I was raised as a boy. The first time I figured out something was wrong with that was when I was 5.
It was after a time I’d been out with my parents at the mall. During that trip, my father and I went into the public restroom together, but he stood at a urinal and I sat on a toilet in a stall, the only way I’d been taught. By that point I’d picked up that urinals were for peeing, but I didn’t understand how he could do it neatly. When I peed while sitting on the toilet, it splashed all over and I needed to wipe up. That evening, when I asked to be excused from dinner to go pee, he asked me if I’d ever learned to pee standing, and he offered to show me.
He peed first, and I saw his penis, a tubular organ that extended out from his body. Pee came out of the end of it. That was obviously the thing I was missing. I stepped completely out of my pants and underwear, not believing for a moment that I could do this without getting them all wet, and stood there and tried to do what he had done. My pee just came out from a little hole between two flaps of skin, which I tried to hold apart in a bad imitation of what I had just saw him do. It was closer to what he did than I had imagined I could do, getting most of the pee in the toilet, but I still got some on myself and on the floor.
He ignored the difference in our bodies, wiped the pee off the floor with some toilet paper, handed me more paper to wipe myself, and said, “Your penis is a lot smaller, but it will get as big as mine when you grow up. Just keep practicing that and you’ll learn to do it perfectly.”
I wasn’t sure whether to believe that. What I had didn’t look like a smaller version of what he had, but something entirely different. I don’t think I understood negative numbers yet at that age, but if I did, I would have said my penis was of negative length.
Nevertheless, I practiced. I tried different techniques. Rather than just hold myself open with two fingers, I found I got the best control by grabbing the widest part of the flaps that covered up my pee hole between my index fingers and thumbs. Using that technique, I figured out how to keep the stream from splashing on me from the first drop to the last, how to keep it going the farthest distance out from my body, and how to shake off the last drop. This eventually allowed me to pee at urinals through the fly in my pants and underwear without getting myself or my clothes wet.
When I was 7 and had mastered that technique, I had still seen no indication that I was growing a penis, but I overheard some boys talking about a girl’s private parts. One of them had seen the real thing, and was trying to describe it in as much detail as possible to the others. It sounded a lot like what I had. It was hard to find pictures, but I eventually found anatomical drawings labeling the parts, and confirmed I had every part listed in the female diagram visible from the outside, and lacked everything that was unique to the male diagram. So why did my parents think I was a boy? I was clearly a girl.
When I was 8, I talked to my parents about it. It didn’t go the way I hoped. Even when I pulled down my pants in front of them both to show them I had a girl’s parts, they didn’t see it. Instead, they thought I was transgender. Mom ended up having a long talk with me about what that meant, and they both tried to reassure me that being trans was OK. It wasn’t what I wanted, but some of the results were helpful. Mom bought me some girls’ clothes, and also helped me come up with Kelly as a girl form of my given name Kelvin.
All my friends accepted my request to be called Kelly and called me by it, but they seemed to ignore the part where I told them I was a girl. They ignored it when I wore skirts and dresses, too. I worried they were going to taunt me about being a sissy, as I had seen some other boys teased just because they were small, but they didn’t. The boys and girls both simply ignored any attempt I made at being recognized as a girl.
When I was dressed in girls’ clothes, I tried to use a women’s public restroom, and I was told by other women and girls that I couldn’t be in there because I was a boy. They completely ignored that I was wearing a skirt. That first time didn’t stop me, and I sometimes managed to use the women’s room when I got into a stall while there was nobody else there to tell me I couldn’t, but repeated rejections led to me no longer trying to use the women’s room and just using the men’s room. The men didn’t care, even when they saw me go in wearing a dress or other obviously feminine clothes and sit in a stall. They neither told me I couldn’t be there nor made any other remarks suggesting they saw me as a girl.
So as I got older, I stopped trying to be recognized as a girl at all. As I grew and needed more clothes, I just had my parents buy me boy clothes, and they seemed to forget the whole transgender thing as a “phase” I had gone through, though everyone still called me Kelly. After I figured out Kelly could be a boy’s name, too, I privately cursed that fact and wondered how it would have gone if I had decided I wanted to be called Melissa or something. Would that have made them recognize me as a girl? But I stuck with being a boy named Kelly.
After I got the birds and bees talk mainly from Dad, Mom took me aside and started giving me the talk about what happens to girls. She explained how to use tampons and pads and why. I thought for a moment she had figured out I was really a girl, and had been pretending not to know, for some reason. But then she told me, “If you really want to pass as a girl, once you get into middle school, always carry a tampon or pad in your purse.”
So she still didn’t think I was really a girl, but simply remembered when I was, in her view, transgender. She was simply giving me tips to pass better as a girl if I decided to do that again, because it was more complicated after these changes boys and girls were going through. And she was also making sure I would know things that a real girl of this age would know. None of that actually helped my situation, since the other kids didn’t even recognize me as a girl when I was trying to make it obvious.
Mom didn’t understand that I really did need to know about tampons and pads starting a year or so after that talk, nor did she ever explicitly give me any, but I took them from the obvious supply in the bathroom when I needed them. That part of what she described about girls happened to me exactly as she said. She never talked to me about the subject again after that one time, neither to reinforce the lesson nor to ask why her supply ran down each month twice as much as it used to. I wasn’t dressing as a girl at school at this point, but I carried tampons in my school bag, and changed them when needed in a stall in the boys’ room at school.
One thing that didn’t happen was breasts. I thought surely that as I proceeded through middle school I would start growing breasts as other girls were doing, and it would become more obvious that I was a girl. I had made up my mind that when my body unmistakably had a woman’s shape, that I would start wearing female clothing again, partly out of necessity, and believed people would have to recognize me as a girl then. But that didn’t happen. I guess there was a little growth there, but no more than the fat some boys develop in the chest. I saw boys in the locker rooms after gym class who had more there than I did.
What changed was down below. The boys now had larger penises, while I just had a tuft of hair hiding my mostly flat parts. In addition to that, I had some growth in my hips. My legs had become farther apart, and the lack of anything dangling between them should have been even more obvious when changing in the locker room. But not once did any of those boys comment on my appearance there, the way they sometimes teased other boys who developed more slowly, or who they were just bullying.
As this happened, boys jeans started fitting me less and less well. They had extra space in front for the dick and balls I didn’t have, and less in the hips where I needed it more. They weren’t stretchable enough to allow the extra in front to really make up for the extra I needed in the hips. Once I was having to buy jeans a waist size larger than my waist really was and cinch them down with a belt, one time I had the idea to try on a pair of girls’ jeans in a store and I found they fit much better.
After I explained to Mom that girls’ jeans fit me better, she explained to me the different varieties of sizes in adult women’s clothes, which were also an option for me at my size. This was the first I realized how complicated women’s clothing sizes were, but I came to understand it was mainly because women have more variety in shapes. Some women have hips much bigger than their waists, and some only a little bigger. So I had many more sizes to consider trying on than I had realized, and in the end, it allowed me to find clothes that fit me even better.
After that point, every pair of shorts or jeans I got came from the girls’ or women’s aisle, though I went through both different sizes and different size categories as I developed. But I didn’t buy girly-looking jeans with appliques or stuff like that, just plain ones in the shape I needed.
At first, I was still wearing boys’ briefs under them. I didn’t want to switch to panties because I liked having the fly so I could use urinals. As soon as I had gone back to boys’ clothes after that period of dressing as a girl, I had gone back to peeing that way. It had ceased to be a challenge for me, and was instead a convenience to be able to pee without pulling my pants and underwear down and sit and have to wipe up afterward.
It wasn’t until I was 14 that I discovered what one brand called men’s fashion briefs. Other brands had similar styles under other names. They were made of fabric more like panties, were thinner, and had more stretch to them. Unlike boys’ jeans, this stretchy fabric allowed the extra fabric in front to pull around to my hips and make them fit almost the same as styles of panties that covered the hips. And they had the convenience a fly.
At age 15, not seeing any breast development in sight, I decided to try wearing girls’ clothes again anyway. I was already wearing the jeans. Mom helped me with what were now really young women’s clothes, and other things. I got my first bra, an A cup. Mom showed me how to apply some basic makeup as well. And I decided I would let my hair grow out. I didn’t do much with it, but kept it at shoulder length. But my parents again just thought I was showing my transgender tendency.
With these clothes and lessons, I started once again going to school some days in full girls’ clothing and carrying a purse. The kids at school didn’t notice. I neither got teased for being a sissy boy nor treated as a girl. The girls told me I wasn’t welcome in their restroom. The boys never protested my presence, nor did they hit on me like boys sometimes did with other girls. So I continued wearing the fashion briefs under any clothes that would let me pee at urinals, including some skirts. I had panties to wear with anything else.
Not even in the boys’ locker room for gym class did any boy say anything when I was putting a dress into my locker or putting it on afterward. And yet, it wasn’t like I wasn’t there at all. They sometimes talked to me about things that had happened in class that day. There were even some guys who talked to me about how some other girl was hot as if they thought I’d be interested in her. But I wasn’t teased the way other boys were, nor did any of them come on to me. I was just one of the boys, as far as any of them were concerned.
