Finally, I was getting to attend The Gathering again. It'd been canceled due to COVID, twice. First event: an off-site picnic. I had barely arrived in time for this, so once I checked into my room, I gathered just what I wanted to take to the picnic in my backpack and headed out to the buses. I was alone, and I ended up sitting next to this girl named Elizabeth. It was warm; we were all wearing T-shirts and shorts. We talked a little. It was her first time, and as somebody who'd been to many of these, I told her about some of the stuff from years past.

When the bus trip ended, I had a specific destination in mind before I actually entered the picnic, so I said my goodbye to Elizabeth and I set off walking there.

I got a couple blocks, and I discovered I was walking on a very hot sidewalk, barefoot. "Why am I barefoot?" I thought. I didn't remember taking off my shoes. I looked in my backpack, and I found shoes. Not my shoes, a girl's sandals.

It was not even my backpack, I realized at that moment. There was a phone embedded in some carrier meant specifically for this in the flap at the top, and just at that moment a text came across: WTF? Jack, did you take the wrong bag? Where can we meet up?

At this point, I realized even more was wrong. Though they were large, the bare feet I was looking at were not my feet. The body, though similar in size to the one I am used to, wasn't mine either. I was in Elizabeth's body! I texted her back: Let's meet back by the bus.

I realized now that if I was in her body, the sandals should fit. I put them on and started the journey back. It was not hard for me to spot my bearded face when I got back there.

"Well I know how I picked up your bag, at least. I'm in your body!" I said, with the mouth I now possessed, Elizabeth's mouth, in her voice.

"Yeah, I noticed," she replied in my voice. "How is this even possible?"

I shrugged and said, "I don't know what we are going to do now, but we'd better stick together."

"I went to get my phone to take pictures and I realized it wasn't there. Then I realized none of the stuff was mine, but I found your phones. Why do you have two phones?"

"It's for Pokémon GO. I'm playing my account and a friend's, to pick up Pokémon here we can trade later. You get a bonus for trading Pokémon caught a long way apart."

"Well I saw that much. You left the game on."

A short distance away, I saw Mike and his long-time girlfriend Gina arguing. I headed that way and Elizabeth followed.

Once I got up to them, I asked, "Did it happen to you, too?"

"Did what happen?" Gina said.

"Well, that's Elizabeth," I said, pointing to my body, "And I'm Jack."

"Then yes," Mike's body said. "I'm Gina, and that's Mike."

We ran into some other people who were also changed. Pretty soon, we figured out that every man who sat next to a woman on the bus changed bodies with her. Where two men or two women sat together, they didn't change.

"So what are we going to do now?" a man I didn't know asked. Or the woman who was currently in his body did, anyway.

The woman next to him responded, "Maybe when we go back on the bus, it'll change us back, the way it changed us coming out here."

Another woman said, "That's all we can hope for. But in any case, stick with your seatmate while we are out here, and by all means sit next to your body on the way back!"

Everybody, of the 30 or so of us who changed, shouted various words of agreement.

At that point, people were unloading from the second bus, and we caught them up on what had happened. A similar number of them were swapped.

While we were doing this, we got word that our pizza was late, and would be here in 30 minutes or so. After that, the group started to disperse in pairs, and I led Elizabeth slowly in the direction I was originally walking.

"Where was it, exactly, that you were originally headed?"

"Submitting a nomination," I replied.

"Nomination for what?"

"For a new Pokéstop. It's a place that appears on the in-game map corresponding to something in the real world. You wanna see?"

"In a place you've never been, and where you won't likely return after a few days, you're going to submit something you haven't seen?"

Elizabeth knew from our conversation earlier that I only traveled a few times a year, really only to my family and events like this where I got to be with friends with common interests, and The Gathering was in a different city every year.

