“Zoe, bring up some pictures of me from about ten to fourteen years ago,” Daddy says to the household AI. Zoe complies, projecting an array of four pictures on the opposite wall. Three of the four show Daddy holding a baby, either Sebastian or his big sister Stella, who lives with Mommy now. In one of them, he’s nursing the baby. “Sebastian, do you see what’s different about me back then?”
Sebastian says goodbye to the casual friends he sits with on the bus, gets off, and walks up to his apartment. It’s hot today, one of the first few hot days of the year, and he hopes that if he gets his homework done quickly (he doesn’t have much today), he can swim in the apartment complex swimming pool, which just reopened for the year.
“Hey, Daddy,” he calls out as he lets himself in. Daddy works from home, so he’s usually around when Sebastian comes home.
“Hey, Sebastian,” Daddy calls back from his bedroom/office. “Good day at school?”
“Pretty okay.” Sebastian walks into Daddy’s bedroom/office and gives Daddy a hug. “Is it okay if we go swimming? I’ve only got one piece of homework, just ten long division problems.”
“That sounds doable. Let me finish up this bit while you do your homework and change into your swimsuit, okay?”
“Yay!” Sebastian practically runs to his bedroom and starts digging through his backpack.
Forty-five minutes later, Sebastian knocks on Daddy’s door, which is closed now. He’s finished with his homework and wearing his swimsuit and flip-flops. “Just a second,” Daddy calls back, and then opens the door a few moments later. He’s also in his swimsuit and flip-flops. “Ready to go, squirt...?” He trails off, staring at Sebastian’s chest in a way that makes him uncomfortable. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to delay going swimming a little bit. Hopefully not too long. Come on, let’s sit down.”
Sebastian feels his heart pounding as he follows Daddy to the living room and they sit down on the sofa together. He has a pretty good idea what this is about, sort of. He knows he should have said something to Daddy after he noticed the weird stuff his chest was doing, when he was taking his bath a few nights ago. But some deep nameless dread held him back.
“Do you know what this means?” Daddy asked gently, pointing to Sebastian’s chest. At the slight bumps under his nipples.
Sebastian shakes his head. He thinks he knows, but he doesn’t know what words to use. The words the boys at school use to talk about older girls' chests sound gross and rude; he doesn’t want to be like them.
“Zoe, bring up some pictures of me from about ten to fourteen years ago,” Daddy says to the household AI. Zoe complies, projecting an array of four pictures on the opposite wall. Three of the four show Daddy holding a baby, either Sebastian or his big sister Stella, who lives with Mommy now. In one of them, he’s nursing the baby. “Sebastian, do you see what’s different about me back then?”
“You were more muscular...” Sebastian says, “and you... uh... you could nurse babies.”
“Right. When your mother was pregnant with Stella, we talked it over and decided I’d change to a parr body type, with breasts that I could nurse the baby with. It took about a month to grow the breasts and have them start producing milk, just in time for Stella to be born. And then I kept them for several years, until after you were eating solid food. That was when I changed to the inframale type body I have now.
“And because I was a parr type when your mother and I had you, you’re also a parr type. You’re going to grow breasts like the girls or the heikki types, but you’ll also keep developing like the boys in other areas. Do you remember when we talked about this before?”
Sebastian shakes his head.
“You were probably too young to take it in,” Daddy says with a sigh. “And I should have brought it up again sooner than this. Well, better late than never.” And he goes on to describe how Sebastian will grow body hair in various places, how his penis and testicles will get bigger proportionally to the rest of his body, how he’ll put on muscle more easily if he keeps being active. Sebastian feels his skin crawling as Daddy foretells his doom, and starts trembling. He feels disconnected, and can’t focus on everything Daddy is saying for a while.
“So, uh... do you want to go buy a new swimsuit that covers up your little breast buds, so we can go swimming before supper, or just sit here and talk it over some more?”
Sebastian is breathing hard. His vision is closing in. He can’t answer.
“Are you okay? Do you need a minute?”
He’s known this was coming, or something like it, but it’s too soon, he’s not ready. He hiccups a couple of times, and the hard breathing gives way to sobs. His daddy’s arms encompass him in a gentle hug, but it only helps a little.
“Shhh, it’s okay. If you don’t like being a parr type, we can go to the clinic and have them undo the little bit of breast growth, and change you to a boy type. Or an inframale type like me, or whatever other type you want,” he adds, sounding desperate as his offers of help don’t seem to do any good in stemming Sebastian’s sobs. “I’m here, it’s okay.”
Sebastian clings hard to his daddy while he sobs and sobs. Finally, he seems to run out of tears, and he’s able to talk again. “I don’t want,” he starts, and falters, unsure how to complete the sentence.
