In the late 1990s a very similar thing happened to me when my lipstick girlfriend and I drove from New York City to Santa Fe, New Mexico and passed though Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. I had gotten a fancy hair cut at a very fancy Manhattan salon and no misgendering in NYC all the way to Tennessee, but the further South we went, the more things go weird. My girlfriend was a former platform model and see never lost her love of looking that way. I don’t know why I ended up with a lipstick. I guess we just hit it off. Before and after my girlfriends have been butch dykes.

As we entered Oklahoma and Texas it was getting really rural and it began to feel “dangerous” that two lesbian were traveling. However, with the quasi-buzz cut of me and the lipstick of her, people began to take us for a cishet couple. Ya, she was cis and it began to feel safer than in Tennessee where we we got clocked as lesbians. And no, there were no PDA’s.

Once we hit Tucumcari, we were re-gendered as dykes all the way to Santa Fe. I talked with other lesbian who had similar experiences where the butchier woman was taken for a boy and it was a matter of safety in those backwater gas stations and truck stops. I laugh now, but two women, Thelma and Louise, or Chris and Tory (Personal Best was more my era), it is a dangerous place.

Glad it turned out all right.