There I was, eleven years old and I had just found a hair on my chest.

I didn’t want hairs on my chest or anywhere else for that matter, except on my head, of course and maybe a little later on, a triangle of the stuff around my private bits, once I have them sorted…

I was a weedy looking kid with few muscles and features too delicate for any self-respecting boy.

I was eleven for god’s sake, nowhere near the time for me to expect to get all male hormonely.

All right, here’s the thing. I am brainy, too brainy mum sometimes says. I have the outlook and attitude of someone a lot older.

According to our warped society, I should stand up and proudly say this like I was a member of TG denial anonymous, if there was such a group:

‘I haven’t worn anything girlie for three days.’

Then the rest of the TGDA crowd would clap and encourage me and then I would be proud of myself.

That was what it should be like, as I despise the fact that I want to be a girl, it was against all the natural and normal feeling that a good boy should have. But I have always thought of myself as a girl and that was that.

So I would never be a member of a group that denied those feelings or try to give up on being who I was and am.

Mum and I lived in a nice house and we were fairly well off after the car accident that killed my dad gave us huge compensation and also the fact that Dad had good life insurance cover.

I still missed Dad, even after three years, but I’m not going to go into all that, as its too painful.

Mum is so laid back she’s almost horizontal. She was a child of the eighties who should have been a child of the sixties. She would have been a leading light in the flower power, hippie, ‘that’s like, so cool man,’ culture. She wore long flowery, flowing skirts and peasant style tops and was heavily into joss sticks and regretfully, wacky backy.

So here I was, eleven years old, in the wrong body and just about to go to senior school with a mother who loved me but wasn’t entirely on the same planet as me.

You see my problem?

I had been home schooled for a number of years and I had done well considering my lack of interaction with other kids. It had now been decided that I had to go to senior school so that my horizons could be broadened and to get the qualifications needed for me to reach my potential.

I had been enrolled, if that’s the word, at a private school close to a prison. I had to look on a map to make sure that I hadn’t been signed up for an extended stint at the prison, but no, it was a school for gifted kids of any gender, whatever that means. It was close to the sea, which was nice and the pics of the beaches around there showed that it was a lovely location; apart from the prison, that is; which turned out to be a couple of miles away and out of sight, phew!

As the school was situated across the country and miles away from home, it meant boarding there, which sucked, as I wouldn’t see much of Mum, but she was into ‘I want to see the world’ and ‘you need your own space, sweetie’, so that was that. She was off on her travels and I was going to school; a school, where I would have to sleep with strangers and not be able to wear a nightie or dresses or anything else faintly girlie.

To be fair, I did push mum into getting me there, as they were evidently the sort of school that encouraged individuality. The problem was though; I had been enrolled as a boy, not a girl.

Mum knew that I sometimes dressed up and was ‘cool’ about it. She actually said, ‘whatever floats your boat,’ and I took that to be acceptance. So around the house, I was often wearing girl’s things. We lived in the country with no near neighbours, so there wasn’t any of the curtain twitching problems that might have occurred if we lived in a street of houses.

Occasionally, I ventured out en femme as we girls like to call ourselves. I passed quite well, being weedy (or willowy as my mum called me) and my hair was long and blond (not out of a bottle, honestly). Mum often took me shopping with her with little me dressed as a girl. I would only go shopping with her in the car when she had not indulged in the use of what the police often call a suspicious substance.

As I packed my clothes I decided to include some girls things, as I thought that I might get the opportunity to dress up, if I could find somewhere where I could do that secretly.

The boys’ uniform was as grey as my thoughts were. Boring, was an understatement. I happened to know that the girls’ uniform looked nicer and had more colour and included a skirt.

After packing, I went to see Mum. She was sitting outside on a lounger and she looking at the information about her trip.

I knew that she was already on a trip of her own, as the glossy pamphlet she was reading was upside down.

‘Hi Mum.’ I said, sitting down beside her.

‘Hey, Hun, don’t these pictures look nice?’

‘They would like nicer the right way up.’

‘Ooh, I wondered why the trees look upside down.’

I could see from her eyes and the slurring of her voice that she was more than slightly spaced out and I worried for her. It was a big bad world out there and since Dad died, she was more and more into the wacky-backy scene.

‘Look Mum, I don’t need to go to school, I have great grades and I could…’

‘Don’t think of it,’ she replied with more force than normal, ‘you need to go and find friends and not be a loner like you used to do. I’ll be okay, your auntie has decided to come with me on my little holiday and she will make sure that I don’t do anything too silly.’

