Twisted Throwback, part 24 of 25

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“I was about your age when I Twisted,” he said. “And it was a mental Twist, like yours... it was a couple of days after the Twist that I realized what my new obsessions and compulsions were. It was the day I went back to school, and I found myself looking at the girls and thinking about what I’d like to do to them... And I was horrified at what I was thinking, but couldn’t stop. I pretended I was sick and insisted on the school nurse calling Dad rather than Mom. And then I asked Dad to take me home and lock me up, and he did.


Twisted Throwback

part 24 of 25

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in his Twisted universe. It's set about a generation later than "Twisted", "Twisted Pink", etc. A somewhat different version was serialized on the morpheuscabinet2 mailing list in January-April 2014.

Thanks to Morpheus, Maggie Finson, D.A.W., Johanna, and JM for beta-reading earlier drafts. Thanks to Grover, Paps Paw, and others who commented on the earlier serial.



The next morning, after breakfast, we all went over to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. We were among the first ones there; Aunt Rhoda’s family had just arrived when we got there, and Uncle Greg arrived with Faith and Todd a few minutes later.

“Ben is at the airport picking up Kerry and Jeff,” Faith told us as she snapped a photo of the people sitting in the living room when she entered. “Their flight was supposed to get in at nine-thirty, but it’s been delayed.”

Uncle Jack introduced Tim to them, and Faith took several pictures of him with various people. I meandered into the kitchen and helped Grandma and Mom for a while to get away from Faith’s camera. Then Renee stuck her head in and said that she, Todd, and Tim were going out in the back yard and did I want to come? It was too cold for Mildred out there today, and I hesitated before I went out with them, thinking maybe I should stay in and keep her company. But I went.

We walked around and showed Tim a few things first; Todd pointed out the spot where he went through his Twist, and you could see how the grass that had grown in there was still a little scraggly after being killed back by the static discharge from his changing body, and I showed him the tree that Dad and Uncle Jack’s treehouse had been in thirty years ago — the branch that was the main support for the treehouse had broken off in a storm when Dad was in college, but Dad and Uncle Jack had pointed it out to me any number of times. After walking around the yard a couple of times Tim asked if we could go into the woods, and I said we’d better wait until after lunch — I hoped it would warm up enough by then that Mildred could join us. We sat in the swing and swung until a couple of blurs of bright color burst out of the back door and down the porch steps.

“Hi, Jerry! Hi, Carson! This is your cousin Tim,” Renee called out. The twins ran over to us and said:

“Hi! That’s Carson.”

“And that’s Jerry.”

“Hi,” Tim said.

Just then Faith came out, camera in hand of course, and I made my excuses and went back into the house while she took pictures of Tim with Jerry and Carson.

I helped Mildred set the tables for lunch. Then Grandma sent me outside to tell the others that lunch was about ready. I evaded Faith’s camera as best I could — she was trying not to take pictures with me in the frame, but sometimes her compulsion got the better of her. “Sorry!,” she’d say, “I’ll crop you out of that one,” or “I’ll delete that one soon.”

It was just a few minutes after we settled down to eat when Aunt Karen’s sons Will and Ryan arrived. They hadn’t seen me or Mildred since our Twists, and wanted to hear about us; we were sitting around the kitchen table with Todd and Renee, while the twins and Tim were sitting around a card table set up in the den, but we heard snatches of conversation from the grownups' table — Mom and Dad, with occasional help from Uncle Jack or Aunt Rhoda, filling them in about how we’d Twisted and what we’d been like since then.

After lunch, I told Mildred I’d step out and see how much it had warmed up, and went out on the porch to look at the thermometer. I turned to go back into the house, and saw that Ryan had just stepped out.

“Oh, hi,” I said, looking up at him — he was the tallest person in our family by a couple of inches, six or eight inches taller than me, and broad-shouldered in proportion.

“Hi,” he said, “...Emily, right?”

“Yes, that’s my new name.”

“You turned out really nice.”

