The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2497 by Angharad Copyright© 2014 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

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At age thirteen I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life—find a way to become female. I’d never met a dormouse, the only boys I knew were those who populated the school I attended and the thought of kissing any of those was about as far as one could get from my little girly mind. So the way that Danni seems to be integrating as a girl pleasantly surprises me, she’s relatively relaxed and forms friendships compared to how I was. I was so uptight trying to avoid being beaten up or humiliated, that I didn’t try to make friends. I saw most boys as the enemy who could harm me, so I tended to stay away from them except for school. Though, the music teacher liked my treble voice which didn’t break unlike my contemporaries. It got a little deeper as I grew but only in the way a girl’s voice is usually higher pitched than a woman’s. I had a girl’s speaking voice, no wonder they wanted me to play Lady Macbeth.

At about age thirteen I refused to get my hair cut, which made me look even more feminine. I didn’t get it cut shorter until I went to Sussex University, partly because my dad made me feel guilty about it.

“Look, son, I know you grew your hair to annoy your headmaster and me to some extent, but do you really want to get off on the wrong foot with your university, remember the impression you make there is going to affect references for post graduate degrees or research funds or employers, depending upon what you want to do. Do yourself a favour and get it cut—eh?”

I sulked for a few days then phoned the salon I went to and got them to cut it much shorter. They all thought I was a girl anyway, so my hairdresser cut it in a girl’s short style, which my mother spotted and made me flatten down with water before Dad saw it.

My reputation as of uncertain gender continued at university and I made very few friends unless they wanted something. Usually it was things like borrowing my notes or making microscope slides—that was something I was very good at, slicing up sections of rat’s brains or kidneys or anything else that was needed. I even managed to do one of an amoeba when two of our technicians couldn’t. So I was an accomplished pondlife preserver.

One of the lecturers who was examining the work of several of our group—there were a dozen in our lab group—noted, “It seems your labelling of the slides appears to be of one hand, which looks remarkably like Miss Watts writing, how did that happen?” There were blushes and snorts all round, I did most of the blushing. “Well, I'm waiting for an answer.” As theoretically the slides counted towards a mark for laboratory work and were supposed to be the student’s own, it could have caused problems.

I cleared my throat and squeaked, “Sorry, Dr Butterworth, my writing was smaller than the others, so I offered to do the labelling.” He looked at me for a moment while he weighed up the likelihood of my story being true. Finally he nodded accepting what I said, which was true he didn’t ask if I’d done the rest as well, so I didn’t have to lie. Why he thought I was a girl, I wasn’t sure, perhaps he was playing safe the equality laws were just being enforced regarding difference and diversity.

As I left the lab that day he called me back—I was a bit surprised, I thought he’d gone home and I’d been making a set of slides of various bits of fruit flies for one of the technicians so was late leaving. “Miss Watts, a word if you please.”

I stopped and he beckoned me into the office, at least no one else heard him. “Look, I know you made all those slides.” I was about to protest when he hushed me, “Your work is leagues above the rest of that motley bunch, most of them don’t know a coverslip from a cow’s arse, so I hope they paid you well. I’ll be keeping some of those slides to hold in our collection, they are so good. Just thought I’d let you know.”

“I’ll tell the others, Dr Butterworth, they’ll be thrilled.”

He shook his head, “I’m giving you an A+ for microscopy, did you know that?”

I blushed, “No I didn’t.”

“I’m glad there was something I knew that you didn’t, Miss Watts. You’re only the second student I’ve given that mark in twenty five years.”

“Thank you for telling me.” I blushed and left as quickly as I could. I had something positive to put in my weekly letter to my mum. The fact that she gave me writing paper, envelopes and stamps was a slight hint of what she expected, she also let drop that as girls wrote to their parents more often than boys, she didn’t expect to hear from me very frequently. Hence the fact I wrote every week.

When I sent the letter about my microscopy mark she sent me a card back by return with a cheque for twenty quid. I bought a pair of high heels with it and told her I got new shoes.

I wasn’t a brilliant student like Mitch Batt, he was the cleverest there by miles. He was also gay and Brighton being down the road meant he had lots of fun. Sadly some of it was unprotected and he got hepatitis B and died. He tended to ignore me because he knew I wasn’t gay, even though the rest thought I was, but they weren’t sure if I was a lesbian or a gay man and I was so shy, I wouldn’t talk about it. I wouldn’t even talk to the emerging transgender group. I would attend lectures, do my research or assignments and sleep. I had virtually no social life, so my skills were not good with people as either a boy or a girl.

In my final year I bought the Scott, the yellow one that was destroyed in the accident when Maria Drummond was so nearly killed, as was Daisy. So I did take some time out for cycling, including riding down to Portsmouth to hear a talk by a certain Professor Tom Agnew. I wrote and told him how much I’d enjoyed it—he was talking about conserving woodland species—not his subject at all, and I explained that I’d been studying dormice for the previous year or so and my experience was very different to that which he described. He asked me to go and see him and offered me the place to do my MSc. I didn’t realise that my prof back at Sussex had replied to his query about me, giving me a good reference academically and suggesting I might be gender confused, knowing that Tom’s daughter had been. In fact I only realised this when Tom showed me the letter recently.

No matter how clever we try to be or even think we are, we never know all that’s going on around us. I was clever in an academic sense but pretty naïve about everything else, sometimes verging on stupid due to inexperience. While everyone else used university to experiment with sex, booze and sometimes drugs, I hid myself away and got a first, one of only two they awarded in my year. I’m still shy and retiring, otherwise I’d be making nature films and doing talks and...oops.