TURBINE | KAPOHAU

A gunge gurl is the fairy that lives in your mouldy closet. She found, and proceeded to take, shrooms there once and now can’t seem to leave. She is begging you please, do not use the dehumidifier as it might re-absorb her ego-death . . .  In exchange, she promises she’ll tell you the tale of the Siberian toadstool eating shaman Santa is based on. She knows his great-great-great-great-great grandson, no no for real I swear, this one time they bonded over neo-jazz-art-rap musicians and being from Eastern European refugee families.

A gunge gurl got called a cry-baby when her parents split up at seven and decided from that moment it wasn’t safe to show people emotions any longer – the start of a road toward self-destruction and late diagnosis.

A gunge gurl, part computer, part living being, has been connected to the internet for almost twenty years. She had her first relationship-turned-five-second-marriage on Club Penguin, and talked to supposed Harry Potter characters on Facebook, getting bored and moving onto another hyper fixation before the grooming had a chance to kick in. What was the hyper fixation, you ask? Well it was Habbo Hotel, where she stumbled into eight-bit parties dressed in a beer barrel.

The gunge gurl has levelled up since her last pink gaming keyboard clickety-clack and now, unmasked: is unfortunately giving more than Grime’s awful essence – she is painfully as awkward as her in Doja’s ‘Need to Know’ video. She would like to refrain from any further association of these two problematic queens.

A gunge gurl can be seen depicted in a portrait of trickling green code. Of course The Matrix is about being a trans woman, how ridiculous the incels attempted to claim it with all their red pill hullabaloo.

If a gunge gurl were to make music she would use a Nintendo DS Lite as a synth and make cyberpop out of the barks of Nintendogs. She would perform on stage with a symphony of iCats as her backup dancers.

A gunge gurl will say pick a card, select a crystal – hell, she might even read your chart. So, I suppose, yes, you could call her an Astro-Girlie, but to be honest her astro-boyfriend has surpassed her with his star cosmos-knowledge now. She doesn’t write the horoscopes anymore, so stop asking her moon related questions – she doesn’t know, I swear, she just works here.

A gunge gurl has four university degrees … on The Sims2. Where she is also a green-skinned alien who sunbathes in a Jabba-Slave-Leia style bikini outside her four gal flat in a desert suburb called Strange Town. Her human-boyfriend got abducted last weekend for being too much of a star-freak. What more can she say, she warned him about the telescope, but ah well he’s extraterrestrially pregnant now, so that should teach him.

On The Sims 4, a gunge gurl is purple and one time she left the house without her human suit on and everyone was way scared and she got like super embarrassed – she couldn’t believe it, it was almost like real life!

A gunge girl wore op-shopped clothes before it was cool. She endured the popular kids making fun of her because, ‘Ew, someone probably died in that’. Now look at the astronomical prices at Recycle Boutique, she guesses that’s on the cringe to cool pipeline. Like bleached eyebrows are in right now but remember when they were giving shaved head Britney, so wacko-psycho-freak-core?!? It’s like when Kim K wore boots that-looked-like-she-was wearing-socks-over-boots-but-she-wasn’t and the five-minute craft bitches went crazy for it!

A gunge gurl wonders if alien drag^[1] goddess Juno Birch might accept her, real tits and all, as a drag daughter in an eruption of absolutely stunning Yes, that’s happening’s. She hopes Miss Birch might see past the fact she is at least a small percentage (depending on the day) the trad-aligned-gender with her assigned-sex-at-birth. She doesn’t even do drag, she just wants to belong, somewhere, and where better than under the mentorship of an alien housewife. A gunge gurl does hate however, that she found the name for her gender identity on Tik Tok, but like girlflux, that’s so me, how could a femme-enby not?

What about that tiny moment cottage-core had its second in the spotlight before it was pushed back onto the queers in favour of clean girl coquette. Despite being one of them queers, the gunge gurl isn’t mad about the cis-het girlies giving ballet-core, wearing bows and ribbons in their hair, she just isn’t hopeful it’ll last.

A gunge gurl loves the fact that it’s on the edge of the mainstream to like Sylvanians, Monchichi, Blythe and Sonny Angels. You see, the gunge gurl’s biggest obsession growing up was Littlest Pet Shop, she made them houses and shops out of cardboard. She ripped the heads off Barbies, except for one absolutely deranged diva she named Egg Man: he, an AFAB trans twink, could stay.

