by (AJ) Eric

I probably shouldn’t even try this. I think I know less about girls’ schools and teen girls in general than your average politician knows about honesty and trust— mostly what I’ve read in stories like this one. (Bru’s original West Peak story, “The Only Boy in School”, was tagged Real World. This one isn’t.)

So here it is. Bru has OKed it, so I’m posting this with a minimum of lead time and content editing, since having it appear while Bru’s original is still on the front page seems highly desirable. If you find any egregious errors in my facts, please let me know.

My parents really know how to hurt a guy. I’m Camille “Butch” Getzler, or at least I was when I graduated from middle school. I was proud to be known as one of the two or three meanest tomboys in the school, and I put one of them on the floor within a week of her showing up.

The other one, Chris Taine, and I were more evenly matched: we had fun trying to pin each other during wrestling practice. It was a lot easier for us to beat most of the boys in our weight bracket in the matches and tournaments during our eighth-grade season than it was to get an edge on each other, and we ended up as friends and allies.

Anyway, near the end of our eighth-grade year, Chris and I, along with four guys, got suspended for a week after a free-for-all in the lunch room. Chris and her family decided to relocate to another town, and Mom and Dad decided that they’d had enough of my brutish ways.

They told me that even if I got all A’s in high school as I did in middle school, I still wouldn’t be credible in future job interviews and college applications unless I could present a reasonably refined feminine image when I had to. I thought their ideas were about 40 years behind the times — hey, women get to wear pants to work these days — but they were the adults in the room. (Did that make me the elephant?)

Anyway, they decided they had a solution and almost the next thing I knew, I was starting ninth grade — the “freshgirl” year — at the West Peak Academy for Young Ladies, the girliest school in the state.

It wasn’t what it used to be — a whole lot of T-girls were going there along with the wealthier superfemmes and wannabes from the middle schools in the region.

And in fact, there were a lot fewer of those GGs than there used to be. After all, the chief feature of the school — like most all-girl academies —had been to provide a first-rate education without the distractions and disruptions that hormone-crazed boys could cause. Now that so many anatomically-male students were enrolled, a lot of girls’ parents didn’t think it was safe for their precious daughters anymore.

Administrators assured them that the T-girl types had been thoroughly vetted in pre-enrollment interviews to winnow out any who weren’t firmly committed to girlhood, and that in any case most of them were already on female hormones and couldn’t molest their daughters even if they’d wanted to — which they wouldn’t.

(The hormone part, as I quickly learned, wasn’t exactly true. It was illegal to start boys on hormones at that age, and not all of those kids were even on T-blockers yet. But the school did an expert job in eliminating the ones who didn’t belong, and another four were caught and removed in the first six weeks of classes.)

I’m way off the subject here. (And I know better; English comp was one of West Peak’s most important academic subjects.)

Anyway, it would have been easy for me to get myself thrown out. I’m sure that getting rid of the hair extensions that I’d been fitted with and then getting into a fistfight with one of the (many) stuck-up girls — genetic and otherwise — who looked down on me would have been more than enough to do the job.

But I’d already decided to go along with the plan. For one thing, a couple of wealthy and eccentric relatives had “bet” me large sums of money that I couldn’t do it; if they followed through I’d have more than half a million dollars free and clear of parental restrictions when I turned 18.

For another, I was stubborn or naive enough to take that old warhorse of a motto — “there’s nothing a girl can’t do” — fully to heart.

And the truth was that I’d been doing more play-acting to support that “Butch” nickname than people knew. Not that I was any girlier than I presented; short hair, unpierced ears, no makeup, and boy clothes were certainly my honest choice, with no desire at all to do otherwise.

(I guess I need to bring it up somewhere, since “Butch” does have sexual connotations. I really hadn’t figured out which way I swung; I ended up kissing several girls and several boys and let people draw whatever conclusions they wanted to.)

But a lot of my swagger and bullying was a put-on. (As was true, I’m pretty sure now, with most of the boys I admired and emulated.)

So I decided to take it as a personal challenge to see if I could fake girly behavior as well as I did my previous image.

The femme curriculum was intense: I had to learn to sit, stand, talk, walk, dress, fawn, mince, flirt, vamp, and even giggle. (The exam on that last one might have been the weirdest thing I’d ever experienced.)

We also got instruction on How a Girl Gets Her Way without resorting to fights and wrestling moves: sad and wistful expressions, wide-eyed innocent-sounding leading questions, mopes and moues, tears on cue, and the most efficient ways to whine. All of which meant that the teachers and administrators at West Peak were mostly immune to those ploys, except for a couple of male teachers who apparently couldn’t help themselves.

