Friday, August 4, 2006

It happened one morning. Like most mornings, I woke up and went to the bathroom to pee.

It started normally. I got a good stream going into the bowl as I stood in front of it.

But I was feeling drained. While a little residual tiredness in the morning was OK, this was more than that, and it was getting worse. And something weird was happening in the bowl. I leaned forward, one hand against the top of the toilet tank to support myself.

Even that was getting difficult. I tried to stop, so I could switch to sitting on the toilet, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop peeing!

I stepped out of my briefs and instead sat on the toilet backward. The seat was up, but I needed to do something. Feeling the cold porcelain against my thighs was better than collapsing uncontrollably into the toilet. I leaned against the raised seat and the tank as my body continued to pee an impossibly large amount.

Some time later, I came to. I guess I had passed out there, and despite my efforts, I was now in the toilet bowl. My legs must have been entirely inside the bowl. There was just my torso protruding from the toilet.

My torso? No! When I looked down at myself I realized the torso wasn’t mine at all. It was slender, feminine-looking, with breasts. It was mine now, though. This was the body I was living in, however impossible that seemed.

I used my arms to lift my body out of the bowl, and it got more impossible. It seemed like my lower body was liquid, and as I pulled myself out, it solidified into the proper pelvis and legs of a girl. Soon I was standing on my two new legs, which weren’t there a minute before. I looked in the mirror, and the face that looked back was definitely feminine, but also something like my own. Maybe if I had had a sister, she would have looked like this.

I looked down at the rest of my body. Definite girl. Curves in the right places. Only girl between the legs. There was a vagina there as I confirmed by inserting a finger to the first knuckle. That was enough of that investigation for now, I decided.

At this point, I was thinking about the fact that my entire body had just been down in the toilet. Gross! I guess it’s time to find out what it feels like to shower as a girl.

I was naked already, so I just stepped into the tub and started the water. I stood out of the spray until it warmed up a little, and after that, it wasn’t bad. My new body seemed a bit more sensitive. Especially the breasts were sensitive! But after washing those carefully, it was not that different from any other shower I had taken.

I noticed the sensitivity more while drying off afterward. Were my towels rough? I had never noticed that before. But I dried myself off carefully.

Now what? I should put clothes on, but I could already tell most of my clothes were going to be too big. And this body should probably wear a bra, but of course I didn’t have one. I had some stretchy, bikini-style briefs I sometimes wore, and they weren’t as much too big as I thought they would be. The hips helped hold them up, though they were loose in the front where there was extra fabric to go around the balls and dick I no longer had.

I picked out one of the T-shirts that was a bit tight on me, normally, and it also was not as loose as I thought it would be, because of the breasts. In fact, my breasts pressed into it so much that when I looked closely in the mirror, I could see the outlines of my nipples. So I put it back and got a looser, more heavyweight shirt, which did not seem to have that problem.

I pretty quickly realized normal pants wouldn’t work. The only pants I could wear were sweat pants, which I could cinch tight with the drawstring around my much narrower waist, with the hips helping to hold them up.

And forget shoes. There weren’t any shoes in my house that weren’t going to simply slip off my feet the moment I tried walking anywhere. At least I was decent.

The next order of business was food. I was starving! Fortunately, I had food in the house. I had expected to eat breakfast after that pee. I prepared my usual and sat down to watch the news while eating it.

Our lead story is a new syndrome affecting many people around the world. It’s fairly uncommon, but there are hundreds of reported cases and we don’t know how many have been affected and not yet reported it. Affected people have reported that when they attempted to pee, they were unable to stop. Even after losing consciousness, they continue to pee out their entire body. In each case, after a short time the pee forms into a new body of the opposite sex. The syndrome has affected both men and women, and a few teenagers, but nobody before the onset of puberty. Medical correspondent Brent Lively has more.