“You don’t want to be a parr type?”
Sebastian shakes his head. “Not just that. I don’t know if I want to be a boy or an inframale, either. It was okay until it started changing.”
“Would you like to be a girl, instead? Or something like a heikki or merck type?”
“I don’t know... I don’t think so?” Sebastian isn’t sure what a heikki or merck type is. There’s one girl at school who people say is a heikki like one of her moms, but Sebastian doesn’t know her well, and she looks like any other girl. At least so far. Sebastian meets his father’s eyes for a moment. He looks desperate and unsettled, unsure how to help. “I just don’t want to change.”
“Growing up means change, Sebastian. Even if we keep your body exactly like it is, which we can do for a while although it wouldn’t be a good idea long-term, you’ll be learning new things in school, and then going to middle school and high school and getting a job, and maybe a partner and maybe having kids.”
“Can we do that, though? Keep my body the same for a while? So I can learn all the different types and decide...”
“Sure. I’ll make an appointment at the clinic and ask them to turn off your puberty. We can have them undo your breast buds or leave them alone, whichever you prefer.”
Sebastian sniffles and says, “That sounds nice.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do. But for now, do you want to go get a swimsuit piece for your chest?”
The panic threatens to come back. But it doesn’t, not quite. “Are you sure? I’d probably just wear it once or twice before we go to the clinic.”
“It might be several weeks before we can get an appointment. We can afford a swimsuit.”
“Okay.”
They don’t make parr type swimsuits for kids Sebastian’s age, or at least they don’t stock them in this neighborhood store. Even twenty years after a lot of adults started switching to new gender types, most people seem to want their kids to grow up as baseline boys or girls. Daddy says that if Sebastian decides to keep the breast buds as they are or let them keep developing, one way or another, they can special order a swimsuit online with matching top and bottom pieces, or a one-piece that has room in the crotch for Sebastian’s penis. For now, though, they’re left trying to find a two-piece girl’s swimsuit where the top makes a decent match for Sebastian’s red swim trunks. They manage to find an okay one, though the shade of red isn’t quite the same. Daddy pays for it and they go home.
A few minutes later, they meet up in the living room again, having changed into their swimsuits again. Sebastian feels shy, somehow more so than when his daddy was seeing his bare chest a couple of hours ago. “Does it look okay?”
“It looks fine, Sebastian. Ready to go swimming?”
Sebastian is a little nervous about other kids in the apartment complex seeing him like this, but he hasn’t gone swimming since last Fall and he can hardly wait. He nods enthusiastically and they head out the door.
Sebastian has a huge decision ahead of him, but for now, going swimming with Daddy is enough to take his mind off it.
When Sebastian comes home from school the next day, his daddy has some kind-of bad news.
“The first appointment we could get at the gender clinic isn’t until two weeks from now,” he says apologetically. “But I don’t think your breasts, or anything else, will change much in two weeks. It will be fine.”
The panic threatens to come back, but Sebastian pushes it down. He nods with a lump in his throat and says, “Okay, cool.”
“Do you want to talk some more about your options now? I’ve been looking up some sites that explain the different types. And, uh, some other stuff.”
Sebastian considers for a moment. He ought to do that sometime in the next two weeks, but that seems like forever. And just thinking about all the options feels overwhelming. “Maybe after I do my homework?” he says. He can hardly believe he’s offering to do homework to procrastinate doing something even scarier.
“Sure. Let me know if you need any help, okay?”
“Thanks, Daddy.”
But the homework doesn’t take all that long, even though he double-checks his work twice to put off thinking about the different types. Can he just not be any of the types? He’s pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.
His daddy pokes his head in Sebastian’s room. “Hey, how’s the homework coming?”
“I’m pretty much done,” he says.
“All right, cool. Do you want to hang out in the kitchen with me while I fix supper? I can tell you about what I’ve learned, and Zoe can show you pictures.”
“Okay.” Sebastian gets up and follows his daddy into the kitchen, where they get ingredients out of the pantry and line them up on the counter beside the stove.
“Okay, first,” his daddy says, starting to wash the potatoes, “you’re sure you don’t want to be a parr, like you are now, or an inframale like me? If so, we can skip those.”
“Definitely not a parr. I’m not sure about inframale, but maybe? I want to see the other choices first.”
“How about a boy?”
Sebastian thinks about the other boys at school. The boys, not the other boys, because he’s a parr, which didn’t matter until now but is about to matter a lot if he doesn’t get a doctor to stop it. They’re gross and brash and boastful and he doesn’t like most of them. “No, not that either.”
“Okay... well, let’s start with the basic girl type.” He starts peeling potatoes. “Zoe, could you bring up an anatomical diagram of a girl at different ages? One of the ones from the kids' gender site I was looking at earlier.”
