episode only!) he could be a ginormous self-aggrandizing fantasist and liar, and trying to cover that up. Either way, Tony has made his bed and I wish for him to lie in it.
Because ultimately this is the reason why I first got involved in the Tony thread. I'm sitting an ocean away, minding my own business, wondering why I can never open a pita bread without tearing at least one side, and some normie with a blindspot for the poor oppressed trans retweets Tony's superficially sensible but ultimately completely selective pseudoscientific horseshit into my timeline.
Blockers eliminate suicide risk in trans kids, trans people's mental health improves after transitioning, trans people have always been here but they've been erased from history, we just want to pee. And on and on and on. You could spend all day trying to refute Tony's batshit claims but it would be pointless, because he's always got another claim ready to go and is sufficiently not-obviously-gross that people took him seriously the first time.
Anyway, enough of that. I think he might be lying about his past playing Dungeons and Dragons.
Post-troonout Tony has talked a lot about how much he loved D&D as a child, which to me seems like an attempt to say "I've always been trans because I was obsessed with becoming a female character." (There's been some discussion of this phenomenon
in the Philosophy Tube thread recently.)
- "Me, pre-transition teenager: … D&D with female characters is my favorite game." (source, archive)
- "Dude who transitions because she spent a little too much time on a roleplaying server and realized she could make her IRL character female too. For me it was D&D, 2001, webRPG and openRPG clients, I was 12." (source, archive)
- "Boy who marveled over the "true polymorph" D&D spell to girl who cast it on herself pipeline." (source, archive)
- "One of the best insights I ever had is that 13 year old me knew herself more than I ever gave her credit for. She knew she was trans, loved D&D." (source, archive)
- "When I was a young teenager, I played a lot of D&D online on an old tabletop tool called OpenRPG." (source, archive)
- "I loved D&D and tried to play shapeshifters often." (source, archive)
In some of the earlier Tony posts we have, he says he rarely played D&D:
- "As far as D&D or Magic … I'm sure someone here on Reddit will probably post and let you know of a few. I don't personally know of any though because I don't really play." (source, archive)
- "I have never been to [a renaissance fair] before. I was never a ren fair kind of person, by far. I've never even dressed up and I think I played dungeons and dragons once when I was a kid." (archive)
Then again, after he moved to DC but before he trooned out, Tony said he had "been playing since AD&D and White Wolf games since 2000" (
source,
archive).
I wonder if this is something he actually got into as an adult and has written into his born-trans backstory.