“Thanks.” I felt a little nervous around him, especially there on the porch when nobody else was with us — though there were plenty of people just a few feet away, inside. I didn’t know what his Twist was or what he’d been in prison for — I barely remembered him being in prison, he’d gotten out when I was in kindergarten. And I’d seen less of him than most of my other cousins, who either lived in Trittsville or visited more often than he did.

“Can we talk for a minute? Your father asked me to... he said you’re the first person in the family for several years to get strong compulsions from their Twist.”

“Um, yeah, I guess so. I mean, they don’t bother me much, but I guess they are compulsions, technically.”

“So, tell me about them?” He sat down in one of the rocking chairs, and I took a straight-backed chair, where I could see and be seen from the kitchen window.

“So, um. I have to wear girl clothes. I didn’t realize at first, I just thought I wanted to wear girl clothes — and I do — but then when I went back to the clinic for more trick testing, and they made me put on boy clothes, I just couldn’t do it at first, and when I finally made myself I was trembling and feeling horrible until they let me take them off. And I feel a lot more comfortable in skirts or dresses than in pants, even girly style pants. I can wear jeans when I’m walking in the woods or doing chores or something, but I change into a skirt as soon as I can afterward.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, I’m obsessed with schoolwork. I hear that’s not too uncommon with kids who Twist while studying or doing homework. I’m not sure if that’s going to go away during the holidays, or when I graduate... it seems to be less urgent, a lot easier to resist, if I’m with other people. But when I’m alone it’s usually the first thing I think of doing, and it’s sometimes hard to do other stuff unless I’m caught up with schoolwork.”

“Annoying, I guess, but not too bad. What about this process you’re going through with the psychiatrists and doctors, the transitioning? Does it feel like that’s a compulsion?”

“I’m not sure... It’s what I want. I want it more than anything. I guess it might be a compulsion, but how could I tell, except by trying to stop? And I don’t want to do that.”

“Have you ever felt any... impatience about it? Wanting to hurry up and do it faster than the doctors or the medical bureaucrats think you should, trying to get drugs on the black market for instance?”

I thought about it. “I’ve felt a little frustrated at how slow it’s going, but I don’t know how I’d hurry it up. If the bureaucrats keep dragging their feet and Grandpa’s lawyer friend can’t get them moving fast enough, I guess I might be tempted to do something else to get what I need... but I’m not sure where I’d start.”

“It’s not too much of a compulsion, then. Good. I was a little worried you might be like Wendy, or me... wanting to get rid of certain unwanted parts so badly that you couldn’t wait for a professional surgeon to do it the right way.”

Suddenly that seemed way too plausible. “No... I can wait. Better to get it done right.” But now that he’d suggested the idea, however inadvertently, I knew it would haunt me until I got rid of my male parts — one way or another.

“It would be a lot safer to let the professionals do it,” he said. “I nearly bled to death, and I was only a few hundred yards from a trauma center when I cut mine off.”

“You... what?”

“I was about your age when I Twisted,” he said. “And it was a mental Twist, like yours... it was a couple of days after the Twist that I realized what my new obsessions and compulsions were. It was the day I went back to school, and I found myself looking at the girls and thinking about what I’d like to do to them... And I was horrified at what I was thinking, but couldn’t stop. I pretended I was sick and insisted on the school nurse calling Dad rather than Mom. And then I asked Dad to take me home and lock me up, and he did. Uncle Greg came over and talked to me, and he prescribed some antilibidinals, drugs that decrease or eliminate your sex drive. And that worked for a while, and I was able to go back to school... but over time I developed a tolerance to those drugs, and I felt the compulsions coming back, and I locked myself up again.

“Then Uncle Greg got me into a study for a new experimental drug to control Twist compulsions. It worked pretty well for a lot of people, and it worked for me for a good while — all through my last year of high school and for several years afterward. There were side effects — I couldn’t drive as long as I was on it, and I couldn’t drink, not that I was ever into drinking that much. And what was worst, I couldn’t focus on anything for long, and didn’t care that much about accomplishing anything — Mom and Dad wanted me to go to college, and I tried it just to please them, but I couldn’t be bothered to show up for class most days, and I dropped out after failing most of my courses the first semester. Still, the compulsions were way worse, so I stayed on the drug. I worked various jobs, few of them for longer than six months, but I was earning enough to have my own tiny apartment down in Rome, and keep food on the table, and that was enough for me.

