“That girl I saw earlier was you?” Tim demanded, looking aghast.

It was a cold, overcast day, alternating between drizzling and pouring rain. Fortunately, it was just a drizzle when I ran across the parking lot from my car to the mall entrance. I got there before Meredith and Sophia, and sat watching people go in and out of the Venn machine for a few minutes before they arrived. Most of it was the usual, old and middle-aged people rejuvenating and plain or overweight people making each other leaner and prettier, plus a couple of catgirls, but there was one guy who became a hive-mind of little furry creatures I couldn’t identify. He seemed to have had some practice before at controlling multiple bodies, because right out of the Venn machine, they acted with perfect coordination to hold up the long train of his girlfriend’s new princess dress. I felt like applauding at the performance.

Just after they left, Meredith and Sophia arrived, and we got in line together.

“What do you want to be this time?” Meredith asked me.

My mind was still on the guy controlling a swarm of furry bodies. I’d heard that it was best to start with two and gradually work your way up, and I wasn’t sure I wanted more than two anyway, so I said, “I think I’d like to try controlling two bodies. If I’m too klutzy, I guess we can get back in line and you can re-venn me with just one, but...”

“Okay. Two of what?”

“Let’s say a human girl body, similar to the one I had back in August? And the second body can be a little dragon that can sit on the shoulder of the girl body when I’m not flying around with it.”

“What scale colors and stuff do you want on the little dragon?” Sophia asked.

“The same I had in my last dragon-girl body back before Christmas — matte purple with a scattering of iridescent scales. And with the same sort of ridge on my head and along my spine, but quadrupedal. What about you?” I asked Meredith.

“I’m going to be a centauroid again. Lower half like a deer today.” She’d done centaur bodies a few times before, although usually not when I was with her. I’d seen photos of her with lower halves like a pony, a jaguar, or an enormous rabbit, standing next to her boyfriend Hunter, who’d venned into a similar centauroid form.

“That’s cool. Same upper half as usual?”

“Yeah.”

“What about you?” I asked Sophia.

“That’ll be a surprise.”

I figured she and Meredith had talked over what body Sophia wanted earlier. They usually did.

A few minutes later, Meredith and Sophia went in the machine, leaving me holding their purses (and mine; I took the opportunity to empty my pockets into it). When they came out, Meredith was unchanged, but Sophia was transparent. Mostly. Her skin and muscles seemed to be nigh-invisible, letting me see her bones, veins and arteries — even some of her internal organs where her Venn-modified top now bared her midriff.

“Wow,” I said.

“I wasn’t sure we could pull this off, but Meredith found a way to make it work,” Sophia said. It was weird watching the insides of her mouth and throat move as she talked.

“Ready?” Meredith said.

“Sure,” I said, and put a gas station receipt in the slot. (A few months earlier, someone had discovered that you didn’t actually have to put money in the slot. Anything that would fit would activate the machine. We should have suspected something when it became obvious that any amount of money would activate the machine, and it never gave change.)

I spent a couple of minutes looking through deer-centaur forms for Meredith before picking one. Meredith, meanwhile, was muttering under her breath and tapping bubbles. “Ready?” she asked.

“Yeah, but I’d probably better go first in case I’m too uncoordinated to tap the button within a minute after you change me.”

“Go ahead.”

So I changed her into the deer-centaur form I’d selected, and she reached out to touch her green button. A moment later, I saw her with double vision. I could feel something small and lightweight resting on my shoulder, and under my feet I could feel both the hard surface of the Venn machine floor and the softer surface of my larger body’s shoulder. I tried closing my eyes for a moment to take in the overloaded sensations of touch and proprioception, then opening the eyes of one body at a time — that didn’t work at first, and I had to try again a couple of times before I reduced the visual input to a manageable level.

Sophia poked her head into the open door to see what was taking me so long. “Nice,” she said. “You need me to help you out? I think the people behind us are getting a little impatient.”

“No hurry,” one of the women in line behind Sophia called out.

