The next week, we had a follow up appointment with Doctor Spector. He didn’t blink when I entered his exam room in a dress, carrying a purse. As a matter of fact, he looked quite pleased. “You’re making good progress. Please undress.”

I unzipped the dress and hung it up, and then my bra and panties. “I just realized, if I’d still been in male clothes, you would have taken it as a reflection that your treatment wasn’t working.”

He smiled. “Everyone is different. But yes, you’re right. It pleases me to see progress in the therapy.” He walked around me, looking closely. He took my measurements with a tape and consulted his file. He asked me a number of questions about my health and then invited me to get dressed again.

“You need to be able to pass in close company in . . . about two months, is that right?”

“Yes,” my wife answered. “He won’t need to do much talking, and the lights can be dim, but he will be close to people.”

“I see. Hmm. I’m pleased with the progress overall. And you’ve been living as a woman, going out in public for about a week now? Yes. Well, the hormone therapy is dong very well, but it takes time. I have a couple of recommendations to speed things along.” He pointed at my throat. “You’re lucky; you don’t have a very prominent Adam’s Apple. Women have a smooth throat, of course. Unless we reduce yours surgically, sooner or later you will be spotted. And you should have breast implants. The forms make clothes fit better but implants will change the shape of your body and give a more convincing appearance. We can do both procedures on an outpatient basis.”

This was the first time surgery had been discussed, and the idea that he intended it for the near future was upsetting. “Are these . . . reversible?”

“You mean, if you wanted to go back to living as a man?” He seemed to think it was an odd question. “The throat surgery—well, I suppose the cartilage could be moved back; I’ve never had that request even for the patients who want to live as males again. They’ve just lived with a smooth throat. I’ve never hear that it was a problem. As far as the implants, absolutely; they can be taken out even easier than they go in. And if they should interfere with lactation they can come out then. I recommend a B cup at least; when a man transitions, he often does not achieve an adequate breast size without implants, unless large breasts are a family trait.”

“Well, my mother and both my sisters have large breasts. My older sister needed breast reduction.”

“Oh. Well, then, eventually you may want the implants out. But in the short run, they will help.”

I didn’t know what to say. There were just too many surprises in my life for me to have a sense of perspective. I had made a commitment to the maid project, and that involved being able to pass. Watching the changes in my body was exciting. I’d even learned to tolerate the electrolysis. I’d loved these first few days of living as a woman. So why did I hesitate? Because it was a here and now change, not something that would happen gradually. It wasn’t a matter of deciding to stop a slow process. I would wake up with boobs.

“I don’t know, Doctor; it’s just something I hadn’t thought about.”

“Even two years from now, when the hormones have done all they can, there are structural differences that will always be there. Men have bigger hands, differently shaped skulls, narrower pelvic bones—none of those we can change. You’re average height for a man, but you’re a tall woman. Nearly tall enough to draw attention. The trick to passing is, keep the observer from seeing those clues. Distract them with a clearly feminine trait.”

My wife squeezed my hand. “Think about it; you’re serving at a party and one of the guests is looking at you, maybe wondering a bit. And then you bend forward and he sees the tops of your breasts.” She giggled. “He’s not going to think about your hands after that, trust me.”

I took a breath. If I was going to do this, I wanted to do it right. The consequences of being found out were not something I wanted to think about. “Ok, Doc; where do I sign?”

“Oh, you’ll sign consents the day of surgery. But if you’re living as a woman now, there’s something you should do.” He handed me a form from the Department of Transportation. “This will allow you to change the gender on your drivers license and get a new photo ID. If you were pulled over now, you would have a lot of explaining to do. Your appearance and the gender on your license won’t match. I have a form letter for you to take along, saying that you’re my patient and that you’re transitioning . . . And yes, we can change it back. You should fill in your female name; I assume you have one.”

Later that afternoon, I was sitting in a PennDOT office, having my picture taken. The clerk knew exactly why I was there—he had the form, Doctor Spector’s letter, and my old photo license in his hand. And he couldn’t have cared less. He was polite, professional, and didn’t say an unnecessary word. I knew the world had people in it who wouldn’t be so understanding, but I blessed my luck that I hadn’t run into too many so far. Well, there was my old boss, but that was different. I knew that, somehow, the firing was about more than just my taste in underwear. Not that it mattered . . . When I walked out the door, as far as the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was concerned, my name was Suzee Lohr and my gender was female.

Before the week was out, I was waking up in the recovery room of an outpatient surgical center. It was an odd waking up; there was no blurriness or feeling of being half awake; I was fully alert. I realized later that I must have woken up gradually; I just didn’t remember it. There were bandages on my throat and across my chest. My wife was standing over me. “How do you feel?”

My mind was clear, but my throat was dry from the anesthesia. “Not bad. It doesn’t hurt.” I drank some water. “There’s a sort of tightness in my chest.” I looked down but all I could see was a bulge under the sheet. “It really doesn’t feel any different.”

“I’m glad you did this. It’s going to give you confidence.”

“I hope so.”

She laughed. “Oh, you’re going to have a lot of confidence. I asked the surgeon to go C cups instead of B. The B would have barely been enough.”

I felt my chest through the sheet. “They don’t seem that big.”

