Graphic created by Patricia Marie Allen.
Background from Pixabay, model photo by Spencer Russell on Upsplash

My name is Rose. I’m about five foot eight, and I’ve got light red hair; pretty close to strawberry blonde. All in all, I'm a pretty normal woman.

I was at the SWEET (South Western Exposition for the Embetterment of Transpeople) convention along with eleven other women named Rose. Each of us had given a nickname so that we could be distinguished between each other. One of the women was dressed like a cowgirl, or at least someone from the country, and seemed very reluctant to say anything. When she insisted she be called Jeff, I figured whatever was eating her must have a terrible case of indigestion. I figured she wanted to be left alone, and was chatting with a woman sitting beside me, when one of the women suggested that we all give our stories of how we came to be called Rose.

I listened to each of them, and when ‘Jeff’ gave her, or rather ‘his’ story, I was horrified. I’m afraid I was rather hard on her for what she had done. She left, immediately after she told the story.

Everyone was quiet for a few moments, until I said quietly, “I shouldn’t have pushed so hard. It must be terrible knowing you’ve only got a few more months.” I sighed, and I’m afraid I missed a bit of the next Rose’s story, as I had to fix my makeup.

I came back to the table, and forced myself to try to pay attention to the story being told. She was a younger girl, named Rose Gold, and I really felt for her. Listening to her, I was finally able to put Jeff and her story out of my mind.

After the next woman spoke, a secret CD who hadn’t planned on dressing as female, it was my turn. “So what’s your story?” someone asked.

“It’s kinda embarrassing. Are you sure you want to hear it?” I asked.

The same woman proclaimed, “Yes! We’re all telling our stories.”

“Well, alright then. First, I should tell you, while my I go by Rosemary. Rose is my first name, and Mary my middle. My mother had a habit of calling me 'Rose Mary' when I got a bit headstrong. Which was often,” I said with a bit of a smile.

“When I heard my middle name before I became Rose, I ran! I knew I was in trouble, but when I heard Rose Mary, it thrilled me, even though I knew I was in trouble. It reminded me that those times as Russel were over. I prefer the name Rosemary now.”

“Anyway, my story:”

“I was probably around five years old when I told my parents that I was a girl. They thought it was cute, and laughed about it. Then, as far as they were concerned that was it.”

“I told them it was really true, but my mom told me, ‘Boys can't be girls, and you're a boy.’”

“I asked why I couldn't be a girl, and my mom said, ‘Girls don't have a wee-wee like you do. They're completely different than boys are.’"

“Well, I was confused and I asked to see that she didn't have a penis,” I’m afraid I giggled at the thought, then said, “She wouldn't show me. I really didn't understand, so I asked about my daddy too. Mom explained that he was a boy, so he had a penis.”

“I really had to think about all these things, but in a couple of weeks, I asked if I could get my penis cut off so I could be a girl.”

The other women laughed, and another Rose asked what my mom said.

I adopted a very bad impersonation of a parent, and said, "Russell, you are a boy and that's all there is to it. That's just the way things are."

I went on; “I was really pissed, but I tried to be a boy. I really did!”

“But you couldn't,” the Rose White, the secret Rose beside me said with finality.

“No. A couple of years later it got so hard I tried to cut the damned thing off!”

Several of the women exclaimed, almost at the same time, “what!?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I got a knife from the kitchen and made one deep cut at the base of it, then I ran into the living room, screaming.” I laughed again. “I got blood everywhere.”

“Mom took me to the ER and it was stitched back together. I tried to get the doctor to cut it off. He wouldn't. He just wondered why I didn't want it. Why did he think I didn't want it? What an idiot.”

“The moron doctor left me alone in the room when he went to talk to my mom. I guess it didn't dawn on him that it was numb. I figured I could cut it off now, cause I couldn't feel anything, but they heard me looking for another knife.”

“I guess my parents finally realized just how important it was to me, cause they started taking me to psychologists, but they just wanted someone who would agree with them. I put up with that for the next three years.”

“My dear father,” I said with sarcasm, “tried sports, models, trains. Anything he could to get me to think I was a boy.” I shook my head. “Needless to say, nothing worked.”

“Finally, when I was ten, they decided to actually talk with me about it instead of at me. My dad said that they’d talked to several doctors and they wanted to try something.”

“ But, I’d had it. I wasn’t going to listen to this crap again. They’d tried and tried, and I was done with my needs being ignored, instead of their wants. I yelled at him that I was Rose, and why couldn’t he understand that!”

“Well, He was mad! He ordered me to sit down and shut up. To hear him out, but I just didn’t care anymore. I looked away and ignored him.” I shook my head again. “We’d finally pissed each other off so much that neither of us was going to budge. What was weird, is that he tried to talk to me calmly. He sighed and told me that he knew that I was Rose, and not Russ.”

