Percy Shelley to Post Secret

*Addendum: Apparently I'm an idiot, and everyone but me knows who Percy Shelley is. If you're going to be offended by my naivety, then skip reading this post...it may seem just a little (or actually a lot) blasphemous.

Dude, you've got to give up on assigning me these English major-y topics. Percy Shelley? I mean, come now. I've heard of Mary Shelley (of Frankenstein fame...gotta love those movies), but Percy?! Nope, no idea. Sometimes I think you make these people up just to confuse the hell out of me.
Ugh, fine. I'll go wikipedia it...
Oh, okay. Percy was also an author, and he was married to Mary. That explains some things. He also, apparently, was a transvestite. I mean, judging by his portrait:


My god, just look at the guy! That's not a man, that's Meryl Streep in a funky collar holding a quill pen. No man has perfectly coiffed hair, plucked eyebrows, and high cheekbones like that (besides Noel Fielding, who we all can agree defies pretty much every gender stereotype). Even wikipedia can't completely cover up Percy's femininity: "In 1804, Shelley entered Eton College, where he fared poorly, subjected to an almost daily mob torment his classmates called "Shelley-baits." Surrounded, the young Shelley would have his books torn from his hands and his clothes pulled at and torn until he cried out madly in his high-pitched "cracked soprano" of a voice." Hello, there is no better evidence than this. Percy Shelley was a lady. I wouldn't be surprised if she was actually born Persephone Shelley, then shortened it to Percy when she was in grade school 'cause she wanted to be a writer and she thought that only boys could be writers. Plus she was a lesbian, and that just didn't go over well in society in the late 1800s. So she became Percy, and eventually gained all this success with her writing and married Mary (who was the daughter of a well-known feminist and wrote Frankenstein, which is about how even when some guy tries to create the 'perfect' man, he turns out to be a monster...yeah, Mary was also fond of the ladies). Then she drowned in a boat accident, probably because the crew was all "AHHH ITS A TERRIBLE STORM OUTSIDE AND PERCY WE NEED YOU TO HOLD ONTO THIS SAIL SO WE DON'T ALL DIE" and she was all "OMGZ NO WAY, DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT THAT WOULD DO TO MY NAILS?!???" And so she died.
At least, that's what I like to think happened.
Yeah, I may be re-writing history, but my version is just so much more exciting than "Percy Shelley was a dude who wrote some stuff then died in a boat."
There are many people in this world who, like our dear P. Shellz, would have preferred to be born as a different gender than what they are. These people are called transgendered. Lots of them decide, at some point, to get operations so that they can actually become the other gender that they want to be. Sometimes, before they make such decisions, these people are afraid to tell their friends and families that they feel like they were born the wrong gender. When people have these kinds of secrets, they let them out in all sorts of ways - some write poems, some do drugs, and others choose to anonymously confess their innermost secrets on postcards which they send to an organization called Post Secret, which then publishes books and websites where they share all these secrets with the world. Basically Post Secret is one big tattletale. People find comfort in these anonymous confessions, however, because a lot of times other people comment on their postcards with remarks like "oh hey I'm also secretly attracted to my pet lobster!" or "wow, I never thought anyone else was afraid of the color orange!" It makes them feel like they're not alone in the world, that their eccentricities are not all that abnormal.
So maybe if Percy Shelley had Post Secret, she would've been able to confess her true identity and she'd have had a much more interesting life. Or maybe if I re-wrote Percy Shelley's Wikipedia page, it would just seem to the uneducated masses that she had a supremely interesting life...

Park Rangers to Pegasus.