In the 21st Century, it's not uncommon for people to be transgender. Far more frequently than is publicly admitted, many individuals have thought to themselves that they feel like they were born as the wrong gender. For some people, this is merely a casual passing thought or an embarrassing guilty secret never to be spoken of again. For other people, these discordant feelings are so disturbing that they live on the edge of depression and suicide, a murky cloud looming over their heads as they attempt to suppress their deep-set feelings in order to desperately fit in with society.Every once in a while, you might encounter somebody who was brave enough to take the nerve-wracking leap to begin "transitioning" into a life as the other sex using medications. Their stories are peppered throughout the media, and they are publicly known in the everyday world as "transgender".But what about the 95% of people who never choose to "transition"?Lin Xiaorui (???), a second-generation Chinese university student with Japanese heritage, never wanted to be transgender. Even though he instinctively knew from a young age that he never fit in with the other boys and secretly desired to have been born a girl, he never dared to mention it to his conservative traditional family.Lin Xiaorui is also a realist. Even as a teenager, it was more than apparent to him how hard life would be if he made a certain taboo choice that everyone shunned. It would be hard to get a job, hard to pay bills, hard to face his family, hard to make friends, and just as hard to find love. The world as it stands remains filled with discrimination against "apache helicopters". Lin Xiaorui wasn't brave enough to commit himself to a life of constant hardship and struggles. A quiet peaceful life was all that he desired, and Lin Xiaorui never thought of himself as a particularly daring or brave person. He's been a quiet, studious, and withdrawn straight-A student all his life after all.Despite how badly his heart yearned for it, every part of his brain screamed that it was a bad idea to become transgender. It wasn't a rational choice. In fact, it seemed like a horrible one in the grand picture of things.This was why Lin Xiaorui never wanted to be transgender.Lin Xiaorui resolved himself a long time ago to simply be a man.Until one day he woke up and discovered that a tanabata wish that he had frivolously written over nine years ago at a shrine unexpectedly came true -- though, not quite exactly in the way that he (she?) expected.

Lin Xiaorui: "Please let me experience high school as a girl."