Just how gullible were most people? I had been coming to class as a boy nearly my entire freshman year, but when I decided to start wearing female clothes, and apparently everyone thought I was a grunge-babe who decided to start dressing nicer.   Samantha's Story part 7 By Maid Joy

I mean, I hadn’t told anyone that I was not a boy, and I hadn’t lied about being a girl either. Everyone assumed that they knew what was going on and invariably the verdict was that I was female. It made me wonder about a lot of things.

Granted, I hadn’t had many - ok any - sexual relations with females so there wasn’t anyone who knew for a fact that I was male. No one had seen my "equipment" as it were. But still you would think that someone would wonder why I was in dresses instead of simply accepting the change without a problem.

I had read about groups like Fred Phelps’ "church", if you could call that group of hate mongers that. I knew their attitude toward those who didn’t fit into their idea of the Judeo-Christian mold was not uncommon, and in many cases it was a standard attitude among society. Mom Porter and the Church I was attending were the odd ducks in the pond and I knew it.

Still, I would have expected SOMEONE to have called me on my cross-dressing.

I didn’t know if I wanted to go all the way and get a sex change or not. I did want my own breasts, so with my parent’s health insurance, I went to the doctor and started talking.

I had looked up the process on the Internet. First would be a LOT of counseling with the head shrinks, a process I had started a couple weeks ago. While doing that I was being judged on my suitability to change over to being female full time. None of the steps to reassign myself to being female would be possible without that counseling.

I wished that the counseling I was going through with the Porters could count, so I could skip that step. But clergy weren’t certified by the State to be able to shrink heads.

Finally, after nearly a month of appointments with the psychologist, she recommended that I go to an endocrinologist, or a hormone doctor, so I could get started on female hormones.

The appointment was pretty anti-climactic. I went in, talked to the receptionist, and filled out the paperwork. Blood was drawn, tests conducted and I talked to the doctor again. I was told that starting a regimen of hormones wouldn’t cause a significant problem to my metabolism, since I didn’t have a lot of male hormones in the first place.

I was given a couple shots and I was prescribed maintenance pills that would boost the effects of the shots for the next few months. The liquid was thick and painful and slow to penetrate my thigh.

He explained very clearly that there would be numerous effects of these pills, the primary effect would be that I would lose my sex drive and start to grow breasts. "Secondary sex characteristics", like growing hair on my face and the musky odor in my armpits, would vanish, and I would start to look more feminine.

Some things like my voice couldn’t be changed without surgery or vocal training, but in most ways someone wouldn’t be able to tell I hadn’t been born female.

The doctor told me that one of the shots was a testosterone blocker and the other was an estrogen booster. The pills were equivalent to what a young girl would get hormone-wise in her body as she went through puberty. It would redistribute the fat in my body to my hips and eventually to the layer under my skin, making it softer and more feminine. It would cause me to grow breasts and my hips would widen. Starting on this regimen would mean I was irrevocably beginning a journey to womanhood.

Once I got back to my room, I looked at the pill bottles I had. It was enough for one month with three refills to keep me going for the next four months. I had my next appointment to return and be checked, it was important to make sure I was adjusting to the hormones since some males couldn’t tolerate them and got ill. Taking them consistently would change my physiology permanently.

I wanted that. I took my first dose of pills and smiled when I had swallowed them.

Summer break continued and I didn’t go back home. I didn’t think I was wanted there particularly and I had gotten used to taking care of myself. Mom and Dad usually traveled to Europe during the summer and generally took their time exploring things they had already seen.

I wasn’t interested in travel there, because I had several memories of going to the Tower of Pisa and the Louvre. There are only so many times you can see something like that before it gets boring.

Someone might ask why I live in near poverty here on campus if my parents had the money to travel the world. It’s a good question, one that I’ve asked myself many times before. When I asked my mother that she directed me to my father, and when I asked him that, I got some sort of responsibility lecture. What I took away from that speech was that I needed to learn to be a responsible person, frugal with a dollar. I wasn’t given access to all that I needed or wanted in an attempt to teach me good money management.

I could understand that to a point, but making me live in near starvation wasn’t very fair in my opinion.

I tried not to dwell on where my parents were and simply focus on my life. If I was going to be living this, it behooved me to pay attention to my life and do the best I could with it. Learning my chosen profession was a good first step in removing the burden of me from my parents.

I may not have been fair or Christian in a lot of ways. I don’t think they actively didn’t want me, but there was almost no emotional connection to them. It was like my sisters were more involved in my parent’s life than I was. Being the youngest was a disadvantage in that regard. It didn’t help that my parents didn’t seem to know how to raise a boy. That they were older when I was born probably meant I was a surprise child. In fact my oldest sister was married and had a child before I was born.

I did love my parents, but putting me in the local Pee-Wee football league when I was 5 just wasn’t the right thing to do. I didn’t like sports, but apparently that never seemed to penetrate the world my parents had created for themselves. It might have made a difference in how I saw myself if I had been listened to when I was little.

While Soccer was okay, I really didn’t like team sports. Tennis, running, things were the only person I was competing against was myself, I liked. Games where I had to count on others to do their part would invariably leave me with having put forth all my effort and someone else taking credit for the successes.

I really learned not to trust others to hold their end up. I did learn that given a chance, others would take the glory of accomplishment for themselves and leave me with very little. In defeat, the blame however seemed to be all mine.

When my parents didn’t believe me when I told them of my preferences in my own life, I gave up trying to convince them at all.

School gave me an opportunity to shine for myself. No one else could claim credit for my grades, which were above average if not stellar. In college no one could take credit for my being home and not out partying except me. I was determined to not let the "college lifestyle", where kids were suddenly without their parents and ran wild, ruin my future. I stayed away from parties, alcohol and drugs. Let others waste four years of their lives and their parent’s money, I wasn’t going to.