Thank you, John. The cases are being reported in a widely dispersed manner around the world. There are 41 cases reported in China, 62 in India, 12 in Russia, 14 in the United States, and similar proportions of the population around the world, a total of 258 cases. Here’s what we know. Affected people get an urge to pee, and they do so, but what results is not a normal urination. Instead, they urinate their entire body, which shouldn’t even be possible, but it is for the affected people. The resulting pee quickly congeals, forming a semi-solid mass which cannot be flushed, so it is unlikely that people are flushing themselves away. The entire process takes about 15 minutes, and after a few more minutes the person awakes in their new body, with no memory loss except for their short period of unconsciousness.

The new body is always of the opposite sex to the original, and men and women have been affected equally. Those who have been checked out medically seem healthy, even to the extent of issues their original bodies suffered from being repaired. But the new bodies are not quite the same. So far, nobody has peed from the new bodies. We don’t know if they will pee normally, or change bodies again, or if the new bodies have a different mechanism for disposing of wastes.

But this brings up another issue. The new bodies do not have anuses. The entire digestive system is there but the colon ends without connecting to the outside of the body. This is sometimes seen as a birth defect in newborns and is usually corrected by surgery. With these changed people, we don’t know. They all started with an empty digestive tract, and a stronger than normal feeling of hunger, but a normal amount of food satisfies them. Since the digestive tract holds 2 to 3 days worth of food, we are not rushing them into surgery until we see what happens. Are they going to fill up their bladders and then pee themselves a new body before the remains of digested food in their colon becomes an issue? There is still a lot we don’t know about these new bodies.

For now, this condition is being referred to as Pee Body Syndrome. Back to you, John.

I hadn’t even realized my new body did not have an anus. The parts in front are there, for sure. But the news anchor went on after the medical guy was done.

We want to stress that people suffering from Pee Body Syndrome should not hide it. The US government has established a hotline, 212-555-3729, for people affected by this problem to seek assistance of any kind. Employers are urged to accommodate employees suffering from the problem whether that means working from home, using sick days, or sending out someone of the employee’s new gender to their home to help them understand any aspect of living as the other sex they need assistance with, or to find suitable clothing. If you are affected, don’t just call in sick. Contact your employer and explain what sort of help you need in order to work. Only then, if you need one or more days to prepare, should you use sick time.

I was expecting to call in sick, but they’re saying I should talk to my boss about it. We’ll see how this goes. I wrote down the number but did not call it. Instead, I called my boss’s cell phone.

“Hey, Mike, this is Clint.”

“Clint, is something wrong?”

“Yeah, if I don’t sound normal, it’s because I’m affected by this Pee Body Syndrome that’s in the news this morning.”

“You mean you’re a girl?”

“Excuse me, a woman.”

“Sorry. Of course.”

“I have clothes I can wear, but no shoes, and not quite up to the work dress code.”

“Well maybe you should work from home today. I can put you in touch with one of the women from HR. Hopefully someone can help you shop for some female clothes over the weekend.”

“That works.”

So I managed to work from home, and Terry from HR was going to come pick me up at 1 on Sunday to go shopping. We picked Sunday because of the suggestion that I might be changing every day, and be male all day Saturday.

I watched the evening news, and also the late news to watch for more info about the syndrome. Except for increasing numbers, there was nothing at dinner, but there was a network news report just before the late local news.

Breaking news: Pee Body Syndrome is now confirmed to lead to alternating sexes every day.

The earliest people affected by the condition report that roughly 24 hours after their first change, they felt the urge to pee again, and when they did so, they changed back into their original sex. The changed bodies in these cases are very similar to the originals, but with serious medical conditions eliminated. We expect the people affected by the syndrome are going to alternate being male and female via once-a-day pee sessions.

Medical studies are underway to determine a basis for what is occurring.

I stripped down to just the briefs for bed, but I had a thought. They said the people who swapped twice got their original bodies back, but the other-sex body was definitely different. I took a picture of my face, and I looked up online about women’s measurements. I didn’t have a proper tape measure, but I made a makeshift one using a ruler to measure along an extension cord, marking it with a Sharpie. I was 5’5” tall, 39 inch bust, 36 inches below the bust, which apparently gave me a 36C bra size, 32 inch waist, 42 inches around the hips. Was hard to say about clothes sizes, since there were a bunch of different variations for height and how high the breasts were on the body, but my breast height seemed average as far as I could tell, which would mean I wore a 12 or large size. Also, I wore a women’s 8 shoe, which was equivalent to a men’s 7, which was why my men’s 9 1/2s were way too big. Some other garments had special sizes, but I didn’t have time for it. I went to bed.

