Ethertravel report #1091, received July 11, 2498.
I was born as Kevin Mankin on an amazingly Earthlike world. The people look like people, they speak English and other Earth languages, and cities and countries that existed on Earth exist here. So when I was first starting to become aware of the world I was reborn in, I wondered if something had gone wrong with the ethertravel.
Pretty soon, though, I realized it wasn’t Earth at all. Besides being long in the past compared to the time I came from, there was a major difference, and it had to do with restrooms. I was 4 when my parents first spoke with me directly about it.
“Kevin, you’re going to go off to school pretty soon, and you’re going to have a choice.”
“What’s the choice?” I asked, not yet connecting this with what I’d heard about restrooms and thinking I was going to get to choose between different schools.
“People get to choose between living their lives as boys or girls.”
That was what I thought I’d heard, and they were confirming it for me.
“How would I decide?”
“Well, it’s up to you, and you can change when you want. But right now I’m telling you so you know how to change.”
I gave Mom my full attention so she’d know I was listening.
“When you go into a restroom, you can choose between one labeled Men and one labeled Women. If you go into the one labeled Women, you’ll turn into a girl. If you go into the one labeled Men, you’ll turn into a boy.”
And that was what I thought I’d heard as well. I had previously been taught to use the Men’s room, but now I was being told I had a choice.
That summer I turned 5, and my parents frequently had me switch so that I’d learn it both ways. The first time I changed to a girl, Mom went in with me to explain the differences, but at that age, the only real difference was whether I had a penis. Before school started they let me choose, and I chose to stay a boy because peeing with a penis was simpler and faster, and I was used to being male before I ethertraveled.
Of course, they were telling me about it then because there were gendered restrooms at school, and I’d have a choice. About 3/4 of the kids chose to be boys, and at that time most of them stayed the same sex all the time. There were some exceptions, though. Starting in second grade, when we went out and played sports, they sometimes made everybody change to the same sex before going out. Sometimes we were all boys, sometimes all girls. The idea was that we’d get to practice in both bodies to help us learn the feel of both of them and help us decide what we wanted to do later in life.
It wasn’t until I was 10 and some of my older classmates were 11, in fifth grade, that we heard more about it. We got the birds and bees stuff first, from our parents just before classes started and also at the start of that grade in school. Then we started hearing about different aspects of how things got this way in several different classes. As recently as 2011, within my parents’ lifetimes, this easy sex-change ability didn’t exist, and everybody had to stay the sex they were born as. There were people who wanted to change, but there was no way to truly perform a complete change. But some transgendered people used drugs and surgery to give themselves the appearance of the other sex, and lived their lives that way. And of course I knew this; the Earth I left was that way.
History’s viewpoint was like this: In 2011, the United States was experiencing increasing strife between liberal and conservative factions, and one of those areas was transgender rights. Some people thought the ability to choose your gender should be a right, and others thought nobody should have that right and you should be forced to live as the sex you were born as. I knew about that, too. My Earth had ultimately agreed that people did have that right, but it took a long time and was the issue behind the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century.
Another issue was the attempts by men to use video cameras to surreptitiously film women naked, or up their skirts, etc. Women’s public restrooms were one area such things happened, and some people argued against letting people born as men into women’s restrooms to prevent this from happening. This was a pointless argument, since the true transgenders weren’t interested in this sort of thing, and it wouldn’t keep the men actually interested in doing this from dressing as women and going in anyway to do their filming; they were already doing something illegal. It was simply an argument used by those opposed to allowing transgendered people from identifying as their chosen gender.
It was in this context when a 60-year-old conservative midwestern woman encountered a being calling itself The Djinn. This Djinn gave the woman one wish, saying it had to be used to help all mankind, and the woman wished that “it should be impossible for anybody to ever enter the wrong restroom.”
She may have meant that a supernatural force would keep men from passing through the door of the women’s restroom, but what happened was quite different. The first reports were from three groups who sometimes entered opposite-sex restrooms for legitimate purposes: janitors, plumbers, and infants carried in by a parent. There were reports from around the world that all three of these groups experienced sudden, unexpected gender changes upon entering the “wrong” restroom. It was 100% reversible by entering the other restroom. And it was only when this started being reported in the news that the woman came forward with this story about the wish. A lot of people doubted her, but it was obvious that something had happened, and ultimately the idea that it had happened that way was largely accepted.