“I think I can do this,” I said, while hissing with my little body’s mouth. I turned and walked toward the door, and promptly fell off my own shoulder as I unconsciously tried to do the same with the little body. In a panic, I opened the eyes of my little body and flapped my wings to avoid going plop on the floor, and pulled up again to land on Sophia’s shoulder. “Excuse me,” I said, and then closed that body’s eyes, gripping the fabric of her crop top tightly with my little claws while I carefully walked out of the booth with the larger body.

“Pleased to meet you,” Sophia said. “I’m Sophia, and you are...?”

“Amanda,” I said. I’d been planning on using that name today. “And the little squirt on your shoulder is Melissa,” I added spontaneously, and made my little body gurgle.

Meredith and Sophia stayed with me while I walked back and forth a few times near the Venn machine, getting the hang of separately controlling my larger body while the smaller one lay still. A bit later, I sat still with my larger body and walked back and forth on the bench next to myself, then took off and flew. By the time we were finished with lunch and ready to change back, I was freely flying around the mall in my small body, doing daring aerial maneuvers while my larger body walked around shopping and chatting with my best friends. It was a wonderful visit despite the miserable weather outside.

We returned to the Venn machine to change back. The line was shorter now, and the few people ahead of us had simple changes to make, so it wasn’t long before I revenned Meredith to her usual body and she revenned me to my usual “apparently a boy” body. We were practiced at pulling those forms out of each other’s histories, so we were only in the machine for a few moments.

Then, when we came out of the machine and headed over toward the bench where Sophia was waiting with our purses and shopping bags, I saw someone I knew and froze, hoping he hadn’t seen me. But he had, and was staring at me too. Before I knew it, he was right up in my face, looking furious and betrayed.

“That girl I saw earlier was you?” Tim demanded, looking aghast.

“Hi, Tim,” I said weakly. “Could you please not tell anyone you saw that?”

“Why?” he asked. “I can get why someone would want to change into something cool like a tiger or a pegasus or something — I wouldn’t do it myself, I don’t trust those aliens’ motivation for giving us those things, but I see the temptation. But a girl? What the actual fuck, [deadname]?”

(At this point, as you can guess, [deadname] now represents my deadname. I’ve managed to work around it until now, but...)

I tried to deflect. “I don’t think it’s aliens,” I said; “probably humans from a more advanced timeline.” I could feel a panic attack coming on and it was a struggle not to start hyperventilating, or curl up on the floor sobbing.

“Or from the future,” Meredith put in. “But you need to leave [deadname] alone. What people venn into in their free time is their business. If someone trusts the people who made the machines, and the friend they go into the machine with, there’s no reason they should just change into a couple of ‘respectable’ shapes like a more attractive version of themselves or a cool animal like a tiger. The changes wear off and they’re easily reversible, so there’s no reason not to try a lot of different things. You can be something silly or weird. Or something perfectly normal, like a disabled person or a different skin color or the opposite sex. You might learn something from it.”

Meredith had mentioned during one of our visits that she’d venned into a body with muscular dystrophy for eight hours a while ago, to get an idea of what her boyfriend Hunter used to live with for the first sixteen years of his life. I admired her courage; I could never do that. It seemed like a more effective deflection than mine, anyway, because Tim engaged with her.

“You think that’s what they gave us the machines for? To learn about each other? Best case, they might hope we’ll do that. Probably they just want to learn whether we’re worthy to join the galactic federation by watching what we do with those things. And they’re probably laughing their asses off, or wiggling their cilia off or whatever. Because we’re using it for stupid shit like this.” I winced. “Being a girl is normal, but wanting to change into one?”

“Please don’t,” I gasped, “tell anyone...” I couldn’t muster arguments anymore. Tim’s venom was bringing back all my original guilt and shame from when I’d first realized I wanted to be a girl. I wasn’t a real trans girl like Meredith, I was a pervert who got off on the contrast between my real body and the other ones I tried out... At the same time my rational mind, getting smaller and weaker every moment, was pointing out how stupid this was, but I couldn’t stop thinking it.