Other girls were getting asked out on dates, but not me. I even, while wearing dresses, asked a couple guys out on dates. They all politely declined, just saying things like they “didn’t go that way.” After less than a year of this, I again gave up on the idea and just wore boys’ clothes, except girls’ jeans.
The comments from some boys about how certain girls were hot got me thinking. Why not? Eventually I got up the nerve to try asking a girl out on a date. I knew that was going to get weird if we ever got to the point of having sex, but at least I could have something, right? The first couple girls I asked told me they were steady with some other guy, and there were loads I knew I had no chance with, but Lisa, the third girl I asked, accepted.
So I got my first date outfit. A boy’s date outfit: a sport coat and matching slacks, a button-up shirt, and a tie. Fortunately, the slacks were loose enough that they didn’t cause a problem with my hips. The top was no issue, naturally, since I still barely had enough to fill my A-cup bras. There was no chance I needed a B.
The date went well, I guess. We had dinner and saw a movie and we kissed. And we made plans for a second date. I had to ask the question.
“Lisa, do you want to see me dressed like I was this time, or would you rather see me in a dress?”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing you in a dress sometime if that’s something you like, but I don’t want our date to get weird. Just dress normally.”
This was yet more confirmation about how the kids at school simply didn’t see it when I was wearing female clothing. I was worried Lisa wouldn’t even notice when I wore a dress to one of our dates. But per her request, I was still dressed as a boy for our second date. At least she told me I could wear a dress around her sometime. The second date went OK as well, and I got as far as touching her boobs, but she didn’t want me touching below the waist and didn’t try me there.
As we were finishing the date, after a pretty good kiss, I asked her, “Can we do this again next weekend?”
“No, Kelly, I’m acting in the school play next weekend. There are two performances, Friday and Saturday evening, so both nights are out.”
“Could we do something in the afternoon?”
“I have a soccer game Saturday, but Sunday is possible. Except I told the other girls I would go shopping with them in the morning and early afternoon.”
“Oh. Could I come shopping with you? I could wear a dress.”
“I guess that would be OK. The other girls have asked their boyfriends to come on these trips but none of them have come. You would be the first. And I guess it’s fine if you wear a dress then. You’d look like you fit in.”
“OK, girlfriend. I’ll be there,” I replied, emphasizing the word because of how she implied I was her boyfriend now. We’d had two dates. Was that enough?
So after breakfast the following Sunday morning I put on my best dress after a few months of not wearing girls’ clothes. I should point out it was simply the best dress I owned; I hadn’t gone all out on dresses, and only owned about a week’s worth of female clothes that fit me now. This was simply the best of three dresses among them, and the one I’d pick to go on a date if they were my only choices. I was going to be with my girlfriend, but also with some other girls. Did that count as a date? I treated it as such, and Mom seemed to as well, reminding me about how to apply makeup and touching up a couple blemishes on my face, and even styling my hair a little into a more feminine style. At 10, Mom dropped me off at Lisa’s house.
Lisa saw me and exclaimed, “Oh, Kelly, that dress looks really nice on you! Some people might not even realize you’re a guy! I’m not sure what I expected, but I didn’t expect you to look this good.”
That was totally not the reaction I had hoped for from her, but at least she did recognize that I had worn a dress, and she seemed to think I looked nice in it. Two out of three, I suppose, when the usual I got was zero out of three.
We didn’t have to wait long for the other girls to show up, which turned out to be just two other girls, Sabrina and Kayla, who arrived together since they lived next door to each other.
It was Sabrina who commented first, “Wow, nice dress, Kelly. I didn’t believe Lisa when she told me you were going to be wearing a dress on the trip with us.”
The same two out of three: She was giving me a compliment, and she actually saw that I was wearing a dress. It was clear that somehow she still thought of me as the male Kelly, though, despite me wearing clothing no ordinary guy would be caught dead in, but it was more than most people could see.
Kayla added, “Yeah. I like that we’re all wearing blue. Nobody planned that, right?”
Everybody denied having coordinated colors for this get-together, but Kayla was right that we were all wearing blue, even though we had four different dresses in different shades of blue.
When Lisa told me we’d be all walking to the mall, I am sure I gave her an awful look. She explained that one end of her street came right up to the mall, and that was why the girls all met here. That end was obviously not the end Mom drove through to bring me here, because I would have noticed. Pretty soon we left Lisa’s house and walked to the mall.
It was actually more of a walk through the mall parking lot than it was from her house to the edge of the mall property. I wished I’d been wearing sneakers, but at least my girl shoes were flats. Mom had advised me to get these shoes, black slip-ons with a strap across the instep that had virtually hidden elastic, if I only got one pair of girl shoes. Black went with anything, and I wasn’t going to have to relearn how to walk.
Sabrina had the highest with three-inch heels, but she was obviously practiced with them and only had difficulty on one irregular patch in the parking lot. And they matched her dress. That was a thing I picked up from Mom’s explanation that girls did with real date outfits. But this had been on short notice, and I hadn’t gone out and bought any new clothes for it.
The actual reason for the walk was probably not to avoid bothering Lisa’s mom to take us there and back, but for gossip. The girls chatted non-stop until we reached the door to the mall, mostly about other girls at the school and who they were dating, and other guys at the school they’d want to date if they could manage to pull them away from their current girlfriends. I felt a bit left out, but I was able to contribute one bit when the discussion became an actual dick-measuring contest.
“Hey Kelly, you have gym with Brad and Randy, right? Have you seen their dicks?”
“Well, I haven’t seen them erect, and I’m not looking at them on purpose, but I think Randy has the biggest dick, limp, out of all the guys in that class.”
And I wanted to add, “And I have the smallest,” but I didn’t say it.
Shopping was as I expected. We went into many stores but bought little, as we were all sophomores in high school with limited budgets. The girls tried on several dresses. Annoyingly, one time while I was waiting for one of them to get dressed, another woman objected to my presence in the women’s dressing room area. Even dressed the way I was, a stranger who hadn’t known me at all thought I was a boy!
“He can’t be here.”
But Sabrina defended me, “Kelly’s with us.”
I did note, though, that she didn’t say “She‘s with us.” Sabrina still thought of me as a boy.
We stopped for lunch at the food court, with our total purchases so far being a blouse for Lisa and a skirt for Sabrina. Then it was back to shopping. A couple stores later, Kayla was modeling a pink dress for us that we had all given her compliments for.
Kayla suggested, “Hey, if I wear this the next time we go shopping, can you all wear pink to match?”
Lisa and Sabrina said they could. But I responded, “Does that mean I’m being invited to another shopping trip with you?”
“Sure,” Kayla replied.
“Why not?” Sabrina said.
“You seem like you’ve enjoyed it, and I enjoyed having you with me, something that these girls’ boyfriends would never do,” Lisa added.
“OK, but I don’t have a pink dress.”
This resulted in the group deciding they needed to find me a suitable dress, so after Kayla paid for hers, the rest of the trip was devoted to that. Now I was the one going into dressing rooms and trying on dresses. Eventually we found one that everybody liked and thought looked good on me. It was when we went to pay for it that I realized my problem.
“Dad gave me forty bucks because he knew I was going shopping with you, and I have another fifteen in here, but this dress costs sixty. I’m going to be a little short. If only I hadn’t bought lunch...”
All three of the girls volunteered to pay what I was short. Ultimately, Lisa paid it, saying, “Kelly’s my boyfriend. I should be the one helping with this.” And Lisa actually gave me twenty, so that I could keep the other fifteen I had. I thanked her for not letting me go home broke.
We all walked back to Lisa’s house, with more gossip, and called for rides home. While we waited, Lisa went into her room and modeled for us the blouse she had bought together with a skirt she already owned that she thought went with it. We’d seen the blouse on her before, but it was with another skirt from the store that she had only tried on so she had something below the waist after taking off her dress. We all agreed it looked better this way than how she had worn it in the store.
I was now committed to going shopping with the group again, wearing the pink dress. Dad gave me money again, but during the second trip, the suggestion was made to wear green the next time we shopped, and I told them I did have a green dress, so I didn’t end up buying a dress. What they did suggest, though, was buying a padded bra. It was designed to make my A-cup breasts look like Bs.
“Your dresses have more space for breasts that you aren’t filling out,” Kayla commented.
“With this you’ll look even more like part of our group,” Sabrina suggested.
Privately, I hoped it would help strangers see me as a girl, but somehow I doubted it would work.
It was a while before we all got together again, with one or another of us traveling or otherwise unavailable, and the girls agreed to wait until we could all be together again before dressing in green. I went out with just Sabrina and Kayla once, all wearing more casual blouses and skirts in mixed colors, and we didn’t buy any clothes.
One good thing came out of that trip; Sabrina let slip that a store that sold sex toys (among other things) that was supposed to be restricted to age 18 and up didn’t actually check IDs. While I didn’t go there with them present, since they’d probably think I was buying something for Lisa and ask her about it later, the next time I was in the mall with Mom, dressed female, after giving an excuse of going to the restroom, I slipped in that store quickly and used the money I didn’t spend while out with Sabrina and Kayla to buy myself a vibrator. It seemed like I was never going to get an actual man, so at least I’d have that. I slipped it into my purse on the way back to Mom and she was none the wiser.