“And then, so slowly that I didn’t realize it, the drug stopped working for me. I still had most of the side-effects, but the compulsions gradually came back. Unlike the antilibidinals, it hadn’t made my sex drive go away; I was still attracted to girls, but I made myself stay away from them because I wasn’t sure the drug would hold up to close contact. So when I started building up a tolerance to it, it wasn’t as obvious as when the antilibidinals stopped working. I was used to looking at girls and never approaching them or talking to them; I was used to having impossible fantasies about asking girls out and going on dates with them and so forth... I didn’t notice at first when those fantasies starting taking a darker turn, and when I started not just looking at girls from a distance, but looking at one particular girl, and spying on her, and stalking her.

“By the time I realized what I was doing, and that I must have built up a tolerance to the drug, it was almost too late. I say ‘almost;’ maybe if I’d talked to somebody, gone home and gotten Dad to lock me up again, as soon as I noticed the problem, I could have avoided what happened next. What I did next. But I was ashamed — I’d already gone a lot farther than ever before, and I didn’t want to tell anybody about that. And I’d been working at the same restaurant long enough and done well enough to get a promotion to assistant manager, and I didn’t want to lose that by running off and locking myself up while the doctors figured out whether I needed a higher dose or a different drug or what. I increased my dose without asking anybody, and that helped with the compulsions, for a while. But it also made me less focused, and I started messing up at work. I thought the increase in dose had helped enough — I was still thinking about the girl, but it seemed easier to avoid following her around. I’d still drop into the coffee shop where she worked every few days, but not every day like before, and I always made myself leave after one cup of coffee.

“Then I ran low on the drug, and I tried to refill it, but the pharmacy said I couldn’t yet. I’d been taking extra, so I’d run out before I was supposed to. The day after I ran out, I went down to the pharmacy to argue with them about it in person; I told them I’d spilled several pills on the bathroom floor and had to throw them away, and they said they were sorry, there was nothing they could do without a doctor’s order. I was walking home from the pharmacy, and I’d about made up my mind to talk to my doctor and tell him what was really going on, when I ran into the girl, and I started following her.

“I followed her to her apartment, and I snuck up behind her just as she unlocked the door, and —”

Just then the back door burst open and Tim, Jerry, and Carson rushed out, said “Hi!” in passing, and continued down the steps into the back yard. They were followed a few moments later by Todd and Renee.

“Hey, we’re going for a walk. Want to come with?” Todd asked.

“Um, not right now maybe... we’re talking. Is Mildred going?”

“No, she wanted to but your mom said it was too cold for her,” Renee said.

“See you guys later.”

When they were gone, Ryan said: “Where was I? I don’t want to go into detail about what I did next, but... I turned myself in the next day. The lawyer Mom and Dad hired wanted me to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but I knew it was my fault for not telling anybody when I realized the drugs weren’t working. And I figured that if they locked me up in a mental hospital like Wendy, I might never get out, whereas I’d probably just get a decade or two in prison. And I had a plan, and I knew I had a better chance with it in prison than in a mental hospital, where I’d be watched more closely, the way they watch Wendy. So I pled guilty.

“The judge sentenced me to ten years. The first few months were bad; even aside from what I’d actually done, the guards and most of the other prisoners just didn’t like Twisted. But eventually I learned my way around, and made a couple of friends, and I got the worst of my tormentors to lay off me. And a while after that, I learned how to make a shiv — though I didn’t want it for the same reason a lot of other prisoners wanted one. I made mine out of a spoon from the cafeteria; it took months of sharpening it a little at a time at night. There was a lot of trial and error; I messed up several spoons before I had one I could use.