A fourth group also experienced changes: transgendered people. Anyone who was presenting as their new gender to the point that they used that gender’s restroom experienced it, a sudden and complete change to their new desired gender. They were talking about it too, but among their transgendered friends. That “grapevine” had spread the word so effectively that nearly all the people who wanted to be the opposite sex had done it before the word started getting out to the rest of the world.
When the word did get out, another group started widely exercising the ability: the curious. There were many more of these than the transgendered who wanted a permanent change. The curious helped explore the limits of the effect. Any restroom, locker room, dressing room, or the like which contains a toilet, shower, or bathtub and is marked with a single gender sign at the door works to allow people to change. It has to be a permanent sort of sign; just printing it on paper won’t do. But the bathrooms in private houses work as long as they are labeled with suitable signs; once people figured this out, there was a mad rush for the signs at stores like Home Depot that sold them. But they were easy to manufacture, and soon you could find them for sale everywhere, cheap, in packs of two (one Women sign and one Men sign).
Pretty quickly, this tipped the scales of public opinion on sex change. Now that it was easy to do, while a few staunch conservatives opposed it, most people felt sex change was fine, and it quickly got written into law most everywhere as a basic right of people.
Most of the religions decided the visitation the woman experienced was a manifestation of their god, and treated it as a miracle, a gift from the god, etc. Each religion also had splinter groups who attributed it to an evil force attacking the world, but the vast majority of the people were on the side that it was good.
It took a generation for things to get the way they are now. There is still a liberal-conservative split, but now the conservatives let you be what you want but ask you to formally register changes after the age of 18 so you can get ID showing your new gender. In the liberal areas, like where I live, they did away with gender as a part of identity, and you can change whenever you want. In schools here, it became part of the curriculum to ensure people spent some time as both sexes so that they can decide later on with knowledge of what it is like both ways. But even then, most of the time they let you be whatever you want.
Other classes talked about the actual changes in more detail. Once you are past puberty, the change becomes more significant, in that it involves changes in body shape. It doesn’t change mass, though, and generally doesn’t change a person’s height much if at all; it just redistributes the weight so that men have it more evenly distributed and women have more in the breasts and hips. This meant that some people who were already adult at the time the change occurred would turn into rather short men, and others into rather tall women. Subsequent generations have been more moderate in height due to people realizing that the sex you choose during childhood influences how much you grow, especially after puberty, and many of those at the extremes took advantage of this to adjust their bodies to more moderate sizes.
This was important; we would still be asked to change one way or the other for some school activities, but at this point, we would no longer be asked to change during the school day but simply to arrive as one or the other. When I understood this, in the summer before sixth grade, I started living as a girl half the time, adopted the name Kelly for my girl self, and Mom helped me with various girl things, like my first bra and girl clothes in general.
Also, tampons. Once I was spending significant amounts of time as a girl, that was an inevitable thing. Only time you spend as female contributes toward your menstrual cycle, so it may take significantly longer than the usual month, but it will come. Pregnancy is different, though. If you get pregnant, you stay pregnant, male or female. While male, you won’t be able to give birth, you won’t go into labor, and early stages of labor can be halted by becoming male. This is routinely used to postpone births by hours or days. Not too long, though, because the child still grows. Staying male can lead to the child getting so big a C-section is needed. And if a C-section is needed, they routinely do them while the mother is male, to prevent labor from starting.
But we were also taught the limit on this. If the birth is beyond a certain point, turning male forces the birth to finish all at once rather than halting it, causing damage to both the mother and the child. We were all taught how to check for that limit; it was more or less if you could reach a hand into the vagina fingers-deep and feel the head inside. A similar rule applies to anything a woman has in her vagina when becoming male, such as a tampon; it would be pushed out, in this case usually causing no real damage other than embarrassment and stained clothes.
Ultimately I decided this was a good thing. If I explored both sides of the street, I could have my choice later in life. That could be especially important if I found another ethertraveler to pair up with, but even if I didn’t, it seemed like there was an overabundance of kids my age on the male side. So I stuck with it. I attended school in sixth grade as a “switcher,” showing up as Kevin on some days and as Kelly on others.