Saturday, August 5, 2006

In the morning, I felt the urge to pee. I started to do it on the toilet, remembering as a girl I’d have to sit down, but I had a thought. Why not do it in the bathtub? Put the plug in, and it would be just like filling the tub. I wouldn’t have to extract my body from the toilet afterward. If I somehow peed normally and stayed a girl, then I’d just pull the plug and wash it down the drain.

I removed the briefs, put in the plug, put the curtain outside, and squatted down and started peeing. And sure enough, once I got started I couldn’t stop. What I didn’t realize was how much of a stream I would get. When I held myself open down there, and pushed, the stream rivaled what I got from my penis. I ended up sitting down and leaning back in the tub, with my knees bent high and my legs spread as I continued peeing. When I let up on it, at first the flow slowed a bit, but pretty soon it was stronger than it started without any effort on my part to keep it going. I watched the stream from that little hole just above my vagina to where it hit the tub a foot away and trickled down to join the growing puddle over the plugged drain hole. Eventually, the puddle reached my feet and even my butt, but by that time I was too weak to do anything but watch it keep going.

Some time later, I awoke in my male body in the tub. There was a tiny bit of liquid remaining next to the plug - not enough to sensibly try to collect - but what I noticed more was some crystalline solid matter near but not in that liquid. Was that the part of me that the transformation could not use? Rather than simply showering it away, I found an empty pill bottle and used a knife to scrape it loose and save as much of it as I could in the bottle. Then I took a shower and got dressed normally in clothes that fit.

After breakfast, I called the government hotline. They asked how they could help me, and I instead suggested I could help them. I told them about the crystals, and they transferred me to a female scientist.

“You aren’t the first person to report such crystals left behind after one of these gender changes, but you are the first person to save them. Thank you. Can you get to a FedEx office today?”

“Yes, I should be able to,” I responded after thinking for a moment about where there was one nearby.

“Great. I can email you a prepaid order that will include the shipping cost as well as packaging costs, so all you will have to do is print the document I send and bring the bottle.”

I gave her my email address, and she read it back and confirmed the spelling, and she sent the document so I could confirm receipt while I was still on the line with her. She thanked me again, and that was the end of the call.

A little while later, I went out and dropped off the bottle at FedEx, and combined that with a regular weekly grocery shopping trip while I was out. And I couldn’t help noticing the “female products” at the store. If I was going to be female half the time, was I going to need these... once a month? once every two months? Never? Nobody mentioned this in the reports so far, but I bought small packages of tampons and pads so I would have them in case I did need them.

After I got home, I thought about my shopping trip tomorrow. I was probably going to end up with a lot of clothes. I needed to make space for them. At first I tried to make space by clearing out some of my existing clothes, but I realized there was no hope to make enough space. What I needed instead was more furniture to store the clothes. Maybe I’d get something more permanent later, but for now, I bought one of those kits you put together yourself, pressed wood stuff. Cheap and temporary but available for pickup at Wal-Mart today. Actually, two of them. A dresser to hold things that did not need to hang and a closet to hang things in, along with 30 hangers.

Sunday, August 7, 2006

In the morning, I predictably changed into a girl again, again using the tub for convenience. Sunday was normally my laundry day, and I did that in the morning, while wearing, I realized, the only other pants that would fit my girl body until my shopping trip today. I just managed to finish cleaning up after lunch when Terry showed up.

Knowing I had no shoes, she had brought along a pair of flip-flops I could wear until I got proper shoes.

“I brought these for you, since you’d said you had no wearable shoes.”

“Thank you.”

“What you are wearing is suitable for a woman... only for going out to buy better-fitting clothes.”

“Yep. That’s about what I thought, too.”

“Do you have socks? They’ll want you to have them when trying on shoes.”

I tried on some of mine and found they fit acceptably. They did not go with the flip-flops, though, so I was going to carry them, and Terry offered to hold them in her purse. Another thing I realized I should have if I am going to be a woman, at least some of the time.

