The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3409 by Angharad Copyright© 2023 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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I'm sure that some TERFs could be nice to other TERFs but the ones I'd encountered were anything but. Why did Sussex TERFs have such influence with the ones here? I rang Esmond but he wasn't there, no doubt getting his leg over somewhere, I glanced at the time on my computer and realised at six o'clock he wouldn't be there anyway. I would try and call him the next day if I remembered. Diane had finished for the day and her office was all locked up. I grabbed my laptop, shoved it in the bag, and pulling on my jacket picked up my handbag switched off the light, locked the door and did the same with Diane's office.

My transition had happened years ago, so none of the students would remember it unless they looked me up on the web, and go beyond the university website and the usual stuff, including my own website which Sammi set up and checked over now and again. That girl was so clever it took my breath away, but then I also knew Trish and Daddy, both of them were pretty damned clever too. Simon was no dunce in specific areas and I suppose I haven't done too badly for a quantity surveyor's son, have I?

I reached home before Daddy, but he is such a workaholic, that he makes me look like a dilettante. I spoke to David and asked him to keep a portion of whatever delicacy he had created. It was cottage pie, seems Danni and Trish had got to him first; I didn't mind as I hadn't had any for some time, cottage pie I mean, the other, the last time Simon was home, still you don't need to know that. Daddy arrived as we were still eating and he quickly washed and pulled up a chair telling me he needed a word with me after. It didn't alarm me too much as we do communicate quite regularly. like every day, but his tone was serious. I helped to clear the table by which time the kettle was boiling so I made a pot of tea. The older girls had one but Daddy declined saying he wanted something stronger than pat's kiss.

I gave him a few minutes to settle with his Laphroaig and topping up my tea I knocked on his study door. I still felt a bit like a naughty schoolgirl outside the headmistress' door, which hadn't happened since primary school and never in a negative way; that had waited until I got to grammar school and boy did it make up for itself. I had a flashback of standing outside Murray's door, which was quite a regular occasion after year nine when my hair was becoming more noticeable and annoying him. We had a battle of wills and I was not going to give way, if I could defy my father, then Murray was a much easier force to deal with, though he could be most unpleasant, not so the person who was the on the other side of this door and for whom I had nothing but deep respect and love.

"I spoke tae Esmond earlier."

"I tried but just missed him, I wanted to know how there were so many links between the two universities when it came to obnoxious female groups."

"They hae regular meetin's, did ye no ken that?"

"No I didn't," I pondered for a moment then asked, "Does he have chapter and verse?"

"Na, but I'm sure he cud get it for ye. They meet as a women's group, but a' thae locals ken wha it is."

"Don't tell me the hemlock appreciation society."

He laughed at my improvisation and went on to tell me that the women met every couple of weeks and kept in touch in between by email, social media and text. I suggested as they were a student organisation he have a look at any minutes they keep and if it didn't contain lots of hate matters, there was obviously a second book of minutes.

Their information was so good I wondered if we were being bugged, but then they have heard me speaking with Laura and they clearly didn't. This was obviously much more organised than I had expected. It seems these days that terrorists are becoming smarter and more sophisticated. If only we knew what they were planning; we almost needed a mole in their camp, but it would be quite a dangerous position as they could get quite violent.

I decided I couldn't ask any of my kids, remember I had three at the university, two doing biology and one physicist. They had all survived their first year and were now starting their second. Trish of course had caused problems with sloppy teaching in the Physics and Maths dept. She called the tutor out on it and proved he was wrong, her professor thanked her quietly but asked that she make less fuss as they were short of staff and she got asked to do some tutoring or mentoring with new students. That was good for her ego and she actually enjoyed helping others or found she did.

The two biologists were a different kettle of fish. Sarah put in the hours and her grades were good. Danni always seemed to have a distraction, be that England or boys, and she had to cram at the last minute. She passed but only with Sarah's help, plus a bit of logic help from Trish. We like to check that our students are awake as well as just sitting exams. Some appear to sleepwalk their way through the course, others are very involved, problem is we never know which are which until the second year or end of the first one, by which time it is sometimes too late for some students.

Anyway, our international footballer, had pulled her socks up just in time and had actually passed her exams with quite a margin, which shows she is certainly not a dunce and like a number of footballers, actually had some functioning grey matter between their ears. Mind you, Sarah had helped her revision and she told me in doing so, she had understood the material even more which enabled her to get a distinction. Danni just missed one. Trish got 100% in her paper but complained it wasn't hard enough, she was probably the only one.