“They’re bandaged. Wait till you unwrap them. It’ll be like taking the wrappings off the Christmas tree.”

I was discharged a couple of hours later. When we were home she stood me in front of a floor length mirror, unbuttoned my dress and let it fall. Then she removed the bandages. Underneath was the ugliest support bra I’d ever seen, bulging with my new breasts. I ran my fingers over the cups. “Easy now,” she said. “You know what the doctor said. You need to leave them alone for two days. They’ll be plenty of time to play after that.” She helped me to bed and I soon fell asleep.

We didn’t wait two days. In the morning she crawled into bed with me and started playing with my breasts. I reached behind and released the clasp, and I realized how big they were. Each one was a double handful, smooth and warm. I looked down at them and gasped. “My nipples. They’re huge.”

She laughed. “Your nipples are the same as ever. We don’t want to touch those. It’s your aureoles. I had them tattooed to make them bigger.”

I should have been upset about the larger size and the tattooing, but I wasn’t. I was thrilled. And as I recovered over the next few days and began to explore my new body, I appreciated her choices even more. It was too soon to have a feminine curve to my belly and hips. Without clothes, in a B cup, I would have looked like a man with boobs. With a C, they were all you saw. Maybe someone would notice that my hips weren’t quite proportional, but now I had an unquestionably a feminine appearance. And the bigger nipples matched the bigger breasts. It all looked very natural, except that there was no sag in what were supposed to be 33 year old breasts. I didn’t complain.

In one way, having the implants was life changing. Unlike breast forms, they were there all the time; there was no forgetting them. I could no longer go outside as a man. But in other ways, the change was not so great. I had no male clothes so I couldn’t have gone out as a man anyway. And I didn’t want to. The longer I was dressed as a woman the more at ease I was. And within a few weeks my new breasts seemed a natural part of my body. I soaped them in the shower just like all the rest of my body parts. Within a month I began to forget what it had been like having a flat chest.

There was one odd thing. As much as I loved having breasts, and as strongly as my wife had encouraged me, she was not very interested in playing with them. As soon as I recovered we went back to our nightly fisting sessions. She would touch my nipples, but no more than before I had breasts. I asked her about it once. She said she wasn’t gay; she just liked the power. I didn’t complain; I never grew tired of the wonderful sensations as she penetrated me. And the more we did it, the more skilled she became.

From the time of my recovery, I no longer worried about being spotted. If anything, I worried about getting picked up by men who liked the tall girl with short hair and big tits. Neither one happened. And neither the beautician, the drama coach, or the electro cist said a word the next time I was in. They had dealt with meeting me as a man and then seeing me dressed as a woman; showing up as a woman with big breasts was an easy one by comparison.

I remember my first visit to Doctor Spector after the implants. It must have been mid-September. Our first party was ten days away. It was the first time I had gone alone; my wife was tied up at the office, even though the appointment was late in the evening.

I stood in his exam room naked as he walked slowly around me.

“Very good,” he said. “The throat is nice and smooth; the scar is hardly detectable. Your makeup will hide it completely. I’m very happy with how you are starting to get curves at the hips. I’m seeing a good fat distribution on the buttocks and thighs. The arms and slimming nicely, too. You can start eating a little more, now; I’ll give you some new diet instructions. The added weight will go straight to your hips and bust and fill you out. The upper arms and shoulder muscles are wasting away. You’re going to wind up with some very nice shoulders.”

“I can still go back, if I wanted to, right?”

“With modern medicine, there’s nothing that is irreversible. I have had patients who have done the full transition, changed their minds, and reversed.”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking about any more surgery, nothing like that . . . I do like this, but I like the idea of going back. If I wanted to, I mean.”

He sighed. “You want to know that if you took a regiment of high dose estrogen and testosterone blockers for years and then stopped, would you go back to your old appearance exactly? No. The longer you are on the hormones, the less likely that would be. It varies for each patient, but, for one thing, the fat that migrates will stay where it is. There would be a female body shape that would have to be remodeled surgically. For another, even if the testicles began functioning again, you might be sterile. And even if there was sufficient function for an erection, the penis may not be as large. There tends to be shrinkage from disuse.”

“Disuse?”

“The penis needs extra skin to expand. Erections keep it stretched. The skin tightens gradually without erections. And with prolonged last of exposure to testosterone, it will tend to revert to its pre-puberty size.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize . . .”

“Can you go back to being able to pass as a man again? Certainly. But at some point, you wouldn’t be able to function as a man. Are you there now? No. After two years of treatment? Probably.”

“If I stopped in . . . January?”

“To be on the safe side, I wouldn’t want to wait too long after that.”

“Thanks for all your help, Doctor.” When we shook hands I noticed that his hand seemed so large and strong compared to mind, even though he was an old man. “I’ll be in touch in January.”

“If you are going to stop the transition the sooner you get your testicles working, the better.”

“You’ve given me a lot of new things to think about.”

“Oh? I’ve gone over this pretty carefully with your wife; I assumed she had been talking to you.”

“Not as much as you might think, Doctor. See you in January.”

I was going to see the maid thing through; I had a job to do and I was going to do whatever it took to do it well. But when the job was over, things would be different.

At least that’s what I thought.