There was something about Sierra's walk that she was completely oblivious to. It wasn't an immediately noticeable detail, though it couldn't really be described as subtle either.

The months of taking female hormones had widened Sierra's hips, but when she saw herself as Devin, it seemed like that fact put her to shame. Her whole body moved in a very stiff and awkward manner, as if she was restricting herself. To put it bluntly, she walked like she had a pole shoved up her ass.

However, when she saw herself as Sierra, her body moved much more freely. Her hips were free to sway from side to side like a woman’s would. She was less restricted, less ashamed, more comfortable, and more alive. She was more content and at peace with herself, and it was very visually apparent.

Sierra herself may not have noticed it, but her girlfriend did. Elise giggled as she studied Sierra’s lower half.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Elise lied, smiling.

***

By the time Sierra and Elise came back from their walk around the neighborhood, they were back to reading “For a Girl”. The tenth chapter was by far the shortest, aside from the Epilogue, and it mainly revolved around Stephanie getting ready for her court appearance, where she’d have to argue in a trial about why she deserved to run in the girls’ race.

It was also the chapter where the principal spanking scene is mentioned once, and then is never brought up again in any meaningful capacity for the rest of the story until the Epilogue

“That’s it?” Elise asked.

“Basically yeah.”

“So… there’s one scene where Stephanie literally gets molested by an older man, who is also the school principal. And then that scene is never mentioned again except in another scene where she is in the same room with him and wants to recreate the experience?”

“Yep, pretty much.” Sierra answered. “I think I already told you that though.”

“Don’t care. This is so baffling to me you could explain it a hundred times and I still wouldn’t get it.” Elise said. “This man should be in jail. He shouldn’t be anywhere near underage girls, at the least.”

“The only way this makes some sense to me is if that theory about the principal infecting Stephanie with GB is true.” Sierra explained. “And that he somehow also programmed her to be subservient to him. It’s extremely eerie to think about though.”

“Honestly I think the best way to view that scene is to do what the story does most of the time, pretend it didn’t happen.”

***

“Holy shit.” Sierra said. “I never noticed how awful Hal is being here.”

“What do you mean?”

Sierra pointed at the paragraph through the screen. “Read this shit. Hal is literally saying he’s glad this all happened to Stephanie. Happy she got hit with GB because he likes being with her. What an entitled prick. Even tries to preempt it with ‘Don’t take this the wrong way’. It didn’t work, asshole… well I guess it did because Stephanie didn’t care, but whatever my point still stands.”

Elise squinted her eyes for a bit. “Oh, yeah… I see it. That is kind of dickish… I don’t think he was trying to be a dick though.”

“I mean… from this paragraph it’s clear he was only thinking of himself and wasn’t even considering Stephanie’s feelings despite her being the one who, you know, actually went through GB.” Sierra argued. “He’s basically just saying ‘Hey, I know having a forced sex change was super traumatic for you, but I like that it happened because you give me a hard-on’.”

“Now now, I wouldn’t be that harsh. They are dating, aren’t they?”

“To me that just means Hal is kind of a shitty boyfriend.”

Elise laughed. “Look at you, you’re getting worked up over fictional characters.”

“I know, it’s a problem.” Sierra agreed. “Yelling over a fictional piece of media. I feel like one of those deranged internet youtube critics.”

“I mean, you are one of those, aren’t you?”

“Sadly.”

***

There wasn’t any break taken between the tenth and eleventh chapters. Once Sierra and Elise got to the part where Stephanie was being driven to the courthouse, they continued through to her arrival.

“I don’t think ‘girl’ is a verb.” Elise said.

Sierra looked down toward her phone, at the “girliest girl who ever girled” line. “Yeah… it’s a weird sentence.”

***

“Hey look, it’s the characters from the Girl School plotline!” Sierra exclaimed. “The only other time they appear in this story, aside from getting mentioned in the epilogue.”

“Weren’t there four of them?” Elise asked.

