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“How does it look?”
“Honestly? It’s not a bad look,” she said. “You know, you’d actually be kind of pretty if you were a girl.”
Leo couldn’t sleep. He had been trying for hours. His body was exhausted, but his brain just wouldn’t shut up. She probably hadn’t even meant anything by it, but that one little comment was bothering him so much.
He was hunched over in front of the dim light of the bathroom mirror with a black sharpie, for lack of a better tool. Karai had made this seem so easy when she had put it on him. He was so mad at himself for washing it off earlier. Maybe then he wouldn’t be using a black marker to trace the edges of his eyes with shaky hands.
He pulled back to see himself. It didn’t look anything like how Karai had done it. It looked even worse with tired bags under his eyes. He groaned, and splashed his face with warm water. He looked up. It wasn’t coming off.
“No, come on–”
He frantically rubbed his eyes to try and get it out. Some of it did come off onto his palms, and the rest smeared and gave him a face evocative of a raccoon bleached green by mutagen.
Why was this making him feel this way? Why was he so upset over this?
He needed some air.
He tied his mask over his hackneyed makeover and crept out of his room. The lair was empty, with no stragglers in front of the TV or the arcade cabinets. In spite of this, a thin ribbon of light spilled into the dark lair from across the common room. The light in Donnie’s lab was still on.
Leo knocked on the garage door. “Donnie?”
“What?” A tired voice answered.
“Can I come in?”
“Yeah.”
Leo didn’t spend that much time in the lab, but whenever he went in he was always so surprised with how Donnie made sense of this space. To an outsider, it looked like a mess on its way to becoming a hoarder’s den if left unchecked. But all one had to do was look a little closer to see that there was a method to his madness. Everything had a spot, and Donnie always got snippy with anybody who tried moving anything, unless it was April. If there was a beaker full of mutagen lying on its side, it was supposed to be that way. Don’t move it, don’t touch it, don’t even look at it.
Donnie was hunched over his computer, his eyes weary but fully engrossed. The past few days he had been working on a pet project which he described as a rudimentary neural net processor, the kind that was used for AI. He wouldn’t tell anyone what it was for. Leo had a theory that Don was trying to rebuild Metalhead, but didn’t want to open old wounds by asking.
“What are you still doing up?” Donnie asked, not looking up from his computer.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” said Leo.
“You here to tell me to go to bed?”
“No, actually.” Leo set down a steaming ceramic mug beside his brother. “I made you some tea. You like hojicha with honey, right? I couldn’t remember.”
Donnie stopped typing and squinted at Leo, but accepted the offering anyway. “Right… so, who are you and what have you done with my brother?”
“Can we talk for a sec?” Leo asked sheepishly.
Donnie’s expression softened. “Yeah, sure. What about?”
“Those couple of months, a while back… When we, uh, thought you were our sister?”
Donnie’s face deflated back into a grimace. “You came in here to ask me about that ?” he snorted. He turned his attention back to his computer. “Get bent, Leo.”
Leo's stomach turned. He hadn't realized that this was still such a sore subject. "Hey, I'm not trying to make fun of you or anything," he defended. “I just… I’m just curious.”
“Why?” Donnie sounded suspicious.
“Because, well…” Leo searched in his hand for something clever to say. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and… I kind of realized I wasn’t really as supportive as I could have been when you were going through all that. I didn’t really do much to try to understand, or reach out or just… I dunno, be there for you while you were going through that.”
“Well it’s a little late for that now, don’t you think?”
“Listen,” Leo sighed. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I won’t pry, I’ll just go back to bed and I won’t bring it up again,” he said. “But I really do feel bad that there was such a rift between us during that time–”
“Leo, I can see where you’re coming from,” Donnie interrupted. “But believe me when I say that this really isn’t necessary, ok? It was what, five years ago?” He cocked his head. “You don’t think I’m still mad at you, do you?”
“No! I mean, I hope you’re not… I mean–”
“I’m not.”
“Ok. Great. Cool. That’s great.”
Shit.
Donnie stared at him, arms crossed.
“Look…” Leo started. Splinter had always told him to speak from the heart, even when utilizing deception or subterfuge. Sincerity was like salt. Sprinkle in a few grains of truth, and trust would reveal itself. “Even though it happened a long time ago, I realized, despite it all, I still don’t know that much about being trans. And you’re trans, and I care about you a lot, and I don’t want to repeat mistakes I’ve made in the past and make you feel bad about yourself or like you don’t belong. I want to be better to you than I have been. I promise I won’t tell Mikey and Raph any of this. Nothing leaves the lab.”
