I’ve been eagerly awaiting the day someone makes a masterpost of theylor evidence but eventually I got tired of waiting and was too excited about the idea, so I decided to make it myself. I pulled together things I thought of myself and also culled information from past posts and comments that discussed it. I’m interested in hearing what evidence people think should be added to this collection. I tried to credit things that I found from other posts, but please let me know if I missed something and I’ll credit.
So first, what is theylor? Theylor is the theory that Taylor is gender expansive. Just like gaylor doesn’t necessarily prescribe what brand of queer taylor is, theylor doesn’t necessarily prescribe a specific gender identity. There are many possibilities including nonbinary, genderfluid, genderqueer, transmasc, bigender, etc. Although I don’t argue for any specific label – because we don’t know – I do discuss quite a bit the idea of a masc or male side versus a femme or female side, because I think a lot of evidence suggests that.
A note on pronouns: I spent a while trying to decide if I should use they/them pronouns. It felt appropriate given that this is a theylor post, and as a nonbinary person myself who uses they/them pronouns, I kind of wanted to. But not all gender expansive people use they/them pronouns, and as I stated above, there are many categories and labels that she could fall under. Moreover, “theylor” isn’t the theory that she specifically uses they/them pronouns – it’s the theory that she’s gender expansive, and that could include a variety of possibilities regarding pronouns. For instance, genderfluid and bigender people often switch back and forth between he/him and she/her or use both; some might additionally use they/them and some might not. Ultimately I took my cues from Taylor Nation who uses she/her pronouns for Taylor. As far as we know those are her stated pronouns and I chose to respect that.
Another important note: I want to say from the start that I fully recognize that some of this evidence can also be read as masc lesbian/wlw. That’s completely valid. But there are certain things that can’t fit so easily into that category. So I hope that skeptics will consider this with the same view that gaylors take with gaylor evidence: that certain things in isolation perhaps can be explained away, but the collective mountain of evidence is much harder to ignore.
Here we go.
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Midnight Rain
On Midnight Rain Taylor synthed her voice so it sounds like it’s male, which alternates with her regular voice. This male voice is still singing from her POV, because they repeat the exact same chorus lyrics, so it doesn’t seem as if it’s intended to be an imitation of a duet involving two different people. Instead it sounds like the masc and femme sides of her are both chiming in.
The lyrics themselves can also be interpreted as theylor-coded.
He wanted a bride / I was making my own name / Chasing that fame
The hidden male side of her wanted to unite with the rest of her so she could be her authentic self, but she desired fame and to achieve all these dreams – and knew that to do so she’d have to hide away that male or genderqueer part of herself.
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Using men as mirror images of herself in music videos: Style, Willow, and Fortnight
Style mv
There could be an entire theylor post devoted to the Style mv alone because it’s so loud. It has some of the most explicit and extensive theylor evidence of any mv she’s ever made.
Both Taylor and the male lead hold up mirrored shards to their face, and the other person is reflected back. For example, the man holds up a shard to his mouth and Taylor’s mouth appears instead. This suggests that they are two sides of the same person.
There are also several instances where her image gets cracked and fractured. In most of these she’s alone; in the one scene where the man can be seen as well, they’re not interacting and they look like they’re in two separate places. The cracking of the surface of these images indicates that when they’re separated, her true self is fractured, broken, and incomplete.
screenshots from Style: holding up mirrors and cracked images
Images of the man are superimposed on her face, hands, and body; and images of Taylor are superimposed on him as well. There’s a particularly interesting scene where we first see her face, and then she raises her hands so they cover her face, and the man’s face appears superimposed on her hands, echoing the mirror shard images.
In a similar vein, there are a couple different scenes where the man is looking out at the ocean from within her silhouetted body and head. In conjunction with the other scenes, this suggests the man lives within her.