“How about underwear?”

“Men’s bikini-style. The only thing I had that looked remotely feminine, and they actually fit surprisingly well, just differently. They’re tight getting over the hips, and then contract and fit without being tight below the narrowest part of my waist.”

“That’s actually how a lot of women’s panties fit a body like yours, except that they’ll be smooth across the front. There are different styles, some high on the side like that, others with more coverage over the hips. And there are the infamous thong ones which are nothing but thin straps everywhere but in the front. You can choose any style you like; unless you are wearing something skimpy or very thin - something which would be inappropriate for the office - none of them are really going to show.”

“OK. I’ve got my wallet with credit cards. Also this.” I handed her the page I’d written measurements on. “My best effort at taking my measurements.”

“Great. That should come in handy.”

“Anything else?”

“No. I brought scissors.”

“What for?”

“To cut the tags off some of what you buy so you can wear them home from the store. The first stop’s going to be at Wal-Mart to get you a few basics and something so you’ll look like a proper woman, and then you can change into those clothes before we look for other things.”

“Makes sense. Thank you.”

So we headed out like she said. At Wal-Mart, we started with panties. I had never imagined myself shopping for women’s panties before. I wasn’t into that sort of thing. But I had never imagined myself turning into a woman before, either! Now it wasn’t a fetish, it was a necessity!

There were some individual, higher-priced underwear, which she held up around me to judge for size, starting with sizes based on my measurements.

“Hmm, I am not sure whether an 8 or 9 panty will be best for you. It might actually depend on the style or brand. But these are cheap. If you decide they’re too tight, go up a size. Too loose, go down one. You’ll figure it out.”

So I got two styles of panties, one a lot like what I had on now, and one that covered the hips. Rather than the loose ones, we bought packaged ones which were cheaper. They came in three-packs that cost what one of the loose ones did. The two packs only made six... but I figured I would be a woman only three or four days a week, so it was enough for now. Unable to decide between the two sizes, based on my own measurements and a guide on the packages, I bought the 8s.

“Bras are more complicated, but you can try them on, and you will,” Terry emphasized.

I nodded. I guess she noticed my timidity when we started looking at the panties. But she reminded me again that this was necessary now that I was a woman, at least half the time. I have to own clothes for that situation all the time.

“These measurements will give us a good guess to start from,” Terry said as we entered the section with the bras.

We started with a 36C bra, and Terry went into the changing room for me to help me with it. She showed me the trick of putting on your bra backward so you can fasten it in the front, and then spinning it around your body before putting your arms through the straps.

“With practice you can learn to fasten your bra behind your back, but this is good for you now since you’re really just starting to wear bras for the very first time.”

And she pointed out some details of the fit. We decided to accept this one.

“I’m not an expert bra sizer. But once we have you in some decent clothes and wearing one of these bras, I’ll take you to the mall where in one of the stores we can have a woman who is an expert bra sizer go over these details and others to find your perfect bra. Because of that, I’m just going to have you get one bra here so you have something to wear.”

We also got one outfit I could change into, and sneakers in my size. At the mall, she led me to a women’s restroom first, where a handicapped stall served as a makeshift dressing room for me to change into my new clothes. But the bra sizer Terry mentioned is how I ended up showing my naked breasts to two women on this trip. The sizer at Victoria’s Secret was very helpful.

“Some women don’t realize that there is more to choosing a bra than band size and cup size. Breasts come in different shapes as well. They can be wider or narrower, and they can protrude more or less from the body. Both of these measurements get combined into a single fullness measurement in the cup size, but depending on whether your cup size is based more on width or depth, different bra styles may fit you better.”

She actually ended up having Terry get topless in the booth too as a model.

“Terry has deep breasts, so this style that has very full coverage over the breast helps to smooth out the breast and keeps it from hanging out. So even though you are both wearing a 36C, some 36Cs will work better on Terry, and other styles will work better on your wider, flatter breasts, Clint.”