Donnie heaved a long sigh. “Fine,” he said. “What do you wanna know?”
-
It had started with the worst night ever. He was eleven.
He went to bed like normal, late, and woke up two hours later with shooting pain in his lower body. Donnie’s groaning must have woken up Raph, because before long, he was outside the door, rubbing his eyes.
“Donnie, w’s goin’ on?” Raph mumbled sleepily. “Are you sick or something?”
“Go away,” Donnie whimpered. He was hunched over the side of his bed, face buried in his arms. He was crying quietly, holding his sheets bunched up at the headboard, like he was trying to cover something up.
“Don, what’s wrong?”
“Go away!” Donnie hissed again. “Get out of my room!”
Raph squinted. “Are you bleeding?”
Donnie lurched away as Raph drew closer. “I’m fine! Get away from me!”
The sheets told a different story. Small, dark spots of blood revealed themselves in the light of the open doorway before another shadow obscured them.
“Why are you guys shouting?” muttered another sleepy voice. Leo. “It’s like, two in the morning.”
“Something’s wrong with Donnie.”
"What?" Leo pushed his way into the room. "Donnie, what happened?"
"I said I'm fine!" Donnie choked.
Leo was suddenly fully awake. "Raph, go wake up Splinter. I'll stay here."
Raph took off without a word. Leo knelt down next to his weeping brother. "Hey, hey. It's ok. What happened?"
Donnie just frantically shook his head. “Don’t look.”
-
"I definitely still remember that. None of us could believe it," Leo said. "And even you never knew?"
"I mean… I kind of did. Sort of," Donnie mused. "At least, I had my suspicions. I had studied the biology of turtles at that point, and I did notice some differences between myself and you guys that were indicative of gender. Even from a humanoid mutation standpoint it makes sense. I grew faster, for one thing."
"So why didn't you tell anybody?"
Donnie thought about it. "Guess I was still in denial. I knew that if I told someone and I ended up being right, things would change pretty dramatically."
"Things did change," said Leo.
"Yeah. They did."
-
Raph, Leo, and Mikey didn’t find out what had happened until the next morning. They had spent the bulk of the night camped outside of Donnie’s room while Splinter was helping him, trying to figure out what was going on. Mikey’s brain rocketed to the extreme theory of some dramatic terminal illness and was nigh on inconsolable. Splinter took them all aside to the dojo while Donnie was in bed recovering from the night’s ordeal.
Out of all of the possible fallouts from a situation that up to this point had only seemed to escalate, Splinter telling them that he had learned that Donnie was actually a girl was nowhere near the ballpark of any of their guesses. What had happened was that Donnie had laid eggs in his sleep, which was apparently a pretty regular occurrence for female box turtles.
So Donnie became Donna and life went on. For everyone except her, for whom time slowed to a crawl and the days felt like an eternity.
The first week, the week that Splinter sat her down, held her while she cried, and gave her a new name, her brothers avoided her. She didn’t blame them. How could she? She wouldn’t know how to deal with her either. How do you talk to someone after learning that something you thought you knew about them was so fundamentally wrong? What ate at her was that she knew for a fact that they were talking about her behind her back. She made up things that they might be saying, to hurt her own feelings.
Not long after that, her brothers started growing comfortable around her again, but not in a way that she remotely liked. They were nice to her at first, which was uncomfortable on its own. They were only being nice to her because she was different from them now, an odd strain of kindness that she could tell they were forcing.
But she knew her brothers. Nice wasn’t going to last forever. And there was also a strange, secret third thing that was nestled between kindness and cruelty that her family seemed very adept at.
Donna and her brothers had an ongoing game that they played with action figures that Splinter had smuggled them from the surface. They had been playing with these figures for a long time, and when they outgrew just playing pretend, they developed an ongoing story campaign that they played out with the figures, despite knowing nothing about them aside from their names and the name of the show they were from, which were printed on their boxes if they ever came in any. Leo had pulled out the box with figures and their story notes in it and declared they would be spending the afternoon continuing where they left off.
“Ok, where were we…” Raph mumbled, flipping through their notebook. “We just did the telekinesis battle at the Canyon of Souls.”
“Oh yeah!” Mikey sped into the circle where the four of them sat. “I want to be Coolstar again!”
“I call General Unsura!” Donna chimed in.
Her brothers fell silent.
“What?” she asked.
“You can’t be Unsura,” said Leo.
“Why not? I’m always Unsura.”
“Because you’re a girl now.” Leo held up a sickly pink figure with long green hair that they only pulled out for certain scenes. “Here, you can be Princess Mae.”