That meant I wore skirts and dresses to school sometimes, though those were no longer only worn by women. Men who wore dresses were usually people who spent a significant amount of time as female, though. And there were two options there as well. So-called switcher dresses were usually made of sufficiently stretchy fabrics that the different body shapes would neither rip the fabric nor cause the garment to look misshapen on a male body. This really only worked for those who were not too curvy as women, though; beyond a C cup you really needed different clothes for your male and female selves, and there were male-only dresses made for such people.
I kept this up, and by eighth grade started facing one of the other weird things this caused. Dating was completely weird, at least, from an Earth perspective. People sometimes hit on other people who were the same sex at the time, including in public restrooms and the locker rooms at school where everyone inside was necessarily the same sex at the time, without it meaning they were gay. This usually meant the person doing the hitting-on would want to date you in this form while they were in the opposite sex, but it didn’t have to. Same-sex couples were accepted, to a greater or lesser degree by some people, mainly because they didn’t have to stay the same sex.
And I had made up my mind... to not make up my mind, but to be open to dating both boys and girls at this point. Though some kids had been dating even back in seventh grade, it seemed there was a lot more of it. I had tried, in seventh grade, by wearing T-shirts I’d decorated myself, letter bracelets not spelling out my name but other things, and in other ways, to show off my knowledge of things from my own Earth that only ethertravelers would recognize, and it hadn’t worked, which probably only meant that nobody else in the same grade with me was an ethertraveler.
My first actual date was to the Halloween dance in eighth grade. My date was the former “Crazy Daisy” who was now known as Dan. We had agreed to dress as sexy devil and she-devil. He came in what looked like a pretty conventional suit, except that it was bright red, and where a normal suit jacket might have two “tails” in the back, his came together with a single long devil tail that hung to his knees. My outfit was basically a skin-tight bodysuit with flame appliqués in strategic places to make it a bit less revealing (though it was opaque all over).
Dan, who had been the girl who had gone on the most dates in seventh grade, explained, “At first, I was too pretty. I was getting hit on by every guy around, and I dated some of them... but they were all jerks. At that point I went goth, and got a different group of guys asking for dates, who were still jerks. By spring I still hadn’t dated anyone twice. I tried asking girls, and switchers, but none of the ones I was interested in wanted me when I was goth. So that was when I went butch, but the pretty ones thought I was still too pretty for them even in my butch look, and the butch ones and the switchers who were guy more than girl wanted a more passive girl who I simply wasn’t anymore. So finally I decided, even though I don’t like being a guy, to see if I had more success that way.”
“And was I your first choice?”
“No, I went on one other date before you, with Mary Spellman.”
“The former Mark?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d that go?” I asked.
“OK. She’s fine, but really timid. I don’t think she’s really ready for dating from either side of the fence.”
“I was surprised to see her come to school female. I don’t remember ever seeing her female before this year except when we were all required to be.”
“She wanted to try it, and now she thinks she might change back and actually ask some girls out. As a guy, Mark had never asked anyone out.”
“Well I don’t think that’s really unusual. I was neither asked out nor asked anyone out last year. It’s really this year that a lot more kids are dating. I think you dated more than half the people who were dating at all last year!”
Dan laughed, showing he could appreciate the humor in his own situation.
“Kelly, I think people saw you as more of a nerd last year, as both a guy and a girl. But I personally think you’re starting to look hot, and I wanted to ask you out before you start getting asked out too much.”
“Thank you, Dan. I’m glad you see me that way and I hope you’re right about others seeing me that way, too. I have been asked out by some other guys and I might try some of them, but I’d like to date you again too.”
Before we parted, Dan kissed me. Oh, how he kissed me! He’d been on two dozen different dates and was never once kissed the way he wanted to be kissed, and now as Dan he was showing me how Daisy had wanted to be kissed. I never knew a kiss could feel so good!
I did go ahead with two other dates before coming back to Dan. Two weeks after the date with Dan I went out with Ben, but he turned out to be a jerk and I called Mom to come pick me up early. My third date was with Rick, who’d been Trish previously, and was at a school dance the following week.
