I Get Older But Just Never Wiser

2023 August 6
Sunday

Persephone could scarcely believe she was going to meet some mysterious transgender drug dealer in this place. Painted bright blue on the outside, The Worlds End was a pub erected at the spot where, umpteen hundred years ago, the city wall had held back the rest of the world. A glance through the door had showed her a place that looked ridiculously traditional—all wood and green felt and weathered stone—and crowded with tourists. She’d expected someplace, well, queerer.

But this was where Basement Dweller had told her to meet her contact. After months of being stalled, it was finally time to make some progress.

She pulled her hair out of the low ponytail Uncle Albert would tolerate, redid it in the high ponytail that she could stand to see in the mirror, took a deep breath to steady her nerves, and stepped into the pub.

As soon as she started looking for her contact, she realized why the woman had picked such an ordinary place to meet: It made her stand out all the more clearly. She was six feet tall, wearing a ruby red dress with a sort of built-in corset that did breathtaking things to her waist. Her left arm was wrapped from shoulder to wrist in tattoos of flowering green vines. Her thick, curly chin-length hair was dyed pitch black, with a dramatically asymmetric cut that left one ear (and its many piercings) visible while covering both the other ear and the corner of her eye. Her nails and lips matched her dress exactly, and the wine in her glass wasn’t far off. Immaculate smoky makeup surrounded startlingly bright blue eyes—eyes that were scanning the room disinterestedly as she leaned back against the bar. Incongruously chunky combat boots completed the ensemble.

She was way overdressed for this place, and she looked like she liked it that way.

Without realizing it, Persephone had been approaching the woman. She turned to face her, showing a little calf through a slit in the dress (this is not the time to be extremely gay, Persephone!), and her mesmerizing eyes took in Persephone’s boymode. The woman’s gaze seemed to linger on her hips for a moment—could she tell that the skinny jeans were a women’s cut?—before meeting her eyes.

This close, Persephone could see the woman’s necklace: a silver heart with inlaid stripes in trans pride colors. Red dress and pride necklace—just what Basement Dweller had told her to look for.

“Persephone?” the woman asked in a slightly husky voice.

She couldn’t help it—her cheeks heated. She’d never been called that name in person before. She glanced around, but nobody seemed to be listening; the barkeep was serving another customer. “I know I don’t look it,” she said.

“Nonsense,” the woman said. “I can see it in your hips. You walk like a woman.”

She blushed more.

“I’m Summer,” she said, offering a hand. Persephone took it, and Summer drew it to her mouth and kissed her knuckles with a slight smirk. There was something funny about her impossibly gentle grip, but Persephone was too busy trying to remember how breathing worked to think too much about that.

“Careful now,” a woman said. “Don’t want to fry her brain before she’s even started.”

Persephone turned, ready to stammer an apology even though she didn’t know what she’d done wrong, but the barkeep’s eyes were on Summer, a sardonic smile on her lips. She was round-cheeked and a little plump in a way that made her look kind, at least when she wasn’t telling off a customer.

Summer dropped Persephone’s hand. “I...right. I’ll, um, grab a booth. Why don’t you get something to drink?” And before Persephone could reply, she was gone.

The barwoman shook her head. “You’d swear the girl thinks she has to make us do it...” She looked to Persephone. “Anyway. What can I getcha?”

“Pint of Guinness, please,” she said reflexively.

She raised an eyebrow. “That what you’re supposed to want, or what you actually want?”

Persephone paused, considering. “Strongbow, then.”

“Attagirl.” She reached for a glass. “Coming right up.”

She’d been correctly gendered? Come to think of it, hadn’t the barwoman been correctly gendering her the whole time? “If I might ask, how did you know that I’m not a man?”

The barwoman smiled as she pulled the tap. “I know Summer. Was a client of hers before I worked here. She doesn’t touch men like she just touched you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like you’re made of spun glass. She can be real firm with her words, mind, but when she puts her hands on a girl like us, it’s like she can barely believe you’re even real. Feels nice, actually.” She set a tall, cold glass on the bar in front of Persephone. “Here ya go.”

“What do I owe you?” Persephone said, reaching for her wallet.

“She owes me a couple quid for nearly breakin’ a baby sapphic at my bar,” the barwoman said. “You owe me a thank-you, and a name if you’ve got one worth tellin’ people.”

“Um…Persephone?” she offered, taking the drink.

The barwoman smiled broadly. “Lovely choice. I’m Molly. Pleasure to meet ya.”

