The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2732 by Angharad Copyright© 2015 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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I related what had happened with Sue and Charlotte and how Trish had taken over in the playground. Simon just snorted. “She’s a case isn’t she?”

“She is so precocious at times I almost feel I’m talking to an adult.”

“Would she be able to do it if she had time?”

“What turn Charlotte into a girl?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know but she’d give it a jolly good try.”

“Well you taught her...”

“A little, Stella and Mima taught her as well, and of course being surrounded by girls in school.”

“I think your input was the most important—you’re her mother and her main life coach, the thing is who taught you, or was it innate?”

“I doubt it was innate, the problem is we soak up so much when we’re children from everyone around us, it’s hard to distinguish what one learns and from where or who.”

“What about the nature element, do transgender children or adults have different brains to normal folk and do women have different brains to men?”

“The new sorts of imaging they’ve got have shown all sorts of things, including the functioning of autistic males and females is very different. There’s also some suggestion that men’s and women’s brains are different, but next week someone will write a paper saying they’re not.

“There was a thing on the web last week suggesting that testosterone reduces the ability to multitask in women, who it suggested were better able to do several things at once than men.”

“I thought some scientist the other week suggested that multitasking was a myth.”

“You see my difficulty.”

“So who taught you to be a girl or to act like one?”

“I learned stuff from my mother about looking after a house, some sewing and knitting, cookery and so on. Stella taught me loads when I transitioned, and Sian and a teacher when I did the Macbeth thing, taught me quite a lot about poise and movement.”

“A teacher?”

“Yeah, she was the wife of our French teacher and she did dance and other things, she taught me how to walk like a woman.”

“Helped by your impressive rump.”

“Thanks for that, Si, if I didn’t have a complex about it before, I do now.”

“You’ve got a beautiful bum.”

“Not sure if I agree with you.”

“I’m an expert on female posteriors and yours is just perfect—like the rest of you, of course.”

“Simon, some days you are so full of the brown stuff...”

“I know, but it makes me grow,” he sniggered.

“Sideways, yeah.”

“Always rely on my wife to bring me back down to earth.”

“I need to go to sleep now, darling.” I turned over on my side and he spooned into the back of me.

I woke up dreaming about Professor Trish’s academy for turning boys into girls and feeling anything but happy about it. I needed a wee and while I sat on the loo I thought about my silly dream. Trish does feel that all boys would be happier if they were girls presumably because she did; which is a view I don’t share.

Despite all these figures they keep publishing which shows that the numbers of people who have some sort of gender problem is about a hundred and fifty percent of the population, I think it pays too much attention to those who like to play at such things in counting them as transgender. It concerns me because I’m a traditionalist, I like two genders and perhaps I’m a bit black and white but I find all these odd variations are—well, odd.

I know that society is evolving in the west and I’m also aware there’s so much oestrogen in the water systems, that strange things are bound to happen. When added to the fact there’s a clinic somewhere that is just waiting for every weirdo to emerge and declare themselves half horse or something and offer surgery to accommodate them. I really do wonder how much of this is driven by availability of services for various things, or has this weird mix of humanity always been there and just been awaiting opportunity to express itself without being laughed at in the street.

Are people who want to dress up in party frocks any worse than those who stand around freezing cold stations collecting train numbers and who know everything about every nut and bolt on the locomotives. Both seem strange to me, but then they might find it bizarre that I’m prepared to wind my way through undergrowth to check nest boxes for dormice and get a huge enjoyment from it.

Sometimes I almost understand where the so called TERFs are coming from in that I went through a lot of trouble to have the most female body I could get because it reflected my need, then had to jump through legal hoops to get the legal reassignment to female. Yet there are people around who appear to have got the same status and who may never have taken a hormone let alone had surgery.

I know it’s a black and white view and in theory everyone should have the right to declare what gender they are and present as such, but it irritates me somewhat. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to stop them just understand them because we have about as much in common as I do with good ol’ muscardinus. Perhaps they think I’m barking, too. Can’t say I care.

Having exercised my remaining brain cell, I washed my hands and returned to bed glad that I had my personal radiator to snuggle into—the nights were getting decidedly colder and it looked very much as our summer, all two days of it, was well and truly over. This has got to be one of the shittiest I can remember with the wettest August since the last wet one—two years ago? At least it’s dry now—mostly—but we have northerly winds which keep temperatures lower than average. I appreciate that weather and climate are different, and this year will probably be the warmest on record for the earth as a whole, but this little rock in the north Atlantic has been colder than usual all bloody summer.

I awoke to find Simon had gone and the news was filled with what we have to do to deal with the refugee crisis. If we have so many who apparently know what to do, how come we have a problem? It strikes me, that no one knows what to do and that all we can do is try to support those who wish to escape the tyranny of Syria and elsewhere. Quite how best to do so is beyond me.

I saw the pictures of the little boy’s body on the beach and it made me cry. He was too young to die as were the thousands like them who have paid vast sums to criminals who send them out to sea in leaking boats knowing they’re unsafe. If they catch them, I hope they punish them appropriately. Thinking of all of these suffering thousands tended to put my own problems into perspective, and I wished every one of them good luck as I went to shower and then get the girls up.