“Then one night, a year and a half into my sentence, I castrated myself. I bit down on a rolled-up sock to keep from screaming, and stuffed my pillow between my legs and clamped my thighs together to stanch the bleeding, but my groans woke up my cellmate and he called the guards, and I passed out from loss of blood before they got me to the hospital. I was afraid they’d try to reattach them, so I’d made sure to carve them up good once I got them loose and I was lying there with the pillow between my thighs. I was planning to call for help once I’d done enough damage to be sure they couldn’t reattach them, but my cellmate heard me and called the guards before I could.

“Anyway, I spent a while in the prison hospital — I’m not sure how long — and it was touch and go for a while, but I recovered. They didn’t even try to reattach it once they saw how mangled it was, they just cleaned things up a bit so I could pee without infecting an open wound. It wasn’t like the stuff you’re going to have done, I think, they didn’t try to make it look like a vagina.

“I’d hoped that after I recovered from that, I could ask for a parole hearing and get out early. Now that there was no chance of any repeat offense, you know. But the parole board turned me down, and I had to serve the full ten years. If I’d known that was going to happen, maybe I’d have waited and cut it off when I was about to get out... but maybe not. I had a better chance of surviving it when I was younger and healthier. Better still if I’d had it done professionally, the way you’re going to, but I’m not sure how long it might have taken to get somebody to take the idea seriously.”

“Did it work? Did it make the compulsion go away, I mean, or just make you unable to act on it?”

“Without the male hormones — I don’t think I mentioned before, but I did a lot of damage to my prostate as well, and they took that out too — the compulsion didn’t go away entirely, but it weakened a lot. I went back on the drug, and found that it worked now that the compulsion was weaker. I don’t need as high a dose now, and the lethargy and lack of focus isn’t as bad as it used to be, but I still can’t drive.”

I sat there thinking silently about what he’d said, unsure what lesson I was supposed to take from it. Be glad your compulsions aren’t as bad as that? Think twice before you ask your doctor for anti-compulsion drugs, because the side effects are awful? Don’t do surgery on yourself?

“Thanks,” I finally said. “Did you... do you tell everyone in my generation about this after we go through our Twists?”

“You’re the first one in your generation to get strong compulsions,” he said. “I didn’t think Kerry or Todd needed to know. And Mildred doesn’t have compulsions either, does she?”

“Not that we can tell.”

Ryan and I went back inside; I found Mildred, who was listening to Grandma and Aunt Karen swap stories about their college days in the kitchen, and Ryan joined Grandpa, Uncle Greg, and Dad in the living room. A few minutes later, Aunt Rhoda came into the kitchen and asked me: “Do you want to work on your trick some more?”

“Sure,” I said. We went to one of the guest bedrooms, the one that had been Aunt Rhoda’s room when she was a girl, and looked into the mirror on the closet door. She coached me and I tried to make myself and my reflection look like I had longer hair. I told her what I was going to try, and she made herself look like my twin, but with a white blouse and skirt, and hair down to her waist.

“That was a bit longer than I was planning on,” I said, and laughed.

“How about this?” she asked, unwinding her hair to just past shoulder length.

“That looks nice,” I said.

“Well, try it.”

I did, taking deep slow breaths and concentrating on the image I wanted. Of course I couldn’t see any change, but after about half an hour, Aunt Rhoda clapped her hands once and said: “Oh! There you are!”

“How does it look?”

“Just like me —”

Then Mildred barged in and said: “Hey, Kerry and Jeff are here — Emily?” She glanced back and forth at us and said: “Aunt Rhoda, you know you didn’t match her hair and clothes, right?”

“I’m trying to match her hair,” I said, “or what it looks like at the moment anyway.”

“You had it for a moment, until Mildred startled you I guess,” Aunt Rhoda put in. “Try again later, maybe. Let’s go.”

The other kids had apparently come back from their walk while Aunt Rhoda and I were practicing. Nearly everyone had come crowding into the living room when they heard Kerry and Jeff had arrived; Ben, who’d picked them up at the airport, was standing beside Kerry, and they were greeting everyone.