One of the most explicit scenes is when the man is driving a car, and he looks in the rearview mirror and we see that it’s actually Taylor driving.
screenshots from Style: superimposed images and Taylothe man driving
Lastly, the actor playing the male, Dominic Sherwood, has heterochromia, which is when someone is born with two different eye colors. I think he was chosen for this role deliberately, and that the two eye colors might represent two different sides of her gender identity. This is supported by another scene where his eyes are superimposed on her outstretched arms, one on each side.
screenshots from Style: heterochromia
All these examples suggest that she and the man are the same person – male and female in the same body.
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Willow mv
Willow contains a series of scenes where a man mirrors her in different ways.
First, Taylor looks into the water and sees a man reflected back where her own reflection should be. This is one of the clearest pieces of visual evidence in support of theylor, similar to the rearview mirror example in Style.
Willow mv: looking in the water and a man is her reflection
She plays with the child-male version of herself and then he disappears and she’s sad and confused. There’s a great deal of evidence suggested in the following sections of references to her losing or being separated from her male side.
Willow screenshots: playing with the boy and then he disappears
There are multiple scenes where they hold their hands up to each other like they are mirror images, and then at the end they clasp hands and walk out together into the daylight.
Willow screenshots: holding her hand up to the man's and then they walk out together
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Fortnight mv
The theory that Taylor and Post Malone are the same person was brilliantly covered by u/18hundreds in this post; she has his tattoos, they wear the same clothes, etc. However I disagree with that post’s conclusion that male figure represents the public Taylor, the clean version that she presents to the world. Rather, I think that Post Malone represents the male or masc side she’s hiding.
One of the most important scenes is when Taylor is given pills from a bottle labeled “FORGET HIM” and the bottle shows dates covering her whole life, from her birth to the date that the music video was published. Since it starts from birth, this certainly can’t represent forgetting a dude she dated. However I think it also can’t represent the public Taylor because there was no public Taylor the day she was born, nor was there for several years after that. However, if she sensed that she was born with a masc side or a male inside of her, and she was socialized to be and act like a girl, and instinctively understood that she had to hide that queer male part of herself, then the dates make more sense.
Additionally, the two streams of lesbian-flag and gay-flag colored light that float out of the two typewriters and become an explosion of white when they meet may represent both the masc and femme sides of her that are equally contributing to her work. When they are united, when she is whole, is when she is strongest.
Fortnight screenshots: Forget him pills and the streams of light
Lastly, there’s a callback to the Style mv, where the sheets of paper are shaped like her silhouette and she and the masc version of herself are lying in the middle. This mirrors the Style scene where the man appears inside of her head.
Fortnight and Style screenshots that echo each other
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Me! music video
Right at the line “and there’s a lot of lame guys out there” there are several different men falling from the sky. Among them is Taylor. Credit for this is u/Front-Inevitable7767 here.
Taylor falling in Me!
The suit and hairstyle in one of the scenes is also extremely masculine:
Me! screenshot: taylor in a suit
Even more interestingly, she alternates masc and femme outfits in the mv, starting with ultra femme in the white skirt, then the masc yellow suit, then the femme pink dress, then the suit and shorts cowboy boots combination, and ending with the femme paint dress:
Alternating masc and femme outfits in Me!
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You Need to Calm Down music video
One of the first scenes is of a framed painting with the quote, “Mom, I am a rich man.” Though this is a Cher quote, it’s also extremely theylor-coded.
YNTCD screenshot: Mom I'm a rich man
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Mean music video
In the Mean mv, Joey King is wearing a dress with a blue bow and isn’t accepted by all the other girls wearing pink bows. This might symbolize the masc side of Taylor not being accepted by society or in the music industry. There are many other ways that Taylor could have visualized a girl not fitting in with other girls. But she specifically distinguished them using only colors that are widely considered representation for the two binary genders.
Joey King in Mean and the blue and pink bows
In the mv for I Can See You, in the hall where Taylor’s old outfits are locked in glass closets, the young girl’s dress with the blue bow appears again:
Same dress in ICSY
This suggests that her masc side is closeted along with her gay side.