On a weekend that Sabrina was away, I finally had another date with Lisa. I guess my appearance during our shopping trips had made an impression on her, since she’d made a U-turn from “I don’t want our dates to get weird” to “Wear the blue dress you wore on our first shopping trip together.” The date went well, though she still shut me down when I tried getting intimate.
Lisa explained, “My family is sorta strict, religiously. They’re fine with you dressing as a boy or as a girl, but I can’t have sex until after I move out of their house. I can let you touch me down there, but only touching. No putting fingers in me, no excessive rubbing, and no removing my clothes any more than you need to to get a hand in there.”
So she let me touch her. While I had my hand there, I told her, “You’re welcome to do the same. My family has no such issues, though I understand if your religion limits you to touching me no more than I am doing with you.”
“OK, I guess,” she said, and worked one hand under my dress and into my panties.
“It doesn’t feel like I expected it would,” Lisa said with her hand still on my private parts.
“That’s because I’m actually a girl,” I told her.
“No, don’t be silly. This is your penis,” she said while running two fingers down the flat part of my vulva between the vaginal lips, stopping just short of my vagina, “And these are your balls, well, no, part of your ball sack. Your balls are tucked down under your dick,” she added, grasping the stretched-out tab on one side and then on the other, the places I grabbed while holding myself open to use a urinal.
As she pulled her hand out, she said, “They are smaller than I expected. I thought you’d be big and hard by now.”
It wasn’t worth trying to explain to her that I was a bit aroused. That was the only reason two fingers had fit between my vaginal lips without her having to pry them open. Since we weren’t going farther than this, I realized I was never going to convince her. I could have grabbed her hand and plunged her fingers into my vagina, and then maybe she would have been convinced, but that was also going to violate her religious limit, and probably result in us never dating again. So I had to let her continue believing I was a boy.
I halfway considered breaking up with her anyway. Maybe it would be easier to convince someone else I was a girl. I considered candidates. The other girls from our shopping trips were out. Though they talked about other guys and even compared them to their own boyfriends, it seemed that that was only talk and they weren’t actually considering dating other guys. The gossip had explained several other girls were firmly attached to certain guys as well. I got down to a short list of about half a dozen who I actually asked. Some said they wanted someone more manly, and the rest said that they didn’t want to cheat on their current boyfriends. Of course I wasn’t manly enough for them, since I wasn’t even a man, but absolutely nobody was accepting me as a woman, even when I dressed the part.
So I ended up sticking with Lisa through the rest of high school. We had a lot of dates, mostly with me dressed as a boy, but once in a while as a girl. She insisted that I dress as a boy for the school dances; she didn’t want to be seen as a lesbian by the others at school, even though it apparently didn’t violate her family’s religious code. She clearly didn’t realize how the entire rest of the student body, apart from our little clique, never noticed the female clothing I wore to school at least two days a week at this point.
And I went on a number of shopping trips with the three girls. I usually got one new article of clothing each trip. After about a year of these shopping trips once or twice a month, and some extra, more ordinary stuff I’d gotten on trips with Mom, I had enough girls’ clothing to dress as a girl all the time. For most of junior year and all of senior year of high school, I did so. And it was still the same way. My parents and the three girls recognized that I was dressed as a girl. Everybody else continued to ignore it.
Every Friday the girls sat together at lunch, rather than with their boyfriends or other friends, and once I was dressing as a girl, they invited me to join them in these get-togethers. Everybody else just thought I was there because I was Lisa’s boyfriend; that was public knowledge. I somehow managed to get one more girl to recognize that I was wearing girls’ clothing, though she also believed I was trans rather than a natural girl, but that was it, no matter how many people I told or how I tried to tell them. She joined our Friday group when the other girls approved of it and I invited her.
There was one other exception, an incident my senior year when I was out shopping with the girls. I dropped a dollar bill when I was putting my money away as I walked out of a store after buying something. A little boy who must have been about 5 saw it, and came running over, picked up the dollar, and yelled, “Hey lady, you dropped this!”
The boy’s parents followed quickly behind, reaching him just after I accepted the dollar from him. His mother scolded him, but not for running off or for talking to strangers. She said, “Timmy, that’s clearly a guy. You apologize for calling him a lady.”
“No, Mommy, she’s a lady.”
The boy’s father picked him up and said, “We’re sorry for bothering you, sir.” And the family quickly rushed away.
I would have given the little boy the dollar back for his honesty. After all, it was only a dollar. I didn’t have much, but I could afford that. But his parents were embarrassed over the fact that, in their eyes, he had called a guy a lady. The interesting thing was that the boy didn’t just see that I was wearing a dress, but actually identified me as female. I could easily have seen a little kid like that saying there was a guy in a dress, but that’s not what he did. Nobody else in all my 18 years of existence had recognized me as a woman, even at times like this I was trying to make it as plainly obvious as I could, and here some random 5-year-old does it.
The girls I was with all considered me trans at this point, and they didn’t notice what was special about that moment. I did, though, and I wished I could have spoken with the family and somehow found out how he recognized me as female, but they rushed off into the mall quickly, and I would never find them.
As senior year was coming to a close, I found out that Lisa was going off to some Catholic college. Since I was going to our state college, the best that I and my family could afford, we agreed to end our relationship after the senior prom with no hard feelings. I think she was a little disappointed, in part due to not getting the chance to have sex with me, but she would have been disappointed anyway since she was expecting to get my dick into her, a dick that didn’t exist. So it was probably kinder this way, I felt.
I was a little worried about what was going to happen when I went off to college. But I had thought about it in advance. I had an interesting, critical choice. On my application, I could tell them I was a girl or that I was a guy, and trying to fill in that little box was what had me thinking.
If I tell them I’m a girl, but I get there and everybody thinks I’m a guy, then I suppose I get called before some official about it. I would probably have to tell them I’m trans, and my parents could confirm it for me. But I had tried that. No matter how convincingly I look like a girl, everybody is going to think I’m a guy, and most people won’t even recognize it when I am trying to look female. I’m not going to be allowed to use the women’s room, and the result would be simply that a few people know that I’m officially trans in school records, but everybody else thinks I’m just a guy, and I’m forced to live as a guy. On the other hand, if I tell them I’m a girl and everybody can see it, perhaps if this thing that affects me is only in my home town or something, then I get to live as a girl, and that’s that.
If I tell them I’m a guy, and I get there and everybody thinks I’m a guy, then nothing happens and I continue living as I have been living. If they think I’m a girl, then... maybe I can tell them the indication I was a guy was a mistake, a mistake my previous school also made that got copied into my application somehow, and then I get to live as a girl.
Which of these two cases was better? It seemed to me that the results are almost all the same, except the consequences of me applying as a girl and them seeing me as a guy could be worse. They could think I was trying to cheat the system, either to get into a girls’ dorm where I could take advantage of the other girls, or because I’m trying to get access to admissions rules or scholarships or something like that which are for women. If I apply as a guy but they see I’m a girl, then most likely it just gets taken as a mistake and corrected, because in today’s world it doesn’t really provide any advantages.
So I marked the box saying I’m male. But I was going to be prepared in any case. I packed both male and female clothes. If they see me as a girl, it’s acceptable for girls to wear men’s clothing sometimes. If they think I’m a guy, the weird reality-distortion field around me that causes that effect will make it so nobody notices, except maybe a few people I specifically tell.
The incident when the boy at the mall recognized me as a girl happened after I had sent off this application but before I heard anything back. That made me realize one possible flaw in this plan. I’m going to be living with a roommate. That roommate is going to be living with me more closely than anybody ever has. We will sleep in the same room every night; even my parents weren’t that close to me. It might be possible that he figures out I’m a girl when nobody else does. Then what? I’d have to figure it out if and when such a thing happened.
Soon after that, I was notified that I got in, and there was no way I was backing out over these worries. During the summer, word came that I was assigned a roommate named Ralph. It was an all-male dorm, too, so if I got there and they identified me as female, I imagined I would get moved quickly.
Move-in day arrived, and my parents drove me there with suitcases and boxes of my stuff. They were a little surprised that I was taking both my male and female clothes, but they had seen me regularly go out dressed either way through much of high school, so I suppose they thought I was planning to be open about being trans. They still didn’t understand the more involved details of my situation.
My roommate wasn’t there when they helped me get all my stuff into my room, so they didn’t get to meet him. And I had to go join an orientation activity he was probably already at, so they didn’t get to stick around and meet him, either, and instead simply said goodbye with hugs and kisses, and drove home.
The orientation lasted all day, and it was dark when I got back to my room and met Ralph. We were both tired out from the moving followed by the other activity, so after some “nice to meet ya” and such, we made our beds, stripped down to our underwear (my boys’ underwear, since I’d worn male clothes with my jeans out of practicality that day), and went to bed.
In the morning, I had to face the showers. They didn’t have showers in the rooms. They were in the shared restrooms on each hallway. It was pretty antiquated by most people’s standards today, both the single-sex dorms and the shared restrooms. And it wasn’t just this dorm; all the dorms here but the married students’ housing were single-sex. I had seen in brochures for other colleges that they had suite bathrooms, one bathroom with a toilet and shower shared by two double rooms, or a larger room with a bathroom for just that room’s residents. That would have allowed me to get bathroom visits alone, just having to coordinate with three other boys. But I couldn’t afford those schools, and I ended up here.