“But I don’t want to be Mae!” Donna protested.
“Just let her be Unsura, Leo,” Raph groaned. “If we change things up now it’s gonna mess with the story anyway.”
Leo reluctantly held out the General Unsura figure to Donna. “Fine. Here.”
Donna took it. She looked at the stupid little plastic villain that she wasn’t even supposed to be playing with. She rose, threw the toy on the ground, and walked out. “I don’t wanna play anymore.”
It was safe to say that things came to a head one day when Mikey was making himself lunch in the kitchen while Donna, Leo and Raph were watching tv.
“Dudes…” he moaned the way he did when nothing was really wrong and he just wanted to complain. “We’re out of eggs.”
“So what?” asked Leo, not looking up from the tv.
“So I already made rice!” Mikey whined. “Now I just have to eat just gross plain rice!”
“And what do you want us to do about it, Mikey?” Leo said blandly.
Raph snickered. “Hey Mikey. Why don’t you just ask Donna to lay you some eggs?”
Raph might have been the better fighter than Donna by a wide margin, but he still wasn’t fast enough to block a reflexive sucker punch to the face out of seemingly nowhere, and he was knocked off the raised couch. Raph only took a second to get his bearings before lunging back at Donna in full force with a bloody nose and wild eyes. The two pummeled each other with Raph on top. Splinter eventually heard the noise and found it fit to intervene, having to literally tear the two of them away from each other.
Things were different. She was different from them now. Raph ridiculed her, and Mikey couldn’t see that their actions were hurting her. But in a way, the way Leo treated her hurt the most. He barely spoke to her anymore. If she was staring down the barrel of the rest of her life, she didn’t want it.
She even felt like an alien during training. It was no secret that she wasn’t as talented as her brothers at martial arts, but now it was something that she couldn’t get out of her mind. She started pushing herself more and more, staying late in the dojo to run drills and throwing herself at her brothers with uncharacteristic ferocity during sparring.
She wasn’t weak. She wasn’t a weak girl.
She became prickly and hardened, and the slightest provocation would set her off. Time spent not in the dojo was spent in her lab, and when she emerged from either, the whole lair was tense and uncomfortable, as if everyone knew that she was almost at the end of her dynamite stick. It eventually got so bad that Splinter no longer allowed her to train with her brothers, and declared that he would be training her privately until her attitude improved.
It was during one of these training sessions that an explosion reared its head. Splinter was leading her in meditation, trying to calm her troubled mind, at least enough so that they could talk. They sat across from each other cross legged, a stick of incense burning between them.
“Would you feel comfortable speaking openly now?”
“Yes sensei.”
“Good,” Splinter said. “Donatella, I’d like an explanation for your recent behavior. This is something that I would expect perhaps from Raphael or Leonardo, but certainly not you.”
“I don’t want to be a girl anymore,” Donna said. She fidgeted, afraid to look Splinter in the eyes. “Sensei, can I please go back to being a boy?”
There was a pregnant silence, which became too much and made Donna finally look up. Splinter was looking down at her with a startled, confused expression.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…” she started. She had practiced this. But the concerned scrutiny of her father’s gaze made it so much harder to get it out. She swallowed back a lump in her throat that was beginning to swell and hurt. “I want to go back to the way things were before. I want to go back to being called Donatello, and your son, and my brothers’ brother. So can I please go back to being a boy now?”
Splinter rested a hand on her shoulder. “Have your brothers been mocking you?”
“No, sensei,” Donna said. “Not anymore.”
But somehow it’s worse.
Splinter sighed. “My child,” he said. “I know that this has been difficult for you. I commend your resilience through this new… discovery of yourself. I do.”
There he went. Splinter always talked about it as if it were a dirty word. It made Donna feel dirty by extension.
“And I know that I am partially to blame,” Splinter continued, rising to pace the dojo. “After all, it was I who raised all four of you as male, as I was told that all four of you were male turtles. It never once occurred to me the possibility that this information could be inaccurate. And I wish that I had known so that I could have properly raised you as a girl.”
The idea alone made Donna shudder. Images of dolls and makeup instead of action figures and comic books for mutation day presents briefly flashed in her mind.
“It pains me to see you so troubled by this. But you must learn to take pride in who you are, Donatella. And myself and your brothers will do everything that we can to help,” Splinter said.
“Sensei, I mean no disrespect,” Donna said tersely. “But I already took pride in who I was. This–” she gestured to her face. “Whatever this is, that isn’t who I am. I just want to be a boy again. I don’t like being a girl and I hate the name Donatella!”