My Aunt was more sensible than Mum and had lost her husband several years ago. I felt a bit better about things now. Mum was just too nice and trusting and she would loose all her cash in double quick time without a minder like Auntie Abby. So I would go to school and pretend to be a boy. I would see how things were and maybe I would get the opportunity to be myself sometimes.

I would just have to wait and see.

So there I was, standing outside my new school, wearing a hated boys uniform and wanting desperately to be there as a girl.

Life just wasn’t very fair.

‘You’ll be fine, ‘said Mum in that ethereal voice which meant that her mind was up in the clouds and not really with us. She did manage to hug me fiercely so she probably wasn’t in as bad a way as I thought. I didn’t want any long goodbyes, so we had agreed that I would go and get settled in by myself. That was good, because I had on occasion let myself down by crying when upset.

I felt more than a bit sad when, with a final kiss on my cheek, she went and sat in the car.

Boys aren’t allowed to cry, but I really wanted to now...

My aunt, who had driven us up to the school, then gave me a hug.

‘Look, it’s a good school and you need to be with around other kids who have your sort of intelligence. Your home school didn’t stretch you and you need a challenge.’

‘Why can’t I be a girl?’

‘Your mum was worried about you not being sure or committed enough to chose about what gender you really wanted to be and anyway you look a handsome boy.’

‘I don’t want to be handsome, I want to be pretty.’

‘Look,’ said my aunt, ‘after the trip that your mum and I are going on, we’ll talk about it. You know what she’s like, one thing at a time with her. We’ll get the trip out of her system and then when we come back, we will have a family conference and decide what to do, but for now, just grin and bear it. She still hasn’t got used to losing your dad. Give her time. Are you sure that you don’t want us to come in and help you unpack and get the paperwork sorted out?’

I sighed, knowing what she said made some sort of sense. However, I did wish that Auntie wouldn’t talk about ‘trips’ like that, talk about double meaning!

‘No. I’ll be fine. You had better go now or I’ll start blubbing and that’s not a pretty sight.’

She went over to the car and then hesitated for a moment and came back over to me.

‘Look honey, your mum is going through a bit of a hard time lately and I know that you’ve been her rock. I’m not supposed to tell you, but her holiday is more of a recovery thing. She needs to be weaned away from her bad habits and let’s face it, addiction. You know that she never got over losing your dad. She didn’t want you to worry about her and that’s why she hasn’t told you. You have a right to know about what’s going on, but I didn’t tell you, okay?’

I nodded, understanding then why she had to go.

With a lump in my throat, I waved them off and then turned to go in.

The buildings were impressive to say the least, being the former home of an impoverished nobleman.

We had arrived late in the afternoon and classes had obviously just finished as a stream of students spilled out from various doors.

A passing girl told me where to go to the office and soon I found myself in front of the head mistress.

She was quite young and very pretty. Maybe she was taking shots, pills or selective surgery and was older than my grandmother. It’s difficult to tell nowadays.

‘So, where is your mother?’ she asked rather directly.

‘She’s gone on a trip,’ I replied, wincing slightly at using that term again.

‘I expected her to…oh never mind. You are dressed as a boy, I see.’

‘Erm, yes Miss.’

‘Please sit down.’

I sat.

She looked through some papers. As I sat there, I could hear children laughing and playing outside. I wished that I were outside and not sitting there feeling and no doubt looking uncomfortable. I had the distinct impression that I had done something wrong…

‘Ah,’ said the head mistress as she picked out an envelope from the papers.

She took the letter out of the envelope and quickly scanned it.

Looking up at me she frowned.

‘It says here that you like to present yourself as a girl, is that right?’

‘Yes miss, when I can.’

‘Are you a girl or a boy?’

‘Outside a boy but inside a girl.’

‘That is what your mother says in this letter, in a roundabout way. She says that you are a beautiful bud that is turning into a butterfly and will, one day fly the nest and be a real girl. Apart from the appalling mix of metaphors I get the drift that you would have preferred to come to this school as a girl and not a boy. Am I correct?’

‘Yes Miss.’

‘And yet you have come dressed as a boy. Did you not read the prospectus?’

‘Not all of it Miss, it was two hundred pages and my eyes sort of glazed over after the first ten. But I think my mum read it all, over a week or so, in between erm, episodes. I’m not sure that she thinks that I really want to be a girl and that it’s just a phase. If it is a phase, its one that I have had for as long as I remember’

‘Hmm, at least you are honest. As for these episodes you refer to, I’m not sure what you mean by that; but the fact that the letter has a number of drawings of butterflies, angels, birds and flowers give me some indication of the situation. But I won’t pry into your private life or that of your mother unless it impinges on your time here with us.’

‘Thank you Miss.’ I replied with relief. I really didn’t want to get into My Mum is a Bit Wacky territory.