This meant I was standing in line with a bunch of guys, wearing only a towel and carrying a caddy with soap, shampoo, and the like. I was wearing a towel wrapped around my waist, since that’s how all the guys wore them. That left my breasts exposed, but they had still never grown beyond an A cup. There were other guys who were clearly guys, with beards and mustaches, who had more breast mass than I did. Of course, they also had twice the total body mass I did, but there were other skinny guys too. And some of the guys had a lot of body hair, but others had only the peach fuzz I did. A couple of the guys had hair as long as mine, too. The only thing that stood out about me among the group was my lack of a dick and balls, and the towel covered that most of the time. Nobody was staring at me, though a number of the guys seemed to be looking around the whole group like I was. Were they all worried about being stared at, too? Either that or they were gay and sizing up potential partners, I thought.
Since it seemed I passed this test as a guy, I went ahead and took my shower when it was my turn, dried off, and covered myself in the same way I went there, then returned to my room and got dressed. Nothing any different happened from my experiences in the locker rooms in high school.
There was a second day of orientation activities, getting registered for classes, getting books and supplies, treks all over campus. I definitely wanted the guy clothes for comfort during all that. Well, it was a T-shirt, girls’ shorts, men’s fashion briefs, and men’s sneakers, as male as I generally got.
I saw Ralph when he came back from his own shower, but after we left the room in the morning, I didn’t see him again until we returned there after dinner. I got back to the room before him, and while I was alone, I unpacked and put all my clothes in my dresser and closet. It was a tight fit, but they had given us dimensions of everything and I had brought what was going to fit and no more. Everything old or that I just didn’t like got tossed. Because of what I’d been buying most recently, that meant I ended up with more female clothes than male, but I was sure I had enough for whatever I wanted to do.
It was only then that I got to meet Ralph at all, if you could say it happened even then. He seemed very shy. I had trouble getting him to talk much or tell me much about himself. My own story was pretty weird and there were lots of things I had to leave out as well, so we didn’t actually talk much that night.
We went to bed early, and it was hours later I was awakened by a sound. I wasn’t sure what it was at first. It was repetitive, and it was close by. Eventually I realized it was coming from Ralph’s bed.
“Ralph, what are you doing?”
“Nothin’.”
He was clearly doing something. Our lights were out, but there was some dim light coming through the window, and after a bit I saw that he appeared to be thrusting his body up and down, on top of something. Was he using a sex doll? He clearly wasn’t masturbating in the only way I’d ever seen guys do it, using their hand. (I probably shouldn’t have seen that when I did. One guy’s girlfriend had dumped him, and he was sharing a naked picture of her in the locker room for other guys to jerk off to, until the coach came and broke it up.)
I’d seen these dolls in the shop with the other sex toys, the one that by this time I would have been officially allowed to enter, though I wasn’t old enough when I actually shopped there. What I saw made the most sense if there was one of those under him. Well, unless he had actually brought a girl in here, but then I would have expected to hear something from the girl as well. And he seemed too shy to do that, anyway.
It was making me horny myself. Apart from that one time in the locker room, which only lasted a minute or two, I had never been this close to a guy masturbating before. I went to the dresser drawer where I had put all my bras and other female clothes that didn’t need hanging up, and at the back of it found where I had stashed the vibrator. I installed its batteries and took it to bed with me, rubbing it all around and inside the body parts everyone else in the world refused to recognize that I had.
Ralph clearly heard the vibrator, and asked, “Are you doin’ nothin’ too?”
“Yeah. Though I don’t do it the same way as you do.”
“That’s OK. Um, just keep doing it until you’re done, I guess. It would be too weird to do anything else.”
“Yeah.”
I’m sure he heard my moans of pleasure the same way as I heard his grunts, but eventually he seemed to finish and fell silent. But Ralph didn’t get up and go clean his toy off. I don’t know if he even came. It seemed like he fell asleep on top of the thing. I couldn’t do that; I had to go clean up in the bathroom. But the room was silent when I came back, and I quickly fell asleep again.
In the morning, I awoke before Ralph and confirmed what I had suspected. He was asleep on top of a partial sex doll. It was only the business part, from the lower torso to a bit of the thighs.
He was gone when I returned from my shower. I assumed he was off somewhere trying to clean up his toy without everybody else seeing what he had. I had the whole day free, but some people were trying to finish sorting out their classes or getting their books or whatever. I decided that today I would see how the world here views me when dressing fully female.
It was warm, so I wore a short skirt. Not one of those super-minis that force you to avoid flashing yourself with every step, because I never let the girls convince me to buy something like that. But it was above the knee, a pleated skirt that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for shorts... if anybody else in the world had been wearing it. I paired that with a sleeveless top that let me cover the straps of one of my padded bras, but was pretty clingy and would show off my shape. The outfit should have made clear I was female up top as well.
Nobody stopped me anywhere in the dorm, despite well-communicated rules that women were not allowed to travel unescorted anywhere within the men’s dorm. I basically took a complete tour, including in the restrooms. When I went across the rest of campus, I was twice rejected in women’s restrooms, and I was addressed as “Mr. Jones” when making a purchase at the campus store. It was basically exactly the same thing I’d experienced at home.
My experience changed after dinner that night. I was sitting at my desk when Ralph came in, and at first he didn’t notice anything, but a few minutes later he crept around to where he could get a better look at me, silently, until he chose to confront me.
“W-w-what are you doing in my room?”
“Ralph, I’m your roommate Kelly.”
“No, my roommate is a guy. You’ve got boobs and you’re wearing a skirt.”
“Oh! You can see! Amazing! Um, I need to explain something, Ralph.”
As I turned to face him, he stared at me a moment. “Oh, yeah, I can see that you are Kelly. Are you trans?”
“Not exactly. It’s more complicated than that.”
Ralph sat in his desk chair and made it clear he was ready to listen to my story, but I tried to keep it brief.
“I am actually female. I have all the same parts as every other woman. But for some reason I can’t understand, nobody can see it. It’s been true from the very beginning, when I was assigned male on my birth certificate. My parents thought I was a boy, and I did too until I learned what the difference was supposed to be. Even when I dress in a way that looks obviously female, people still see me as a guy. And most of them don’t even seem to notice that I’m wearing female clothes.”
“So the fact that I saw you as female just now is... unusual?”
“Yes. A handful of people have been able to see the female clothes, and, just like you did for a moment, they think I’m trans. But even after I explained my story to them that I’m actually female and it’s the male version of me that’s trans, they still thought of me as male dressing as female. My parents and four girls I went to high school with fall into this category. There was a little boy I ran into at the mall once who returned a dollar I dropped who called me a lady when doing so. He was the only one besides you to actually identify me as female and not just trans. But his parents were aghast since they saw me as male, and hurried off with the kid before I could say anything.”
At first, Ralph seemed proud of himself, I guess for being able to do something other people couldn’t. But in less than a minute, his expression changed.
Ralph shouted, “Prove it! I’ve been made a fool of too many times by bullies and I’m not going to take it anymore. If you are lying to me, I’ll find a way to get you back.”
“And if I’m telling the truth?”
“Um...” Ralph was dumbstruck, but after a long pause quietly said, “I guess I’ll be your friend, the one friend who sees you as you really are.”
“Well, I don’t think I should have to prove myself, and the way this crazy aura around me works, I am not even sure that I will, but I’m curious whether you will actually be able to see it.”
I stood up, unzipped my skirt and dropped it to the floor, and then dropped my panties as well.
“I see... some hair. But definitely not a dick and balls.”
I put my hands on either side and pulled myself open so he could see everything.
“OK, I believe you. I know that is what a woman is supposed to look like, even if it’s my first time to actually see it in person.”
“Thank you, friend,” I said.
I put my clothes back on, and invited him in for a hug, which he accepted.
The next day, which was Saturday, we went out together, not as a date, but just doing stuff together, and learning about what we could walk to from the campus, since neither of us had a car. And he saw my reality-distortion field in action. I was wearing a dress, a floral print, something that was hard to mistake for anything that a guy would wear. I was twice called sir when making a purchase, and we were called gentlemen when a woman at a restaurant took our order. We also went into the men’s room together, with several other guys around. Of course, I went into a stall to do my business, since my clothes weren’t practical for urinal usage. But not one of the men said anything about me being there or even had a strange look, including the few who were washing hands as we were doing so and I was checking myself out in the mirror.
Sunday I talked with my parents. I had only left them a message Thursday, saying everything was going well and I managed to get registered for classes, but this time we actually talked.
“How’s your roommate?” Mom asked.
“Oh, he couldn’t be better. He’s pretty shy, but he can see me as I really am.”
“You mean he’s got no problem with your dressing as a girl?”
“You could say that.” I could have said more, but I was well beyond the point of trying to correct them every time they got this wrong.
When I talked with Dad, he asked, “Have you had sex yet?”
“No, Dad, I haven’t even gone on a date yet since I got here. Give me time.”