"Yeah. It's one of the ways I play the game. It's possible to peek at the map remotely and see which landmarks (which are interpreted pretty broadly) are in the game and which aren't by way of another game that shares the same location database. So I did that in advance, as well as virtually wandering around, using Google Street View, near the hotel, near this picnic, and other places I might travel to look for things that could be in the game but aren't. I might be duplicating work - I can't see what somebody else may have already submitted but hasn't been decided on yet - but I don't really lose anything except temporarily losing the right to submit one nomination, and they give us more of those than I can really use, anyway."

"OK, I think it's a bit weird you planned out something like this but I'll go with you to look at your landmark."

After a walk of about 4 blocks, we arrived at the thing I wanted to submit - a sculpture that was installed on a traffic island. I grabbed my two phones from my bag - which Elizabeth was still carrying, as we had never swapped bags - and since she was curious, I explained, in simplified form, what I was doing.

"This app that displays the map from the related game, overlaid with geographic data. You can only get one Pokéstop in each of these cells, but when something is close to the cell boundary, like this is, you can choose a placement on either side. This cell already has a stop, so I'm submitting on this side of the line."

"I see. And I guess this is a sort of landmark. You did say they accepted a broad variety of landmarks."

"Yeah, any public art qualifies, even graffiti if they drew a picture instead of just tagging their name, as long as it's not in one of the areas where no stops are allowed. It can't be on single-family residential property, on the grounds of a K-12 school (colleges are OK), or blocking emergency services like at a fire station or the emergency room of a hospital. And it has to have pedestrian access - but the crosswalks leading to this traffic island on either side qualify."

I opened up Pokémon GO and started the process of submitting the nomination. I showed her how the map in the first app was the same satellite map displayed in the game when I was picking the location. The nomination map did not show the cells, but I could use even the most insignificant landmarks like trees and lampposts to help me confirm I was putting it in one cell or the other. At one point in the process I took a picture of the art, and then I needed to take a picture of the surrounding area. For that part, I crossed out of the street using one of the crosswalks.

"This second photo, the supporting photo, doesn't go into the game, but is used during the nomination review process. For something that is literally in the middle of the road, it's important to show it has pedestrian access, so I am showing the crosswalk leading up to it. The reviewers will be able to see that in Google satellite maps and Street View, but I'll point it out anyway. Other times, it may be verifying the location that is more critical, such as if something is newer than the Street View photos. In that case, I will want the support picture to show the nominated object with other clearly identifiable features that are in Street View."

I finished up and submitted the nomination.

"Done. And that was the only one I wanted to submit in this area. I'm going to keep these phones out and play the regular game, catching stuff, but we can go back to the picnic or anywhere you wanted to go now."

"Well, I don't have anything, but there is one thing that you need to do."

"Oh? What?"

I started looking around my body - Elizabeth's body that I now occupied - in case I'd ripped my clothes or stepped in dog doo or something.

"You need to change your tampon. I would have done it before coming out here, but I was rushing to get here for the start of the picnic, only to find they weren't actually ready to start yet, and then this happens."

I blushed for a moment - the redness might not have been very visible on my hairy face, but Elizabeth's face had no such hair to hide it and I am sure she saw it.

"Oh, of course. It's pretty easy, right?"

"Yeah. We need to find some place around here with a public restroom, but there should be plenty, and probably something at the park. Even a porta-potty will work."

As I got us started walking toward the park, she retrieved her clutch purse from the backpack I was carrying, removed a tampon from it, and then put the purse back. She ripped open one end of the wrapper to show me the tampon as she briefly explained how it was used.

"OK, thanks for the emergency girl lesson. I've seen tampons before. I think I basically understood how that all would work, but it's useful to have it all spelled out now that I have found myself unexpectedly in my period for the first time in my life."

"Oh, and if you need to pee or poop, it's easiest to do while you don't have the tampon in. If you do have to use the restroom while you have the tampon in and you don't want to change it, you need to keep the string from getting messy. You can either hold it out of the way, or you can push it just barely inside you and pull it back out when you're done. And if you poop, you have to wipe front-to-back, not the guy way. You have to make sure you don't get poop in your vagina."

