In 2003, I was 13 years old. The Iraq War was just starting, the Pioneer 10 satellite had broadcast its final radio signal, and I was seated at a public computer in upstate New York, looking at porn. My house was still connected to 128k dial-up, and I was forbidden from having my own AOL password; as such, I spent an hour a day at the library whenever possible, browsing assorted Flash cartoon sites and quietly investigating the wide world of adult entertainment. (To the librarians: I am sorry for sullying your hall of learning. I had no choice.)

Since I’d already been reading comic books for eight years, it should come as no surprise that my smut of choice as a teenager was the cartoon variety. I’d open up Internet Explorer, navigate over to Penisbot (I know), and search their galleries for something different than the creepy Simpsons-cest that dominated the cartoon porn landscape. For the most part, everything I found was solidly heteronormative, with a few lesbian scenes here and there. And I didn’t think to question it.

Until Tilt Mode.

Created by an artist known only as Locke (who also published a few stories through Eros Comix, an adult-oriented imprint of Fantagraphics Books, but has since faded into relative obscurity), Tilt Mode is the story of Amanda, a student who discovers while masturbating in the shower that she can sprout a penis from her clit when aroused. She immediately gets a chance to test her new member when her friend Suzy comes over, and studying takes a back seat to sexy times.

It might not be a particularly good comic — Suzy’s stylized text-speak dialogue is grating at best — but Locke’s faux-manga style has a sexy-cute appeal to it. It wasn’t the bad dialogue that drew me to the story, though. Tilt Mode gave me my first look at the gender-bending world of futanari and started me on the road to realizing my identity as a trans woman, a journey that would take more than a decade to complete.

Futanari is a Japanese word literally meaning “dual form” or “to be of two kinds,” and is used to describe various states of hermaphroditism and androgyny, depending on the context. When discussing pornography — as we’ll be doing for the next 600 words or so — futanari, commonly shortened to “futa,” is a genre of Japanese cartoon porn that stars women with penises. Some have testicles, some don’t; some have vaginas, some don’t.

Internet perverts have argued for years over what types of futa, if any, make the consumer gay, but at 13, I had no interest in codifying the nuances. The extent of my thought process at that time was my sudden knowledge that being a dickgirl was probably the best thing I could ever be.

And then I carefully avoided thinking about the consequences of that idea for five years.

Instead, I spent that time navigating the barbarous wilderness that is Appalachian public high school, filled as it was with hyenas prowling for fresh meat to call “faggot.” (It’s not a perfect metaphor.) Though I wasn’t convinced I was gay — boys held little appeal for me, though I admit I was curious — there was something weird about me, something I tried to understand by reading queer erotica, which was easier to download and save for later, on the rare occasions that I managed to sneak onto the dial-up connection, than cartoons. But reading about gay boys and crossdressers didn’t quite scratch that itch, and for years, I could never find anything quite like Tilt Mode, having even forgotten its name.

In college, everything changed. Not only did I have access to high-speed campus internet, the student body had also set up an illicit file-sharing network that contained untold terabytes of movies, games, music — and porn. Between that and my newfound friends on 4chan (I know), I had all the X-rated resources I’d lacked in high school, and none of the supervision.

Over the next few years, the way I related to myself and my sexuality shifted dramatically. I read what seems in retrospect to be hundreds of hentai stories in dozens of disparate genres, always coming back to sci-fi and fantasy tales of my beloved futa.

I thrilled to the misadventures of the stud-slash-sub Yukito in Kawaraya Ata’s Kopipe, in which a mad scientist copies body parts from one person to another — a trope that thrilled me but was unrealistic enough for me to convince myself that this fetish was just that, not an indication that I was unhappy being a boy. After all, wasn’t I surrounded by hundreds of people on the internet who also got turned on by this stuff? And it’s not like anything like that could ever happen anyway, right?

But it only took so long before I had to admit: I was jealous. I could barely contain my envy when the hero of Hinemosu Notari’s Mirror Image crossdressed so hard he became a futa, and I saw too much of myself in the shy-but-slutty futas and femboys of the artist InCase. Still, I managed to convince myself I wasn’t trans; I just wanted to live in a girl’s body, like the protagonist in Custom Girl who plays a futuristic VR game that allows him to experience sex as a woman! That’s normal for boys to desire fervently and constantly, right?

I realized later that I’m not the only one who felt this way. Many trans women in my community with whom I’ve spoken have expressed similar feelings about futa and “trap” comics — about boys who are girlish enough to “trap” straight men into having sex with them. Thirty Helens, a trans woman who is herself a creator of futanari comics that she posts on her Tumblr, told me in an interview that consuming futa material before transitioning “helped partly fill a void left by being in the closet while maintaining a mental distance from transness.”

The fervor over whether futa “makes you gay” or “straight” that I used to see online is understandable, she says, “because I used to do all these logic backflips in my head to do anything to convince myself I wasn’t trans while still engaging with that side of me a little.” But, she continued, “it helped me come to terms with a lot of stuff after transition. It helped me to feel more secure and sexy regarding my body.”

Transitioning was inevitable for me as well. Once I read Katou Jun’s Avatar Transform!, there was only so much I could do to deny it. Similar to Custom Girl, the hero in Katou’s story explores a futanari body in a VR world, while slowly abandoning all pretense at maleness in real life.

The more I read the chapters in which he realizes a woman’s body in VR feels more natural than his own, the less I could deny it: I wanted that. I wanted to be cute, girlish, even beautiful. It took until the summer of 2015 — more than 10 years after I first read Tilt Mode — to begin coming out to my friends and family, and months more to begin hormone therapy. But I did it, and the results have been more fulfilling than I could ever have imagined.

All this is not to say that futa is intrinsically a trans genre, nor are all its aficionados trans themselves. But as Thirty Helens says, “I think they’re inherently linked. These bodies resemble our bodies and it’s time to stop pretending otherwise, it’s time to stop being afraid that it makes you gay . . . and maybe even more people can connect in a real way without doing the same thing I did, engaging but still keeping a distance from trans womanhood.”

Futa didn’t make me a dyke-y trans girl. It just helped me realize that’s who I wanted to be. Hopefully, it will help other fledgling dickgirls realize it sooner than I did.