“Just kidding with ya,” he replied.
But I think he was actually encouraging me to have sex. He had given me condoms when I started dating Lisa. After Lisa had told me her religious restriction and I passed that on to him, and said that as a result, I hadn’t used any of the condoms, he just said that was fine. It was beyond his understanding of my situation to grasp that even if we had had sex, we couldn’t have used the condoms. He gave me a new batch before I came here, pointing out that they had limited lifetimes and the ones I had never used with Lisa should be thrown out, and clearly assuming I would find a new girlfriend here.
As the phone call continued, Dad reminded me of one of his earlier lessons, basically going over the whole thing again with me on the phone. It was about how to tell if a girl likes me, and also the kind of signals I could show girls before actually asking them out on dates to try to get an idea if they were interested in me. Did he expect I might use those lessons the other way around? He knew I dressed female, so maybe he did think I might use those lessons as a girl on guys. I had never been able to, though, because they all saw me as a guy. Until Ralph, that is.
All of this got me thinking after the call about whether I wanted to date Ralph. He was literally the only guy I had found who I could go on a date with without him thinking it was a gay date. I didn’t consider what we did the day before a date, but I realized that someone could see it that way. We ate lunch together and did other things together for hours. It just wasn’t a romantic date. We didn’t kiss, hold hands, or do other more intimate touching.
I decided to watch him first and try to get a better feel for what he was like. By the end of the second weekend, I had concluded he was either gay or so incredibly shy he’d never been out on a date. But one of my worst fears was allayed: He wasn’t in any way taking advantage of me, despite being the only person in the whole world who knew I was really a girl. Heck, he hadn’t touched me, apart from one hug and one time we held hands for a moment that were both touches I initiated.
At this point I started dressing as a girl all the time. Until then, it had been half and half. And I started giving him hints, mostly when we were in our room or otherwise alone together, since I didn’t want to force him to be widely known as gay. We could do things on our own, not at college parties, but still be dating. I still kept watch for any sign he was dating anyone else, and tried to sit either at the table with him or at least where he was in my sight when we ate meals. He definitely showed interest in girls, but it didn’t seem to go beyond ogling. Sometimes ogling me, sometimes other girls.
But I didn’t get him to do any more than that, so I started doing homework in our room wearing just my bra and panties. That finally got him to say something the second evening I did it.
“You, uh, OK, Kelly?”
“Yeah. You notice something?”
“Yeah, I noticed you’re not dressed.”
“What do you think about that?”
“It’s very tempting.”
“You’re not dating anybody, right, Ralph?”
“No,” he said with a sad tone in his voice.
“Did you ever ask anyone on a date?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I was afraid they’d say no.”
“Hey, that’s part of it. They might say no, but you keep trying. Different people. Someone might say yes.”
“Maybe.”
“I dated while I was in high school, but it wasn’t easy. None of the boys I was interested in would date me, even when I asked them explicitly. They all thought of me as a boy, even when I was wearing a pretty dress when I asked them, because they couldn’t see me for what I really am. I finally asked some girls, and it took some tries but I found one.”
“How did it go?”
“At first I went on dates with Lisa as a guy, but later I dressed as a girl after explicitly asking her if that was OK. She thought of me as transgender after that, but she was OK with it. We never had sex or even heavy touching. Her family imposed strict religious limits that she obeyed faithfully. Kissing and light touching was her limit. I got her to touch my private parts once, and got a weird glimpse of how the distortion field around me works.”
“What happened?”
“She thought I had a dick and balls, even while touching what were definitely not my dick and balls. Come here, let me demonstrate what she did with your hand.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. It’s fine.”
So he cautiously stepped over to me, and I stood so we were at the same level, and I put his hand into my panties, and guided him to put two fingers between my vaginal lips with one on each side.
“She put her fingers about like this, and decided my dick was tucked down between my legs covering my balls, and these bits sticking out were part of my ball sack. Do you think it feels like that?”
“No. Not at all. For one thing, the dick should have some volume to it, even if you’re not hard. It’s also got the wrong texture. Also, the part that would be your dick is actually lower than the outside.”
“Exactly. But that’s how this thing affects people around me. They ignore what should be obvious signs I’m a girl.”
“Except me.”
“Right. That gives you a... special opportunity.”
“Kelly, are you trying to ask me on a date?”
Finally! But no, I didn’t say that out loud. It was clear I had to treat him tenderly.
“Yes, Ralph. I would love it if we could do something together. Something like we did our first Saturday here, but just a little physically closer. That’s all it really takes. It doesn’t have to be as close as we are now, though.”
Ralph realized he was still touching my private parts and pulled his hand away.
“So how do we do this?”
“Did you ever go on a date, Ralph?” He’d already told me he never asked anyone out on a date, but there was still a chance someone had set one up for him once, so I asked this question too.
“No,” he said, hanging his head.
“Well we’re going to fix that! A first date doesn’t have to be too elaborate. Dinner and a movie is a classic. So we just need a movie to see, a restaurant nearby to eat at, and a time that works for both of us.”
“I guess that’s not too much to plan. But it is something to plan.”
“Yes, and I’d like you to plan it. Make sure you allow enough time for us to eat and get to the theater, even if service is slow, and make reservations if they are required. And... what are you wearing?”
“Should I dress up nice?”
“It is traditional. Not a tux, but a suit or a sport jacket and slacks that go with it, a button shirt, and a tie. I wore clothes like that when I was dressing as a man on my dates with Lisa.”
“OK, I have one outfit like that.”
“I’ll wear a dress. I have some of those I wore on dates, too. And one more thing.”
He gave me a look that was like “What else could there be?” but I just grabbed him by the back of his head and pulled him into a deep, passionate kiss. My first kiss of a boy. He just looked at me, stunned, as I pulled away.
“That’s the kind of touching that is appropriate for a first date.”
“Wait, are we having the first date right now?”
“No. This kiss was for practice. You’ve never been on a date before, so I assume you’ve never done that, either.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Thanks for the kiss.”
He wanted to start planning right at that moment, and I told him to relax.
“I’m free Friday evening, all day Saturday, and Sunday afternoon. Any type of restaurant, any movie, your choice. Just let me know no later than the evening before.”
“Thanks. I will let you know. Can we have another practice kiss?”
“Of course. And I can give you tips about how to do it better.”
I cut him off after three more attempts so he still had something to look forward to.
The next morning we went down to the shower together, topless, and he whispered to me, “You just walk in like that?”
Was he just noticing today? He had known I was a girl for weeks now. He’d stared at me the way he stared at other girls, when I was fully dressed. Did he somehow not associate being a girl with me when I wasn’t clothed that way? Maybe the field still affected him some. He definitely hadn’t noticed it the first two days, when I dressed as a boy. Again, I didn’t chide him over this. I wanted to reward him for noticing.
I whispered back, “Yeah, they don’t realize I’m a girl and don’t think anything of it. But now that you know, you’ll get a free show every morning. Lucky you. But my breasts are so small it doesn’t make much difference anyway.”
The showering went without any issue, as had happened every morning since I moved into the dorm here.
That evening, after we left dinner, on the way back to the dorm, Ralph pulled me aside for a moment and said, “Be ready to leave here Saturday at 5.”
“Great. Thanks. I’ll be ready.”
When we got back into the dorm, we both needed to pee and went into the restroom together. I was dressed casually in a blouse and shorts with a fly, naturally with my fashion briefs under them.
As we unzipped, I saw Ralph look around before he said quietly to me, “How do you use urinals, anyway? I thought women had to sit down to pee.”
I looked and confirmed nobody else was in the room with us, and said, “The secret is holding myself open. Feel free to peek over the divider if you want.”
He did so, and I continued the explanation as I peed. “Women can pee standing, but it’s a lot harder. It’s automatic for penises, but when a woman just pees without holding herself open like I’m doing, the stream hits one side or the other and splashes and gets the whole area wet. You see these tabs I’m holding? They’re stretched out from a lifetime of peeing this way.”
As we washed our hands afterwards, he asked, “How did you learn how to do that?”
“Practice, and out of necessity. This was something everybody expected I could do, and so I simply figured out how to do it in a way that worked. It took me two years of practicing in front of my toilet at home multiple times a day to get to the point I felt confident enough to do it at a urinal.”
But we didn’t do anything else that night.
Since I didn’t have to prove myself to Ralph anymore, I continued to dress casually the rest of the week until our date. But I stewed over how to prepare for the date.
One of the thing I had learned during all those shopping excursions and lunch sessions with the girls in high school was just how much stuff some girls do to prepare for dates. Hours and hours of preparation. Not just bathing, but hairstyling and shaving various body parts and skin treatments and makeup and multiple perfumes and stuff that I wouldn’t possibly notice my date had done. But I also learned that not every girl does all that stuff, or at least she does not do it for every date.