And she demonstrated by having us both try on some of the styles. Ultimately, she decided that my breasts were close enough to the ideal shape breast that most styles will work for me, but the ones that worked better on wider breasts would work better for me in some cases. She also told me how I could switch to what they called sister sizes, a 38B or 34D, in styles that didn’t quite fit right in different ways. It was more than I ever thought I would need to know about bras, but I could tell it was going to be helpful to know it.

Ultimately I just bought one bra there as well, but now I knew what to look for. Once I was through with that, the rest of the shopping was easier, even when we were looking at skirts and dresses.

We spent about 4 hours visiting other stores in the mall and elsewhere, despite only coming home with a maximum of 7 of each sort of garment. Terry made sure my purchases included one dress, one skirt, and one each of several other kinds of garments I might not have thought about, just to make sure I’m aware of those things. Traveling to different stores and teaching me used up a lot of that time.

At the end of it all, when Terry helped me carry the several bags of clothing into my house, she stayed to tell me secrets of womanhood I should know. She explained about tampons and pads; the flow is usually light for the first day or so, heavy for about one or two days, and then light again for a day, and bigger tampons or pads are meant for the heavy flow in the middle. Makes sense. Also about wiping my butt - which I am supposed to do by wiping away from the vagina. That would be incredibly useful information if my body still pooped at all, but I couldn’t blame her for not knowing that aspect of my change.

Tuesday, August 8, 2006

But I was well prepared to return to the office as a woman - on Tuesday, since Monday I was a man and went in normally. By lunchtime, I had put on a big CLINT nametag like a newbie to help people I encountered recognize me. And I gave a bunch of the same answers repeatedly. “Yes, I’m still going by Clint even when I’m a woman. I’ll be a man again tomorrow, and I don’t want to have two different names or pick one of those gender-ambiguous names. No, I’m not interested in men. I’m not sure yet if I’m interested in women when I’m a woman. I haven’t had sex as a woman yet, and I’m not going to talk about it when I do because that sort of talk is not appropriate for the office.” That last comment got several guys to drop that line of questioning, making them realize they had gone too far and asked something they wouldn’t even have asked most of the other women in the office.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

It was better on Thursday, though there were still people seeing me as a woman for the first time. But I made it through a week of work and it made me feel like I could keep living my life.

I was still getting used to the fact that I didn’t go to the bathroom anymore, except to change bodies. It had become part of my routine in the office - I’d stop to pee first thing after getting in, midmorning after washing out my coffee cup, either before lunch or after lunch, again in the afternoon, and again before going home and now I didn’t do any of those. I needed to invent reasons to get up out of my seat more often! Also, since I was a girl half the time now, never having to go into the restroom meant there was no chance I’d accidentally walk into the wrong one. I guess I could still use them for washing hands, or changing tampons/pads or something about my clothes, but I’ve been washing hands in the kitchen and haven’t had issues with the rest.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

By the weekend, a lot more information was coming out about the condition.

They had a plausible mechanism. Somehow, the entire body’s worth of cells were converting to stem cells. And for some reason, as they did so, they were entering the bloodstream, getting separated out in the kidneys, and passing into the bladder until it was full. After this, they would build up in the bloodstream a bit, keeping enough blood cells there to not endanger the body, and after that they would build up in the body tissues. By this point the person feels a very strong need to urinate. Those stem cells don’t want to be in all those other places, so this urination triggers the removal of the rest of the stem cells from the body. It also, for some reason, causes the reaction that converts the body’s cells to stem cells to go into overdrive. They could not explain that.

And the stem cells are not exactly normal, either. They have some novel genetic factors which seem to cause the cells to generate an adult body, or a teen if appropriate, rather than, say, an infant. Details of these genetic factors make the bodies age properly up to about age 25, to match the person’s natural age. But in people any older than that, the newly produced bodies come out significantly younger than they originally were. So, while it may be too early to confirm it, it’s possible the condition comes with eternal youth.

Another odd thing about these cells allows the sex change to happen. Normally sex is associated with the XX or XY chromosomes. But those chromosomes merely control the expression of sex. All the genes necessary to create male and female bodies are present in every body, whether it has XX or XY chromosomes. The stem cells produced by a body expressing its normal gender carry genes that suppress the normal gender in the new body, and those produced by a body suppressing the gender have these genes deactivated, and allow the normal gender to be expressed.