“Yeah, the story kind of forgets Beth exists after the third chapter.” Sierra answered. “She’s never mentioned again. It's really strange. I kind of like to think that in universe, someone performed an identity death on Beth and made her a guy again, making it so no one remembered ‘Beth’ even existed.”

“Okay, that’s the second time today you thought of a fanfiction for this story.” Elise pointed out. “You need to calm down.”

“I know.” Sierra said with a sigh. “I promise I don’t have any other weird theories about this story, okay?”

“Don’t trust you.” Elise replied before Sierra gave a knowing laugh. “Also what’s ‘identity death’?”

“It’s this very controversial type of transformation in TF fiction, where someone transforms into something else and loses all of their old memories.” Sierra explained. “They forget all about their old life and gain a new set of memories, essentially changing reality.”

“Damn, that sounds intense.”

“Yeah, it’s no wonder why it’s so controversial.” Sierra responded. “Personally, I don’t think it’s used well most of the time. The concept of identity death is terrifying, but it’s rarely ever treated like the terrifying thing it is. It’s usually forced in at the end and that’s it. Very cheap.”

***

At this point, Sierra felt like a broken record. She had already criticized “For a Girl” for being problematic multiple times, and she didn’t want to keep doing it.

But damn, this story really messed up… again.

The courthouse scene took up most of the eleventh chapter, and it was everything one would expect from a courthouse scene in media. Unrealistic, overdramatic, and very entertaining. At least, Sierra thought it was entertaining. It was all going well.

Until the very end.

The prosecutors in the trial, after not being able to prove Stephanie has a physical advantage, start going for anything that could indicate Stephanie is still male in some way. And it eventually ends with them trying to claim that if Stephanie were attracted to women, she’d still retain some elements of her maleness, so she couldn’t participate in the girls’ race. Stephanie counters this by saying she has a boyfriend, and after that she wins the trial.

Comparisons to real life controversies with trans athletes aside, it was an extremely off-putting scene that absolutely did not need to be there. Sure, one of the characters does state that sexual orientation is not relevant to someone’s athletic ability, but the story still insists on having this be the deciding factor in the trial.

No other way around it, Stephanie’s heterosexuality is used as a justification for her being able to compete with girls.

Were the 2000s really that bad for LGBT representation? Even outside of mainstream media?

Seriously, what the hell?

***

“Okay, I didn’t say this before, but I can’t ignore it anymore. No mother and daughter would be that okay with each other’s nudity.” Elise declared. “At least not in America. I’ve never seen it.”

“To be honest, I never thought this scene was very realistic either.” Sierra said back. “I just couldn’t buy that a teenage girl would skinny dip with someone else, even if it was another girl. They definitely wouldn’t skinny dip with their mother, that’s for sure. Maybe the 2000s were a different time, but I still don’t see it happening.”

“Even then, I doubt that much cultural change could happen in just two decades, especially since this story was written after 9/11.” Elise added. “Maybe my mom could inform me about this. If, for some reason, I feel the need to ask her.”

***

The young couple continued to find themselves in awe of the sheer absurdity of the skinny dipping scene. And for Elise, that was all it was. But for Sierra, reading the scene evoked a much deeper feeling.

The skinny dipping scene actually had a lot of significance in relation to Stephanie’s character development. It marked the moment in the story where she realized she wouldn’t want to be male again, even if given the choice. She comes to appreciate her womanhood to the point where she’d turn down a cure for GB if one were ever found. And for the reader, it was a very satisfying moment. The story had been building up to it for ten chapters, and it made for a fantastic pay off.

There was also one rather interesting quote. There’s a part where Stephanie describes a magazine she flipped through as a young boy, which featured two women in a forest in only underwear, admiring a butterfly. When she saw that image, she got the sense that the two women shared something she, as a boy, couldn’t understand. And in her own words: “I remember feeling jealous of them, of whatever… magic they had and I didn’t”.

This was the only line in the story that implies Stephanie may have been transgender all along, and never realized it. It was normal for a person to think about or wonder what being the opposite sex would be like, from time to time, but to become envious of two women sharing something special that a man couldn’t understand was a feeling Sierra believed most young boys just wouldn’t get.