Even after I heard about all this, I never went through such a routine for any of my many dates with Lisa, even when I was going as a girl. Bathing, yes. Shaving, nope. I don’t have male facial hair, and I don’t have especially noticeable hair on other body parts. Nearly everybody sees me as a guy anyway, and even Lisa just thought I was a guy dressing as a girl. Hairstyling, no, or minimal. Same reason; I just washed it the way I normally would as part of the bathing. Mom had showed me how to use a curling iron to make the ends curl up in a way that reminded me of a certain girl’s hairstyle I had seen, though I didn’t know what it was called, and I did that sometimes. Skin treatments? At most I’d try to hide a zit or something. Makeup? I didn’t spend more than 5 minutes on it. Perfume? I had exactly one cologne I used on dates I was going as a guy and one perfume I used on dates when I was going as a girl, and I just used a little at my neck and that was it. I never spent more than an hour getting ready.
But how should I prepare for my date with Ralph? Unlike my other dates, he could actually see that I was a woman. I decided, though, that I was just going to be myself. Maybe take a little extra care getting ready but not try to go overboard doing things I’m not even familiar with. I was pretty sure I wasn’t competing with any other girl for Ralph, anyway. So it was 3:45 when I went down to the dorm shower to start the process. And when I got back from the shower I kicked Ralph out for a bit while I was doing some of that prep naked in our room, but only for 15 minutes.
It was a 10 minute walk from the dorm to the restaurant in the “village” of stores near campus. Ralph picked an Italian restaurant I had noticed and thought looked nice, and it was great. He had allowed plenty of time, during which I told him some of my other misadventures of people not being able to see me as a girl. And he saw more of the weird way I faced the world, as we were greeted as “gentlemen” multiple times during the dinner. Ralph chuckled at least three times after that happened.
Ralph picked a newly released romantic comedy as our movie. I wasn’t sure if that was what he really liked, or what he thought I’d like as a girl, or if he thought it would help me get closer to him. I didn’t really care; I had told him he could choose any movie and that was what he picked. But the movie was awful. The comedy fell flat. The romance... well, it was fine if you wanted to see a man and woman kissing. But it seemed forced. The one thing it was good for was making opportunities for you to kiss your date if you were there on a date. So maybe that was the point of the whole film. But I’d watched every romantic comedy of the last three years on dates with Lisa, and none of them were this bad. It’s not anything against Ralph, though. I’m sure he didn’t know. The bad movie just happened to be in the theater when we went. But he caught on, and in the second half of the movie he was ready to kiss me every time the couple in the movie kissed. He definitely got better at it.
But it left me in a weird spot. He had kissed me so much I figured he would want to kiss me in more casual settings, settings where it would make other people think we were gay. I decided I didn’t care, for myself. Other people had me wrong already anyway. But was Ralph OK with it? Would he even think about it? I decided I had to speak with him about it on the way back to our dorm.
“Ralph, the plot of that movie was terrible but it gave us lots of chances to kiss, and I could see you really enjoyed that.”
“Yes, I did, Kelly,” he said as he planted a quick one on my lips.
“That’s actually what I want to talk to you about. Because you know how this thing with me affects other people.”
“It makes them think you’re a man.”
“Yeah, so if we go kissing in public they will think we’re gay.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t care, for myself. They already have my gender wrong; if they think I’m gay on top of that, it’s not any worse. But I want to make sure you’re OK with it.”
“Hmm. Maybe we should keep this private.”
“On the DL,” I agreed.
“Huh?”
“On the down-low,” I elaborated. “Secret. Don’t let others know we’re dating.”
“OK. Down-low. That’s a new term for me, but yes, I agree.”
So that’s how it was. We started going to dates in another area we could walk to but which was farther from campus, so we saw fewer of our classmates. The people there saw us as two men as well, but few students who knew us saw us there.
We went on dates like that about once a month, but we also had time together in our room. And still, Ralph was slow to step up our relationship. It wasn’t until after our fourth date, three months after the first, that he touched my private parts again, and that only after I took the initiative to reach down his pants.
In the last week before spring finals, one night I caught Ralph using the sex doll. When I did so, I told him, “Toys like that are for guys who don’t have girlfriends.”
“Um, you mean...”
He knew what I meant. He was staring at my panties. It wasn’t unusual by that time in the evenings for me to sit in just my bra and underwear, either panties or fashion briefs, whichever I’d worn that day, and this happened at that time of night.
I stripped my remaining clothes, and he quickly got out of the bed and was ready to jump me, standing, but I pushed him back. He looked hurt, but understood when I retrieved a condom.
“Oh, yeah.”
I enjoyed feeling him inside me, but it wasn’t as good as when I used my vibrator. But I hoped we could practice and improve that. And I could see he was thrilled.
I had talked with my parents several times during the year, telling them I had gone on a date with a boy, then more dates and that I considered him my boyfriend. When I was alone I called them and told them I had finally had sex.
“With this boy?” Dad asked.
“Yes, in my vagina,” I told him, knowing he would take it as a euphemism for my ass since he was unable to believe I had the female organ.
“Well, that’s fine if that’s what you want. He hasn’t coerced you into this, has he?”
“No. Like I told you before, he’s very shy. If I hadn’t gotten him to open up he probably would never have had sex.”
I kept them informed as well as I could.
Ralph and I were allowed to stay in the dorms during the summer, but we had to move at one point to our room for the next year; the room we’d initially been assigned was reserved for incoming freshmen only. That worked out, though, because the other rooms were a little bigger and I didn’t have to cram my clothes quite so much. We both got summer jobs on campus, and were more open with our dating with few students around. And we had more sex, weekly at first, and roughly twice weekly by the end of the summer. Ralph got better at sex, and was also getting over his shyness, even being the one to ask for sex sometimes.
Our social life improved during sophomore year, with more regular dates and more regular sex. Ralph blossomed under my encouragement, now able to ask for dates and for sex, and being able to ask for help also helped him in his classes. We did the summer job thing again, though I helped him find a real job programming that he could do remotely from our room for real money, rather than just something on campus. I spent most of each weekday out of the room, a lot of that at my own job, and we were together nights and weekends. We had sex almost every night that summer.
A lot changed junior year. At the start of the year, we enrolled in drivers’ ed. That cost extra money, but the money from our summer jobs paid for it. The fee included insurance, the driving test, and use of school cars for taking the test. It was a one-semester class offered pass/fail with a pass if we got a license, and we both did.
But somehow, some other students figured out Ralph and I were dating, and almost immediately after we finished getting our driver’s licenses, we became widely known as a gay couple. Ralph was upset and even had a long cry with me, but I consoled him, told him that it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we had each other.
Ralph was too upset to have sex the night the “gay” issue erupted around us, but we did it the next night, and I helped him bounce back. So much so, in fact, that in the spring he proposed to me. Same-sex marriage was just approved in a ballot initiative November of that school year, so we could get married even if everybody thought we were both men. We both told our parents about the engagement and they were happy for us.
There was also a gay and lesbian club on campus, and even though we refused to accept the label for ourselves, several members invited us, and we accepted the friendship and attended their meetings.
Ralph had a second summer of real work, and the money he earned from both summers let him buy a cheap used car which let us get out even further from the campus for dates senior year.
Throughout senior year I wore the engagement ring, and most people didn’t notice it, but the ones who did realized that it meant Ralph and I were getting married, and made even more gay jokes about it. But we were strong and took it all. Those people didn’t matter. Ralph and I had each other; that was what mattered.
We ended up planning a combined graduation and wedding. We rented graduation robes and Ralph’s tux for the wedding, while I managed to find a wedding dress for three hundred dollars and spent another eighty getting it tailored down to fit me. One thing I didn’t tailor was the bust. It was designed for C or D cup boobs, and it was cheaper to buy C-cup breast forms to fill them than fix that part of the dress. And why not? It would help me look more womanly, and it was something I should have done years ago. I started wearing them about once a week to get used to them, with some of my other dresses that had enough space for them. Ralph noticed, but if anybody else did, they didn’t say anything.
There was a chapel on campus that we were able to rent for weddings. We had to rent slots, because other students wanted to get married right after graduation as well; the graduation march was going to be Saturday afternoon and we had the chapel from 10 to 11 AM on Sunday.
We also had to hire the marriage officiant, and we never expected so many choices! As a state university, they were forbidden from providing religious services, but they were allowed to provide a place for students to practice religion without limiting the religions practiced, and this chapel was it. There was a list of clergy from various churches nearby who could be hired to come here to hold religious services, weddings, christenings, bar mitzvahs, and other services, and the list included at least one clergyman of every Christian denomination I had ever heard of, three different Jewish ones, a Muslim, Baha’i, and more.
I hadn’t been raised under any religion except the general air of Christianity that existed throughout much of America. Ralph had been raised Christian, though his family had moved around and attended different sorts of services over the years, and he hadn’t attended any services here. There was a non-religious person who could perform civil marriages, but Ralph wanted a Christian wedding. So what I mainly looked for was one who would be OK with gay weddings and transgendered people, whatever they might think of me as, and there was a Methodist one who was popular among students and known to accept anybody. Sadly, he was giving services in his own church at that hour. We found a bilingual Baptist who gave services in Spanish at 11:30 at a church after an English service run by someone else ended, and he also didn’t discriminate and just had time for our wedding before his own services, so we hired him.
There was room for about 50 on the pews, but we weren’t expecting to have anywhere near that many, as the “gay” situation had alienated us from most of the students. I just had my parents, Ralph had parents and a younger sister, and we invited the entire gay and lesbian club and 6 of them said they would attend. And we weren’t having any bridesmaids or groomsmen. Neither of us had good ideas on who we would have picked, and there were so many confusing things due to my condition that I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.