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The Man
Both the song and mv. An entire work about if she was a man. Performed in full drag.
The use of ‘was’ versus ‘were’ in “if I was a man” is interesting. I’m not certain how much stock to put in this one because of the scene in Miss Americana where she’s writing this line and she goes back and forth between them, seemingly based solely on how they sound. But they have two different usages in proper English grammar.
Sourcing from the grammar.com page on this, “if I was” is used when it’s a situation that could have happened. “If I were” is used for a situation that could never happen, an imaginary scenario, something that couldn’t ever be true.
If you consider her to be cis, then she’s using the wrong one. In that case it should have been “if I were a man” because it’s an imaginary and hypothetical situation. But she used “if I was a man,” indicating a situation that could have happened.
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Taylor Nation called her “The Man”
TN calls her \"The Man\"
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Delicate
Although I’m trying to keep this whole post muse-free because muses aren’t all that relevant to theylor, I wanted to include this comparison between the Delicate scene where Taylor gets on the train to Dianna’s performance on The Killer’s mv for “Just Another Girl,” because I suspect this is being referenced based on the similarities. And most relevant to theylor: Dianna is in drag.
Taylor in Delicate and Dianna in drag in Just Another Girl
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I Bet You Think About Me
There was a great analysis by u/Sea_Dress_8957 that the groom in the mv represents Taylor and her masc side, and that in the song she’s talking to herself. I won’t rehash the evidence that’s already listed in that post, but one thing to add is in the mv’s opening scene with all the men lined up at the urinals, one of them is wearing a skirt, certainly implying gender nonconformity and possibly genderqueerness too.
This comment by u/SubwayGirlsInTheMan in that post also points out that the groom and The Man are wearing the same shoes, further connecting these two mvs, in addition to the halos around the groom’s head and the Man’s head.
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Ready For It? and the two Taylors
In RFI, the two Taylors hold up their hands to each other, echoing the scenes in Willow with the man:
RFI screenshot that was echoed in Willow scenes
The two Taylors, which appear in more videos than just RFI, have been discussed a lot. They are usually taken to represent the public Taylor versus the private Taylor. But from a theylor perspective they can also symbolize the masc and femme sides of her, and her struggle to reconcile and unite the two. If Willow is visualizing that with the way their hands are held up to each other on either side of glass, then the fact that the two Taylors did the exact same motion in RFI is interesting.
The two Taylors also reminds me of the very gay, very masc outfit she wore as she exited the stadium after the Eras tour in Vegas. The vibe of the outfit is a stark contrast to the costumes in the tour and some of the outfits she wears on pap walks, and I always think of it when considering theylor.
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The Joker and the Queen King
The lyric video for Ed Sheeran’s “The Joker and the Queen” shows Taylor wearing the king’s crown.
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Fearless TV cover
On the OG Fearless cover, Taylor’s wearing a white dress and looking to her right. But on the TV version, she’s wearing a shirt that looks very similar to Romeo’s shirt in Love Story, and she’s also looking in the opposite direction, to her left. By doing this she’s rewriting the Fearless narrative to position herself as a man, Romeo, and creating a visual distinction from the very femme OG cover.
Fearless TV cover and Romeo
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King
Phoebe Bridgers called Taylor “king” in an interview, then did it again on an Instagram story. Gracie Abrams also called her “king.” Note that Taylor also called Lana “king” which might take away from this theory but there’s a lot of masc words being tossed around nonetheless.
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“A Girl Named Girl”
As a 14 year old, Taylor wrote a novel called “A Girl Named Girl” about a mother who wanted a son but got a daughter instead. Seemingly a whole book about gender and disappointing a parent.
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US census comments
In 2020, Taylor made comments on a video where she was angry that the US census only had male and female options, saying how upsetting “the erasure of trans and nonbinary people” was to her. Video can be found at the 11:28 timestamp.
