Of course it’d have to be on a “Take your daughter to work day” that we visit this factory. Of course, for me every day is “Take your daughter to work day.” I’m surrounded by small and big girls eager to ask me lots and lots of questions while my mother does what presidential candidates do. I hate having to participate in my mother’s campaigning but that’s Mother for you. Whatever can be useful not only can be used but MUST be used.

Once more I field the same embarrassing questions from the assorted girls, and a fair number of boys in dresses and skirts. Some of them can pass, some can’t. Not like me. Not only do I have the small dainty body for it but I’ve had the best help money can buy to be as feminine as possible.

You’ve got it. I’m the famous/infamous transgender daughter of The Party’s nominated presidential candidate. The one that was trailing badly in the primaries until she revealed she had a transgender daughter. The absurdly exaggerated attacks on transgender children by the other party had created a back-lash that Mother rode on to get the nomination. Of course, that meant I had to be an integral part of the campaign.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m good at it, VERY good. Everyone says so, even Mother. I do baby-kissing. I do being kissed. I’m cute. I give interviews in all kinds of media. I look adorable, I say exactly the right things all the time and come over as the perfect girl any parent would be proud of. Sometimes I feel it’s me that’s running for the title of All-American girl instead of Mother for president.

I can live with that. I can also live with the expensive, yet deceptively simple dresses and skirts I have to wear all the time. What I have a problem with is that the campaign is trying to give the not so subtle impression that I and the son of the vice-presidential candidate have a “thing”. The two perfect teen-age kids making the perfect couple. The all-American boy, the baseball and track and field star and the cutest little all-American transgender girl.

At first I was surprised that the rather conservative vice-presidential candidate (balancing the ticket you know) got along with it. That was before I realized that, like Mother, he’d do ANYTHING to get elected.

Well, anyway Paul is fun, intelligent, generous and just too damned NICE. He’d never stand up for himself. Least of all to his narrowminded, opinionated, authoritarian father. Oh god, if elected let my mother survive her presidency!

So, as I said, Paul could never be my boyfriend.

As I write my umpteenth autograph, I look over at handsome and genuinely nice Paul who’s doing the same thing and think that it’d be a completely different thing if it really was I that was transgender and not she.