The professor of physics knew her well enough, he used to set her problems in the school holidays and had told me more than once that as soon as Cambridge knew how clever she was they'd be luring her with all sorts of offers. She finds our course too easy but we need to let her grow up sufficiently to do a PhD, so I planned on trying to keep her here for a master's or perhaps somewhere fairly close like Southampton, though I think the travel to and fro would drive her nuts. She's 16 and soon will be 17, then she could learn to drive and travel back and forth, as she'd be two years older and hopefully a bit more mature. In some ways she is, in others, she isn't and I think she could end up being led astray possibly into drink or drugs.

The next day Laura sent me a text to say she was in the labs downstairs and acting like a technician. I went down to see her and saw that she was helping set up some experiments on tissue cultures. This usually involved sections and stains and so on, basic stuff really which she should have covered at Sussex. We all know about my cottage industry of making them for other students, helped me to eat a bit as I'd spent most of my student loan on the Scott, my yellow machine which gave me the confidence to learn to ride, which was all it took, that and being told to join the girlies. A few months later, I beat the same person who'd dismissed me in the annual hill climb - why? Because I was smaller, lighter and trained to beat him. It was in some ways my only real triumph on a bike or anything sporting. I learned which hill it was to be held on and got used to it, then went off and found something even steeper and practiced with a rucksack full of books, bricks or tin cans. This was just before I started oestrogens but even then my feminine-type body which didn't recognise testosterone had more than a passing resemblance to a young teenager, with breast buds and growing hips and a large backside in proportion to a thin body.

So I looked a bit of a softy, or girly and even after all the training I had done, my muscles didn't show that much. About fifty had entered and I had difficulty getting registered as a boy, especially riding a girl's bike, but it didn't really matter in the end because I actually had the fastest time overall, beating Big Mouth into third place. After claiming the trophy, I managed to escape from the usual interview with the university newsletter though photos that had been taken during my climb featured, and because I looked feminine they asked who the mystery woman was. I had entered as a male student but they thought this was a blind. I don't know why, I wasn't hiding, my own cohort of students could have told them who I was, the swotty wimp who was either a grungy girl or an effeminate boy, they weren't sure but they knew me, sort of.

I kept up the riding, after all it was how I came down to Portsmouth. I had become very interested in populations, distribution, and mapping and Prof Agnew was trying to put forward suggestions for competing for the project which we eventually won. It didn't help that it wasn't quite his bag, but Sussex, through Esmond had encouraged me to go and listen. I did after riding down there on my bike, I asked some penetrating questions and was invited to come and study for a master's degree using dormice as my project mammal. Many of the criteria I adopted for studying dormice were taken almost verbatim from my dissertation, and I was offered a chance to do a doctoral degree using data from the mammal survey and my own studies.

The rest is history; I transitioned during my master's and only learnt later that Esmond, who knew Tom had had a gender dysphoric daughter asked him to take me under his wing and give me some space to sort myself out. I did as you all know and of course, my genius was recognised in doing the survey, ha like hell, I think my petulance and self-destructiveness was also recognised and only the patience and love of Tom, Stella, and my Simon held me together during my periods of darkness. Daddy and Simon were really incredibly generous giving me somewhere to live and someone to experiment with as a partner because until Simon happened, I'd never fallen for anyone, in fact I used to wonder if I ever would, because I didn't know if I was even a sexual animal. I know I've said that the man from the garage was my awakening when he stole a kiss from me, but all the hard work was done by Simon and it was his patience I sometimes wore to the bone, not to mention that of Tom who not only gave me a home, allowed me to become a woman, but also allowed me to gain academic, personal and family fulfilment. It was his house that I filled with waifs and strays who later became my adopted children and who unofficially adopted me as his daughter. I feel closer to him than I ever did to my birth father.

Now all I had to do was try and keep the TERFs and Laura apart. Thankfully they didn't exist in my day or at least weren't a problem and they don't seem to have noticed me in the university or my three trans children, although all have become legally female since, and Danni's was quite public because of her footballing skills, including a bit of a fuss when she got an England cap. Perhaps because she's almost a teen icon, they leave her alone, the flak they'd receive would be overwhelming as she is now one of the Lioness heroines who nearly won the World Cup, they stay well away from her. Now where was Laura and will I get involved in playing with slide making?