A gunge gurl, with her often high-pitched cadence, slow processing times and over the top reactions, knows the trials and tribulations of being manic-pixie-dream-girled by sweaty-suave teen-boys, Oooooh you’re so cute when you’re mad! Awh, she doesn’t understand they’d say, but they still held her bags.

A gunge gurl could be a jelly-shot-wOoooOoOo-make-out with the short king because he plays the drums and likes the indie band Crumb-girl or cough-bong-girl who plays CSGO or COD or GTA. Learning the language of intoxicated-teenager-in-the-skate park was easy, just drop in a trueeeeeee where it doesn’t make grammatical sense and compliment the guy wearing pinstripe pants and a straight-man-silver-chain on his steeze.

A gunge gurl masked her ADHD traits in Y13, realising she could act like a dazed skater bro and the boys would love her low maintenance; the fact she too, would sniff her clothes to see if they were on the a lil stank to diSgUsting scale before deciding these JNCOs look sick who cares. She let them light her cone piece in the forest and kiss her post-vomit. She zoned out in Ubers home at two am while hyper-focus deep philosophising on Kendrick Lamar lyrics in the notes app.

A gunge gurl remembers being cat called in her human disguise at 19: tanned, shaved and glossed for the male gaze – fake eyelashes, heat curled hair and a straightened self in a skimpy purple dress. He called her a bitch for not responding to his whistle. At first she smirked, I mean the disguise had worked successfully, the disgust was processed much later, thanks to alexithymia.

The other time she was freshly 15 and looked even more like a child. A group of 40+-year-old men in a car asked her and a friend to ‘Get in, surely, it’ll be a gas.’

A gunge gurl watched Heartbreak High in 2022 after first thinking she might – just maybe, but like I don’t know, surely not, but ah what the hell, let’s indulge this wack reality I – could be autistic. She saw Chloé Hayden as Quinni and got a mysterious pang, oh fuck that’s a bit of me isn’t it . . . oh no. She had seen herself represented on TV, and for once, it wasn’t in a comic relief dumb blonde or a manic pixie dream-or-weird girl love interest, it was authentic.

It gave her a similar stomach ache to when she watched CAROL at 14 in secret under covers with eyes darting left to right and right to left and had to turn it off after the sex scene, in fear that a parasitic gayness had been awoken to eat her comp-het-ness alive, in reality it was always there looming in the gunge swamp of the gut. She remembers watching America’s Next Top Model with her brother and especially the first trans model and that time when another model said she was queer. She didn’t know what it meant to be queer or trans, but she was happy that in and amongst all the awful race-fishing and body-shaming that they were there, showing her it was okay to be different.

A gunge gurl did unknowingly have a queer platonic relationship with her high school best friend. In hindsight the constant fighting when they both had stupid boyfriends makes perfect sense.

When she was 13, a gunge gurl listened while the anime side fringe shark-bag boy of her dreams told her, step by step, how to kill herself. A couple weeks later she would help him ask out his soon to be new girlfriend, ‘No it’s so cool, I love helping out’ and a week after that he would reward her by stroking her face and tucking her frizzed hair behind her ear and saying ‘Wow your hair is so soft, I’d kiss you if I didn’t have a girlfriend’ . . .

Years later, she would see the shark-bag boy again at a New Year’s party. They reminisced, chuckling about it all, he was all ‘so sorry about the suicide thing . . .  I really did like you too, yknow.’ She just thought it was a funny reunion moment, so random . . . but then he proceeded to hit on her and ask her to come sleep in his bed ‘tonight, surely if you don’t have a place to stay?’ She doesn’t remember what he said to her. ‘Uh no I should get home, somehow’ but the trigger response alarm rang with a similar piercing shrill: ‘Are you sure – It’ll be a gas’.

A gunge gurl is misunderstood not just by others, but by herself.

Don’t be mistaken, Gunge Gurl is not Cool Girl, where Cool Girl is fun, Gunge Gurl is described as a little bit funny. Where Cool Girl is game, Gunge Gurl is trying her very best to process her shame. She is unlearning how to be multiple somethings for a world full of someones. Watch out though she’ll get her slime on you if you get too close.