Fashion was extremely important; unlike some of the deportment classes, it was a requirement in all eight semesters. By our senior, sorry, Lady year, we knew what to wear to make the impression we wanted or needed to put across: the difference that even an inch in skirt length could make, fabric choices, ways to disguise a less feminine physique — some of the T-girls needed that more than I did, but I was maintaining as muscular a build as I dared and had some needs in that department as well.

We also learned which of the clothes that had been hyped to us in the previous three years’ fashion classes were now so out of style that no self-respecting teen would be caught dead in them. To someone starting from ground zero as I did, that could get pretty bewildering; there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

Makeup was equally critical, and we learned more there than I’d have thought was possible to know. (Which showed my ignorance, of course. We found out that it takes years to get qualified as a cosmetologist, so there’s obviously a lot that one needs to learn.) As with fashion, the impression that we want to put across has a lot to do with the choices we make. And as with fashion, a less feminine-looking face can be improved somewhat.

Most of us were ambivalent about the training in hair and nails, because the final exam for the juniors consisted of doing the freshgirls’ hair. The newbies who got the C students — or worse, since some of the practitioners couldn’t seem to make their hands do what the brain told them — started the summer with ongoing bad hair days until it got long enough to be repaired professionally. It was especially tough on the T-girls whose self-assurance in their appearance needed even more boosting than the rest of us, though most of us teen girls had confidence issues.

(And on the other side, botching the hair of the daughter of a corporate president or a politician could be hazardous to one’s future prospects after graduation: those people remembered, and networked.)

Catfights were strongly discouraged as unworthy of a West Peak lady, even to the point of possible expulsion. I don’t think there were more than three or four during my four years there. Though nobody got expelled, at least a couple of the participants decided to transfer elsewhere. (And no, none of the fights involved me. Scratching and clawing didn’t appeal to me at all.)

There were rumors of other encounters outside of class time, but no one showed up with visible and unexplained bruises or scratches, not even in the locker room. So either the stories were overblown or the participants were putting their makeup training to good use.

All that said, self-defense was one of our required courses; among other things, we learned the best ways to immobilize a male attacker, including a practical use for stiletto heels. Our dance training — more about that later — would prove to be helpful if an encounter reached the point of kicking a man in the groin. (One more reason the T-girls among us were looking forward to surgery when they graduated.)

Ballet had been a requirement at West Peak for much of the academy’s history. In my soph year, modern dance was added as an alternative, and a lot of the students welcomed the new option, me included. It was just as strenuous, but there are important moves in ballet that not everyone can do even after constant practice. Not that modern dance was simple or easy, but that was less of a problem.

And when it came time to perform, there were a lot of us for whom a tutu was very unflattering. We avoided that embarrassment on the modern dance side. On the other hand, a lot of girls, T and otherwise, thought of a tutu as the ultimate in girly attire, and wouldn’t miss it for the world no matter how chunky it made their legs look.

Academics at West Peak were just as intense, even more so in some ways. We had to take everything that was in the standard educational requirements, and almost all of what we got was at a more advanced level than the state demanded.

English — grammar, reading comprehension and composition — was treated as the most important subject. But history (world, U.S. and feminist), social studies and math weren’t neglected. In fact, more than half the Lady class was taking calculus — though the deportment teachers were adamant that we should never mention that in any context that didn’t absolutely require it. (And when on a date, never correct a boy’s math.)

There were a number of science courses. Chemistry and biology were the most popular, though to the disgust of many, a year of physics was required first, and the physics teacher, who looked old enough to have dated Archimedes, seemed to do her best to keep things as dull and boring as possible.

Biology, on the other hand, was exciting, thanks in large part to a teacher who not only made it interesting but also was as good-looking as any male movie star one could name. A lot of the class would have enjoyed practicing human biology on him, even the ones who weren’t really into men.

Anyway, I continued to breeze through the academics, though acing every course turned out to be impossible; they graded hard, especially that physics teacher.

I wound up doing better on the femme side than I’d feared, if not quite well enough to keep my overall grade-point average in the high threes as I’d have liked. I started calling myself Cam Melion (get it?), though most of the students stuck with Cammie, or more often Getzler.

But no matter how good my acting job was, I couldn’t fool myself. As the years went on, I was feeling more and more dubious about this whole concept. It clearly wasn’t as alien to the rest of the girls, including the T-girls, as it was to me: it seemed to me that they weren’t starting from scratch when it came to feminine behavior and Getting Your Way, as I was.

Sports helped, especially field hockey, as a means of channeling my aggression. And I certainly wasn’t the only one at West Peak who had issues there. We were fielding the most physical team in the league, though our style didn’t necessarily translate to winning. The most intense hitters were probably the Ts among the freshgirls, especially the ones who weren’t on blockers yet.