‘She says at the bottom of her letter that she wants you to decide if you want to be here as a girl or boy. If you had managed to read up to page eighty-five of the prospectus, you will see that we have a number of students that are at least, shall we say, gender confused. We allow, with parents permission, children to dress as they wish to be; either girl or boy. We do not tolerate any form of discrimination here and I am proud to say our students are not the type of people who would cause harm to anyone who did chose to dress differently to the their birth gender. Do you understand?’

‘Yes Miss.’

‘So I ask again, do you wish to dress as a girl or boy?’

‘You didn’t ask…sorry, Miss; yes I would like to be a girl here, if that’s all right.’

She smiled at me and she looked even younger. Perhaps I should ask what pills she was taking and then Mum could take them and look younger…better not though; Mum might take it the wrong way and anyway, Mum says that she has laughter lines, well if they were laughter lines, she must have laughed quite a lot…

‘Well?’

‘Sorry Miss; I was miles away there. You were saying?’

‘Do pay attention, girl. You have bought some girl’s clothes with you?’

‘A few things Miss, I thought that I might be able to wear them, in private, maybe, but I only have this boys uniform.’

‘Well, surprisingly, your mother has thought of that. You will find your girls uniform in your bedroom, together with some other clothes she sent from home. Why she didn’t just send you here as a girl, I don’t understand, but I assume that she thought that you might want to be here as a girl and she then sent clothes over, just in case.’

‘Oh, that’s Mum. She does things like that, but I love her and that’s the way she is.’

‘If you say so, dear. She says in her letter that she will arrange appointments with doctors for you, if you really consider yourself to be a girl, when she returns from her trip. However, enough of that for the present. I suggest that my secretary take you to your room now and then you can change into more appropriate clothing. We used to have dormitories, but now parents expect more private arrangements for their children, so at least you will have some privacy.

‘The head girl will come to see you later, after lessons and she will find someone to mentor you. In the mean time, the rest of the day is free for you and you will start lessons tomorrow. When you feel comfortable you can meet some of the other girls and boys, but for now, just get used to things and have a look at your timetable and other information in your room. I will see you tomorrow. If you need any advice, just come and see me. My door is always open, except when its closed, that is.’

‘Erm, right Miss and thanks.’

Before being shown my room, the secretary had sorted out the name thing; I would be Bethany and not Tom. She didn’t seem at all worried about my gender, just like the head mistress and acted as if it was almost an every day occurrence. She altered the school records and then that was it. I was officially enrolled as a girl, not a boy and I felt happier than I had been in a long time.

The halls were quiet as I was shown up to my room. It was evidently feeding time at the zoo, so I wouldn’t be having any interaction with my fellow inmates until later. That was good, as I wanted to change out of my horrid boys uniform as soon as I could.

The secretary, a Miss Beazley, was nice enough and she sort of prattled on a bit about nothing in particular and I just nodded in the right places as she led me up the stairs, along another corridor and finally to my room.

She left me to get on with things and I thanked her.

‘No trouble dear, if you need anything just come and ask.’

My room was nice, if a bit small, but as my mind was on other things, I didn’t really take in my surroundings too much.

I lay down on my bed looking up at the ceiling.

So I was allowed to be a girl at school. Amid the confusion that was Mum’s mind now, she had come through for me.

I had no idea how the case my mum had packed had been sent without my knowing. Perhaps Mum wasn’t as spaced out as I thought she was.

As lessons were over for the day, I didn’t need to wear my uniform but I decided I wanted to try it on anyway, just to see if it fit.

I took off the boys’ uniform and slung it over in the corner and then standing in my panties (I never wore boys briefs, I would have rather died), I opened the case my mum had packed and sent on to the school.

On top was a note and I opened it.

Bethany,

Hugs and lots of kisses,
Mum
XXXXXXX

Sniffing, I put the letter down and then burst into tears, which is probably perfectly allowable for girls and probably mentioned on page 95 of the prospectus.

After pulling myself together and washing my face, I went over to the open case. The uniform was on top and I carefully took it out and placed the various items on the bed.

Taking a deep breath, I slowly put on my new uniform.

As I dressed, my thoughts turned once again to Mum . I was so happy that she was now doing something to get her life together and despite all the things happening to her, she had still found the time to worry about my problems.

I sighed with happiness and relief as I put on the skirt and blouse and then tied the red scarf around my neck, giving the uniform a much-needed splash of colour.

As I brushed through my hair, I wondered if makeup was allowed? I would have to ask someone or just plough through the rules to see.

Looking at my reflection, I smiled as I saw a pretty girl called Bethany and I could see no sign of Tom.

I had arrived.

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