“Emily?” Kerry asked. “Is that you?” I glanced aside and saw that Aunt Rhoda was back to looking her usual self.

“It’s me,” I said, feeling very self-conscious. “It’s good to see you.”

“You look great!”

“Thanks.”

“And this is Tim,” Uncle Jack said. “You remember him?”

“I haven’t seen him since he was this little,” Kerry said, holding her hands improbably close together.

Tim was staring wide-eyed at Kerry, with her leaf-green skin, and Jeff, with his tusks and his light coat of fur all over his six and a half foot frame. Though it was cold enough today for Mom to forbid Mildred to go outside, he looked warm enough in his fur plus sandals and shorts. “Tim, this is our cousin Kerry and her husband Jeff,” Mildred said. “Kerry is Uncle Greg’s granddaughter; her mom is your dad’s cousin.”

“Right,” Uncle Jack said.

“And she’s my big sister,” Todd said, at which Tim finally said:

“Oh, okay.” All the other stuff apparently hadn’t quite connected, but he’d spent enough time with Todd in the last few hours, more than with Faith or Uncle Greg, that Kerry being Todd’s big sister made more sense to him than all the other connections. “Nice to meet you.”

We all stood around in the living room for a couple more minutes while Kerry and Jeff told us about their trip, and then broke up into smaller clusters drifting off to various rooms for separate conversations, games, or TV shows. Mildred and I stayed with Kerry and Jeff at the other end of the living room from where Ben and Uncle Leland were watching a football game on TV.

“How have you been doing?” Kerry asked Mildred, with a concerned expression. “I heard you’d been expelled from school —”

“Not expelled, just suspended. But then Mom and Dad took me out and started home-schooling me. So far actually it’s mostly Uncle Jack and Grandma helping me with my lessons, but after Uncle Jack goes on the road again it’ll be more Mom and Dad.” Mildred told her about the pranks the other girls had played on her, her pranking them in revenge, and getting suspended.

“That’s not good,” Kerry said. “It’ll be better in Spiral — not perfect, even there the kids with pretty Twists sometimes make fun of the weird kids like us, but definitely better than here.” She turned to me. “How about you? Are the kids in school treating you like they did Mildred?”

“Nowhere near that bad,” I said.

“You’ll find kids like you in Spiral, too,” Jeff said. “When I was in high school there were two or three gender-Twisted kids in every grade, and there are even more at Spiral State, coming from all over.”

“That would be nice,” I said. “I’ve met one girl kind of like me who lives in Lithonia, and Uncle Jack introduced me to a woman who was visiting Atlanta on business... The kids at school aren’t treating me as bad as they did Mildred, and my friends have been pretty cool about it, but still, it might be good to see some new faces and make a fresh start.” It occurred to me that things would be more strained between me and Vic than before; I wanted to stay friends with him, but part of me, just then, wanted to put a couple of thousand miles between us, and come back to see him after I’d gotten my body thoroughly fixed. And Kerry and Jeff made Spiral sound so good.

Mildred and I talked with them a while longer, and later, when we were playing Dominion with Renee and Todd, I overheard Mom talking with Kerry and Jeff in the next room.

As we drove home that night after supper — just Dad, Mom, Mildred and me in Dad’s car; Tim was riding with Uncle Jack in his car — Mom said: “Kerry and Jeff told me there’s a house for sale on their street. They went to see it and showed me the video; it looks like it might suit us.”

“So maybe we can move out there soon?” Mildred asked.

“Perhaps so,” Dad said. “We would like for at least one of us to find a job in Spiral before we commit to moving. But I have been making inquiries, and sending resumes to certain companies in Spiral, and have had some interest... I may be going out for one or more interviews in the next few weeks.”

“I haven’t had any bites yet,” Mom added, “but the kind of work I do, it would be easier to look for work once we’re already there.”