"Ah, right. That's gotta be much worse than getting it on your balls, which usually doesn't happen, but it sucks when it does. You end up cleaning for a while."

"I can imagine."

"Anyway, not much need for a guy lesson. Penises are simple. At a urinal you use your fly to get your dick out, aim and shoot. Any more to the girl lesson I should know?"

"Um, don't get pregnant? Well, there are more girl lessons, but nothing you really urgently need to know at this moment."

I didn't find an obvious public restroom before we got back to the park, but there was a real restroom there, a building with the usual multiple-stall men's and women's rooms.

So I went into the women's room, found a stall, pulled down Elizabeth's shorts and panties - the ones on the body I was currently inhabiting, I mean; she had simple shorts with elastic at the waist - and did what was needed.

While I was doing this, I heard some other activity going on, and stopped to listen.

"Are you changed too?" I heard from Grace's voice.

"Yeah," came the reply from Eileen's voice.

"It's really ironic. I lusted after that body for years but she's Lesbian and I had no chance."

"Oh, man, the body you have hasn't been here as long, but I've wanted it since day 1, and of course, another Lesbian. Can you imagine how I would be now if I had switched places with her on the bus. I would probably be sitting in one of these stalls masturbating for the rest of the party."

"We still can do it, together. Like Lesbians do."

"You want to?"

The next I heard was them moaning in one of the stalls. I peeked under the walls and saw they were in the last one, the larger handicapped stall. I had to admit it was pretty hot, and I was having a hard time resisting masturbating myself, but I finished up my business, got dressed, and got out of there. Pretty ironic, though: Two guys - not sure which ones they were, but both declared straights from their comments in here - engaged in passionate sex together when they both turned into girls.

"No problem," I told Elizabeth, "Though two guys-turned-girls were going at it pretty hot-and-heavy in there."

"Oh, sheesh! I didn't even think about the people wanting to have sex in their swapped bodies. Do I still like guys or do I want a girl now? Mmm, I think I still like guys."

I heard the tail end of a nearby discussion that seemed to result in a few of them getting in a car and driving off. Most of the others watched them drive away.

"What was that about?" I asked Elizabeth.

"Oh, in addition to all the buses coming here today being affected, the people in that car were affected, and they wanted to see if they could switch back. They hope to locate a specific place on the road the change is occurring. They were sure it happened before we actually arrived here, though something about the change made us not notice it right away."

They came back pretty quickly, and addressed their group easily within my hearing.

"There's a place where the road goes down into an underpass a few blocks from here. In any lane, passing through the underpass triggers the change so many of us have observed. We went through several times, in different lanes, at different speeds. It did not seem to matter. Just make sure you sit very close to the person you swapped with when you go back. If you're too far apart the change won't happen."

The car group left again, but few of our group seemed to be in a hurry to leave. After the food came and people had had a chance to eat, I didn't think it was unusual to see people going to the restroom, but pretty soon I noticed a lot of people going in pairs - mixed-gender pairs going into either restroom together. I looked more closely at the pairs; I recognized many of them as established couples. They were going in to have sex in their switched bodies. There were also same-sex pairs of people I didn't associate with each other. Just as with the Grace/Eileen pairing I'd observed, straight people who weren't already attached to someone were mostly looking for their preferred gender, which was now their own gender. And plenty of people were going in individually.

"Wanna try it out?" Elizabeth asked me as she grabbed a bunch of condoms from her purse.

"You mean, do I want to go have sex with a bunch of men in women's bodies while I'm in yours?"

"Yeah. I promise I will use condoms for anything I get your body into."

"Um, OK. Sure. Maybe our only chance, right?"

"Exactly."

"Wait, my period?" I asked.

"Your partner should just focus on the clit. Then your tampon won't get in the way. If you're enjoying it, the tampon will get wet, but it's fresh and should be good for now."