They have studied the reproductive systems of affected people. Males seem to produce viable sperm, though in those originally female, they always contain an X chromosome and would lead to all female children ... possibly female children affected by the syndrome. It’s still too early to tell whether the condition would be inherited. The female reproductive systems seem active but not in the ovulating phase, and since they only last for a day, for all practical purposes the females are sterile. However, they do appear to have egg cells which could be harvested, fertilized, and grown in a surrogate mother. One such test has already started, but again, it’s still far too early to know whether it will be successful. It was likewise reported the female reproductive systems are never in the menstruating phase.

The genes controlling the expression of sex in these people are clear genetic markers for the condition, but genetic samples taken before the changes started do not show these genes. Where the genes came from and why they suddenly appeared in what they have now found to be about 1500 people widely dispersed around the world is unknown. Those affected are generally not related genetically, and don’t have any common environmental factors linking them. They have no explanation whatsoever for which people were affected.

Most affected people quickly adapted to changing either in the morning after waking up or in the evening before going to bed. It seemed that, even without an urge to pee, as soon as 8 hours after forming a new body you could pee on purpose to trigger a change, while by 24 hours after, the urge to pee was there, and you could hold it perhaps 3-4 hours at most. This allowed people to quickly adjust their schedules and thereafter stick to a 24 hour schedule.

So that was all very interesting. I had never had sex as a woman yet, but I had already thought that finding another person with my condition, but out of phase with my body, might be best. Now I know phase can be adjusted, and the tiny field of candidates is twice as big. But if I did find one of the rare other people with this condition as a potential spouse, we wouldn’t be able to have kids together. We’d have to find a surrogate to carry our child. But I could potentially get together with any bisexual person, anybody who could accept I was male some of the time and female some of the time. Not sure where I’d look for one, but if my partner was female, we could have children normally. If my partner was male, we’d still need a surrogate. I had been a heterosexual male, but now I don’t know what I am.

This morning, while I was female, these thoughts got me aroused, and I investigated what masturbation felt like as a girl. Of course I knew I’d have to experiment a bit, but that was something I thought I should know about my new body: How did it respond sexually? The answer was awesomely! Either women had it a LOT better than men, or my sexual response got magnified greatly as part of getting the new body. And that was just with external stimulation. Women used dildos or vibrators inside them to simulate the feel of a penis. I had never desired to have a penis inside me before, but if it felt that good without anything inside, doing that with a vibrator going inside me must be incredible!

I had sat on the toilet for this, the first time I’d been there in a week, and it was probably a good thing, as I leaked a good deal of what I realized was meant to be my internal lubrication. I washed up and went about other chores.

Also, I had a skirt and a dress I’d never worn, and I really should try wearing them at some point. So that I could do it when I could simply go home if I got uncomfortable with it, I did it today, taking a trip to the mall to go buy myself more female clothes. And it went OK. Once I got going, I barely noticed there weren’t two thin layers of fabric between my legs. I bought a couple more outfits, now that I had had some time to wear the ones I had.

I stopped at the sex shop too. There were probably other places I could find them, some maybe only by asking for something stored behind the counter, but it was the one place I was sure I could find dildos and vibrators. This store had always been a little controversial here, though I am sure there are lots of them down in The City. They managed it by making it adults only. Or at least, nobody under 18 without being accompanied by a parent or guardian. And it was enforced. I worried that I was going to get rejected at the door, since while I somewhat resembled the photo on my ID, it said I was male and 30, and while I might still look old enough to be 30, I looked young enough they’d check ID, and there was no way I could pass as male. So when I stopped at the place, I told the guy I always thought of as a bouncer right up front.

“Yes, we wondered if this was going to be an issue, but you are the first to inquire. And I know you don’t have any ID that really looks like you. You’re probably going to have to get some, but I am not sure what they are doing about that yet. But let me tell you what. We do actually have a policy that lets some minors in here unaccompanied provided they have prior parental authorization. So you come back tomorrow when you look like your ID. We’re open 12-6 on Sunday. Bring this form I will get for you in a moment, and your ID, and ... we usually ask you to bring the person with you when you want to register, but since you obviously can’t, let me take your picture now and I’ll put you in the system pending the parent form. Then we’ll get your female self entered on the system as a permitted minor with a note that you’ll have this ID.”