I had mixed feelings about that. Earlier, when I was talking to Kerry and Jeff, moving to Spiral had seemed like such a good idea... but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to stay in Trittsville, and fix things up with Vic. I wanted to make sure we’d stay friends, and really, moving thousands of miles away too soon after that awkward conversation yesterday would be a good way to ensure that we wouldn’t stay friends, that my vague dream of disappearing for a year or two and coming back all finished and fully female was just a dream — that after so long apart we’d find it impossible to interact without remembering that last conversation. And I wanted to get to know Sarah and Morgan and Olive better, and... well. There was more than one way to solve this.

“I’m glad things are working out,” I said. “And I think Mildred would be better off in Spiral. But if we can figure out a way for me to finish out the school year and graduate here, while y’all move to Spiral — maybe I can live with Grandma and Grandpa, or Aunt Rhoda and Uncle Leland for a few months?”

“That’s a good idea,” Mildred said quickly. “I mean, I’ll miss you, but you’d be going off to college in a few months anyway... And you shouldn’t have to go off and leave your friends behind just because some of mine won’t have anything to do with me.”

“Your plan has possibilities,” Dad said. “We will have to approach your grandparents and your aunt and uncle carefully, to ensure that they do not feel undue pressure to consent to an arrangement that may be unsuitable for them. Perhaps we can discuss it tomorrow — but not, I think, in front of others. I will look for some opportunity of speaking with each of them in private, and if tomorrow does not suit, certainly I will make arrangements to speak with them by the end of the week.”

“Thanks,” I said.

We pulled into our driveway and got out. Mom hugged me. “I hope this works out. I was resigned to the idea of you leaving to go to college, and if you need to leave us a few months sooner — I don’t like it, but I can see that it might be for the best.”

I hugged her again, and we cried a little.


We were all up early on Thanksgiving Day; Mildred and I helped Mom cook things to take over to Aunt Karen’s house. After a light breakfast, Dad, Uncle Jack and Tim went over to Aunt Karen’s to help set up the extra chairs and tables, and Mom, Mildred and I followed an hour or so later when we’d finished cooking. We brought our microwave and toaster oven to heat things up at the last minute.

Within half an hour after we got there, there were even more people around than there’d been at Grandma and Grandpa’s house — all of the ones who’d been there yesterday, plus a few more cousins from Atlanta and Nashville who hadn’t gotten into town until late Wednesday, and Uncle Lyman, Aunt Karen’s husband, who’d gotten out of the nursing home for the day. Will and Ryan had gone over to pick him up, and they arrived with him shortly after we did.

Aunt Rhoda and Faith had been up since long before dawn, cooking the turkeys in Aunt Karen’s ovens. Faith was so busy cooking that she didn’t have time to take as many photos as usual, but I still kept my eyes peeled and made myself scarce when I saw her hands moving toward her camera.

Aunt Karen’s kitchen was big, but it was still pretty crowded with so many of us working in it at once. After a while, Mom shooed me and Mildred and Renee out, telling us to set the tables and then go hang out with our cousins.

As we passed through the front parlor looking for them, I saw Dad sitting on the sofa with Grandpa and Grandma, talking with them. We found Jerry, Carson and Tim on the front porch; it had warmed up a bit from the day before, but I still didn’t think Mildred ought to stay out there too long, and after fifteen minutes I suggested we go back inside.

We went upstairs — Aunt Karen doesn’t do stairs anymore, and the second story of the old Harper home place is wonderfully cluttered with neat stuff going back to the mid-twentieth century. Will and Ryan keep a couple of guest rooms cleaned up, for them to stay in when they visit, but then there are several storage rooms, and an attic above them, that we like to poke around in when we visit. Jerry and Carson hadn’t been up there very often, and Tim had never seen it, so we had fun showing them things, including an ancient pre-VR game system that sort of worked if one person held the wires steady while another person played, and board games and card games that had a brief vogue fifty, eighty or a hundred years ago.

