None of this ever happened to the bride who decided to be wed in great-grandmother’s wedding dress. The dress was not worn for every family wedding, or even in every generation, since fashion is as fickle as love. However, when a bride-to-be was inspired to wear great-grandmother’s wedding dress, and she opened the old cedar-lined trunk in which it was stored, she would find that the dress had held up remarkably well. She would also discover that it fit her beautifully. This oddity was excused as being proof that physical form and personal taste runs in families.
Nothing else. Surely nothing else.
Stephanie had begun life as Stephen.
He hadn’t meant to become Stephanie, not full-time at least, but one thing had led to another. There had been the job-shortage after the dot-com bust. Stephen had heard that there was a really good post available with a very solid company but that the company was in trouble with the equal opportunity people and planned to hire a woman. They couldn’t say so, of course, not without starting all sorts of reverse discrimination nastiness, but the fix was on.
So Stephanie, still Stephen at that point, had decided that one good fix deserved another. He’d apply for the job representing himself as a woman. Then, if he got an interview or, even better, if he got offered the job, he’d follow through right until the inevitable discovery that he was a man. Then he’d have his new employers in a bind. They could either offer him the job or face an interesting discrimination suit. He bet they’d offer him the job.
Up to this point, Stephen had been indulging in a bit of self-deception, concentrating on how much he needed the job, ignoring why he thought he’d have even a slight chance of being mistaken for a woman. Now, as he opened various closets and dresser drawers and pulled out a wide variety of attire, he allowed himself to face the headiness of his deception. The honest truth was that Stephen had indulged himself by dressing in women’s clothing for the greater part of his life.
Stephen’s first appearance as a girl had been the Halloween when he was eight. There had been a contest for the best disguise, and Stephen had set his heart on winning. He immediately ruled out rubber masks and the like. Too cheesy, too easy. After weighing and discarding numerous options, he fastened on the idea of going as a girl about his own age, a girl dressed up as a princess. That way his costume would have two levels. Everyone would look at him and try to figure out who was the girl dressed as Cinderella. They’d never guess it was a boy dressed as a girl dressed as Cinderella. At the culmination of the evening, he’d reveal himself and win.
Stephen’s dad had died in a car crash when Stephen was two. His mother, who doted on him, thought the idea incredibly clever-so clever that she didn’t think about how strange it was that just at the age when boys are starting to use “girl” as the greatest imaginable insult, her son would want to dress as one. On the night of the party, she helped him into his Cinderella costume and did his make-up.
No one guessed, and Stephen won the grand prize-an enormous jack-o-lantern filled with candy. He also won the nickname “Princess Stephanie.” Stephen supposed the name should have bothered him more, but the truth was, it didn’t.
Right before Christmas that year, he bloodied the nose of a boy who teased him a bit too much. The budding bully, horrified at what “the princess” had done, didn’t tell his parents exactly how he’d gotten blood all over his shirt. He just said “another boy” had punched his nose in a fair fight. His parents, proud of their son’s manliness in refusing to rat out a chum, didn’t push.
After that, no one doubted that Princess Stephanie could stand up for himself. By spring of that school year, the joke was fading, and by the time the class merged with several others in junior high, no one remembered about Stephen’s turn as Princess Stephanie. No one but Stephen. He remembered. More importantly, he remembered how right that Cinderella dress had felt. He remembered how he had enjoyed feeling beautiful and confident. He remembered his pleasure when he had overheard a few of the fathers say, “That little girl is going to be a looker,” and things like that.
His pleasure was so intense that he never confessed it to anyone. Behind the closed doors of his bedroom he would dress up in the costume until he started splitting out the seams. He borrowed some of his mother’s dresses when she was out at work, but no matter how carefully he hung them up, she noticed. Luckily, for Stephen, she thought he’d been after something else stored in that closet and only cautioned him to be more careful.
In junior high, Stephen joined the theater club, but the male parts he played only convinced him that he wasn’t simply interested in dressing up. He skulked in the back of the theater when the director was coaching the girls-most of whom wore a dress about twice a year-how to move in skirts and high heels. If anyone noticed, they either praised him for his devotion to theater arts, or, more usually, figured he had a crush on one of the girls in the cast.
Stephen continued acting through high school, but he dropped it in college, when he would have had to be a theater major to get more than a walk-on role. By then it didn’t matter. He had learned what he needed. He knew the secret tricks of make-up and hairstyling. He’d garnered some tips for dealing with excess hair. He could walk in three inch heels or a long skirt without tripping.
He’d learned something else that would have bothered him more except that just about everyone he knew had some confusion regarding either sex or gender identity-if not both. He’d learned that although he was not attracted to women, he was not attracted to gay men either. He preferred men who liked women, not men who liked men. That made having a love life rather difficult for Stephen, because the only people to whom he was seriously attracted were solidly heterosexual males.
Stephen’s mother died from breast cancer a few months after proudly attending Stephen’s graduation from college, so there was no one to pressure him to date or settle down. He took a job in a city where he knew no one and began to experiment. At work he was Stephen, but a few nights a week he would transform himself into Stephanie, and go out on the town.
He refined his techniques to perfection. Stephen did not attire himself as some flamboyant drag queen but instead transformed himself into the young woman he felt that, but for an accident of nature, he would have been. Stephanie dressed well, but not extravagantly or outrageously. She was demure, maybe even a little old-fashioned, preferring skirts and dresses to more casual clothing. This aura of respectability, combined with the cubicles in most lady’s rooms, meant that Stephen had a lot less trouble with maintaining his masquerade than a woman would have had in a similar situation.
His natural physique made the transition even easier. Where Stephen was skinny and androgynous, with the addition of a little padding, Stephanie was willowy, slim, and wholly feminine. Naturally fair-haired, Stephen’s beard-growth was so light that he could go three days without shaving, though he never did, of course. His chest was flat, but naked of hair, saving him the horrors of waxing such a large area. Happily, pony-tails were not uncommon among men in his profession, so he could wear his hair long enough to give Stephanie plenty to work with.
There were a few close calls, especially during the first year or so, but nothing Stephanie couldn’t handle, especially since he had taken care to study aikido and other of the more defensive martial arts. The occasional man who got aggressive found his prey gracefully slipping away and was usually so embarrassed by his failure to hold on to such a slip of a girl that he would be the last to draw attention to it.