So I passed up a lot of the social aspects of college, but I managed to remain in the "good" column with my teachers. I wasn’t a pet, and I didn’t suck up to them, but I had my work done, it was done completely, and I worked my backside off to make sure I understood the material.

Toward the end of the Summer Term, I managed to land a part time job working in the Campus Library. I happened to be in there one day and one of the senior girls told the head librarian that she wouldn’t be back next semester. Overhearing this I went to the Librarian and asked if I could apply for her job.

I didn’t expect to be hired on the spot, but apparently I had the "look" of a hard working library assistant. Part time, not even $12 per hour, but I was happy since any money would be more than I had now.

Most of my boy clothes had migrated to far corner of my micro-closet, and when I helped out down at the Church, I could grab another outfit or two thanks to Mom Porter’s generosity. I still had to be careful so that they weren’t short for others that needed those clothes, but it was nice to know that the clothes were there if I really needed them.

Soon the seasons had changed again and it was time for Homecoming. True to my nature I had not been paying much attention to the Football Team, the Cheerleaders, or anything else sports related. I had been working too hard at the Library and at the Church to have time left over for mere sports. I didn’t care about our school’s standings in the Final Four, I didn’t care that we were AAA Ball club or any of those esoteric things. I was more worried about getting the proper sized under things with the correct size dress, or making sure that the Biographies were properly shelved in the Biography section, not the Natural History section as some students seemed to enjoy hiding books they needed for a particular class, ensuring it would be available for their exclusive use.

So it was a shock to me that one of the regulars at the library asked me to a formal event at his Fraternity. Apparently they were planning on having their own dance in protest of the whole Homecoming thing and needed people to attend. He had put out fliers earlier in the week and a few were still on the table, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to be invited to it.

I babbled for a bit. Me, on a date? With a boy? What imp of the perverse had decided that I needed this complication in my life?

But Ben was sweet, shy and kind. He was one of those nerdish boys that you know will run the world through computers and the software, so being nice to the Future Masters of Reality is always a good thing. I didn’t say ‘no’, but I also didn’t accept. I deferred my answer until after I could talk to my "privy counsel". That’s what I had taken to calling those whose advice I treasured, who knew my secrets, but who didn’t really talk to each other much, in other words, Mom and Pastor Porter and my Counselor.

Doctor McNair simply turned the question around on me. She asked if I wanted to go out with him. I think she was attempting to find out if I was attracted to boys yet or not, although I couldn’t be sure.

Honestly, I didn’t know. Ben was cute and sweet, but I wasn’t attracted to him. I couldn’t name on male that I was attracted to in that way. I knew men that I thought were good looking, ones that were cute enough and ones that were nice, but not ones that I could see myself settling down with and having children with. As I thought about the possibility of actually kissing another man, I realized that I really wasn’t attracted to males.

She turned that statement around and asked me if there were any girls I was attracted to. I had to admit that I wasn’t attracted to them either. Last year, before all this started, I would have answered differently, I would have answered that I found Dr. McNair attractive and that I found Tina attractive as well. Now I found myself looking at them and wondering if what they were wearing would look good on me.

For some apparent reason, I had become a neuter.

I realized that I hadn’t wanted to do anything sexual in months, not with a partner and not with myself or with "adult" toys. I tried thinking of things that used to excite me, things that I would dream of in my fantasies. I got no reaction.

I wound up crying.

It took some time to get me calmed down, and when I finally spilled my emotions to her, I told her that I was afraid that I was becoming something that was a freak.

It took her some time, but she finally managed to convince me that it was normal to feel this way while on hormones. They had blocked most of the male hormones which would have made me attracted to females, and there weren’t enough female hormones in my body yet to make me attracted to males. That confusion was the reason I had no desires right now.

I immediately became embarrassed since I forgot that one of the effects of those pills was no sex drive. I apologized for crying all over the place, and told her that I was doing that too much too. She pointed out, again, that it was going to happen as a side effect of the hormones.

I confessed to the doctor that there were many times I felt like a fraud. *I* knew what was between my legs, what I had missing internally, and there were days that I felt that I was lying.

I told her about the invitation to the party. Ben thought I was a girl, and was probably hoping to get lucky at the end of the night. I knew that and I had a bit of an advantage in that I knew what was on a guy’s mind. So I felt bad, lying to him like that.

Then there were people like Tina, who was rapidly becoming my best friend. SHE thought I was a girl and was sharing secrets with me that she would never share with anyone who wasn’t a girl. I felt bad about lying to her too.

Dr. McNair was quiet for some time while she thought. I kept babbling in the silence, trying to fill it up with words. I think I said a lot more than I intended to.

"Samantha, let me ask this; do you feel bad because of a perceived lie, or is it because you don’t know who you are yet? Put another way, if you had grown up as Samantha, would you feel that you were lying to Bob and Tina, even if you had the extra equipment you have, or would you feel that you were Samantha with some extra body parts?"

I had to think about that question for a few minutes. I understood why she asked it while at the same time not knowing how to answer it. "I think I might be okay if I had grown up as Samantha. But I’ll never know that now will I?" I could feel some tears starting to build up again.

She patted me on the hand. "Samantha, you need to think of yourself as a girl. I want you to go out and buy yourself something like a journal. You probably have access to several notebooks from your school supply store, don’t you? Then get some and start writing out a journal like you were always Samantha. Start as far back as you would like to and write events of your life as though you were a girl."

I nodded. I understood what she was suggesting and I could get a composition notebook easily enough. I thanked her for our session and left to go home and start on my new homework.