Don't Read this unless you've read Being Christina Chase Chapters 1 - 11 or unless you like spoilers!

You know, perception is a very funny thing. We all have our representational systems and we take data from the outside world and try to pigeon-hole them into our maps. This is influenced more than we realize by how we associate things, and how we feel about things. An easy scenario is to watch people next time you're walking down the street. If you see someone in the distance, ask yourself, is it a boy... or girl... or is it my friend Larry... etc. As they get closer, your assumptions will tend to change and probably get to be more accurate. Your assumptions will also change depending on where you are, how you're feeling, who's around you and their assumptions, etc.

The important thing here is that most people don't operate in an I-don't-know fashion. When you see someone coming down the street at a distance, you process and classify the information so quickly that you will likely identify the unknown as a known. That is, the person down the street is a girl. Then they get a little closer, and the person is a boy. Then he gets closer and he's your cousin Phil. Then he gets closer still, and he is a guy who kinda looks like Phil. It's very rare for the person in question to not be anything. It's just the way human nervous systems are wired. Taking a step back into I-don't-know requires a lot of effort after you get above a certain age.

I remember back in Chapter 3, some people were asking how on earth could everyone think that Chris was a girl when he had no idea how to act like a girl? There's a lot going on. Misha and Nina have the impression from Chris' voice that he's a girl. Every time he's on the phone, until he meets them in person, he's either nervous or scared or rattled. When Alek and Andrei discover him, he's under his coat, a blanket, and covered in mud.

More specifically on Alek's side of the equation, he has the expectation of a girl, and he has the experience burned in his head of the night Anastasia died, so when he opens that car door, and he sees a face peeking out from under everything, he's going to jump definitively right to girl.

Misha's pretty much in the same space when Chris comes home. Five years ago, Alek left to bring Anastasia home, but she never made it back. And now he just brought home this person she assumes is a girl and looks a lot like Anastasia. It's a mental whammy. And even after Chris is cleaned up, he's led down a dimly lit hallway to Anastasia's bedroom. For Misha, all the expectations and cues, and the poor visual stimulus are firing off girl girl girl. Does it mean that Misha is incapable of seeing Chris as a boy or that at some point she's actually figured it out? Maybe yes, maybe no, but at that point in the story, it doesn't matter.

The next morning, Nina sees Chris poke his head out of the shower. He can probably pass for a girl, he has longish wet hair, and Nina has the girl expectation, and a less strong memory of her older sister than her parents. It sums up to girl.

And from that point on, Chris is always dressed like a girl, either Nina or Steph is handling his makeup, he's in desperation mode, and all the stimulus and expectations around him are telling him to act like a girl. He's not even sure why people see him that way cause when he looks into the mirror, he's seeing boy boy boy, even though the reality is he can pass for girl. It's only after Steph gives him the full treatment that he sees himself as a girl. And that's when how he sees himself works as a feedback loop for how he acts and so on.

Now we fast forward, and Chris is trying to make himself look like a girl again in Chapter 10. For starters, he sees boy. He's also not in a good space emotionally. He thinks that if he doesn't look like a girl, his family will want nothing to do with him. He's got a negative world view; he thinks nothing ever works out, and this is no different. Also, he really doesn't know how to do hair and makeup, and when he tries and fails, it only reinforces that feeling he has that everyone will know he's a boy.

Could he pass for a girl with no makeup, long hair, and the right clothes? Probably, but not in his own eyes. So what does he do? He goes to a pro that not only specializes in appearance, but specifically on how to make the masculine appear feminine, and then he's back in that mental space again.

What this all comes down to is that perception is not a passive act. You don't just open your eyes and see things. You get raw data, then process and classify it all so very quickly that you don't even realize it's going on.

So, as far as the story telling is concerned, when we're in Chapter 10, it's Chris' perceptions that are driving the story. I suppose I could go into my dry rant about what I think about perception and about how other people's perception affects reality, but that's not the story. The story is, when Chris was in Chapter 3, passing as a girl worked, and in Chapter 10, to him, it doesn't seem to work anymore. And he doesn't know why. It's the same way that when he talks to his uncle on the phone, dressed as Chris, he feels weird, but when he's dressed as Christina, and feels like Christina, it's comforting.

The bottom line is, it's not all supposed to be explained and it should come off as confusing. It's supposed to be.