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The male perspective
She writes and sings from the male perspective in a lot of songs, including betty, dorothea, Mine, Our song, Love Story, and Speak Now.
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jaMEs
She wrote herself as James in betty (which gaylors were already confident about) and then she went and confirmed it during the TTPD clue hunt in lyrics by capitalizing ME in “jaMEs” when there were other M’s in the preceding words that she could have used instead.
jaMEs
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Named after a man
She was named after James Taylor and likes to talk about that.
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She’s the Heartbreak Prince
She’s the Heartbreak Prince. The lyric goes, “It’s you and me…Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince.” In English, the order of the pronouns in the first clause reference the respective order of their subjects. So the ‘you’ is Miss Americana and the 'me” is the Heartbreak Prince.
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Mandolin
She wrote an unreleased song around the age of 13 called “Mandolin,” about a guy who plays the mandolin. It was written almost entirely in third person using he/him pronouns. But in the outro of the song she reveals she’s the man when she says “I’m the guy who plays the mandolin.”
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Congressman in Anti-Hero
She’s a congressman, not a congresswoman.
Did you hear my covert narcissism / I disguised as altruism, like some kind of congressMAN.
The line actually would have been more balanced if she had used congresswoman because then it would have had the same number of syllables as both “narcissism” and “altruism” but she chose to use congressman instead.
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Willow
There could also be a whole post analyzing Willow lyrics through a theylor lens.
The more that you say / The less I know / Wherever you stray I follow / I'm begging for you to take my hand / Wreck my plans / That's my man
The more her male side presents himself – the stronger he grows inside her head – the more confused she is about her identity. But she follows him anyway because that’s the way her authentic self lies. She wants him to take her over, to embrace her queer self, and thus wreck all the plans she had for her career which require her to closet. That’s my man, she says. She says it exactly 13 times in the song.
The original voice memo of willow is very close to the final version, however there’s an interesting change. The very last phrase in the song replaces “that’s my man” with “that’s my myth.” This is at 3:33 in the linked video.
The definition of myth from wikipedia: “Myth is a genre of folklore or theology consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths.”
Her man is part of her origin story.
Now this is an open-shut case / Guess I should've known from the look on your face / Every bait and switch was a work of art
Now that her identity is clear to her, she realizes in retrospect that she should have seen it all along. She was an egg and now she’s cracked. Every time her man surfaced to lure her in, ultimately made her who she is.
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Dear Reader
So I wander through these nights / I prefer hiding in plain sight / My fourth drink in my hand / these desperate prayers of a cursed man
One of the clearest instances of her referring to herself as a man. And the statement is all the more stark and meaningful by existing in the same line as her telling us she hides in plain sight. Probably the most honest line in her entire oeuvre and she calls herself a man in it.
On the first night in Tokyo at the Eras tour, Dear Reader was one of the surprise songs. And in this performance she changed the lyric in this line to “these restless tears of a cursed man.” Both gaylor- and theylor-coded. Tears because she can’t be her true self. The restless man wandering in the closet.
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Cowboy Like Me
Calling herself a cowboy. I think this one is obvious.
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Teardrops On My Guitar
And there he goes, so perfectly, the kind of flawless I wish I could be
Interesting that it’s the guy in the song that she wishes she could be like.
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Tim McGraw
“When you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think of me” is theylor-coded to begin with. When you think of a man, I hope you think about me.
But her original lyrics had a slightly different version of this line that makes the theylor of it all go even harder: “When you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think me” (instead of “hope you think OF me”). This seems to take it to the next level: in the final version Tim McGraw reminds the muse of her, but in the original, she’s actually standing in for him.
“Tim McGraw” was also interpolated into “cowboy like me”, thus connecting the songs.
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The Story of Us
“The Story of Us” was referenced in the TTPD installation as a notebook with a huge “US” lettered on it. It turns out it was an easter egg (lol obv) because the same notebook appeared in the Fortnight mv. The original song may or may not have intended theylor clues, but in retrospect the lyrics seem quite coded, especially in light of the appearance in the Fortnight mv, which I theorized above was about two versions of herself, the male and the female.