She got it, though.

She had always gotten it, throughout her entire life. The incredible, overwhelming envy of women. Jealous of them simply because they were women and she was not.

There was a time, when she was very young, where the mere suggestion that boys didn’t want to be girls would completely blow her mind. She could just imagine little Sierra saying “What? All boys want to be girls, that’s a fact! It’s something they think about every day. How could they not? Girls are so much nicer and prettier than boys and their clothes look so fun to wear.” She cringed now, but when she was a little kid, that was exactly what her thoughts were. She never voiced them however. Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if she did. Maybe things would have turned out better. Maybe worse. Who knows?

Nowadays, those thoughts reminded her of a simpler time. Recently, her thoughts about wanting to be a woman were more along the lines of “only a sick, perverted, and entitled man like you would want to be a woman. No one will ever see you as a woman, so you shouldn’t even try. You’ll always resemble a man perpetually getting off to a fetish. You should just kill yourself. Permanently end your existence and all the hatred of yourself and your body will be gone. But make sure you do it by self castration, wouldn’t want to be buried with that thing attached to you.”

She really wanted to kill herself, and in a dream maybe she could. But in real life, she was too afraid of being buried with the name “Devin Farrow” carved into the gravestone. There was a small part of her that hoped one day, she’d be able to get over that fear.

Sometimes her feelings were just too overwhelming and she needed to escape from reality, which she was partially doing right now, with “For a Girl”. And the current skinny dipping scene was hitting her especially hard in both a good and bad way.

When looked upon a bit deeper, the scene seemed to feature some kind of religious symbolism. A mother and a daughter swimming together in a nature environment, with grass, trees, and birds. What specific kind of religious symbolism Sierra couldn’t say, but the overall tone strongly pointed toward something religious.

But beyond any possible references to religion, the scene largely represented one thing: the fact that Stephanie could now give birth.

When Stephanie realizes this, she enters a dream-like trance, becoming extremely happy and content with her status. It was the main factor leading to her discovery that she wouldn’t want to be a man again, if she was given the option.

When Sierra reads this, she enters a dream-like trance of her own, imagining herself as Stephanie. The girl who just realized she could give birth. The girl who loves the feeling that knowing one can give birth exudes. The girl who is at peace with her body.

Sierra put herself in Stephanie’s situation, imagining how amazing it would be if all of that happened to her. And since Stephanie was transformed into a girl against her will, there was no shame attached.

But then once she stopped reading, and came back to reality, it was a miserable feeling.

The truth was that Sierra couldn’t give birth. Pregnancy for trans women was still mostly just a theory. Considering how science had been able to do so many incredible things in the past, Sierra didn’t think it was impossible. But not in her lifetime, and that was if global warming didn’t destroy the world before it could be done.

Reading the story was such a great feeling. To read about someone else getting everything you could possibly want was, for Sierra, too thrilling to quantify.

It was a beautiful daydream, showcasing how amazing the brain could make one feel when in bliss.

And it was a harsh reminder of how hard that all plummets when you go back to reality.

Did it have to be this bad?

***

Sierra had a longing expression on her face as they finished the eleventh chapter. The skinny dipping scene had hit her a lot harder than she initially expected. Ending a reading session of a TG story, it had never been this bad before, even during the previous sessions with Elise. What had changed? Was there something wrong with her? Did she need help?

“Hey, are you okay?” Elise asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“Well, I am.” Sierra said a bit harshly.

“Uh-huh.” Elise said sarcastically.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong… let’s just go on and read the next chapter, we’re almost finished with this story.”

“I think we oughta call it quits for today if you’re acting like this.”

Sierra rubbed her face. “Alright, whatever.”

Elise inched closer and put her hands on Sierra’s shoulders.

“Doing the massage again?”

“Of course.” Elise said to her. “You’re tense. It’s what you need.”

“No offense, but this isn’t making me feel any better.”

Elise removed her hands and then kissed Sierra’s lips.

“Did that make you feel better?”

Sierra smiled. “Yeah, it did.”