We had arranged jobs in my home town after we graduated, so my parents rented a U-Haul both to come see the graduation themselves and to bring all of our things back to town with them. But we didn’t hear from them when I expected them to get here on Friday, and I was worried. In the evening, I got a call from the police. They had been in an accident on the way here and they were both killed.
It was my turn to be a ball of blubber and Ralph’s to console me. What worked was getting me talking. I told him every story from my childhood and the misadventures that ensued due to both my parents and fellow school students’ misunderstanding of my gender. I got composed enough before the end of the night to decide that I was going through with our plans for the weekend. We would do graduation normally, only missing the opportunity to introduce Ralph to my parents. Some calling around allowed us find that one of the gay students we had invited had a tux, and he was willing to stand in for the “father of the bride” role, the only other person besides the two of us we expected to walk the aisle while the music was playing during the ceremony.
Graduation went mostly fine, though while I had asked to have my name read as “Miss Kelly Jones” I was called as “Mister Kelvin Jones” instead. I got to meet Ralph’s family afterward, but they certainly seemed confused. It turned out it was because he had never told them about my condition and had only described me as a great girl he met, dated, and got engaged to. Upon meeting me they thought I was trans. But we spent the evening with them, and I told all those stories over again. And Ralph swore he had had sex with me in my vagina and not my ass. I could tell they didn’t believe that, but they accepted me for whatever they thought I was and didn’t disown Ralph over it or anything.
It was good that we got that over with then rather than when I marched down the aisle. Ralph’s family was there and they were all able to enjoy it despite the feeling they had that I was actually a guy. It was clear, though, that everyone there saw my bridal gown for what it was. I still don’t know what a lot of the students thought I was wearing when I wore my ordinary dresses, but the ceremony had at least put the people here into the camp of “Kelly is trans.”
Every wedding is special, but something very special happened at the end of our wedding when our wedding officiant pronounced us husband and wife. I had spoken with him before the ceremony and wanted to make sure he didn’t say “husband and husband” or any such thing; I was to be Ralph’s wife and to be described as a woman entering into marriage, regardless of what some people thought of my gender. He did say “woman” and “wife” when appropriate, but at the exact moment he finished “I pronounce you husband and wife,” I felt something. I couldn’t say what it was, but Ralph afterward said I literally glowed for about five seconds.
We kissed, and marched off together as a married couple. We didn’t have time for excess ceremony, as we had to clear the chapel for the next couple. In another room nearby, we signed our marriage license for the legal part of the marriage, as well as the name change. I was pleased to see that, unlike at graduation, they had gotten my name and gender correct. I was becoming Mrs. Kelly Hodgson, nee Miss Kelly Jones. No Kelvin in sight, no male gendering.
Then we hurried off for the makeshift reception we had planned, which the guests had gone directly to, with the students no doubt helping Ralph’s family find the room. In a room in another school building nearby that we had reserved, there was a small wedding cake and several pizzas waiting, along with all the guests by the time we got there. We did the foolishness with feeding each other cake, and everybody got what was effectively lunch, given it was after 11 AM. We cleared the middle of the room and did some dancing, and told some stories of our lives up to this point, such as they were.
And the penny dropped. Our handful of guests were literally crying at hearing me tell my stories of having been mistaken for a guy. The students claimed to have always known me as a woman, but some compulsion had made them treat me as a guy. Ralph’s family was saying a thousand “sorrys.” They had not wanted to treat me as a man, either, but likewise described being unable to act in the way they had wanted to.
Had I been under some kind of a curse? One broken by marrying my true love? Did such things really exist? It certainly seemed like it had ended, at least for the people in this room.
We finished up the reception and said goodbye to the other students, two of whom gave us their contact info and promised they’d do anything for us to apologize. Ralph’s family followed us to my dorm. We still had to work out how we were going to move out, since our plan had been destroyed along with my parents’ lives by the accident.
A lot of the other students had already moved out of the dorm, but we passed several who were in the process of moving out. Every single one apologized to us, some putting down stuff they were carrying to do so. They also regretted missing our wedding, but understood why we didn’t invite them due to the way they had acted toward us. We spoke with one student from my entering class at length:
“I knew you were female from the beginning. I wanted to warn you that you couldn’t live here, in a male dorm as an obvious woman, using the restroom and showers with the men, whether it was because of you exposing yourself or the threat of rape or worse, but something prevented me from acting on that in any way. I was relieved to see other students also treating you as male, figuring that whatever possessed me was also affecting them, and as a result saving you from anything worse than being ogled. And I was stunned junior year to find out you and Ralph were dating, doubly so. First, to find out that he, uniquely among us, was able to treat you as a woman, and second, to hear myself calling your relationship gay. I apologize deeply for that.”
“Apology accepted.”
We got to our dorm room, and the first thing we did was make Ralph’s family stay outside while we changed out of our wedding outfits and back into normal clothes. We couldn’t celebrate our wedding any longer; we had to deal with our problems.
Ralph’s parents wanted to help. Not only were they apologetic to me, but they were his parents, and so they were there to help with the moving problem that was partly his. While they called around to try and find another truck, I returned the rented clothes. When I got back, they told me that due to students moving out, every truck nearby had been rented, but they found a truck large enough 50 miles away.
We drove them there in Ralph’s car to pick up the truck and bring it back to campus. Although I expected only Ralph’s parents to drive the truck, all of us signed up as possible drivers. To my surprise, when I pulled out my driver’s license it said Kelly Jones, female. Of course I needed to get the name updated; in fact, one of the forms I’d signed back at the chapel was an application for that update. But I was surprised to see that even my existing license now said female.
We completed the rental paperwork and they followed us back to campus with the van. The four of us loaded up all our stuff, most of which was packed already, as we had expected to move out. Another change in plans was that rather than moving to the apartment we had leased across town from my childhood home, as my parents were no longer living there and I was their only child, we were going to live in that house. So I drove Ralph’s car and led his parents in the truck to it.
We halfway worried something weird was going to have happened to the house, something that nobody could see until the distortion of reality surrounding my life was lifted when Ralph and I married, but it was fine. We moved my stuff in, and after some more goodbyes and sorrys and hugs all around, Ralph’s family drove back to return the rental truck and make their flight home tomorrow.
We boxed up my parents’ clothes right away so we had space to put ours, but that was all we cleaned out the first day. We had lots more to worry about.
We called to cancel our apartment lease. We had had to put down a deposit of first and last month’s rent, and canceling it today, on the expected move-in day, meant we forfeited that amount. But we were going to save much more than that living in a house with a mortgage that was almost paid off already.
There were two different insurance claims to get done, and on Sunday we only filed to get things rolling. First, their automobile liability insurance. We didn’t know yet how the accident happened, but we needed to at least report it to them. Second, their life insurance, which was small but would help.
Ralph’s parents called in the evening to say they had made it back with no trouble, and the next day called to say their flight went fine as well.
Monday was nothing but making calls. I made arrangements for my parents’ funeral, and separately started the process to handle their estate so their house and car could be put into my name, as well as access their bank account and Dad’s pension plan.
To invite people to the funeral, I found myself calling a bunch of the kids I grew up with and their parents, people who had known my parents, as well as a few of the college students who we now knew didn’t really hate us. The same thing that happened to the college students happened to the locals, too. They had always known I was female but found themselves unable to acknowledge it. They were worried about me using the men’s restroom, especially when I dressed up female and still did it. One of my college dorm-mates confessed wonder about how I had managed to use urinals since he had seen my female genitals when I was there for showers. One girl who had kicked me out of the women’s room apologized for that. And it went on and on, each person we called finding a new thing to apologize for. I told all of them that everything they had done was forgiven because it was clear to me they had been constrained by something beyond their control.
Lisa was the most interesting one. She was actually always a lesbian, and had agreed to date me because she could see I was female, even though she was then forced to lie about that and never mention being lesbian. She was glad to have been able to date me, and told me she had found somebody else now. I told her “me too” about the last point.
Ralph and I didn’t have a honeymoon. We spent the two weeks before our jobs started dealing with business like getting utilities put into our name, shutting off subscriptions my parents had had and I didn’t want, and going through more of my parents stuff, as well as the actual funeral and the other processes we had set into motion. But we did set aside time to have sex every night.
We got started at our jobs. I filed for my name change, and didn’t have to file a gender change, as that record had also been updated properly when the curse was lifted.
It was a couple months after we moved into the house, once we were able to start cleaning up more of my parents’ belongings, that I encountered my mother’s diary from the year she was pregnant with me.
“Should you read that?” Ralph asked.
“Who else should possibly read it?” I responded. “Besides, if there is any way of ever figuring out what happened to me for the first 22 years of my life, maybe it’s in here.”
Indeed, I think it would have been pretty boring for anybody else, but it was fascinating for me to read Mom’s documentation of her growth in weight and girth and her other experiences as I grew within her. But then I encountered something strange. A bunch of pages were stuck together. The last entry before that was when she was five months pregnant and had an ultrasound planned the next day to determine my sex, and the first entry after the stuck pages she was eight months pregnant and they were getting ready for the birth of their baby boy. Had they glued the pages together to hide something, and if so, why?