“You too, thanks,” she said, and Molly waved in reply, already turning to the next customer.

As Persephone walked in the direction she’d seen Summer go, there was one question on her mind: What kind of work did Summer do that had her touching Molly like she’d touched her?

 

* * *

 

Stop it, you dumb bitch, Summer thought to herself. Stop sponsoring her!

The moment she’d met Persephone, she’d slipped into sponsor mode. Probing for levers, testing them, figuring out how to steer and shape the girl in front of her. The perfectly alright trans girl who didn’t need fixing.

Her euphoria? A lever. Her fear of being outed? A lever. Her attraction to women? A lever. One lever after another, all visible to her mind.

Even before the basement, levers had been obvious to the boy Summer had once been. He’d never lacked for sex or anything else he wanted—the right lever would pry it out of any woman he met. Until the day he woke up in Cell 3. Nothing he’d tried on the sponsors had worked; Tabby in particular was made of tempered steel. He, on the other hand, was mere flesh and bone, increasingly worn down by the constant invasions of privacy, off-balance from the hormone changes, jittery from the lack of control. And Tabby may not have been as skilled as he was, but she was merciless. She would pry him open at every opportunity, and the fact that he could see her doing it and still couldn’t stop it only made it more effective.

After four months of it, he finally slipped. At the climax of a particularly heated argument about how he was treating the newly-renamed Melissa, Tabby had twisted the knife about some past regret, and the boy she’d been had shouted, “Stop pushing on your bloody levers!”

Intrigued, Tabby had asked him what he meant, and he was angry enough to be honest. “It’s what I did,” he’d said, “what you lot do. You chart out all the cracks in someone’s personality. The vulnerabilities, the sore spots, the weaknesses. Then, when the time is right, you jam a crowbar into the right one and you push. You lever open a yawning hole and you fill it with whatever you want.”

Tabby had looked at him like she’d never truly seen him before, and not long after, he noticed that her manipulations began to change. She used his levers more sparingly, but she thrusted deeper, pulled harder, wrenched him wider. She wasn’t just opening up gaps—she was methodically prying him apart. He’d never done or even imagined anything like it. By March, he was little more than a pile of disconnected pieces on the basement floor; he barely noticed when Tabby wheeled the heap into an operating room, plucked out two of the parts, and discarded them as surplus to requirements. Then she began to assemble a girl from what was left.

It was another year, though, before Summer actually heard a sponsor use the word “lever”. Tabby and Maria had asked for her help in figuring out what made a particularly tricky boy tick, and as they discussed tactics, levers kept coming up. She asked her sponsor about it afterwards, and Tabby told her that the sponsors had always used levers but never had a way to talk about them until boy-Summer described them so lucidly. The word “lever” was Summer’s first contribution to the program—“first of many, I hope”, Tabby had added with a fond smile. The sponsors kept coming to Summer after that, and she started routinely sitting in on sponsor meetings in her third year.

After Summer graduated—late, thanks to the United Kingdom’s habitual mistreatment of trans people—and was finally allowed to read her own file, she’d learned that it was the brief basement conversation about levers that had first made Tabby see a future sponsor in her boy. A talented protégé to follow in her footsteps.

She’d been wrong, of course. In the end, Summer had been a shit sponsor. But three years of working with and as a sponsor had honed her already sharp perception. It was still in her nature and her training to look for levers, especially in a girl in transition, and it was hard to turn off.

The thump of a glass hitting the table pulled her from her reverie. Persephone slid onto the bench opposite her and took a sip from a tall glass of something amber. She set it down with a smile, apparently satisfied with her choice.

“I owe you an apology,” Summer said, picking up her glass and swirling the wine. “That was too forward. Sometimes I…see a”—not a lever, Summer—“button, and just push it without thinking. I’ll try to do better.” There, all the elements of a good apology; Aunt Bea would be proud.

“Alright,” Persephone said. “It was a bit flattering anyway.” She gave Summer a crooked smile.

Persephone, Summer noticed, already had a few nice features: startlingly green eyes behind oval frames, mostly-straight red hair that ran halfway down her back, a slender neck exposed by her ponytail, and—as best she could tell through Persephone’s clothes—a physique that was toned but not bulky. Not to mention cheekbones that were about six months from making other women jealous. Persephone would be pretty even without FFS, and gorgeous with it. Shame about the flat chest, but that’s what she was here to fix, right?

