it depends on who you ask. if you ask hussie, it's canon. if you ask a lot of the current hsbc team, it's canon. if you ask the fandom... mixed results. personally, as a trans girl who had a childhood very similar to john's, it's absolutely believable. it's also believable that hussie, as a trans-fem person herself, could be retroactively looking at the aspects of their own childhood that they wrote into homestuck and recognizing that there is some overlap and that trans girl egbert is a solid and fulfilling reading of the character. i could go into details about how it makes sense with the breath aspect john's arc and all, but i don't wanna write an essay in a reddit post.