I showed it to Ralph and he was as suspicious as me.
“It’s too weird that you have this mystery around the way people see your gender, which has been wrong since your very birth, and right here in this book that’s literally about when you were developing in the womb, there’s a bunch of pages glued together starting from the day before they were going to learn your gender.”
Some fiddling with these pages led me to believe they were only glued along the edge, and I applied a knife and was able to pull the pages apart carefully, one by one.
The first revealed page showed that they went to the ultrasound and found Mom was carrying a baby girl. And she went on with the weight updates and such. So what happened? I worked to carefully separate the remaining pages to find out.
A month later, Mom had written something about Dad discovering a bad crack in a brick wall in our basement. He called in someone to look at it, and they recommended taking down all the bricks because they surrounded the central pillar beneath the crossing of the main beams that held up the floor of the house. If those bricks were cracking, that could mean the pillar was also cracked and needed to be replaced, and the house was in danger of collapsing or sagging in a way that could cause more damage throughout the house.
The solution was to install temporary supports on all four sides to hold up the beams, and then remove the bricks and inspect and repair or replace the pillar. That was expensive, but the most expensive part was chipping out the bricks. This needed to be done by hand, slowly, brick by brick, to avoid putting too much stress on the house and avoid endangering the temporary supports.
They already were having to deal with the expense of Mom’s pregnancy, so to save money, after he paid people to put in the temporary supports, Dad went down there and spent an entire weekend chipping away mortar and taking down the wall brick by brick. Strangely, they discovered one of the walls around the pillar was double, and the space between them held a long, flat metal box, within which were a set of three books.
They got the repairs done on the pillar and had it bricked back in, but naturally they didn’t cover up the box again, instead simply covering the pillar itself. The box contained a set of old books handwritten in Latin, embossed in gold lettering on the covers reading LIBRIS PRAESIDIUM, with Roman numerals after it, I to III. This apparently meant “Books of Protection” in Latin.
Dad had been a classics major, and between his knowledge of the language and a Latin-English dictionary, he translated the table of contents written into each book. If the books were to be believed, they were magic spell books, and Dad became fascinated by a spell designed to protect a young girl. Another part of one of the books explained how spells could be cast on a fetus in utero by drawing the magic design on the pregnant woman’s stomach, and he did that and cast whatever this spell was on me. This was in the last of the entries that had been glued together, and starting on the very next entry, they had forgotten all about the books and the spell and now believed they were having a baby boy.
Well now I had to find the damned books. We went down to the basement and indeed found the column with its relatively new brickwork, unlike all the old bricks elsewhere in the basement, surrounded by stacks of boxes of stuff. My parents were such pack rats; it was all the clothing I’d outgrown as a child, male and female, up to about age 14, and a few other childhood possessions I had outgrown the need for. You could literally trace back through the years, see where I had switched to and from wearing mostly girls’ clothes when I was 8 and 9, with boys’ clothes before and after.
Under all these boxes, the metal box with the books was lying directly on the basement floor. They were exactly as Mom had described them in her diary. The box had three velvet-lined compartments each just big enough for one book and a space for a hand to pull it free. One book had a bookmark in it, and Ralph and I worked to translate what was on the pages it marked.
The spell on those two pages was indeed described in the text as spell to protect a girl, though it seemed like it was meant to be cast after birth. We decided that was probably because they didn’t have ultrasound centuries ago whenever this was written, and the book was adamant it could not be cast on a boy. The spell was supposed to protect the girl from evil and hide her from anyone who might do her harm, so that only truly innocent people would be able to see the girl’s true self. And it was designed to last until the girl married, to ensure she married someone pure of heart and who would be certain to obey the marriage oaths to protect and honor his wife, and to be faithful to her, and it also would ensure she did indeed find such a person.
“So that’s what I am?” Ralph asked. “A truly innocent person, pure of heart, and certain to protect and honor you?”
“I think that describes you pretty well, Ralph. Remember that you hadn’t even had a date with a girl until you entered college, much less had sex.”
This led to an evening of me reminding Ralph about our first days together, and him telling me about his experiences in high school. They totally confirmed his innocent and pure nature. Then I realized something.
“But wait. You were having sex with a doll when we met. Was that pure?”
“It was purer than having sex with a bunch of different girls,” Ralph countered.
“Hmm, maybe so. It may be that you were considered a virgin until we first had sex.”
“And I still counted as innocent after our sex because I was the person the spell chose. I have never had sex with any other girl, before or after; you have always been my only one.”
“So you’re faithful. I now have more reason than perhaps any other married woman in history to believe my husband has been faithful to me since the day we met. It’s still weird, though. The spell hid me by making everybody else act as if I was a man, even though they knew in their hearts otherwise?”
“Even your parents. They went from casting the spell on their unborn daughter to writing about their unborn son the next day.”
“Yeah, we will never know what they experienced, since they couldn’t even write down the truth, but I assume it was the same as the others. They knew they were sending their daughter into men’s restrooms and the boys’ locker room at school and that must have caused them severe anguish, tempered only by the fact that, by that time, they must have figured out everybody else in the world was also unable to do to me what they would have done based upon seeing me as a girl.”
“Apart from the mental trauma, how much of your life do you think the spell orchestrated?”
“A lot. It kept me from ever being able to date any man, or ever having sex with any, until I met you. No doubt it arranged for me to live in the men’s dorm and for you to be assigned as my roommate. It let me trust you. I was scared when you first recognized me as a girl. Nobody else did. You could have taken advantage of me in so many ways and you didn’t.”
“What about the ways you helped me after that?”
“I think that was just me. The spell didn’t say anything about helping my mate, just finding me one.”
“Do you think it made us have the time slot when our first choice of marriage officiant was unavailable, so we’d have to pick somebody else?”
“Oh, maybe. Maybe the Methodist guy the students liked wasn’t pure enough. The one we got was able to get my gender right, and presumably met that pureness condition of the spell.”
Ralph added, “Yes, the spell seems to have done what it was meant to do, but the way it did it was terrible. Torture for you and for everyone close to you in your life except me. Not that I didn’t suffer some, being called gay for being with you.”
“Definitely not worth it. We shouldn’t let anybody else ever fall into this trap. So what do we do now, Ralph?”
Ralph stopped for a moment, seemingly about to say something. I was about to suggest burning the books, slicing the pages to bits, or anything to prevent any other person from ever being able to cast any spell from the book, but found myself unable to do so. Were we still being affected by the books?
Ralph then said, “Let’s bury them in the yard. We can plant a memorial garden for your parents over them.”
“That will not prevent somebody from eventually finding them, but it is better than leaving them around the house,” I agreed, despite wanting to do otherwise.
I found I wasn’t completely powerless. The compulsion was apparently only against destroying the books. I wrote out a short summary of my experience on blank pages at the back of the diary, wrote THESE BOOKS ARE DANGEROUS in large letters on the cover, and hollowed out enough of the case to fit the diary into the metal box along with the three books. We went out the next day to dig, and the day after that we got flowers and shrubs to plant over them.
We moved on, and I was able to adapt to a normal woman’s life actually treated as a woman. I never used a urinal again, but the skill didn’t go away. Sometimes when I was in a hurry at the house I’d still stand in front of the toilet to pee.
Years later I looked back at this. As much as I hated it, I had benefited greatly from the spell. I had a totally devoted husband. I had guided his transformation from an incredibly shy nerd into an incredibly successful technological wizard. But my own job was going nowhere. Five years after we married, I retired from work to become a housewife. Ralph and I agreed to have kids. With the house paid off and him making good money, there was really no need for me to continue working.
The next year we had a child, a son. We named him Melvin, a combination of the name Kelvin I thought I had had from birth, and Melissa, the female name I wished I had chosen rather than Kelly when I discovered Kelly could be a boy’s name, too. It was correct to say that I only thought I had had that name, as every record showing the name Kelvin, including my birth certificate, had turned out to be disguised by the spell and actually had read Kelly.
Two years later we had a second son who we named Fred, both my father’s name and one of Ralph’s grandfathers’ names. And absolutely nobody denied those sons came out of my vagina! I sometimes wondered what the doctors would have said if I had gotten pregnant and given birth while under the curse, but I suspect the curse would have done everything to prevent that from ever happening.
I never told my sons about my childhood torture, instead only telling them the positive bits like how I dated a girl when I was in high school before meeting Ralph in college.
Privately, Ralph and I did discuss the curse. I worried that we had had two daughters, had cast the spell on them both, and couldn’t speak or act in any way to reveal it. But Ralph reassured me that the people affected by the curse knew the truth all along. We both knew our children had always been boys.
Our boys never showed any transgender bent; they were both as straight as could be, another reassurance that we had not cursed them the way I was. We raised them to treat people of any persuasion fairly.
Melvin ended up being an attorney who focused on cases of discrimination, of which there were still a lot based on gender and sexual identity. Fred went into politics, hoping to make right the places where our laws still treated some people unfairly.
We never told anybody about the books. Certainly, someone will find them someday. Hopefully, they will heed the warning I left.