“I was wondering, actually,” Persephone continued. “Molly—” she crooked an eyebrow to ask about that name, and Summer nodded that she knew it, “—mentioned that she was a ‘client’ of yours once. What is it that you do?”

“I’m an electrologist,” Summer told her. “My practice is pretty heavily skewed towards trans women; lots of word-of-mouth.”

“What’s that like?” Persephone asked.

“For the client? Unavoidably painful, to be honest, no matter how much I try to reduce it. For me? It’s pretty satisfying—it’s delicate, tiring work, but I get to help a lot of people and then leave my work at work when the day’s done. You spend a lot of time with trans clients especially, so you make conversation and get to know each other really well. The city is full of folks like Molly who want to say ‘hi’.”

Seemingly subconsciously, Persephone’s hand had reached up to touch her own stubbly cheek.

“Yeah, I’ll do yours too when you’re ready for it,” Summer told her. “You’ll probably need electro; laser clinics need specialized equipment for red hair. But I assume that’s not right now?”

“No,” Persephone said. “I can’t do anything that obvious yet. And besides, I don’t have any way to pay for it.”

Summer smiled at the girl. “Before you start accruing imagined debts to me, let me tell you something about repayment,” she said, sipping from her glass while she thought out what she was going to say.

(Persephone’s eyes quickly widened and then relaxed, and Summer relaxed too. That was the look of someone who had just noticed that most of Summer’s right index finger was missing, but who had decided to just be normal about it.)

“One of the things that makes transition difficult is that everything in this society is tit-for-tat, but many girls have to transition before they have any tit to offer.” Persephone giggled a little, and Summer’s lips quirked in acknowledgement. “That’s not how I did it. I transitioned during an ill-fated attempt at a nursing degree, in a private dormitory for disadvantaged non-men. They would accept trans girls if we were on a gender clinic’s waiting list, so there were a bunch of us there, and some of us formed a sort of loosely-organized mutual aid society. Everyone shared skills and resources—that’s why I trained for electro—and the older girls helped teach the younger ones.”

All this was just as much a part of Summer’s New Personal History as the fake deadname on her fake birth certificate. It was written into every NPH that said a trans girl had passed through Dorley Hall: An idyllic fantasy version of the program that was close enough to the truth that they could talk about many experiences without too much editing. One of the perks of not trying to pass as cis.

“There’s this girl, Tabby, who took me under her wing. She’s my best friend and my chosen sister. One day, I looked in the mirror and I realized I was starting to like what I saw, and I was so grateful that I asked her how I could repay her. And she said, ‘You can’t ever repay me directly, because someone else already did for me what I’m doing for you. Instead, repay me by doing it for the next girl who needs it.’”

Actually, she’d said ‘boy’, but those days were behind Summer. And she’d also used more swear words.

“So when I do something for you that you can’t repay directly, I want you to say ‘thank you’. And then I want you to remember your gratitude and some day, when some other girl in need crosses your path, repay me by helping her. Just like I’m repaying Tabby by helping you.”

Persephone took a moment to take this in. “Okay. I understand,” she said.

Summer nearly insisted she add and agree to that sentence. Instead, she said, “So tell me about this home situation we’re working around.”

“Well, my parents passed when I was thirteen,” Persephone said, waving away Summer’s sympathetic noises, “and my uncle Albert took me in. He’s a rich idiot with no day job, and he wants me to be one, too. I have access to money, but I have to account for my purchases, especially cash—so, like, I can buy a pretty girl drinks at a pub, but I can’t buy estradiol from a DIY supplier. And even if I could, home is pretty intense; there’s domestic staff and they report to him, so there’s no privacy. Gilded cage, basically.”

“I get the picture. Can you get work?”

“Not without his approval, and he’s not giving it. ‘Beneath our dignity’ or some rubbish. He wouldn’t even let me learn anything useful at uni; I read classics because it was the only thing we could agree upon.”

“Okay,” Summer said. “He’s preventing you from building the resources to get out from under his thumb. Typical abuse tactic. But he’s okay with you dating?”

“More than okay,” Persephone said, “with women, anyway. He thinks a real man is a womanizer.”

“Charming. So, here’s the plan: The two of us are going to pretend to date. You’ll take me out and pay for everything with cash—or at least, that’s what it’ll look like. In reality, I’ll pay and you’ll give the cash to me for safekeeping. In a year, you should have enough saved to get on your feet outside of his home.”