Tim was just about getting the hang of Knight of the Living Dead when Will came upstairs and found us. “Neat,” he said. “Haven’t played that since I was your age... I’ll come up with you after dinner and show you some tricks. But it’s time to eat now.”

We didn’t need any more encouragement than that; most of us were downstairs before Will got to the head of the stairs. Aunt Karen was counting people, making sure everyone was there.

“Where’s Oswald and Rhoda?” she asked. “And Leland?”

“I think I saw them going into the back den,” Uncle Jack said. “Want me to go get them?”

“Yes, please.”

When they came back, we all held hands in a long chain zig-zagging through the front parlor, the living room and the kitchen, and Grandpa asked the blessing:

“We thank you, Lord, for this eventful year that’s brought its share of joy and eke of pain. For Jeff and Kerry, newly wed in June, we ask your blessing on their married life, and for their child or children yet to come. For Emily and Mildred, sisters true, who’ve suffered much since going through their Twists, we ask you to increase their fortitude, to build their courage as they build their lives. For Tim, long sundered from his father’s kin, and now at last returned to visit us, we ask that this may not be one rare chance, but just the first of many happy days.”

There was more of it, but that gives you a sample. I prayed with him, making mental notes to look up some of the archaic words on my tablet after dinner (I found out that “eke” used to mean “even” or “also”, for instance), and thanked God privately for Vic, and Lionel, and Sarah and Olive and Morgan — and for Rob, and his dad — and Dr. Underwood, and Dr. Park... but especially for my family. Mine was a hard Twist to deal with in a lot of ways, but it could have been a thousand times worse if my family didn’t love and support me, or if I had no family. I had problems to come, I knew, but with my family and friends, I was sure I could get through them.



The epilogue will follow sometime next week, I hope. My Internet access will be intermittent while I'm traveling for Christmas, and possibly involving firewalls that block BC.

I've just finished a new story, an RPG portal fantasy, about 13,600 words. Send me your email address via PM if you are willing to beta-read the first draft. (I have a couple of others, a stand-alone fantasy novel and a Valentine Divergence novella, that are finished in first draft; but they are really messy and I won't send them to beta-readers until I finish the second drafts.)

I am still open to suggestions about what to write next.

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Comments

Would be nice if the Attorney

Would be nice if the Attorney could actually get Emily into the program where she could be completely changed, but not have to go through the SRS like the old days. You would figure that in her time, the medical field would have figured all that out by now.

They probably did. But Emily

They probably did. But Emily is pretty much a unique case and they really aren't sure what to do about her.

I Don't Believe You Have That Correct...

Janice, I haven't read of any "program where she could be completely changed". The doctor and attorney are trying to get her a side-effect-free drug which would prevent male puberty from continuing, but it's hormone therapy, which won't change her reproductive organs from male to female.

Re the medical research, they've already cured gender dysphoria prenatally, so why would they spend time and money trying to improve a medical procedure no one needs any more? (Leila asks about the possibility of cloning Emily a womb and ovaries, so it's certainly possible that SRS isn't necessarily the same as it is now. Then again, she's only speculating.)

There'd be no money in it, and after a certain length of time, no one's going to go into the field to try to cure themselves, their parents or their siblings. So it's hard to see where any improvements would come from, other than byproducts of more useful lab work.

Eric

the value of support

" it could have been a thousand times worse if my family didn’t love and support me,"

very true.

I'm lucky in that department

DogSig.png

What program?

Eric is correct. I'm not sure where you got the idea that they have some method of perfect sex reassignment and are refusing it to Emily out of sheer orneriness. From chapter 4:
Around fifty years ago, most developed countries added gender dysphoria to the list of things they test for and treat prenatally. The technology for adult sex reassignment had improved a fair bit since Ms. Pendergrass' time, but over the next few years, researchers' attention shifted focus toward prenatal sex reassignment, both neurological and physiological. After that, adult sex reassignment was done by fewer doctors and hospitals every year; no young doctors were going into a field where the supply of new patients had dried up. By now, I'm pretty sure all the surgeons, psychologists and endocrinologists with experience in that area have retired.