It wasn’t very often that Donna saw Splinter unsure of what to say. “Well, then perhaps we can try something different,” Splinter offered. “Artemisia Gentileschi was an artist of the Baroque period, but she–”
“No! You’re not listening to me!” Donna interrupted, the backs of her eyeballs beginning to burn. “I don’t want to have a girl’s name! I said I want to go back to the way things were before!”
“Dona-” Splinter stammered. “My child, we cannot change who we are,” he said firmly.
“What are you talking about? If we had never known then nothing would have changed!” Donna screamed, tears finally bursting forth. “You used to be a human!”
It was too much. She stormed out of the dojo, not lingering long enough to see Splinter reaching after her as she left.
-
“I’m really sorry about all that,” said Leo.
Donnie shrugged. “Enh, it was a long time ago.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t make it ok.”
“Well, my point is that I’m over it,” Donnie said.
Leo still felt queasy thinking about it. At the time he had been too young to understand the kind of hell Donnie had been in when they were younger. He had really believed that Donnie was just being bratty and difficult through a process that seemed so straightforward and simple. He had felt annoyed. Spiteful.
Jealous?
Was that why he had felt so angry back then, when Donnie was getting so much attention from Splinter? Was that why he never did anything to stop Raph and Mikey from participating in that passive othering? Was that why he took part in it himself? Was that why it had all felt so unfair?
Because I wanted to be a girl too.
Leo pushed the thought down as soon as it surfaced. “So that’s when you decided you were going to go back to the way things were just… by yourself? How were you so sure of yourself?”
“I wasn’t, really. I don’t even know what I was thinking,” Donnie groaned. “I just needed to be away from everyone for a while. I think it was Mikey who talked me into coming back.”
-
“Donna!”
“What, Mikey?”
Mikey’s round head peeked into the lab’s garage door, holding a small cable. “Can you fix the charger for my DS?” He grinned. “It hasn’t been working ever since I tried feeding it to Spike.”
“Let me see it.”
Mikey placed it on Donna’s workbench. She swiveled her chair away from her current project and began checking the cable for signs of damage.
“Hey Donna?” Mikey asked.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like it. Just go back to calling me Donnie.”
“Don’t you wanna be called a girl’s name?” Mikey asked.
“No, I don’t,” Donnie said without looking up. “What were you gonna ask me?”
“Uhhh… Oh yeah!” Mikey recalled. “How come you don’t hang out with us anymore?”
Donnie said nothing.
“Raph beat your score at Space Heroes pinball yesterday.” When he was met with more silence, he rested his face in his hands and pouted. “C’mon. We miss you, dude. We haven’t hung out in, like… forever. You’re in here all the time now.”
Donnie shoved the charging cable into Mikey’s hands. “There was a frayed wire beneath the plastic sealant. It should be able to charge again. Now go away.”
Mikey clutched it in his hands tightly. “Is it ‘cuz of all the jokes we made? ‘Cuz if it is, I didn’t mean to–”
“It doesn’t matter! I just want to be alone! That’s all!” Donnie snapped. He pointed to the door. "Get out!”
Mikey's mouth twisted into a grimace, the way someone would look when they were trying not to cry. He threw the newly repaired charging cable on the ground. "Why are you so mean all the time?” He wailed. “Why are you such a big jerk now?”
“Same as I ever was, Mikey,” Donnie said dismissively.
“I liked you better when you were a boy."
Donnie felt something inside him tear. “Well, so did I! But there’s nothing I can do about it!” She yelled. “You think I’m enjoying this? This is something about myself that I can’t change! And nothing anyone does is making it easy!” She put her face in her hands and breathed deeply. “But I don’t have a choice, Mikey!”
Mikey stood in stunned silence. He stepped closer. "Dee Dee?"
“What?” Donnie sobbed.
Donnie was startled by a tight hug. Mikey was smaller than he was, but Donnie somehow felt smaller in this embrace. Mikey’s voice was muffled, his face squished up against Donnie’s plastron.
“I think you should go back to being a boy.”
“Mikey,” Donnie said, “I just told you that I can’t. ”
“Says who?” Mikey looked up. “We can just keep calling you Donnie and talk about you like you’re a boy like we always did.” he asked.
“But it won’t be true.”
“Donnie,” Mikey said. “We really miss you. Can you go back to being a boy so we can all hang out again?”
Donnie hugged Mikey back. She had missed this so much. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She suddenly felt so tired.
Something was over.
“I’d really like that,” he murmured.
-
“Of course it was Mikey,” said Leo.
Donnie chuckled. “Yeah. Of course it was.”
“And Splinter was ok with it in the end?”
