FebulousFebruary 2026: The Old Photograph

day four

Whose choice is it anyway?

I took a towel into the hotel bathroom. You were standing at the sink, leaning, head bowed as if searching for answers. I walked over, gave you the towel and ran my fingers across your cheek, then, playfully down your back. You looked at me, with a strange expression I couldn’t place. “What’s wrong, baby?” I asked, gently.

“What the fuck are you?” The words were spat, accusingly, reproachfully.

I stood, rooted to the spot, dumbfounded. Where the fuck had this come from? I thought back to the night we had just spent together, close, intimate, sweaty, hearts pounding. There was no doubt in your eyes then.

“What the fuck are you?” You repeated the words, slower this time, more menacing.

“What do you mean?” I replied, meekly, knowing full well what you were asking. I had heard this question a thousand times before. I had asked myself the self-same question a thousand times before. I still ask the same question. What the fuck am I? I still go to sleep with the question rolling round my head, like a poison, creeping out of the dark.

“Are you a Transvestite, Transgendered?” Again, the venom was undisguised, the words raw and barbed.

“I’m a woman,” I proffered, almost in a whisper. I wanted to be anywhere but here. I didn’t want to be having this conversation. “I’m a woman,” I repeated, far less sure of myself than I wished I was. Suddenly my nakedness was painful. I felt the usual sense of betrayal as I looked down at myself. I turned to go back to the bedroom.

You turned to face me as I moved and said “Were you born a man?” I couldn’t lie. I had promised myself, when I had the surgery, that I wouldn’t have to lie about who I am anymore.

“Yes, but I am the woman that you see in front of you now.” I tried to brazen it out, but it just sounded weak. I heard the familiar roar of emotion in my ears, which always preceded crying. I felt the tears on my cheeks like acid. The look on your face hurt almost as much as the words, a mixture of bewilderment, accusation and revulsion, telegraphing your inner emotions nearly as effectively as your body language and anything you said.

“You aren’t a woman. You’re a man. You can’t change from one to the other. It just ain’t right. How could you do this to me?”

Wait, what? Do this TO you? I haven’t done anything to you. We have just spent hours fucking. I have given you the most intimate elements of myself to you and you took them enthusiastically, willingly. And now you say that I have wronged you? With this statement, you completely unravel me. You unpick the delicate stitches that I have put in place to hold myself together, each time I am called a name, mis-gendered, looked at askance and whispered about behind my back. Each time my daughter tells me about the bullies at her school, or I hear people scoff about “Trannies”. Each of these stitches holds together a wound, in the hope that it is worth the fight.

I wish I could say this to you. But I can’t.

Weakly, I said that I have done nothing, that I am a woman. I left and went to the bedroom, wrapping myself in a duvet as I got there, shamed by my naked vulnerability.

Then the knife twisted in the wound. I heard you retching, and then vomiting. The thought disgusted you so much that it made you sick. But what thought was that? Was it your conviction that I was still a man, or was it the realisation that you had enjoyed it? Or maybe it was what others would say?

My friends tell me that you’re not worth worrying about. That I should ‘let it go’. Others sympathise and commiserate. “You’re better than this baby”, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about”, “He’s a wanker”.

But this isn’t about just you anymore. You were only ever a one night stand, my chance to exercise my right to express my sexual being as I wish.

No, now you represent that homogenous mass that is masculinity. You represent their pervading, misogynist belief that I have ‘lowered myself to join the ranks of women’ as if women are simply inferior. You represent the uneducated and naïve, or simply bigoted, phalanx that believe they have a right to decide who I am, without listening to me.

And right now, with my heart ripped out and strewn across that hotel bedroom floor, I simply don’t have the strength to fight back. I have fought, all of my life, to understand me and to be understood in return and it leads me to this, to have all my belief and sense of self torn to shreds in front of my eyes. To you I will never be who I believe myself to be, because I simply believe that I am a woman.

Instead, to the likes of you, I will always be, at best, a Trans Woman, a woman with Trans history, a Transsexual. At worst, I will always be a man.

Is my belief enough to make me what I believe?

Kelly Tonks, 42, Folkestone

day three

So much to feel, as Halifax beef eaten and steaked out with Christine and John; who love and have loved, feed my envy of calm post seasonal night out, just two who know and find the places in the years, northern local shapes we share,

and then my familial wonderings of will he want one of his own?

Seed of the generation war,

where dramatist tales will give tears and the pain of how it is to a song lyric;

haunting a starved chance as you just try with what you have and wait for harsh weekend words that speak of flow and ending,

78yrs towards a time we only know will, not when,

and blue shirt checked joy repeats the care

JJ, Brighton

day two

Handover

By Maj (May 2015)

She has left me with her cats

Full instructions on the door

I put out food but they want more,

I slosh fresh water into their bowl,

Toss firewood at the grate

Try to tidy up a bit, the place is in a state

But that is, not for her cats, that.