Meredith saw how messed up I was getting, and took my arm and guided me toward the bench. Sophia had finally looked up from her book and noticed what was happening, and she jumped up and headed toward us at the same time.

“Even if you think what [deadname] did was wrong,” Meredith said, “do you want to ruin his life?” I would have flinched at the “his” if I hadn’t already been shaking and hyperventilating. But I was grateful to her later for trying not to give away more than Tim already knew. “Because you know how his parents are going to freak out if word gets back to them because you told people at school. Best case, they’ll ground him until he’s eighteen; more likely send him off to a military academy or worse.” Sophia took hold of my other arm and in a few more moments they had me on the bench, where I buried my face in my hands and only half-heard the rest of the conversation.

Early in our email correspondence, I’d told Meredith about how Mom and Dad had talked about how her parents should have sent her to conversion therapy. I was pretty sure that was what she had in mind by “or worse.”

“No skin off my nose if his parents knock some sense into him,” Tim scoffed. “It’s not like we’re friends. Huh — I bet this is why you got so mad about me talking shit about those transgenders? It was because you wanted to be a girl, too. Shit...”

I didn’t hear everything he said, or what Meredith or Sophia said in reply, but everything that got through my fog of panic made it worse. When I finally managed to calm down a little, Tim was gone.

“It’s over,” I said miserably. “I can’t go home after this.”

“You can’t stay with your parents,” Meredith agreed. “But what’s the earliest your parents could find out through the rumor mill after that asshole tells people at school tomorrow?”

“You don’t understand. His parents are friends with mine — not close friends like your parents and mine used to be, but they talk once in a while. Worst case, his mom could call my mom this afternoon and she’d know by the time I get off work.”

“What if you don’t go to work? Go straight home, maybe, tell your parents Subway closed early because of a gas leak or something and you’re going to grab a few things before you meet up with a friend...? Then grab your most important things and meet us somewhere. Back here, or at the library. Do you think that would be safe?”

“...Maybe?”

“She shouldn’t risk it,” Sophia said. “What if her parents want her to do chores at home since she can’t go to her job, and she’s stuck there until that creep’s parents call her parents? And she probably shouldn’t drive in this condition anyway.”

“I have to,” I said. “I’ve got to get away. Venn me into an older woman — bigger, stronger, maybe with dragon scales I can hide under my clothes. I’ll go off to a big city where I can find work under the table, washing dishes or hauling heavy boxes or whatever. Maybe Atlanta or Miami? Until I’m eighteen and I can reclaim my identity without Mom and Dad being able to...” I shuddered, unable to articulate what I feared they’d do.

“You shouldn’t drive there,” Sophia said, looking something up on her phone. “Your car title’s in your parents’ name, right? And they can have the police track you by the license plate. Let us give you a ride to the Greyhound station in Greensboro...”

“No,” Meredith said. “You’d be safer with a big, strong adult body than as a teen girl, but you’d still be in danger. You should come home with us.”

“Our house is going to be one of the first places the police look once her parents report her missing,” Sophia said slowly. “Think about it. There’s police cameras watching every Venn machine. And Tim can tell the police exactly which Venn machine she used, so they’ll get pictures of us from the mall security cameras and show them to her parents and they’ll tell the police who we are. And whatever we venn her into, they’ll know from the camera footage what she looks like, so we can’t claim she’s our cousin who’s come to visit even if Mom and Dad cooperate.”

I sobbed. It was hopeless. “Your parents probably won’t want me there, either,” I said.

“So we have to use another Venn machine,” Meredith said. “One that’s a good distance away so they won’t think of checking its cameras. And maybe lay a decoy trail. We can shuttle her car to the Greyhound station and leave it there, and then go to another Venn machine the police won’t think to check camera footage for.” She pulled out her phone and brought up vennlocator.com. “Then it’s your turn, Sophia. Turn her into a small animate statue like the ones you’ve been making for your science fair project. A little dragon that can hide on my desk in plain sight and not move a muscle — well, they don’t have muscles but you know what I mean — if Mom or Dad come into my room. But she can talk to us, and read or use my laptop when we’re at school or work, and continue her education that way until she’s eighteen.”