Zoe projects four pictures on the wall, naked girls of different ages with their body parts labeled, including some of the inside parts. The youngest one looks pretty much like a little boy, except she doesn’t have a penis, but something called a vulva, which is connected to a bunch of inside parts that he’s never heard of.
“Okay, you see there how she starts growing little breasts, and then they get bigger, and then when she gets old they start sagging some? That’s pretty much the same for girls, parr, heikki, and merck — they all have breasts and they all grow at about the same pace.”
Daddy explains how those inside parts let girls, and some other types like the merck, grow babies inside them. When the baby is ready to be born, the vulva gets pretty wide to let the baby squeeze through.
Heikki and merck, it turns out, look pretty similar to girls, except that heikki have a penis instead of a vulva, and merck have both. Merck have the same inside parts as girls, it looks like. Sebastian hasn’t found what he’s looking for yet, though.
“What about types that don’t have breasts?”
“Well, inframale, of course, and boy type, but you said you weren’t interested in that... and then there’s, hmm. Zoe, what were the other ones that don’t have breasts?”
“There are one thousand, eight hundred and seven registered types, although most can be considered variations of basic types. Of those, 41% do not have breasts of any kind. Of those, boy, elzinga, inframale, lopez, and beringer and their subtypes are the most popular.”
“Okay, let’s see what they look like. Start with elzinga, I guess?”
The elzinga pictures make Sebastian’s skin crawl. The little one about Sebastian’s age isn’t too bad, though he’s bigger and stronger than Sebastian or most of the boys in fifth grade, but it looks like he shoots up tall and super muscular in the second picture, and then even more in the next one. And he grows hair all over his body, and his penis looks really big and gross. “Not that,” Sebastian says, making a face, and Zoe clears away the pictures, replacing them a moment later with pictures of a lopez type.
This one looks a lot like Daddy, wide-shouldered and soft, without much body hair, but with wider hips, and they’ve got a vulva behind their penis, which isn’t anywhere near as big as the elzinga’s.
“That might be okay? What was the other one?”
The beringer is kind of like Daddy or the lopez pictures, but not as soft, and doesn’t have a penis. Their shoulders and hips are both narrower than the lopez.
“That one looks nice. I guess I want to find out more about the, uh, the lopez and the beringer?”
“Looks like we’ve made some progress,” Daddy says happily. “No hurry about making up your mind. If you can’t decide by the time we see the doctor, he can just stop your puberty for a while and give you more time to decide.”
“Thanks, Daddy. Thanks, Zoe.”
“Oh, there was another thing I wanted to ask you. If you’re interested in one of the types like lopez and beringer, would you like me to use a different name or pronouns for you?”
“Like what?”
Zoe speaks up. “People with lopez type bodies most commonly use they/them or sie/hir pronouns. People with beringer type bodies most commonly use fae/faer pronouns. Some of the most common names of lopez types include —”
“Let’s stop there, okay, Zoe?” Daddy says. “Maybe bring up a list Sebastian can read later.”
“Yeah,” Sebastian says gratefully. “I’ve got a lot to learn before I see the doctor.”
“Remember, anybody of any type can use any name,” Daddy says. “You can still keep going by Sebastian if you change into a beringer or lopez or anything else; I kept going by Alonzo after I changed to parr and then inframale. But you’re getting old enough to think about what you want your name to be, and not just keep going by Sebastian because Mommy and I picked it out for you.”
My new short fiction collection, Gender Panic and Other Stories, contains 253,948 words of transgender fiction: seven short stories, seven novelettes, one novella, and two short novels. Six of the stories (including both novels), 163,318 words, have never appeared online before. It can be found at:
- Smashwords (epub)
- itch.io (epub, pdf, and mobi)
- Amazon (Kindle)
You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collections here:
Comments
Fascinating
An interesting world you paint! What would we choose to be, in a world of infinite choices? I suspect it would cause no small amount of gender panic! More depressing, there would probably be fads and such, and we would paradoxically loose some of more infinite variety which natural selection produces, as people migrate towards popular types. But for sure, gender dynamics would be completely up-ended.
Emma
On the other hand...
Or would that be foot? Remember, sex is between the thighs and gender is between the ears. So far the physical differences are somewhat superficial. A lot of gender is learned.
Have I just made things a bit more complicated. It still is a fascinating concept. I'll take one from column A and two from column B.
Ron
Is there something
- in that spread of types called nwydeah? 'Cause that's where I would end up.
Teri Ann
"Reach for the sun."
Neat futuristic story!
I'm really enjoying reading this story. It reminds me a little of my Gender Express story, only it's a lot more detailed, and includes things I hadn't even considered while writing my story. I'm looking forward to reading the next chapter!