Rick did ask me out, but he was very unsure of himself, and uncoordinated on the dance floor. He wasn’t leading well, and I took over the lead to keep us from falling over or into other people. He was trying, and was very sweet, but clearly dancing was not his thing and I convinced him to just go sit at a table with me after a while.
We sat there the rest of the dance, nibbling on cookies, and Rick shared his experience with me. This was his first date as a boy, but he’d had several as Trish. But between the guys who were jerks and the guys she’d embarrassed in some way, she’d never had a second date. I thought Trish had better looks than Rick did at this point, and wondered if, like Mary/Mark, he’d be better off going back to his first form. He definitely needed some advice from someone more experienced, and I suggested he try asking his parents.
I mentioned the experience to Dan, but at this time we didn’t plan anything. The next week was Thanksgiving, and we’d each be with our families. Of course, during that Thanksgiving, my family wanted to hear about my recent dates.
“Dan was great, and I’d gladly continue dating him. He used to be a girl, and she had trouble with too many of the guys she dated being jerks, and wanted to try it the other way and do some girl right.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“Ben was a jerk, as you know, Mom, since you picked me up early.”
“Yeah. It happens. You did the right thing.”
“Rick, on the other hand, well, didn’t do anything really wrong, but he didn’t do a whole lot right either. He’s clumsy and inexperienced. This was his first date as a guy, but he had had similar troubles as a girl, when she wasn’t fending off jerks. He needs some help.”
“Aww. And you want to be the one to help him? You hardly have much experience.”
“Trust me, I’m way better at it than him. Anyway, Dan had mentioned to me he’d had one other date as a boy, and his date had similar inexperience issues. I was wondering if we could help both of them somehow.”
“Oh, that’s nice. You could double-date.”
“Double-date? How would that work?”
“Two couples, on a date together. You’ll be dating Dan and the inexperienced couple will be dating, but you’ll go to a restaurant as a group of 4 and do other things together and let them learn by example.”
“Oh, that’s interesting. When they do something wrong, Dan and I can do it right.”
“Yes. And be up front with them about it. Tell them before the date that it’s for them to learn, and if necessary explain explicitly during the date, privately just among you four, whatever you think they need.”
This was an obvious thing, really, but this sort of experience had never come up in my first life.
So that’s how it was. We got together the following weekend just for dinner at my house. I invited Rick, and Dan invited Mary, both of us explaining it was for them to date each other and not us. And we put them in touch with each other so they could decide if they wanted to go as Rick and Mary, or as Trish and Mark. It was Rick and Mary who showed up, even though I thought they would have been better the other way.
It went pretty well, considering. Nobody spilled anything or knocked anyone else over. I interrupted Rick once when I could tell he was starting to say something dumb, and gave Dan the opportunity to do right what Rick had been going to do wrong. And he understood; later, Rick was able to follow Dan’s example, and Mary followed an example I provided, and at the end of it they felt good about the whole thing.
So the following weekend we scheduled a full double-date. Rick spilled his drink at dinner, but Dan and I were able to throw napkins in front of it and get a waitress to help us. Otherwise we got through the dinner unscathed. We went to a movie afterward, and Dan and I kissed, and I saw that Rick and Mary tried, it appeared not very successfully. After the lights came on when it was over, I took Rick and Dan took Mary aside and we showed them how to kiss, and then had them kiss each other again. They agreed they did it better at the end than they had done during the movie.
We kept doing this, scheduling double-dates each weekend the four of us could all get together. After one more date as Rick and Mary, they decided to switch, and we had Trish and Mark with us for the remaining dates. Everybody was happier that way, and they definitely improved. After a couple months, we let them start planning some of the double-dates, and by summer, we spun them off on their own, telling them they no longer needed our help.
Dan and I stayed together, sometimes switching to Kevin and Daisy for dates, but usually going as Kelly and Dan. Trish and Mark stayed together too, and we usually dated separately, but we planned a double wedding two weeks after graduation, which was a great success.
Also, in high school, I made another attempt among a larger school group to look for other ethertravelers. This time I was successful; I found just two, who were together as a couple, and they’d had less comical adventures on the way of getting there. But they had also made contact with other ethertravelers in another city who were already making progress on an ether communicator. By the time I finished high school, the group had already finished it, and the couple and I added our own reports.