“Sure, that sounds good.”

He got me the form, and I put it in one of my shopping bags and came home.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

When I was male again Sunday, at some point I remembered this experience and I took the time to get myself suitably aroused. That turned out to be pretty easy. And the experience was... still not as good as it was as a woman, but better than I remembered it as a man. Maybe as good as I fondly remembered it as a teenager. Was that really better than I’d had it at 30? So I think the change increased my sexual pleasure and it’s also true women get more from it than men.

I did my laundry and went about my day. And I went out to get my female self registered at the sex shop. While I was there, I went in, and asked the guy inside. “Pretend I am shopping for my daughter. She’s masturbated but never had sex, and she wants something to put inside herself. What do you recommend?”

He showed me several choices, and I decided to go with a dildo and a somewhat smallish vibrator as a start.

Monday, August 14, 2006

After having proved to myself that I can wear a skirt in public, I went to the office in one. I really think everybody who knew me noticed. Only about a third of them commented on it, with half the comments neutral or positive, a couple catcalls and the like (from people I’d already told I wasn’t interested in dating and they were each warned it was the last time or I would report it to HR), and a few like Frank’s:

“Wow, really going all out with this female thing, huh? A skirt?”

“It wasn’t my choice to become female, Frank, but I’ve decided I am not going to hide it. This is a normal, accepted, and in some cases expected way for a woman to dress and I wanted to prove to myself that I can look the part.”

“Well, it does look good on you.”

“Thank you.”

I felt my responses to these had turned potentially problematic interactions into good ones, and made note of it for the future. The situation was, as far as I knew, permanent, so it was forever going to be possible that people who first met me as a man would later encounter me as a woman.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

I wore pants the rest of the week, but I felt good about the experience. This was something I knew I could do now.

It was Wednesday evening when I first tried out my new toys. The first thing I had to do was break my hymen. This was expected; in fact, it was likely to be a regular occurrence for me, because one of the things I caught in one of the news reports was that anybody who started male or who started female but had an intact hymen when the change happened has had their hymen regenerate every time they turned female.

Saturday, October 7, 2006

Weeks passed, then months. I grew completely used to and comfortable with being female every other day, and my coworkers got used to it, too. I kept watch for any news reports about the condition. One report, apparently due to some people with the condition getting medical exams each day they turned female, confirmed the regenerating hymen thing, and also said the reproductive system resets basically to the no-uterine-lining state right after the period ends every time the female body was formed, so unless they found some way of prolonging the time you could spend in one body, there was no way I could get pregnant. However, the machinery was there to produce a pregnancy, even in those who started male, if such a prolonged state could be maintained.

Two months after my change, I saw a report about more people getting the syndrome, who fell into two categories. Some women who were pregnant when it started changed to male the next time they peed after giving birth. The pregnancy apparently suppressed the change, so one of us getting pregnant only requires a roughly two week span with no changes to initiate the pregnancy, and then the body will stay female until birth. Maybe. These women were peeing and pooping normally during their pregnancy, leading people to wonder if one of us did get pregnant, would the body switch to the normal human excretion activity? But so far nobody had even managed to go two days without changing, much less two weeks.

The other category was young teens (or realistically, tweens, 11 and 12 year olds). It appears that some trigger, early on in puberty, flips the switch and puts the body into a state where the change will occur. It’s too early to tell the rate, but the limited data available suggests that they could have been affected at the same rate as older people, and simply inhibited from changing until puberty enabled it. There was a program collecting DNA from 10 and 11 year olds, hoping they’d get something from somebody with the syndrome who had not started showing symptoms yet, so they could compare that DNA with the DNA after the change, as well as with the bulk of DNA from unaffected people, and figure out if it was possible to detect the condition in people not showing symptoms yet. There were very few of these, but given how few, relative to the world’s population, changed at all, it wasn’t too surprising.

So the number of affected people, who were now being called changers by some, switchers by others, was slowly increasing, but we were still so rare that most people would not know one.