She went off into the men's room, and I stepped into the women's.

Or I should say, tried to go in. I barely got past the first privacy wall that takes the place of a door on places like this, and there were girls and women everywhere, ranging from college age to perhaps 60. Some half dressed, some completely nude, some in pairs, some in larger groups. Girls on the ... I guess it's a waiting bench? Girls on the countertop with the sinks. Girls under the countertop. Girls standing. Judging by the clothes visible on the floor under the stall doors, the male-female couples had hidden away there. Except the first stall had a handwritten sign taped to it: NO SEX THIS STALL. They wanted to make sure girls who really had to pee had a place to do it.

One of the couples split up, with one of girls trying to wash sloppy genitals with water from the sink and dry them with paper towels before putting her clothes back on. The other girl approached me. I guess it was my turn. Elizabeth did say she felt like she liked guys. Was she going to drill some other guy in the ass with my body? Or would she be the one getting drilled? In any case, it's clear she was OK with whatever I was about to do.

And that was ecstasy. I had heard many times the argument over whether guys or girls had it better with sex, and now I was certain the girls had it better. I hoped Elizabeth wasn't too disappointed. When we were done my partner went to clean up. I cleaned up with her, got dressed, and followed her out. I didn't want to stay too long.

That turned out to be perfect. Elizabeth came out a few minutes later, and we gathered over with the others who were waiting for the next bus back.

That ride back was slow, because the residents had learned of this place, and the police were now diverting everybody except those who had already been changed and wanted to change back. And while we had some who were not changed, with so many on the bus who were, they let us through after confirming we were sitting correctly. And we all changed back.

When we got back to the hotel, Elizabeth asked me to stick with her a little longer. So I followed her to her room, where she wrote out a note for her roommate, who wasn't there.

Laura,

Just wanted to let you know I made it back from the weird body-swapping party that was our picnic, and in my own body. I am in the hotel and I will come back to sleep here tonight, even if it's at 2 AM.

"OK," Elizabeth told me. "Your room now."

"I have a single room. Nobody to leave a note for."

"That's the point."

"What?! What exactly did you do this afternoon?"

"Your room. Laura could come back at any moment, and this should only be between the two of us."

Since she insisted, I led her to my room, worried that this was going to be wild sex romp part two.

"Jack, I want to apologize."

"Apologize for?"

"Apologize for pushing you into something I could tell even then that you were a bit uncomfortable with."

"Uncomfortable? No! I didn't tell you this, and there's no way it could have come up in the very short time we have known each other, but being able to experience sex from the woman's side, just once, any orgasm as a woman, has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember, and I always thought it was an impossible one. I'm not trans; I don't want to be a woman for good. What happened today was perfect. I wanted to ask you, no, beg you for permission to do that, but I thought it was too much, way too much to ask of a woman I'd just barely met to ask, 'Hey, can I go have sex in your body?' And then you simply said, hey go do it. I was flabbergasted."

"But you did, I hope."

"Yes, I did. Once, just like I said. I went in, and one of the other couples was breaking up. One girl had had enough, while the other wanted more and saw I had no partner and invited me over. In a minute your pants were off and in two we each had our hands on each others' pussies bringing each other to orgasm. I am not sure how long it was. After the second orgasm I took off the rest of your clothes to keep them from getting too sweaty. I was in fact pretty sweaty all over by the end of it, and I did what others were doing, trying to clean off the sweat and all the sex juices with water from the sinks and then getting dry enough with paper towels to get dressed again. It was a good thing somebody had brought in the extra rolls of paper towels from the picnic, because there never would have been enough."

"So you just did it with one woman."

"Yeah, and I have no idea who it was! The woman wasn't one I recognized, and even if I had, I would likely have had no idea which guy was inside her. And you're new here so I suspect the same was true for her about you."