“And she won’t need to eat or poop, so it’ll be a lot easier to hide her,” Sophia said. “But the bus station parking lot would have a lot of cameras, too. They might spot her going from her car to ours if the camera coverage is good enough. We should leave the mall separately — visibly going off in different directions when they check the camera footage — and meet up somewhere with few or no cameras for her to get in our car.”

“Yeah, that makes more sense,” Meredith said. She looked at the map on her phone, zooming in here and there. “Okay. Amanda, what about if you park your car here, at this Waffle House in Greensboro, and then walk a little way south and meet us in the Wendy’s parking lot? That way the police will probably figure you left your parents’ highly traceable car and walked to the I-40 ramp to hitch a ride. Or hitched a ride with one of the customers at Waffle House.”

“Um...” I said. I was still a little out of it, but I was glad to have them figuring things out. I could barely think at all. “I think that works? But can you explain it again...?”

They patiently explained, and Sophia added, “Would you be okay with being an animate statue for a while? Until it’s safe for you to have an organic body again?”

It took me a few moments to gather my wits enough to say, “Anything’s better than going home.”

I have scheduled all remaining chapters to appear weekly on Scribblehub for the next year. If something happens to me and I stop posting on TGS and BigCloset, you can finish reading the story on Scribblehub.

Instead of plugging one of my books and briefly mentioning the others, this week I'm doing something I should have done a while ago: talking about the extent to which my older stories (particularly my ebook novels and the stories in my ebook collections) are likely to appeal to my newer readers who discovered me through stories like Pioneers or Wings.

I started writing gender-bender fiction a long time ago, way before I figured out I was non-binary or knew any trans people (well, I knew one egg besides myself who hatched long afterward, but that's beyond the scope of this essay). Thus, despite consciously rebelling against some of the annoying tropes of early Internet TG ficton, I baked a lot of its assumptions into my stories. In particular, what's now called "comphet" -- compulsory heterosexuality, where when a character is transformed to the opposite gender, their orientation changes so they're still straight. (I didn't write any gay characters until years later.)

Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes was the first long novel I finished, back in 2010. And though I like a lot of it still, the social maneuvering and intrigue particularly, the comphet is baked into the worldbuilding, the way the transformation magic works. I tried to fudge that some with its first sequel, When Wasps Make Honey, having different characters affected differently by the same magic, but I couldn't really fix the fundamental problem without being massively inconsistent with the first book. That's the main reason I've never finished the final draft of Like Bees in Springtime, the third book, and I don't know if I ever will.

A Notional Treason is set in the same universe, many years later and thousands of miles away; again, there's a lot I still like about it, but it's got comphet baked into the magic system.

The Bailiff and the Mermaid is in the same setting as The Mural and the Cabinet, about a century earlier, and an immersive fantasy instead of portal fantasy. It doesn't quite have the same problems as the earlier books, but that's mainly because we don't meet the tranformed character until after she's been a mermaid for a while; I don't think her sexual orientation before she became a mermaid is ever mentioned in the story, though it's alluded to in the dramatis personae. I think this one holds up pretty well. It's really two novellas in a trenchcoat, rather than one novel, but there is an ongoing romance plot that links the two courtroom dramas into something moderately unified.

My short story collections are a mixed bag, as you might expect. The Weight of Silence and Other Stories is older, from 2014, and mostly contains stories from years before that. The title story has a trans character, and is one of my favorite stories from that period. The others are mostly free of comphet, except for "The Manumission Game," but that's mostly because I don't think any of them have romance or sex except for "Rodric and Melisande". Some of them do have moderately questionable notions about gender baked in, though.

Unforgotten and Other Stories is newer, from 2019, and includes most of my short fiction from between 2014 and 2019, plus a few older non-gendery stories. I think most of the stories in this one are better about gender than the older ones, with the exception of "Like a Butterfly, from Flower to Flower" which is a prequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, and "Contagion", which is my take on the infectious feminization trope. A lot of the stories have explicitly trans characters; I think the best are probably "Succession" and Listening to Jekyllase.