Friday, December 29, 2006

Eventually, they confirmed the rates of new people starting to change. The change originally affected about 1 in 3.5 million people past puberty. There are about a billion younger people in the world, and about 250,000 of them reach puberty each day. So they expected one new changer every two weeks. The rate of births was similar, so they expected one mother to start changing after giving birth every two weeks, for nine months, I guess. It was five months in when they announced 11 teens and 8 mothers had started changing, very much in line with the estimate.

By this time, the USA had followed many other countries’ lead by introducing a “switching” gender to apply to people affected by the syndrome. Well, they did this two months ago, but the individual states issued IDs, and so each state had to figure out how they were going to do it. And most states only had one or two affected people, so for the most part they didn’t consider it a priority. California had 11 such people, though, so they established a system to deal with it, and most other states copied theirs. Under this system, the affected person and a witness (usually a family member, doctor, or coworker) had to attest under oath that the person was affected, and the affected person had to show up for an appointment on the day they were in the opposite gender from their original to get a picture that way. They’d get a new ID or license showing pictures as both genders in a slightly reduced size and a rearranged form of the other data. New York’s version of this system went into effect this week, as the news joked a “Christmas present” for the 6 people in the state affected, and Terry and I went on an officially excused trip during work time to let me apply today.

The rules the US established in theory went into effect immediately, even before the new IDs were available. The Supreme Court found one of the “bathroom bills” of recent years unconstitutional on a challenge from two syndrome sufferers (ironically, one who was born male and objected to being forced to use the men’s restroom at times she was obviously female, and one who was born female, and objected to being forced to use the “substandard” women’s restrooms with no urinals while he had a functional penis, and doubly ironically, because switchers didn't pee regular pee anymore, though this never seemed to come up in the press and wasn't mentioned during any of the trials). This paved the way for the federal government to establish uniform rules. Under the new rules, anyone who was on a medically certified gender change program could enter the restroom of their new gender whenever they were attired appropriately. Anyone who had completed such a program, meaning they had had their surgery and were now fully (as much as that was possible) changed to their new gender should only use the new gender’s restroom. And switchers should use the restroom they currently looked like, which didn’t necessarily mean the organs they had now, as some were going as one gender all the time, with the exception that if they had to change gender in a public restroom, they could use either. Of course, switchers did not pee or poop, so they were most likely to use a public restroom if they did have to change genders, though I suppose they could use one for hand-washing or checking appearance. Or changing clothes, which I’d already done once without being questioned. Or masturbating, I thought with an evil grin.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Nine months in, and very likely the last of the already-pregnant changers gave birth and started changing. There were now 20 teens and 17 new mothers who had become changers in addition to the original group. There was no progress on any sort of drug or procedure to keep somebody from changing. The longest any switcher had managed to go without involuntarily starting to pee their body out to begin a change was 34 hours. So based on our current knowledge all switchers were effectively infertile as females. Some of them had already fathered children. Well, gotten women pregnant, anyway. The first of those children would be born soon.

They had made no real progress on identifying a genetic marker for changers. They had managed to get samples of before and after DNA for changers, and there was no identifiable difference. The genes which were active in changers causing the chromosomal gender to alternately be suppressed or active and those causing the change to occur were both present in over half the population, as part of the so-called junk genes which were never known, until now, to be active. Based on the presence of these genes, there was a test that could eliminate about 45% of people as potential changers. They had not identified any cause for these genes to become active. They had found that these genes were not present in other mammals, including all known primates, so this was a human-only condition.

I had never used the tampons and pads. My female body never reached a condition where I would need them, resetting after every change. But I kept them. There was no telling what might happen in the future. We didn’t know why it had started, so we had no idea about how it might change again in the future.

Friday, June 8, 2007

The first children born to changer fathers, conceived after the change started, were born recently. Only 3 so far; there were, after all, less than 2000 of us in the world. These were born to changers who started out male and were already married, and simply had children with their existing wives normally. And while they all had the genetic factor that would allow them to possibly become changers when they reached puberty, none of them were changing from birth, born with both sets of organs, or any other such silliness.