Life in the shadows

Sydney Moya

(c)2016

Synopsis

Thando is a 27 year old woman. Everyone sees a man though and she can’t tell anyone otherwise. She feels trapped in a life she doesn’t want. What is she going to do?

Part one-Despondency

Thando took off her hairpiece returning her hair to it’s natural Afro style, then her stripped turtleneck dress, before removing the balconette bra, freeing her ample breasts. She smiled sadly, proud of her assets but sad she had to hide them. She left the panties on, not prepared to face the abomination that was her true sex.

She sighed loudly as she wiped her face clean of the makeup, before putting on her tightest sports bra.

‘I should get a binder,’ she thought before sighing again as she reached for a bulky t-shirt and pair of jeans.

She carefully put away all the items she had taken off before placing them in some shoe boxes.

She was tired of all the secrecy, the furtive dressing in secret, taking some selfies and then putting everything away in a box, hidden in the depths of her closet. She was so tired of it.

All she wanted was to tell someone, to shout out,

‘I am a woman dammit,’

It grated when people saw as her a woman even when dressed as a man, was the universe trying to tell her something.?

Like the other day, she’d been standing in at reception for Tara and some man had walked in and addressed her as miss.

She had blinked but smiled and carried on. It happened enough times for her to know not to make an issue out of it.

It was the long hair Tara often said. She suggested a hair cut, advice Thando had no intention of taking.

"People will talk you know," Tara remarked.

Thando always shrugged, knowing she was right but also knowing couldn't watch her hair, the only outward concession to her femininity, chopped off.

‘If only she knew,’ thought

Tara had confessed she’d thought she was a girl when she’d come in for her interview a year ago. She’d been so close to telling her till she heard her views on transgenders which were not worth repeating. Besides this was Africa, who ever heard of people transitioning?

She wished someone had told her that when she was 15 and had started pilfering her mother’s hormone pills. Years of that had given her a rack of very nice 36c breast’s, a soft rounded face, a thin waist and more padding than a purported man ought to have.

Still the same feelings she’d had at 16 made her bristle at the idea of growing a beard and becoming more manly. She had attempted to stop her hormones a couple of years ago but an erection weeks after that had put paid to that. She wasn’t cut out to be a man but she’d grown to hate this in-between life she had.

It was so hard, she was 27 and very single. She had never dated. How could she when she was a woman pretending to be a man? She felt nothing but envy for girls, guys didn’t do anything for her too and she knew it had to do with her dyshporia

She didn’t dare come out, she needed the job and even though writing online was beginning to make her some extra cash to fund her clothing habit all it did was pay the till not the bills. She had a degree but everyone knew that being suspected of being gay was enough to turn one into a pariah in her little corner of the world.

Transgender was beyond the pale.

All the blogs told her to come out but it had it’s risks.

Cross-dressing was still counted as indecent here. She was too scare to even get help, that is if she could afford it, which she couldn’t.

She was taller than most, 6ft thanks to her tall parents but she even though she was supermodel thin, this counted against her in Pangani where most women were much shorter and very round. It would out her instantly or at the very least put a spotlight on her which was the last thing she wanted.

She knew deep in heart that her parents suspected something was wrong with her. After all who reached 27 without showing any interest in the opposite sex? She guessed it was a case of don’t ask, don’t tell.

As much she loved them she didn’t think it was possible to share this with anyone in her family. Case in point, her mother had found out she had breasts some years before. She had told her to exercise and join a gym.

Thando had begun buying sport’s bra’s after that. It helped when she layered her tops under her shirt though it was a bitch during the humid October’s.

Once in a while she’d catch her mother staring oddly at her chest which would immediately result in her leaving the room or turning away.

Her father was completely out of the question, they weren’t close, and she always felt he didn’t like her much as compared to her siblings. It was like he knew something wasn’t right. She wasn’t going to pour petrol on that flame.

No she couldn’t tell her parent’s.

As a child she’d once dressed up with her younger sister’s all the time but now they were quite transphobic. One of them had caught their ten year old little brother playing with a wig of her’s as he pretended to be some rock star he saw on this crazy American’ cartoon, ‘Regular Show,’ and had immediately disgustedly told him he would end up like Bruce Jenner.

Nope no telling anyone. She had considered getting her own place where she could at least be herself at home but she was paid peanuts and couldn’t afford it. Most of her money went towards furthering her education so she could become a management accountant , her hormones and blockers, helping her folks and some savings for a rainy day or the trip to Thailand she dreamt about so much.

She had considered suicide but the fear of death was too much for her. There was no way she could put her family through that.

Thando sighed, it seemed like she was stuck.

Life sucks, she thought.

As much as she longed to she didn’t dare tell anyone. She’d once bumped into another girl who was out but wasn’t as fortunate in the looks department as she was and she’d heard the slurs. She was a laughing stock. The very idea of a male wanting to be a female was scorned by nearly everyone she knew. No one could ever accept it her being a woman unless she moved somewhere else and started afresh

She'd wanted to go and tell her about voice therapy, electrolysis and hormones as well as all the other stuff she learnt online.

However she’d been too scared to do that even though deep down she envied that girl's guts.

Other kids her age had dates all the time and were obsessed with relationships while all she did was spend her free time reading about others like her. Unfortunately none of them were on the same continent as she was. How she wished she could have a group right here in Magumeni, her home town but as she said she’d only met one or two people she suspected of being trans and she didn’t dare approach them.

Her online friends had advised her to try and get asylum in the UK but she wasn’t prepared to take the risk her application might be denied. The UK wasn’t as welcoming as it used to be years ago she noted from watching the news. Besides she was smart enough to know it would reflect badly on her father, who had a cushy government job, if his oldest son fled the country as a transgender. She wasn’t going to be cause of that.

She also didn’t want to be an activist if her application was successful, the few asylum seekers she’d heard of could never come back to Pangani while ‘Silwane’ the infamous nickname for their tyrant president (it meant lion for how he devoured all opponents to his misrule) ran the country.

Thando wasn’t sure that was a risk she was willing to take.

She wrote about girls like her finding happy endings all the time. Would she ever ever find her own?

She slumped onto her bed and covered herself with the sheets and quietly sobbed herself to sleep.
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To be continued