The minotaur in the petting zoo was an adorable toddler-calf, at least the last time Nora had seen him — not this creature out of nightmares. And at his side, there was something even more terrible, a vast maw full of fangs and slavering tongues with no body attached; it hovered along keeping pace with the minotaur and its prey. “This won’t do,” Nora said.

Nora had been terrified, in those first few days after the Divergence when everyone’s thoughts were leaking indiscriminately into everyone else’s, that everyone would treat her like a pariah once they knew about her.

“Our sources indicate that many humans whose gender identity does not match their biological sex have denied this in order to avoid shame or social stigma. Is this the reason you assert that you are a guy?”

“No! I’m cool with transgender people. I’m just not one of them. Or I wasn’t until you changed me.”

“We apologize. We thought we understood how to tell male from female humans, but we were mistaken. We must do further research.”

A couple of hours after Themia was captured, I felt the moon rise. I couldn’t see it in our windowless cell block, but that didn’t matter; I felt the possibilities of change through every part of my body.

“Some kids have disappeared too,” Gerald said. “The news didn’t say, but I’ll bet a first-edition Monster Manual that they were playing ‘pretend.’ Same as we were, only without dice.”

Calamity's Child

Aliens! Djinns! Secret Agents! Succubi! A mysterious gender-bending ray gun! Hit play on this month’s TG Mixed Tape flash fiction collection for all these stories and more and an interview with Kathryn Mayhew, author of The Call of the Void saga.

Funky Lady: A TG Mixed Tape

A mortally wounded superheroine chooses her successor. A young man makes a mistake when administering a love potion. In the near future changing genders is as easy as popping a pill. Hit play on the first Mixed Tape collection of 2015 for all these stories, an interview with Morpheus, and more!

“It’s experimental, so the Medical Bureau won’t pay for it; I’d have to save up for it, probably put it off till I finish college and I’ve been working full-time for years. And there’s no guarantee it’d work; I might have a womb and ovaries but still not be able to have babies...”

“— I might have been like that guy who Twisted into a giant cockroach in his sleep.”

 

“That’s an urban legend,” I said. “There’s a book where that happened, but it was way pre-Antarctic Flu, pure fantasy.”

“I’m not sure, but I think I may have a clue about why your condition is somewhat different from many of my earlier patients. It seems to me that you may have Twisted based on your idea — much more accurate than it had been a few hours earlier, but still somewhat oversimplified — of what transsexuals are like.”

“— trick to make herself look like a girl, she could look like a supermodel, and instead —”

“She looks fine,” Vic said. “Better than fine. And I think her trick’s mostly subconscious — she’s making us see the girl she thinks of herself as. A girl next door, not a model. I respect that. And I don’t think Rob does.”

“Vic, it’s just a game. And I’m not exactly Rob’s girlfriend, not yet anyway. Besides, when me and Laura were an item, that didn’t mean my character couldn’t flirt with girl NPCs... or even with other players. When Lionel was playing a girl alien in Schwarzschild Radius II —”

Ingrid said: “I’m not going to ask you about your Twist. You’ve told me more than you really need to tell a stranger, already. But if you want to listen I’ll tell you about mine.”

“I have another question for you. What does it mean to you to be a girl?” After I’d been quietly thinking for a while, Dr. Underwood said: “I’m not your Social Studies teacher, asking you to define gender. What being a girl means to you might not have much to do with what it means to someone else. Just say what first comes to mind.”

I gave in. I was annoyed at how overprotective he was being, but another part of me was secretly pleased about it, too — that it showed he really thought of me as a girl.

“You should stay here near the house,” Renee said to me, “and me and Todd will go way over to the far corner, maybe even a little way into the woods but not so far the trees block our view. And we’ll see if you still look like a girl from that distance.”

I heard a guy sitting a row or two behind me say: “Aren’t guys who Twist into girls supposed to get a really nice rack? She’s not much to look at,” and I felt my face burning. Ms. Rutherford heard him, though, and wouldn’t stand for that; she assigned him a three-page paper on the persecution faced by first-generation Twisted, and sent him to the office on top of that.

“Around fifty years ago, most developed countries added gender dysphoria to the list of things they test for and treat prenatally. Over the next few years, researchers’ attention shifted focus toward prenatal sex reassignment. 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.”

I’d been there when my cousin Todd went through his Twist, when we were playing in Grandpa and Grandma’s back yard a few years ago, and he’d passed out completely, while the sparks shooting out of him burned off all his clothes and killed all the grass where he fell. I seemed to have burned a few holes in mine, but I was still decent, and still conscious.

“It would give more credence to the rumors if Serenikha shows up and can’t control her tail because it feels like a pair of human legs, or can’t talk sense because she’s still speaking my native language.”