And the story of us looks a lot like a tragedy now / And we're not speaking and I'm dying to know / Is it killing you like it's killing me?
The story of “us” is her male side having to be hidden away and closeted; that’s her tragedy. They’re “not speaking” because she has to live separately from that part of herself.
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Cardigan
Tried to change the ending / Peter losing Wendy, I / I knew you
I think she’s both Peter and Wendy in this line, representing the two sides. Peter is alone in the closet while Wendy, her femme side, is exposed to the world. Peter is left behind because she can’t be her complete self.
This also fits perfectly with the song Peter.
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Peter
“Peter” seems to be a callback to the Cardigan reference. The whole song can be read through a theylor lens.
Forgive me, Peter /My lost fearless leader / In closets like cedar / Preserved from when we were just kids … Said you were gonna grow up / Then you were gonna come find me
Peter is her male side that she had to hide away in a closet, specifically a cedar closet. Ceder closets are used to preserve clothes, because the smell that cedar wood gives off repels the bugs that eat holes in clothing. She’s had to keep that side of herself in the cedar closet so he’s preserved for later when they’re at the point that they can be united.
The “fearless leader” phrase is also a callback to The Man, “I’d be a fearless leader,” which deepens the theylor connection.
There’ve also been some other analyses of Peter through a trans lens.
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But Daddy I Love Him
BDILH has major theylor undertones. The entire song can be interpreted as a metaphor for wanting to others to accept a gender identity that’s different from the one they think you should have.
The bridge is particularly coded:
God save the most judgmental creeps / Who say they want what's best for me / Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I'll never see / Thinking it can change the beat / Of my heart when he touches me / And counteract the chemistry / And undo the destiny / You ain't gotta pray for me / Me and my wild boy
This could refer to the desire to embrace her male side, her wild boy. That the idea of uniting with him and being her authentic self – her destiny – is what makes her heart beat. Them being together is, for her, the ultimate chemistry.
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Down Bad
Similar to BDILH, Down Bad also is very theylor. Some select lines:
"What if I can't have him" / "I might just die, it would make no difference" / Down bad / waking up in blood / Staring at the sky, come back and pick me up / What if I can't have us
She feels like she might die if she can’t be with her male side.
They'll say I'm nuts if I talk about the existence of you
This line is particularly loud to me. What romantic interest (gay or straight) is so ridiculous that people say she’s nuts for talking about that person’s very existence? It makes far more sense that she’d think people think her nuts if she talks about a male or masc person who lives within her. Her twin.
Like I lost my twin / What if I can't have him
Similar to the above line, it’s a little odd to refer to a romantic interest as your twin. Not impossible, given she’s likely dated three blonde women who all vaguely look like her, but combined with the other lines, I think this is theylor-coded. What if she can never be united with the male twin within her.
There might also be a twin connection in “The Albatross”, because male and female albatrosses are essentially identical. Credit for this is u/1DMod here.
I'll build you a fort on some planet / Where they can all understand it
Obviously queer-coded in general, but I’d argue that being gender expansive today is less accepted than having a queer sexual orientation. There’s undoubtedly a significant number of homophobes who don’t like gay people, but there are massive quantities of people who flat out deny the existence altogether of trans and gender expansive people. So the idea of escaping to another planet where our identities are understood and accepted and normalized is very theylor-coded.
She also alternates saying “Fuck it if I can’t have us” and “Fuck it if I can’t have him” throughout the whole song. And she says “if I can’t have him” 13 times throughout the song, similar to the way she says “That’s my man” 13 times in Willow.
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Guilty as Sin
Another song I could do a whole theylor analysis on.
This cage was once just fine / Am I allowed to cry? / I dream of cracking locks / Throwing my life to the wolves / Or the ocean rocks / Crashing into him tonight / He's a paradox / I'm seeing visions, am I bad? / Or mad? Or wise?