“A year?” Penelope asked with a frown. “If I’m taking hormones, won’t he notice before then?”

“Well,” Summer asked, “did you ever come out to your uncle?”

Persephone shook her head. “Wouldn’t try in a million years. When my mum transitioned—”

“Wait, your mum was trans?”

“Yes, a trans man. I was eight when he came out, so he told me to keep calling him ‘mum’. Anyway, Uncle Albert could barely stand the thought of his brother being married to a queer cis woman, but when my mum transitioned and my dad stayed with him, he practically disowned us until the custody battle after my parents passed. He caught me with a dress soon after I moved in, but I cooperated with a year of masculine comportment training and haven’t resisted since, so he thinks he purged my parents’ queerness out of me years ago.”

“Hmm...how old is this prick?” Summer asked idly.

“Like, sixty.”

Out of intake criteria. “Pity. Anyway, here’s the thing: Even if you’re visibly changing, most cis folks will never guess it’s because you’re trans. There’s just a hundred other things they’ll think of first; they’d sooner expect you to be replaced by a robot. So you can almost certainly make it six months without him noticing, and a year is pretty plausible. Just don’t change your clothes or voice for now, and don’t go topless at the pool.”

“As if I ever did,” Persephone muttered.

Summer smirked; typical egg. “Do Sundays work for you?”

“Yes,” Persephone said. “I’m usually out at the pubs anyway.”

“Good. Now, hormone therapy. We’re gonna do the ‘Basement Special’—the same accelerated HRT start we did in my old dorm. You’ll spend about a month on testosterone blockers only; during that time, you want to restrict calories a bit, drop maybe a stone. Then we’ll add estradiol, and you’ll want to gain back that weight in the next couple months. With the right hormones in your body, that’ll start putting body fat in the right places. We can start progesterone any time after four months.”

Persephone frowned. “What’s with the ‘basement’ thing? The girl who sent me to you called herself ‘Basement Dweller’ too.”

Shit. “Inside joke,” Summer said, drinking her wine and thinking very fast. “We’re trying to get our T levels down into the basement, y’know?”

Persephone chuckled. “Right, I get it. So, how do we do all this without me having something around at home?”

“Well, Stephanie—that’s ‘Basement Dweller’ to you,” she added when Persephone looked confused, “—has sources that can get us injectables. Rarely prescribed in the UK, more common abroad. So we’ll block T production with Goserelin, a subcutaneous implant that lasts about a month, and add E with estradiol valerate, which lasts a week or more per dose.” Standard intake cocktail, not that Persephone should ever know that. “That way, the only hormones you have at home will be in your body. Stephanie overnighted me a Goserelin kit; it’s waiting on my kitchen table. I’ll get more of those and the estradiol later this month. So I’ll give you your meds on our little Sunday night dates.”

Persephone blushed at the word “date”, and Summer realized the girl wasn’t just gay—she was nursing an actual crush on her.

Another lever, her brain helpfully pointed out.

She wanted to throttle it.

 

* * *

 

When Persephone had agreed to go back to Summer’s flat, she hadn’t known that it was at the top of about a million stairs.

The location was great: Only a few blocks from the pub, they passed through a narrow walkway into a charming little close and then entered a building whose stone blocks were weathered and mismatched, a hundred shades of gray and yellow and soot. And once they reached the flat, it was small but airy, with high ceilings and big windows with a great view of a cobbled street below.

But the six floors of crooked, mildly claustrophobic stairs between the two were a bit much.

It was dark outside now, so when they first came in, Persephone’s first impression was of tiny fairy lights in the darkness and reflected street lamps painting pale grids of trapezoids on the ceiling. Then Summer hit the switch by the door and the room was bathed in low, warm light from a collection of mismatched lamps. The flat was full of well-used wooden furniture; shelves were nailed to the walls, and plants were balanced on the shelves, and fairy lights were draped around and over and through the plants. Some photographs tucked here and there, too. There was a couch that looked very comfy after the long climb, and a chunky coffee table with an art book of tattooed women. And a kitchen table with some medical stuff on it that she wasn’t quite prepared to look too closely at.

Summer set her purse on an end table by the door. “Tea?” she asked.

“Please,” Persephone answered.

“Milk? Sugar?”

“Two sugars would be lovely,” Persephone replied.