"I did what all the girls-as-guys were doing together: Once giving, once receiving. I can't say what I did was a dream of mine, but when I was presented with the one-time opportunity I did not want to pass it up. So much did I want it at that moment that I wasn't really thinking about how you felt about it. And that is what I want to apologize for."

"OK, for that, apology accepted. But I also want to thank you for giving me that opportunity."

"You're welcome. But I also want to thank you for having such a great body."

"What, really?"

"Yeah. I mean, I thought you looked nice when I sat down beside you on the bus, but when I really got to experience your body, from the inside, I saw that you are actually quite fit."

"The Pokémon GO exercise program."

"What?"

"I used to be fat. Quite a few years ago, I pulled a muscle doing something ordinary, and my doctor determined that the only real reason for it was my weight. I weighed 250 pounds!"

"Wow!"

"And I realized I was eating junk. I just ate any old thing that tasted good and it was building up on me. On that doctor's advice, I gradually eliminated one source of extra fat or calories after another from my diet. It took years, but I lost 80 pounds."

"Whatever your weight is now, it's nice. You are definitely not fat, regardless what any scale or chart says. You are in great shape."

"Sure. But there's more. I had not really gotten a lot of exercise, even well into my diet. I actually have trouble with that. I have asthma, and because of it, I cannot do intense exercise. I can sprint 100 meters, maybe 200. At a more moderate pace, I can run half a mile. If I try to run a whole mile I will not make it. I will end up wheezing and barely walking to finish the mile."

"Wow. It doesn't show at all. You have great legs!"

"But I realized I could walk. I'd done some walking, occasionally up to 2 or 3 miles, but I didn't do it consistently. That changed in 2016, when Pokémon GO came out. Conicidentally, the game was released during one of these Gatherings. I had no idea about the game; I was not a Pokémon fan. But people were saying that people were playing this game walking all over the hotel and outside. I didn't actually start during the Gathering, but the next week I did. I thought that something that encouraged me to keep walking would be good for me. And so I walked. Six months into it, the game gave me a gold medal for having walked 1000 kilometers."

"Awesome! That's what, about 600 miles? So 100 miles a month. 3 miles or so a day. Not bad."

"I picked it up even a bit more since then. 15,000 kilometers in 6 years."

"Cool. Keep it up. One day you will have walked enough to go all the way around the world."

"I walked enough, at times, that I was able to let up on the diet. Or really, I had to. Sometimes I needed something just to give me more energy."

"Well that's good. Give your body what it needs, I guess. I mean, whatever you are doing works, keep at it."

"I've really accomplished most of my major goals in the game, so now I am keeping up with new releases, trying to do some really difficult things a lot of players can't do, and giving back by helping to make more Pokéstops everywhere to help more people play the game. I already added more than 100 stops in places that I play a lot, to help myself and the other players who play near me, but I've saturated those areas. Now I'm submitting nominations everywhere."

"Cool. Maybe I should start playing. Maybe I'd get as nice a body as you."

"Oh, don't you think you're fat. You're big, for a woman, but you're taller than most women and you have a broad frame. There's no way you could ever weigh only 100 pounds like one woman I know was striving for; you'd be dead of malnutrition before you got there."

"Yeah, but even so I am still fat. I weigh as much as you, 170. We could wear each others' clothes!"

And with that comment, she started taking off her clothes.

"Whoa now, Elizabeth! Just because I have seen your naked body when I was in it doesn't mean it's OK to be naked around me."

"But I want to," she pouted as she finished getting completely naked.

I sighed. "Well, I did figure it was going to come to this when you insisted on coming to my room."

"I want you, Jack. And I already figured out you're the kind of guy who is just never going to ask a girl out. So ask me out. I'll say yes."

"Ask you out? Or ask you for sex?"

"We don't have to have sex. It can just be a plain date, no sex."

"That's why you are naked in my room, huh? No sex?"

"Well, if you ask me to have sex I'll say yes too."

