Contrary to popular opinion, Spencer Reid does not know everything. For example, she has no idea why, right now, she’s standing naked in front of her little dormitory bathroom mirror bawling her eyes out. It’s sort of humiliating, and very out of character.
She forces herself to meet her own eyes again, then pushes them lower. She’s grown in the past few months, fourteen melting away and bringing with it changes she’d assumed she would simply… skip. Biologically, she knows that females often do not reach sexual maturity until their mid to late teens, but she had been hoping that she finished early. New evidence would suggest that that was not the case.
On her chest, so recently inhabited by modest B cups in good proportion to the rest of her gangly body, were two round, pale breasts, scattered with stretch marks and distinctly larger than they were this time last year.
She ghosts her hands over them, feeling ever so slightly out of sync with her reflection, and settles her fingers on her waist. Her palms settle in the new divots below her ribcage, the ones that dive into the “V” of her pelvis in one direction and, in the other, swell out to join the pads of fat over her hips. This is not right.
Developmentally, it’s perfect. Spencer is a perfectly (physically) healthy teenage girl. Her period comes on the twelfth or thirteenth of every month and ends on the eighteenth. She’s up to date on STD-prevention shots she’s yet to put to the test. She’s in the ninetieth percentile for height and the sixty-third for weight, which her doctor says is alright as long as everything else appears normal. So why does she feel like she’s been betrayed?
The body image issues aren’t the only oddity to crop up in recent years. Reluctantly, Spencer turns her memory to the night of October 31st past, sitting on a bench on Main Street with Ethan from enrichment and social therapy (a cursed procedure in which she visits a local high school every Wednesday and Friday afternoon to “interact with children her own age”).
Ethan had sat silent for approximately thirty seconds longer than normal before turning to her and saying, “I’m gay.”
Ludicrously, Spencer had wanted to respond, “So am I,” which wasn’t true. She liked boys and only boys, just like 94.9% of women in America. She didn’t know where it had come from. It was almost out of her mouth before she’d caught it, ringing with a kind of horrible, soothing truth few things ever had before.
Instead, she’d said, “Oh, cool,” and then, “Do you have a crush on anybody?” because that’s what Doctor June had told her to say if she had the opportunity to. Ethan said he didn’t, and that was the end of it.
Spencer was well-aware of the existence of transgender people. She’d never met one, but she’d read several interesting articles and papers discussing the origins and treatment of gender dysphoria, the effectiveness of various forms of hormone replacement therapy, and the structure of the brains of people of varying gender identities and birth sexes. But that couldn’t be her.
Two months later, on her fifteenth birthday, Spencer puts on blush and a bit of eyeliner and thinks, Hah, that looks kind of gay.
Wait.
No, that’s not right. Wearing makeup does not make girls look gay. Spencer doesn’t like girls, anyway.
She’s at the coffee shop a block down from her nine a.m. wearing a big hoodie and loose jeans and her voice is a bit hoarse from a bug that’s going around and the cashier calls her “buddy.” She nearly drops her coffee.
Spencer kind of wants to kill herself. She’s gone on like this for one year, two months, and fourteen days if she’s counting from the moment the thought am I transgender crossed her mind, which she is.
She’s curled up under her blanket, headphones pressed tight to her ears and eyes squeezed shut, and she’s suffocating. Each breath that enters her lungs brings a fresh reminder of the dissonance in her mind and body, and each one to leave screams with the pain and panic of a trapped animal.
She’s a trapped animal, a taxidermy in reverse, all the life and truth bound up in false, dead wrappings. A mummy, perhaps, but dead pharaohs are on their way to Heaven. Spencer’s on her way to the end.
Like a Feynman calculation, this is an impact site. Several possibilities spread out from here, virtual particles waiting for her to get close enough. She takes stock of her options.
She pushes the blanket off and starts on her way to the RA’s desk. Lindsey controls the phone access these days.
“Ethan, I’m… I’m transgender. I’m a guy. My name is still Spencer, and I still like guys, but, you know-”
“Spencer, Spencer, chill. I know, alright? I know.” Ethan takes Spencer’s chilly hands in his own. They’re on that same park bench, but now it’s November and four p.m. and much colder and Spencer kind of wants to throw up again. “I already kind of guessed, and I’m still your friend. What do you need from me?”
Spencer hits a metaphorical wall. He has no idea what he needs from Ethan. What could Ethan even give him right now? Why is he so calm about this? Had Spencer really been so obvious?
He bursts into tears.
“Hey, woah, it’s alright,” Ethan exclaims. “Can I hug you?” Spencer nods and they fall together, Spencer sobbing and sniffling into Ethan’s coat and Ethan giggling, for some reason.
“Why are you laughing? This isn’t funny; I’m in emotional distress,” Spencer complains, pulling back. He finds it distinctly harder to cry while Ethan is laughing.
Ethan puts his hands on Spencer’s face. “Because I spent like, forever wondering if I was wrong for wanting to do this. ”
In retrospect, maybe Spencer should have expected the kiss. He doubts that would have alleviated the butterflies, though.
“Morgan, wait. I have to tell you something.”
“What’s up, Pretty Boy?”
They’re standing outside Hotch’s office, on the verge of filling out the paperwork to make Derek Spencer’s second emergency contact. Spencer has known Derek Morgan for seven months, one week, four days, and thirteen hours. He’s interacted with him five hundred and thirty-six times, comprising one thousand two hundred and fifty nine hours of time spent together, and Spencer would like to think he knows Derek Morgan better than he knows most people. He’d like to think he knows him well enough to know with certainty that Derek will not react badly to learning that Spencer is transgender, but Spencer is a scientist, and thus does not believe in certainty. He does, however, believe in the clarifying power of experiments, so he proceeds with the one he’s conducting.
“I have no idea if this will ever become relevant to you as my emergency contact, but I don’t want you to be taken by surprise.” Derek raises an eyebrow and Spencer takes a breath. “Alsoyou’reoneofmyclosestfriendsandyoudeservetoknow.”
“Reid, you’re kind of freaking me out here, man.”
Spencer closes his eyes. “I’m transgender.”
“Huh? You mean, like-”
“I mean like I was born female. I have two X chromosomes and female anatomy. I also have gender dysphoria, which is the main expression of the underlying physiological causes of transgenderism. Transgenderism is an outdated term, by the way, mostly used by the medical community to convey information. Being trans is a medical condition in which the sex of one’s brain developes at odds with an individual’s sex as presumed at-”
“Reid, hey, calm down. I get it. Sorry, you just took me by surprise, that’s all.” Spencer dares to open his eyes and finds that Derek is regarding him with a look not unlike the one he had the first time Spencer passed his firearms certification. “I wasn’t sure if you meant you were transitioning to a woman, which, no offense, wouldn’t make sense to me.”
“I- no, that’s not… offensive.” Spencer blinks. Derek sees him as a man. He always has, of course, he’s never had reason not to, but saying that means that Derek really sees him as a man. Derek believes him.
“Good. I’d hate to be on the outs with the BAU’s prettiest boy.” Derek ruffles his hair and then cups Spencer’s chin in his hand, just for a moment. Before Spencer can really figure out what’s happened, Derek is through the door and Hotch is welcoming them in.
Huh.
Spencer knows more than he did ten years ago, but he still doesn’t know everything.