Yes, they let Ts play; it seems that state laws said that if a school didn’t have a boys’ team, it had to go coed. The only exceptions were track and tennis, where international standards were in effect that limited testosterone levels, and even there, almost all of the T-girls got legal eventually. But when it came to spring sports most of us gravitated to softball, which wasn’t restricted. I wasn’t that good on defense; I usually ended up in right field or at second base. But I could hit better than most of the other players, and I wasn’t bad at running the bases.

In keeping with the academy’s femininity standards, we wore culottes for field hockey, and for softball, they’d gotten somebody to make us the miniskirted unis worn in the film A League of Their Own, and in the All American Girls’ Professional Baseball League of the 1940s that it was based upon. For basketball, we all wore matching ponytails and hair ribbons, but we weren’t the only school that did that. They threatened to make us put tassels on our sneakers, but even the T-girls wouldn’t go there.

There was no shortage of cheerleaders and pompon girls at our games; in fact, there were frequently more of them than there were spectators, who stayed away in droves, as the saying goes. Watching losing teams like ours isn’t many girls’ idea of a fun afternoon, and there weren’t any boys on hand for them to attract (or distract); the school made it really difficult for guys to get on campus.

But I’m getting way off the subject (again). The summer after my junior year, I made a big decision and started taking male hormones. I smuggled some into the dorm when we all came back that fall, though not quite enough to take every day during the school year. Anyway, though my hips weren’t going to get any narrower, my body fat started to redistribute, and I started really needing those clothes we’d learned about that disguised one’s physique.

By the end, it was getting really difficult to conceal the changes. I avoided changing clothes for sports and dance by having a plaster cast placed on my left foot. I’ll never tell who it was that helped me out there. But I will say that the male medical specialists who occasionally came by the school were generally more susceptible to Get Your Way stratagems than any of the regular staff, though trying to get more male hormones that way would have spoiled the effect. And yes, I saw the irony in using girly behavior to contribute to a decidedly non-girly result.

While my face hadn’t developed more than peach-fuzz and a really thin mustache, it was still enough by the end of February to require shaving it two or three times in a school day in order to avoid embarrassing questions.

Final exams in the Lady year are in March, in order to give the T-girls time to get their SRS operations and recover somewhat before the graduating ceremonies in May. Seeing the demand, a well-respected surgeon had moved into our town, though many of the kids still opted for Colorado, Thailand or Canada.

And I was gone too, getting phalloplasty and breast reduction. It wasn’t exactly legal, with only limited psychiatric time and practically no real-life test. In fact, I was precisely the kind of patient the rules were established to prohibit. But I squeezed through somehow, in part by using all that money I was getting for graduating from West Peak to grease the scales, or however that expression goes.

My change wasn’t official yet; the state law that had been passed to give the T-girls of West Peak immediate female status and a new birth certificate didn’t apply to me going the other way, or so the guy in the attorney general’s office informed me when I applied.

But it didn’t matter much. Though there’d been some grousing from the school’s board of trustees at first, the fact remained that I’d passed all the courses and even made the honor roll my last two years. Depriving me of a diploma wasn’t an option and making me get it in secret or in the mail would raise more questions than it answered.

So when we all took the stage for the graduation ceremony, I was wearing a guy’s suit and tie and a boy’s haircut under my cap and gown, and I was identified to the assembly as Cameron Getzler — thus becoming the second boy ever to graduate from the West Peak Academy for Young Ladies.

The first guy to do it, taking note of my lack of legal male status when it happened, still claims to be the only one. But just about everyone who saw me graduate wouldn’t agree.

And especially not the ones who saw me at the graduation ball that evening. Chris Taine had left her family and returned to town when she turned 18, and we hit it off again right away. Still as feisty as ever, but a lot prettier now, and more than willing to dress up when the occasion called for it. Her gown that night ranked up there with the best ones I’d seen in my four years of fashion classes, and she filled it out perfectly.

Best of all, she was really pleased to see me as a guy. She’d reached the conclusion that she’d had a crush on me from way back, and since her orientation turned out to be totally heterosexual, my life change made things a lot easier for her.

My parents hadn’t exactly taken all of this in stride, but they hadn’t disinherited me — not yet, at least. At least one of the relatives who’d paid me big bucks to graduate from West Peak was also pretty upset. But he had to acknowledge that I was no longer the misfit and hoodlum-in-training that he’d been trying to forestall.

And I had to admit that Mom was right in at least one respect. I’d gotten a scholarship to the upscale university that I’d been aiming for: my SAT scores were over the roof, and my core course GPA was in the A-minus range. But since I was still Camille at the time I was interviewed, I might never have gotten through that last important step successfully without West Peak’s unique training.