“I mean, I think at first he was pretty hesitant,” Donnie admitted. “It took him a while to warm up to it. You know how he was. Getting him to admit he was wrong about something was like pulling teeth.”
“Yeah,” Leo said distantly. “I know.”
“Leo?”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you really asking me all this?” Donnie asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I guess I mean…” Donnie hesitated. “The way that you’ve been phrasing things… Is this about someone who’s not me?”
Leo suddenly started to panic. He had come this far. If anyone was going to understand, it was going to be Donnie, right? That thought should have been comforting. He didn’t understand why he was so nervous, but he was. Slowly, he undid his mask and let it fall.
Donnie looked surprised. “What happened to your face?”
“Karai put some eye makeup on me earlier today,” Leo said sheepishly.
“Well, she didn’t do a very good job.”
“No, that’s not…” Leo stammered. “I did this. I took it off earlier because it made me feel weird, and then tonight I tried to do it again, and it kind of just… ended up like this.”
“What did you use?”
“Sharpie.”
Donnie rose and started going through the medicine cabinet he kept on the other side of his lab. He produced a bottle of rubbing alcohol and some cotton balls. “Here. This is the best way to get permanent marker off of skin. Just try not to get any in your eyes.”
“Don, I think I want to be a girl,” Leo blurted out. “I know that you still don’t really like Karai, but being able to hang out with her without, like, the Foot or Shredder hanging over our heads… for one thing, it’s been really nice. But it’s making me realize some stuff.”
Donnie was stunned. “Like what?” he asked.
“When she was putting makeup on me, it almost felt like we were sisters.” Leo buried his face in his hands. “And… it felt good? Like something I didn’t even know that I really wanted? I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me if that’s what’s going on.”
“How would I know?”
“Because you went through the real thing.”
“I thought that I was biologically male until I was eleven. It’s not the same thing,” Donnie explained. “I only started hurting after I found out that wasn’t the case. I already knew who I was. If I really wanted to be a girl, I almost definitely would have figured things out sooner.”
“But it’s similar,” Leo protested. “Isn’t it? Just tell me if it’s the same for me. I need to know. This is going to drive me insane.”
“Leo,” Donnie said impatiently. “I love you so much, but I can’t tell you who you are. That’s not something that I can decide for you.”
“But I’m telling you I don’t know either!” Leo said desperately. “What am I supposed to do?”
Donnie sat down close to him. “Look. I have something that might help, but it’s only going to work if you answer 100% honestly,” he said. “If someone came up to you and said ‘I can turn you into a girl right now,’ would you say yes?”
“No, I would call them a crazy person.”
“Come on. This is purely hypothetical. What would you say?”
Leo thought about it. He thought about how he felt when he was with Karai, who had begun treating him more like a sister, whether or not she realized it. And how when they parted ways, how much he missed getting to indulge in that feeling. What would that feel like if it never got turned off while they were apart? What if Casey and April and his brothers treated him the way Karai did? As something closer to a girl and a sister than what he was now?
If Splinter were still alive, how would it feel to be treated as his daughter?
“I think I would say yes.”
Donnie wrapped Leo in a gentle hug. The sudden contact made tears fight their way to the surface that Leo didn’t even know he was holding back. He sniffed to try to keep them off of his face. “Please don’t tell anyone about this,” he said.
“Nothing leaves the lab, remember?” Donnie reminded him. He drew away, lightly punched Leo in the shoulder, and smiled. “Why so blue, fearless leader?”
Leo laughed in spite of himself. He wiped his face with his arm. “This is awkward, I’m sorry.”
“Hey, no need to apologize. I’m happy you felt like you could trust me. Sheesh, you always try to deal with everything by yourself,” said Donnie. “Everything doesn’t have to happen right now. Try things out. See what feels right. Heck, I bet you could even talk to other people online. I could send you some internet forums I found for trans people around our age.”
“Maybe,” Leo sniffled. “I dunno. I’m tired. Can we put a pin in this?”
“Yeah, ‘course,” Donnie said. “Wanna go make some popcorn? Put on Space Heroes?”
Leo scoffed. “Nope. Uh-uh. We don’t watch Space Heroes together anymore.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because you always talk through the whole thing.”
“Oh, and you don’t?”
“Donnie, we’ve been over this. I’m not about to sit through a single episode of Space Heroes if I have to listen to you harp about how it’s ‘scientifically inaccurate’ every two minutes,” Leo teased. “And since when do you ever want to watch Space Heroes?”
“I’m trying to be nice!” Donnie said, exasperated.
“I’d be down for Mecha Force though.”
“Yeah, ok.”