“I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right, because he never seemed to care how I thought of myself. Then he actually got tears in his eyes! It freaked me out cause I’d never see or heard him cry before.”

“He surprised me even more by saying, ‘We want to let you live for a year as Rose, but we want to do it safely.’”

Rose Gold asked, “Really? What did safely mean?”

“My thoughts exactly,” I replied. “I figured it was gonna be something like I could be me on weekends and after school, but I had to disguise myself as Russ at school. I told them no way did I want to do that, but Mom told me, no. I could be me all the time, because they were going to homeschool me for my fifth grade year. In a year, they wanted to talk about it, after they saw how well it had worked for me.

“That would be nice excuse for saying it didn’t work, so you were going back to being Russell,” Rose Gold commented.

“That’s what I figured too. I didn’t say anything, though. A year to be me sounded so wonderful! Of course, now, I realize that if I hadn’t stayed Rose, I probably would have been tempted to end it all, rather than just cut off my penis.”

“Which brings me to their other stipulation.The other thing ‘safely’ meant was they didn’t want me to hurt myself anymore. So even though I would have my penis while I was living as myself, I wasn’t to try to remove it. I told them it was gross, and I still wanted to get rid of it.”

I gave a disgusted laugh, and said, “Dad reaffirmed that if I tried again, the deal was off. I figured whatever. As long as I could be myself, I could handle that one hitch. I would just ignore the damned thing.”

“I started wearing the girliest clothes I possibly could, but then I started to realize that the clothes didn’t really make me a girl. Who I was did.”

“From that moment on, I’ve lived as me. I haven’t looked back. When we talked about it a year later, I told them that I’d been the happiest I’ve ever been, and I think they saw it as well. They never tried to turn me back into Russ after that.”

I paused for a moment, remembering something. “The first time I called my father ‘Daddy’, he hugged me with tears in his eyes.”

Several of the women were happy about that, and one said, “Awww.”

“I’d never expected anything like that,” I told her. “They totally changed!”

“One thing that their ‘safely’ did was allow me to go to middle school without people realizing that I used to be Russ. Since I wasn’t in fifth grade with them, they assumed that I had moved away. I acted dumb and the ones I remembered, I pretended I didn’t”

“One though,” I said with a big smile on my face, “I wanted to get to know, and I did. We hit it off real well. His name was Lyle Williams, and we went steady all through middle school and then high school.”

“He didn’t know that I had ever been a boy until then. He found out, because he told me he’d always wanted to be a girl! I asked him how come he dated me and he said he was embarrassed and said it was because he’d tried to be a boy.”

“He was going to break up with me! I thought maybe if I him that I was a trans-girl he’d reconsider, but then he was really mad and he wondered why I hadn’t told him!

“What? So it works only one way?” Rose White, the secret cross-dresser beside me asked.

Laugh out loud, I said, “At first, that’s how it seemed, but as he thought about it, he realized he had done exactly the same thing to me.”

“We didn’t talk for several days, but then he stopped by my house and wanted to.”

“We had both enjoyed kissing each other, and I loved being touched by him, or rather, her. She loved being touched by me just as much and we wondered if we could make it into a lesbian relationship.”

“Her real name was Lily, and we stayed together all through high school.”

“Lily didn’t let anyone but me know about her. Her parents were all for her being a girl, but they didn’t want other people to know. Lyle had never been a jock, and he was picked on because he liked to spend time with girls.”

“So, all through school, we kept up the boyfriend / girlfriend thing, but we were really lesbians.” I giggled at the memory of what our classmates would think if they knew about us. “Several of the girls wondered what I saw in ‘him’. They never caught on that he was actually Lily, a girl, and I sure wasn’t going to tell them. I just said he was the sweetest, gentlest guy a girl could ever wish for.”

“On summer vacations, Lily went with us, and I went with her on her family’s trips. We spent as much time together as we could.”

“Sounds like both your parents were understanding,” Rose Gold said.

“Yeah. Once they saw how much being a girl meant to me.”

“Would you believe that they gave me the most wonderful graduation gift they could? They paid for my surgery!”

“They went from wanting me to stay a boy to paying for my surgery!”

“Lily and I went away to a university in a different state. We wanted her to be herself. She had one last time as Lyle, and that was when we got married.”

“She didn’t wear a wedding dress?” asked Cis, our one born female.

“Not that time, but we went to a city where no one would complain and said our vows again. We celebrate that anniversary. Not the other one.”

“When did she transition?” Cis wondered.

“She hasn’t,” I told her. “We found that there are certain things that we enjoy with her keeping her male parts. It makes things pretty exciting.”

I looked over to the bar at that moment, and saw Lily. She looked stunning. She had dark blonde hair, and was dressed immaculately. I saw that she was getting a couple of drinks, and she brought them over to the table. She gave me a kiss, and handed me one of the drinks. Rose White slid her chair over a bit to make room for her. I don’t think the woman to my left was in any shape to move.