While Summer fussed with the kettle, Persephone occupied herself by looking at the photos. Lots of shots of Summer as a younger woman, including a few where she still looked a little bit in transition, but nothing from her childhood. A black girl a few years older was the most common companion, followed by a redhead with excellent makeup. There were a few shots in a kitchen that somehow looked homey despite being sized to feed dozens. Nobody who looked like blood family; she couldn’t say she was surprised. Something nagged at Persephone for a moment, though, until she finally put her finger on it: There wasn’t a single man in any of the photos.

Probably not bi, then.

After a few moments, Summer was at Persephone’s side offering a steaming mug. She accepted it gratefully, then gestured with it at a photo of Summer between the black girl and the redhead. “Is one of those Tabby?”

“That’s her on the left,” Summer said with a nod. “On the right is my ex, Autumn. We picked our names together.”

Persephone smiled at the photo. “That’s really cute. Okay ex, or nasty ex?”

Summer swirled her tea bag by the string. “We…didn’t feel the same way about each other. No hard feelings; we’re still friends.”

Persephone glanced at her. “I can’t say I’m not a little envious that you transitioned with friends. Doing it in secret is...even more isolating than the rest of my life.”

“Oh, believe me, my way involved plenty of fucked up shit,” Summer replied. “Besides, you have at least one friend, if you want her.” She quirked a smile.

“I’d like that,” Persephone said softly. She sipped her tea to hide her blush; it was sweet and nearly scalding, just how she liked it.

“Great,” Summer said, reaching for her shoulder and turning her towards the kitchen table. It was the softest ghost of a touch, yet Persephone still moved as though it were irresistible. “So now that you’ve got the friend, let’s start the transition.”

Persephone let herself be guided to the table and sat down, then stared at the pile of medical supplies. Oh, yeah. That.

“We’ll just need to draw some blood first, then...” Summer trailed off as she picked up on her mood. “Something wrong?”

“I...” Persephone put her hands in her lap. “I don’t really like needles.”

“That’s okay.” Summer smiled softly and smoothed Persephone’s hair a bit; she blushed hotly. She just could not control herself around this woman! “Drink your tea.”

She did.

Summer went to the kitchen sink. As she washed her hands thoroughly, she asked Persephone, “So, you studied classics, right?”

“Right.”

“Does that mean you’ve read Sappho?”

Persephone’s eyes lit up. “Are you kidding? I learned Aeolic Greek so I could read Sappho!”

Summer giggled, sitting down across from Persephone. “You know, that’s kinda gay, Penny.” She snapped on gloves and, with the gentlest of tugs, pulled Persephone’s arm into position to wipe it with alcohol.

Persephone stammered at the nickname. “I-I guess so. Not that I knew it at the time; I only figured it out in the last year. Working with my uncle made me realize how disgusting being like any man—let alone him—feels to me.”

“I know what you mean,” Summer said, feeling for a vein. “There came a point where I just...couldn’t imagine being that guy anymore. The thought of it made me sick. So I stopped.” With the most careful of thrusts, she broke the skin.

“Ouch!” Persephone blinked and looked down at her arm. “You—you’re doing the blood draw? I didn’t even notice!”

“That was the idea,” Summer said as she started filling the first vial. “Keep you thinking about other things. Drink your tea, sweetie.”

She did. As she set the mug back down, she noticed some writing on the side, and turned it to look. “‘If you don’t have a sister, make one.’ Aw, that’s so sweet!”

“Housewarming gift from Tabby,” Summer said. “Which makes it sweeter, I think.”

Persephone nodded. “Does yours have writing too?”

Summer turned her mug towards her, and Persephone laughed so hard Summer had to grab her arm to steady her. It had a pair of scissors and the words, ‘I can fix him’.

 

* * *

 

By the time the Goserelin was in and they were discussing plans for next week so they could part ways, Summer was fuming at herself.

You just can’t seem to help it, can you? she asked herself. That’s six levers just to draw some blood. Persephone’s crush. Her uni subject. Her lesbianism. Her new name. Her feelings of invalidity. Her empathy. And there’d been more for the Goserelin. All gentle, affirming uses, not painful ones, but she didn’t like using them at all. Why can’t you just make conversation like a normal fucking person?

And now she was going to have to ask Persephone for one of the nastiest levers you can have on any trans woman: Her deadname.

“Hey, Persephone, I hate to ask this, but…what should I call you around cis people?”

She was expecting a frown, a flinch, a bit of cringing, but instead she got a smile. “Oh, most people use my surname anyway,” Persephone said. “Just call me ‘Chase’.”