They rub against me, stretch and purr

Try to make me sit to stroke their fur

But they know they are not,

And never will be,

Her.

day one

Never

Never was a soul more welcome into mine.

Never was a mind so loved,

so curled with the curl of mine.

Never were the burning branches of Autumn as hot

as the ice white, fire beyond fire,

that sprang from you to me.

Never were the membranes and veins of the ants virgin wing

as intricate and new

as your eyelashes.

Never did a hand feel so healed in mine.

Never did a heart roar, as yours did,

with the roar of the thunder in mine.

And never was there a more desolate,

more deserted place,

than the emptied room that we left.

I still

feel the chill

of the draught

from the swing

of the door.

Renée McAlister, Brighton

day twenty eight

The sky is blue, the wind rushes past me, my legs are trembling, my arms ache

The sky is grey, the rain falls on my face, my legs are trembling, my arms ache

It is cold, so cold, movement keeps me warm, shivering legs, aching arms

The forest smells of spice, he looks back and catches my eye.

My horse talks to me, my heart sings.

Chrissie Snell, France

day twenty seven

WALKING THE DOG.

As we walk across the field,

the low winter sun shines slantwise

cutting flashes and sparkles off the flat white snow.

It creaks beneath my feet but beyond that is a deep silence.

I realise I can’t hear the river and as we approach, I see that it has frozen over.

In the shallows every ripple and eddy has been etched in ice, a fantasy of Winter.

My heart is warm with wonder.

Whilst behind  me, the dog kangaroos in and out of the soft drifted snow,

snorting with joy.

Megan Williams, Mid Wales

day twenty six

I want people to admire me with gasps

By Majikle

I want people to admire me with gasps

I want to have a feminine woman who dotes on my every word

I want to give her a hard time that she doesn’t give me enough attention even when she does I want a bed on wheels and a driver and unlimited petrol I want people to gather round the bed and encourage me when I’m having sex to relax and get into it

I want, I want, I want, I want it, I want whatever I want, I want, I want, I want to be a writer of stories that women take to bed with them deep under the covers unable to put the book down because they are so anxious to find out what is going to happen next

I want the picture on the back of the book to make people pass it around and say “have you ever seen a better looking woman” I want to smoke and never get asthma to get stoned every day and have a crowd of women sat outside my truck waiting for me to wake up so they can get me whatever I need.

I want the most beautiful forest to grow just outside my truck overnight so that I can wake up and go walking in it and get lost in the twists and turns of trees and find a little pool where I can swim naked. I want to impress I want to be acclaimed and arse licked. I want to have my friends talking about me when I’m not there and saying how worried or concerned they are over me or how lucid and cleverly I explained something to them that they now understand after years of wanting to. I want to I want to I want to be the centre of attention all the time until I get bored and then for it to all go away I want to be a celebrated I want a helicopter. I bet you think this song is about you But it isn’t its about MEEEEE

day twenty five

Does the heart sing or hum

Stutter or stun

Was it the moment before the kiss

Or that moment when I looked in the mirror

And I was Moving with you

Does the heart sing or sting

Leap and lurch

When your arm was my pillow

And your son brought me Lego

Does the heart sing or shout

When you asked me

While drunk

And sealed it with plastic rings

And you lost yours

But I kept mine on

Does the heart climb out of the dark

To sing again?

For you? No

For whom ?

Indeed ?

Anon, Kent

day twenty four

Hallowe’en 1987

the tartan flash of your scarf as you appeared at the top of the platform at Euston

the beam of your smile as you ran towards me hurtling a trolley to scoop up all my worldy possessions crammed in cardboard boxes

the look of sheer delight across your face as you held my face and we kissed, a long deep kiss, and a warm knowing glow hummed between us as we took the first steps to setting up home together sharing the weight of the wobbly trolley up the sloping platform.

Fiona Thomson, 54, Margate

day twenty three

Friends

Because we do not differentiate between friends and lovers by gender, so we are free to love each other in whatever way we both think we can…and I am proud to call old lovers, friends. Prouder still to call their new loves, wives, and even boyfriends, friends.
And because we have not yet perfected time travel, so the past will always be a place we cannot visit but can hold complete in our hearts… and because the perfect whole of that imperfect past cannot be unravelled, so we do not need to take it out of its box to check, we just know it is a place we have lived together, with joy….

When I got your text,

The one about the accident,

I suddenly thought that you might actually die

and I might lose you

And then I realized – you’re not mine to lose

Not any more

All the people Ive ever truly loved,

and there haven’t been many

I can’t stop loving them…It’s like a genetic fault.

300 miles, 15 years and 100lbs away

We were young, gorgeous, and stupid

now we are old and wise enough to be disgraceful,

still wading out into that river of life

still jumping from stone to stone

still falling in

All the people Ive ever truly loved

I will love them for ever

And when I got your text,

The one about the accident,

Just for a moment I forgot what decade it was,

And what happened to those leather trousers.

Fin McMorran