Big oof, it's impostor syndrome time. I'm trying to remember when I first started playing femme characters as my mains in various games, and I don't think it was very long before my egg started to crack. At the time, I explained it away by pointing out that I had a much easier time coming up with feminine names to fit a specific character/build (because of fucking course I am a nerd with a copy of the Silmarillion on my desk, and I'd thumb through the Elvish dictionary at the end to combine root words and suffixes to come up with names for characters). At least back in the WoW Burning Crusade/Lich King era, those were usually alts and all of my mains that I rotated between for raiding and whatnot were still male. (I mean, honestly -- how the hell are you going to come up with an appropriate avatar for a death knight named "Goofus" with Blizzard's femme orc options? To say nothing of the femme Tauren models not really fitting the Masters of the Universe villain vibe that is implied by the name "Burgor.") My first Skyrim character was an Imperial named after . In ESO, I just made one of my (male) cats as a derpy Khajiit. I don't think I switched off of the regular Steve body in Minecraft until a few years back; I always play first-person, so the avatar never really mattered much to me.

My first fem main character that I can remember was a hobbit Valkyrie build that I slapped together for my brief stint in Lord of the Rings Online, and I think I did something similar in Guild Wars 2. I also remember liking the female Barbarian voice actor better than the male one in Diablo 3; when I came back to D3 several years ago to try out the seasonal mechanics, I pretty much exclusively played femme characters, aside from my original monk from 2012 who was still decked out in his auction house yellows (no, I did not pay real money for them). The D3 femme Necromancer may have been the first time I experienced extremely intense gender envy. This was also around the time I started almost exclusively playing female Breton builds in Skyrim, ostensibly because I was min/maxing for magic resist for runs on Legendary (but also because the Skyrim male Breton model has a really fuckin' weird hairline). But yeah, this was all within the past 5-6 years or so, and I didn't start identifying as trans or even genderfluid until 2020-2021.

Looking waaaaay back, though, I suspect that I was getting some low-level gender euphoria from playing as a femme blood elf fire mage back in my WoW days. I remember feeling this giddy sense of contentment, like my male mains were a day job that I dreaded and this was a nice break. Has anyone else had that?