"Yeah, I figured that out. I'm not stupid, I'm just not looking to have sex with a girl half my age who I just met today."

"But in my body you did just that!"

"That was different. I knew that was a one-time opportunity. This is the rest of my life."

"How old are you, anyway? I recognized you are older than me, but I couldn't really figure out how much."

"Forty six."

"Really? Wow! You are in amazing shape for forty six. And I am actually twenty-four, so you are almost spot-on with the 'half your age' comment. The offer stands, though. You look great, you do a lot of interesting things, and I want to have the opportunity for us to get to know each other better, even if we don't have sex."

"OK, no sex tonight, but we can do things together," I told Elizabeth.

We talked a bunch more, and eventually she did take my clothes off as well - I reminded her no sex and she said she wanted to prove she could wear my clothes, and did by putting them on - not a perfect fit because they were made for a man's body, not a woman's, but pretty well. And she dressed me up in hers as well, including grabbing some hand towels from the bathroom to stuff the bra with. Her clothes fit me about as well as mine fit her.

"OK, you proved your point," I told her. "Let's put our own clothes back on."

I started taking her clothes off my body, and she followed suit, and we both got dressed properly and went out and participated in some of the games and other random activities at the Gathering.

The next morning, the topic of the sex-changing weirdness naturally came up during announcements. They asked if anybody, voluntarily or otherwise, stayed swapped with another person, and nobody admitted it. Either everybody got changed back, or they were keeping it secret. Or they weren't there in the morning.

They sent us all copies of the local news story, which said that evening they had completely closed the underpass. There was a hotline to call if you had gotten swapped and wanted to change back, and another hotline for anybody who was changed and wanted to stay changed but needed help getting their identity documents sorted out.

Elizabeth and I hung out together for much of the rest of the Gathering, never having sex but just doing stuff together. Sunday, before we headed home, she revealed to me she had installed Pokémon GO, so I added her as a friend, so we could exchange gifts and build up to best friends while she was away in New York, finishing law school.

By that time, the story was national news. They had thousands of requests from people who wanted to change their sex, and they were going to set up a process to handle it.

Apparently you had to be touching or pretty close to change. No drivers had changed, because the width of the center console, gearshift, parking brake, etc. provided enough separation to prevent it. That was fortunate, since the disorientation it caused would have probably led to accidents. But our bus seats had only been separated by the 2-inch armrest between the seats, and that was close enough. A couple teens had gotten swapped, but no younger kids. It was guessed to require puberty.

The reason it just started happening when I was there was because that underpass only opened the day of our picnic. The intersection had long been a source of traffic jams, and they had built the underpass to streamline things for the 95% of traffic that wanted to go straight there. Now they were building an overpass instead. Nobody had ever discovered the portal, as they were calling it, during construction of the underpass because the number of construction vehicles that passed through the intersection with male-female couples sitting side-by-side was, of course, none. Nobody had discovered it before the construction because it was entirely underground.

They had determined it was magical in nature, and they had brought in the top magic experts from around the world to study it. I didn't even know there were magic experts, but apparently they keep things hush-hush. It was unheard of for there to be unknown magic discovered in the wild, but they concluded this portal had been here a very long time, probably predating the construction of the city. Who had made it and how was a mystery, but it was deemed very stable and safe for people to use.

It extended partly into the basement of one building nearby, but so little of it was there that it would have been impossible for a couple to pass through it. That building and the adjacent building on the same side of the street were bought out by the government to use as their base of operations, and they leveled the above-ground part of the buildings, keeping only an entrance with stairs and an elevator for each. They connected the two basements to each other, and into the former underpass space where the portal was. The rest of the ground level was paved over as a parking lot for people coming to use it.

