Gil enters the place, and sure enough, it's one of the showgirls from the other night. She's very sultry for lunch hour. Mimosa offers to buy Gil a drink; he declines because he's still on the clock. Oh, come on, Gil. Surely you could have a Shirley Temple? A Virgin Mary? I mean, so long as we're going with the girl-drink theme here, you might as well be gracious and come up with a booze-free alternative. Mimosa purrs, "You still let me lure you away from the lab. Is that because you thought I was a beautiful woman?" She gives him a look that's the very Sontagian definition of camp. Gil looks back, and Mimosa says defiantly, "I'm a beautiful woman now." Gil charms her with, "Beauty is a societal construction." Mimosa points out, "So is gender. People find out you're MTF and they think you're psycho. Michael Caine with a bad wig and a pair of sunglasses stabbing Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill." Or John Lithgow, dressed like Carry Nation in The World According to Garp? (Then again, I found the movie a lot less irritating than the book, in which it's made clear the most tolerable women are either mute [Ellen James] or formerly male [Roberta Muldoon]. A sensitive examination of gender it was not. But I digress.) Mimosa points out, somewhat unnecessarily and with a charming degree of understatement, "DePalma had some issues." Gil declines to comment. Mimosa explains, "You're an outsider -- that's why I trusted you. You get it." She taps his hand lightly, because The Attempted Seduction of Gil Grissom is only slightly less fresh than The Attempted Blowing of Gil Grissom's Mind. Neither are ever successful; watching these people try is just tedious after a while. Mimosa reassures Gil, "This isn't about sex. It's about soul."

Gil finally speaks: "What was it that you wanted to trust me with?" Mimosa gets less arch and more sincere: "I loved Wendy. I was there with her through her whole transition. I was going to be her maid of honor. Do you know how hard it is, for people like us to find love?" Sensing some messy emotion coming up, Gil deflects it by asking Mimosa if she knows what happened. Mimosa says, "She called me, hysterical. Um, I don't know, she kept going on about a videotape or something." Gil presses on the tape -- "Blackmail, pornography?" -- and Mimosa laughs shakily while trying to stanch a sniffle. She says, "Ha! Wendy was such a prude, she'd cover the mirror when she got out of the shower." And yet she was a showgirl. Gil clarifies the dichotomy with, "People confuse your obsession with gender with an obsession with sex." Mimosa tells him, "Imagine being three years old, tormented by the sensation that you had the wrong parts. Your body's like a foreign country, and you're stuck without a passport. All because in your first trimester, your X and Y chromosomes split off and went different directions -- girl brain, boy body." Gil comments, "It's like the [Arthur] Guiterman poem: 'Amoebas at the start -- were not complex; they tore themselves apart -- and started Sex.'" Mimosa quips that Wendy's chromosomes might have been tearing themselves apart in the beginning, but she picked up the slack just fine after that -- "I don't know. Planning a wedding, working a rookie vagina, and about to lose her cherry to a man who doesn't know?" We find out that Wendy brought all of this up in her therapy group, headed by one Dr. Lavalle.