I'm not sure this was brought up in the thread before; I happened to stumble across it while working on a writeup of what I believe to be the underlying truth of John's fictional life so far. I was searching for posts John made on the Susan's Place forum, which is a little difficult considering he doesn't have a profile page there anymore, presumably because his account is so old and was banned nearly two decades ago. But I found his introduction post, which mentioned a longer autobiography on Fictionmania, a website devoted to various fetish writings, mostly troonery. I tracked it down and was going to archive it for posterity, but it turns out someone else already did a few years ago, so maybe it had already been posted here?
Anyway,
here it is. In it, he claims to have started hormones February 2006, after months of therapy and years of "always having known" he was a woman. So it seems that his story hasn't changed, though I'm still doubting his insistence that this was something he truly believed since childhood. In particular, I want to highlight this section:
I discovered Fictionmania in 1998 with the advent of the Internet. In hindsight, I can say that I wasted many years that I could have been living as a girl by visiting that site. It all seemed to be so impossible for so long - but here is the story of how I beat my fear and got the courage to transition.
John basically confirms that it really was nothing more than a fetish, using post hoc rationalization to conclude that his feelings of attraction to men and any gender non-conforming behaviors were because he was actually a woman. This fetish site led him to go down the path that would eventually result in his trooning out. If he'd come to terms with his homosexuality, he'd probably just be a weird gangling queer. Instead he's chasing the womanhood dragon, desperately trying to convince himself that one more surgery will be all it takes to be the true and honest woman he fetishizes.
There's a lot more to unpack, including his deluded beliefs that synthetic female hormones are actually improving his brain function, as well as his insistence that he's going to be the star reporter that takes down the Bush administration (lol) after he gets his journalism degree (double lol, he was forced to leave not long after this was written when the gravy train got cut off), and how he's going to write a bunch of books and learn Spanish (triple lol). If you want insights into the mind of a true and honest woman, have a read.
