I wasn’t sure which times were changing if his instant response was to walk away. Before my essentially telling him that I’d once had a penis, he saw me as sexual, sexy, desirable, kink-able and as someone to get intimate with. Had my once having had a penis meant that in his eyes I was no longer ‘feminine’? Did the shadow of a penis override any sense of being now? In truth I questioned my own sense of self. Did I really understand how the world perceives me? A stream of horrible and reductive questions about passing, blending and my own reality sprang into my mind as my pussy dried up like a river in Sudan. His comment "the benefit of the doubt’" reduced me to a visceral fragility that undermined my being the woman who upped and moved to the remote Spanish mountains or the woman who took on the inequality of the education system and made real gains. I became packed to the rafters with bricks of dysphoria that I felt I’d dismantled years ago. I became ‘out of body flimsy’ again.