“You know what gardeners say,” I quipped as Lily and I grabbed each others hands, “Lilies and Roses go well together.”

I ended my story there, and listened as the remaining women told their stories. Afterward, Rose McColloch took me to task for my treatment of Jeff. Lily hadn’t been around to hear it, but she gave me a tongue lashing as well. I felt suitably ashamed.

I made my way to the registrar’s desk, and talked to the woman sitting there. I don’t think I would have gotten away with it had Rosie, the leader of our little group had been on duty, but I told her that Rose Carlisle had given me her number and address before she left, because I wanted to check up on her. She was sick, so I was concerned.

The woman looked her up, and I jotted down the number and address.

It took Lily and me a couple of hours to get to her home. We knocked on her door, but nobody answered. Looking around, I thought I saw some movement on top of a hill a ways off.

We hurried toward the place, and found a little cross stuck in the ground. It said Rose & Jeff. My eyes widened as I realized the ramifications of the cross, and I desperately looked around. I didn’t see anything, but Lily did. She called out his name, and we hurried toward him.

He was standing at the edge of a huge hole in the ground and we both knew what he had in mind.

He turned toward us, recognized me, and yelled to get off his property.

I stopped in my tracks and shouted, “Jeff, I’m so sorry. Can I please talk to you?”

He snorted. “Why? So you can point out more of my ‘sins’?”

“No!,” I answered. “I want to help you.” I was slowly approaching him as I talked.

“Stop!” He yelled when I’d gotten to about ten feet from him, Lily right beside me.

“Please let us help,” Lily pleaded.

“I don’t even know who you are!”

“I’m Rosemary’s wife,” she answered.

“Ah. Another moral compass?”

“No, Jeff. Someone who cares for you.”

“Well, your wife has a funny way of showing how much she cares. Are you any better?”

“I spoke without thinking!” I exclaimed. “I don’t think I thought of how much you cared for your sister. You did what you could to take care of her,” I told him.

Tears came to his eyes, as he seemed to think about it.

“Why would you care?” He turned back to the edge and it looked like he was going to jump.

“No!” both of us shouted at once.

A moment later, he took a step backwards and tripped. He ended up falling to a sitting position on the grass. Then he buried his face in his hands and started crying. “I can’t even do this right,” he moaned.

We hurried to him and wrapped our arms around him. Tears came to my eyes as I thought of what he must be going through.

-=#=-

We helped Jeff from then on, staying with him until the end.

I had grown close to him, but Lily seemed to understand him more. It was like they just seemed to know what the other was thinking.

The end came two months after the convention. We had stayed with him, making him comfortable throughout that time. Almost never did we leave him alone, except while he was wrapping up his affairs with a minister, and then an attorney.

Both of us were with him at the end. We were on either side of him as he passed away, each holding a hand.

I’ll never forget watching that last breath. It was heart rending.

He had told us so much about his life. How he’d felt when his sister died. I’d derided him when he told of his actions after her death. The fact was, her death affected him so badly, he couldn’t think straight. He now had two deaths to carry.

Well – he felt as if he had benefited from the death of his parents, so he carried their deaths as well.

We attended the funeral, and there weren’t many people there. He had told us he had no family, and very few friends. While we had known this, it still shocked us both that so few people were present.

It shocked us even more when his attorney told us that he had left a letter and his remaining assets to us.

He had told us both that he invested money before Rose died, for her, in case anything ever happened to him. He had left everything to her when he apparently died, and since he had no friends, he continued to invest.

When we saw the bottom line of what he left us, we were shocked. He had very few friends, and none of them were close. So he had treated the stock market as a hobby. Much of what he had was invested in big name internet companies, as well as environmentally friendly vehicles.

In the letter, he assured us that everything had been his to give. Not Rose’s.

He told us how grateful he was that we helped ease his burdens throughout his remaining time, and that he considered us his ‘family’.

His attorney knew of his background, and reassured us that none of the money had been obtained illegally. His only attempt to obtain anything illegally had been the failed robbery. While Jeff was an accessory to that, and guilty of taking his sister’s identity, the attorney was able to get him acquitted for the killing of the clerk, and cleared of every other charge. I understand that the term ‘time served’ was prevalent in that.

So Jeff died knowing that everything he had done had been revealed and his record was clear, legally. Now he would face God, which was no longer a terrifying prospect for him either.

For our parts, Lily and I had learned so much, and gained so much, and I don’t mean financially. We learned how to give much more than we got. We went into this situation with the only expectation of helping someone who needed it. Instead, we gained a real friend, and we were able to make his remaining days much easier than they ever would have been, otherwise.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Lily judge someone spur of the moment, and I don’t think I ever will again. After this, I can’t.

We plan on using the proceeds from the multiple investments for easing the pain, both physically and emotionally, of people as they enter their last days. Hospice, I suppose is the correct term.

One way or another, our lives will never be the same.