Weeks later, they announced details of how it would work. If you were from in-state, they'd handle your identity change right there. It cost $200 per person plus an extra $50 if you wanted to change your name. If you were from out of state, or out of the country, you needed to apply with your relevant local office first. They would send a tentative new ID to this office, which would give it to you only after they certified you had changed. In that case it was $150 for the service, plus whatever your local offices wanted for records updates. The cost included extensive background checks to look for warrants and wanted pictures from open cases, but testing was extra. They wouldn't allow you to swap if you were on drugs, had various diseases, or pregnant. Also, not if you were a minor, for a whole list of reasons. And nobody was being allowed to use it on a temporary basis the way we had. It was only for people who wanted to permanently change.

There were tons of people in the world who wanted sex changes. Previously those sex changes weren't real - they rendered the person infertile and gave them a facsimile of their desired organs, with the exception that men becoming female were able to grow breasts with hormone therapy. The portal in the underpass suddenly made it possible to change for real - but you had to find a person who wanted to go the other way, and whose body was acceptable to you. Fortunately, there were many people looking to go both ways. Several web sites started to match up these people.

One of them was the bargain basement. "I don't care what I look like, I just want to change from male to female, or female to male." They would match people up first come first served. It stood to reason that you weren't going to come out pretty or handsome doing this, but the people who didn't have bodies other people would especially want - except for the people who desperately wanted any body of the opposite sex - had a way to get matched up.

The others were more like dating sites. Here's what I look like, what you could look like. Here's a description of what I want to look like. Match me up. One of them had people reviewing the applications and trying to match people up the best they could. If you asked for too much, say, you were not a handsome guy and you wanted to become a looker of a woman, for instance, they'd reject you as not having a good match. Another was more like Tinder. They'd show you a bunch of photos, possibly including people who had already selected yours, and when you and another person picked each other, you were declared a match and put in contact. And the last was a weird bidding site. It was kind of like the Tinder one, but you put a value on your body - and could look for bodies in various price ranges, which could be more or less than what you asked for your own body. Again, when you and another person matched you'd get connected, and the person who set the lower value was asked to pay the difference into escrow.

However they did it, they applied to get changed and made their arrangements to meet there once they had done so. Since most people needed new wardrobes, they often came with multiple suitcases stuffed with all their clothes, and arranged to stay at the same hotel - sometimes even in the same room, or rooms with an adjoining door - and they swapped all their clothes before going home. There were new hotels built in the neighborhood just for it.

And some of them did more than just swap clothes. All four of these sites gave you dating options:

• (A) I want to date the person who I swap bodies with
• (B) I am open to dating the person I swap bodies with
• (C) I will not date the person I swap bodies with.

Of course, some people already had a person they were committed to and would stick with even after changing sex, and some of them didn't want to date a person of their original sex, meaning that after the change they would be gay or Lesbian. Some people thought the concept of dating their past self to be creepy. For these and other reasons, the (C) pool was the largest, making up more than 80% of the customers of these sites. About 15% were Bs, and only 5% of the people insisted on dating their swap partner. They tried to match A to A, B to B, and C to C as much as they could, but Bs could match anybody, and the sites used them to even up differences in the male-female ratios of the three groups.

Surprisingly, there wasn't an overall male-female bias. Just about as many men wanted to be women as women wanted to be men. But out of every 100 men who wanted to become women, only 3 were As and 12 Bs. Out of every 100 women, there were 7 As and 18 Bs. So almost all the male-to-female As and Bs got dates, but only a little over half the female-to-male ones did.

I wasn't actually interested in changing sex, but being there in the middle of it when it started got me to follow the story. It was intensely popular, and once all the paperwork started rolling, they were changing nearly a thousand couples a day.

The next year's Gathering was a pretty weird one, as I was learning a lot of new faces and some new names for people who had changed. It calmed down after a while, and Elizabeth and I never changed, though we were a couple going forward, and we did have sex during this gathering. And Elizabeth was now a skilled Pokémon GO player and joined me in playing during the Gathering. I guess I wasn't too surprised when she found a job in my area, and I was soon seeing her frequently.