In the years to come, Day would experiment with her own anonymous online profiles as she slowly fumbled toward coming out and beginning her transition in the early 2010s. And they were mostly anonymous, their legal identities hidden so they could better explore the people they actually were. The people on the message board (who were, in Day’s recollection, primarily women) were discussing the struggles both big and small that factor into everyday life as a trans person. Scrolling through that message board, actually getting to see people’s experiences, I got that feeling, like, ‘Holy shit, this is everything I’ve felt my entire childhood,’” Day said. “That was the first time where I was actually seeing other trans people talk. In the late 1990s, when she was a teenager living in a highly conservative part of Texas, Emily Day stumbled onto an internet message board full of trans people talking about their lives.