The cage is her male side being closeted and the pain that entails. She dreams of breaking the lock on the cage and letting him out so they can be united, which would mean, she fears, tossing out everything she’s worked for.
It’s easy to see how having both a male and female side could be construed as a paradox. Wondering if she’s crazy, if she’s bad, or just wise are emotions that are common to people trying to figure out their gender identity.
Without ever touching his skin / How can I be guilty as sin?
He’s not a person who she can touch. He’s a person who lives within her. Struggling with religious guilt around this makes a lot of sense.
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I Hate It Here
Tell me something awful / Like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy
This is both trans-coded and theylor-coded, the idea of being trapped in a body you don’t identify with, or feeling different on the inside than you present on the outside.
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Orlando by Virginia Woolf
In this novel, the main character, Orlando, transitions genders. This amazing post by u/AliceStanleyJr discusses some of the Taylor connections. In the novel, Orlando wrote a book called “The Oak Tree”; Taylor once compared her skin to oak tree bark, and she also performs Champagne Problems under an oak tree. Additionally, a comment by u/onemore_folkmore on that post pointed out that one of the Taymojis for “Tim McGraw'' is an acorn and underneath it says “Acorns don’t grow on acorn trees, they grow on oak trees.”
Some of the taymoji's for Tim McGraw, including an acorn
There are other Virginia Woolf connections, like this post by u/PomegranateNo3155 which links a short story to the carnations line in Maroon.
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thanK you aIMee
I’m not sure who the first person to discover this was because I think I saw it on one of the megathreads, but u/-periwinkle reminded me that when you googled “thank you aimee” when the song first came out, the top result was a memorial page for the trans activist Aimee Stephens.
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A Place in This World
A song about feeling alone, feeling different from others, and trying to figure out who she is. It’s sad the way she repeats “Oh, I’m just a girl,” over and over, like she’s forlorn to think of herself as just a girl.
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Endgame
Big reputation, big reputation / Ooh, you and me, we'd be a big conversation, ah
If she came out as gender expansive, it’d be a HUGE conversation.
I wanna be your endgame / I wanna be your first string / I wanna be your A-Team
This could be read as the endgame to unite with her male side and finally be complete.
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I Did Something Bad
There was a great post from an anon who did a transmasc analysis of IDSB and interpreted “They're burning all the witches even if you aren't one” as Taylor saying she’s not a witch, and thus not a woman, since she often uses witches as a metaphor for femininity. There’s a lot of other analysis so the whole post is worth reading.
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I Think He Knows
I think he knows his hands around / A cold glass / Make me wanna know that body / Like it's mine
This could be interpreted as she wants to pretend she has a male body. It has similarities to the Teardrops On My Guitar line above.
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Cosmo quiz
In the 2014 Cosmo quiz, she said, “If I were a boy for a day the first thing I’d do is be the best boyfriend EVER.” Definitely gaylor-coded but there are theylor overtones as well and is consistent with other evidence of her expressing jealousy towards men.
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Acting Like a Boy
This is the name of an unreleased song that Taylor apparently wrote for Fearless.
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Other Theylor posts
I wanted to close with links to some past theylor-related posts from this sub. If there are other good ones I missed, please let me know and I’ll add them.

• Taylor and Envy by u/Dammit-Hannah
• Taylor Swift as The "Man" by u/CakiestBitch420
• Lightning strikes every time she moves: Taylor's public vs. private personas & electricity in the Fortnight music video by u/liminaldyke
• Forgive Me, Peter: Theylor in TTPD by u/afterandalasia

What do you think? She is so cute and looks like a so sexy vampire... I think she would be the best cast, overall.

It’s kinda funny that almost all characters I know from here turned out to be overweight (me too, me too) But knowing that Sookie got herself a loving chef boyfriend is giving me hope ahah

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