Sean walked into the store, nervous about her bicycle. There wasn’t anyplace outside the store to tie it to, so she was left with nervously watching her bike through the window while she stood in a line at least 20 people long. She fretted while the line proceeded slowly toward the counter. Just as she was about 5 people from the front of the line, a guy just walked into the line in front of her. She was completely dumbfounded and had no idea what to say to him, but after about five minutes of nervously eyeing her bike through the window, she decided she had to say something.

When she spoke, however, what came out was very much more combative than what she had intended to say. Instead of the polite things she had intended, what came out was ”Dude, you just jumped the line, Get to the fucking back of the goddamned line like everybodyfucking else”.

The guy who the line jumper had stood next to turned around and proceeded to curse at her. She traded verbal jabs with him for a moment until he threw a verbal jab that was just unforgivable in her mind.

With a sneer on his face, he looked her in the eye and said ”Well what the fuck do you expect when you look like that?”

Now Sean knew that she was taller and more strongly built than the tgirls in most of the stories she had read, but at this point, she was already angry. Anyway, she wasn’t even sure just exactly sure how she had been insulted. Was it racial
(She was the only white looking person in the line), or was it a jab at her feminine self or what exactly? The only thing she knew for sure was that it was a major insult and basically a direct challenge, right there in the aisle.

The only thing she knew to do was to throw it back in his face.

“So, do you wanna throw down right here in the aisle or do wanna take it out back?” Her anger had overwhelmed her common sense and she was in fact ready to tackle the man right there and beat him senseless.

Another part of her mind was busy berating her for being so stupid. What would happen if the cops showed up to arrest her and they found her out. There was no doubt that this would happen. She knew full well that they would put her in with the male population in jail, it had happened before, although that time she had been able to hide her painted toenails.

She was terrified of being raped in jail. The time before, she had managed to hide, even from the cops. Noone ever saw her nails, although she had to figure out a way to braid her hair since they took even a hair band from her. She pretended to be a butch male and apparently pulled it off rather well. Everybody just thought she was a hippie.

Those memories flashed through her mind and she fled the line, leaving the thing she had come to buy. A stupid one dollar bottle of aspirin and she, the tough woman who had been ready to stand down 20 people, fled. She fled with anger , but the truth is, she ran away.

Too many things, too many people, all against her. She did the same thing she had done all her life and ran away. Shame washed over her. Shame that she could not, in the end, stand up for herself.

The anger fed the shame and hot tears blurred her vision as she straddled her bike and ran away, recklessly dashing in front of cars in the parking lot. She got very drunk that evening and her husband did not understand. How could she expect him to?

He was comfortable in his gender identity, it was hers that threatened him. He had no idea that his insistence on calling her a male and trying to make her act and look like one was slowly killing her, even though she had told him time and again. She had tried so hard to tell him, but he just didn’t seem to get it. Even tearful late night sessions just couldn’t make him understand that she had to be herself.

He didn’t understand and the truth is, neither did she. Here she was, a six foot tall girl who could be mistaken for a woman until her panties were out of the way and she hated the evidence of manhood that removal made obvious. Everything was just wrong

There was an overriding truth that made up for everything, the years trying to pretend she was a he, everything.

The truth was that no matter what the gender roles, despite all the extraneous crap, he treated her like his woman in bed and had since the first moment they met. Protest though he might, that was the truth. She fell asleep that night snuggling into his welcoming arms and feeling his half asleep hands cup her breast and twiddling her nipples in his sleep.

Nothing could be finer. When she awoke to his hardness pressing against her back, all of her self doubt flew out the window and she knew, for just a few glorious moments, that she was in fact his woman. She knew that he loved her and that was enough, enough for a lifetime.