I was born a girl here. At least, that’s what my parents said. When I inspected myself, I found myself to have a penis, but they seemed sure I was a girl.

I tended to think of my parents as my two moms, since they both had boobs, and indeed, took turns breast-feeding me. They nevertheless identified as Mom and Dad when they talked to me as part of that very early teaching parents do with babies.

When I got a little older, at potty training age, I inspected myself more closely. I definitely had a penis which I peed from. But it also looked like I had a vagina below that. But that’s Djinn Worlds for you. Fully half of them change something having to do with sex. I was sure my parents would tell me about it all in time.

As I had experiences outside and among more adults, I noticed that, just like my parents, all the adults had boobs. Some of them dressed in very man-like clothes, but that had been true of women for centuries on my Earth. Studying them more closely, I could see that, despite the boobs, there were distinguishable men and women. The men tended to be larger, they didn’t have the wide hips of women, and as a result, they walked like men. It wasn’t universal, but maybe 80% of the men I identified wore man-like clothes. But they all had boobs, sometimes small, sometimes large, just like my “Dad”.

I was so confused. If men have boobs and women have boobs, and women have penises and vaginas, does that mean men have penises and no vaginas? I’d figured out they didn’t have the shape to give birth. And do women have penises just so they can pee? Was that the wish? That all people could have the convenience men have of standing to pee, and the ability women have to breastfeed their children?

I made this realization shortly before I started kindergarten, and going to school started giving me other opportunities to observe society and test the theory.

First off, I realized it was 1977. I’d been born here in 1972. Several of the travelers to Djinn Worlds had gone to the 21st century, but starting before the computer revolution was going to be a challenge. Maybe other travelers came so far back but we didn’t hear from them because it wasn’t possible for ethertravelers to build an ether device with the technology of this era. At least the computer revolution was going to happen soon; if anybody had gone back to, say, 1850, there would be no hope whatsoever within their entire lifetime.

Second, public restrooms aren’t gendered. But it’s clear they used to be! They all have relatively new signs, in some cases just saying Restroom, in which case you can find urinals and toilets inside like any men’s room on my Earth. Some are labeled Toilets, for restrooms that used to be women’s restrooms and do not contain any urinals. There are also some labeled Urinals, for what probably used to be men’s restrooms that now only contain urinals, presumably the toilets having been replaced with more urinals. And I was taught to use them that way, with no regard to a person’s sex; if you only need to pee, go in the urinals restroom; if you need to poop, go in the toilets restroom.

Third, I heard references to the Change, emphasized in speech, and on the occasions where I had seen it written, with a capital letter as if it was a proper noun. That isn’t surprising on a Djinn World, but it was clearly a recent event, something that happened within the lifetimes of the adults alive today. Some picture books we used had pictures of adult men without boobs, and at least once our teacher apologized about the “old” picture, saying, “People don’t look like that anymore.”

The teacher didn’t want to say more about this, but this gave me the opportunity to ask my parents.

“Dad, a picture in a book in school today showed somebody’s dad without...”

“Without boobs?” he responded, then correcting himself, “Breasts?” He pointed with both index fingers to his own.

“Yes.”

“Things changed. People changed, not too long ago. Nobody knows why. But when your mother and I were kids, men didn’t have boobs. Some other things changed too, but we’ll talk about those things when you’re a little older.”

Of course. Because every other thing that changed has to do with sex or penises. In all likelihood, my parents got the sex talk before the Change, and everything changed on them, and they are going to have to figure out how to give the sex talk for the first generation after the Change. But this put Dad on alert for a task he needed to do a few years from now. I was sure kids still got the sex talk around age 12, just before they started getting erections, periods, and growing breasts. And with the equipment I now have, I figured it was possible all three of those things will apply to me!

I started watching for references to relevant things. For instance, television commercials for menstrual pads and tampons. And what was surprising was that I didn’t see them. Even though I was a guy in my first life, I knew what those things were, and basically how they were used. The only feminine product ad I saw was about a douche, which advertised it for women when they get “messy” inside. That didn’t seem 100% right for what I expected, but it showed that they weren’t so prudish in this era as to not advertise the products at all. So where were the others? In fact, I hadn’t heard menstruation talked about at all, so I didn’t even have a reference I could legitimately ask my parents about.

So I waited, and watched. The fact that from kindergarten through fifth grade I didn’t see any advertising nor package in the store, etc. for any sort of menstrual product suggested to me it had changed. And Dad’s refusal to talk about the other changes also suggested something had changed about sex. So in the summer before sixth grade, while I was 11, when I got the sex talk, I wasn’t surprised to learn it was quite different. It was a lot more complicated than the idea I’d considered the wish might have been when I was 5.

One thing the Change had done here was give women the lead role in sex and dating. And it had mixed up dating and sexuality such that same-sex relationships were accepted. I’d have to have a man involved if I wanted to have children, but I could date and marry another woman if I wanted. This was decades ahead of the schedule for that to happen on old Earth.

Dating

So did I like women, or men? Just because I liked women in my first life didn’t mean the same was true here, where I’m in a different body and both the men and women are different. This was not something I’d figured out at the time I got the sex talk, but as I matured, and my own breasts grew in, my penis got erections, and all the other puberty stuff happened, what I figured out was I liked boobs. The bigger the boobs, the better, and it didn’t matter if they were on a man or a woman.

My breasts seemed to top out at C cup in high school, and I ended up dating a guy with bigger breasts than mine. I think Eddie was a D cup at the time, but by the time we finished high school he was an E cup. We started slow, but by junior year, it wasn’t uncommon for us both to get naked above the waist, suck each others’ nipples, and draw a little milk. Like everybody else, we both started milk production a year or so before that and we hadn’t yet reached the state where it would shut off if they weren’t used. This was another of those differences from old Earth; milk production wasn’t only limited to the period right after pregnancy.

In our senior year, Eddie and I started having sex. Of course, that was more complicated, and part of that complication had made it easy to avoid getting pregnant. But at first, we just did basic sex, my penis penetrating his. Because that’s how it was here. Foreplay led to both of us having erections, but they were completely different. The erection of my female penis is much like that of a man’s on old Earth. Eddie’s penis gets very wide, rather than long, and his vagina opens up within it. My childhood idea that men would be different by not having vaginas was wrong, but who could have guessed the vagina would be within the penis?

Technically, the man’s penis was now called an ovipositor, but nobody used that word outside of medical settings. Mom used it once, and the little sex book they gave me, A Teen’s Guide to Sex After the Change, copyright 1968 with three revisions, used the word only twice. And it wasn’t even doing that function during the normal male erection, anyway, but serving as the vagina. The actual sex act was a lot like that on old Earth with the roles swapped, though my penis was a bit longer to compensate for 3 inches of Eddie’s vagina being outside of his body.

It was three weeks later during one of our dates that I got to see his other erection. While men still got the long erection which was relatively narrow, in comparison to their other erection, when they had to pee, the only other time they got it was when they were ready to lay an egg. Because my come was stored in a reservoir inside Eddie’s body, it was certain that when his body ovulated, his egg would be fertilized and develop into one the size of a chicken’s egg containing a tiny embryo, and that egg was apparently ready now. It was just chance that it was ready during one of our dates; once the egg was ready to lay, he only had about two days before the egg would force itself out without my presence, but since ovulation was pretty regularly every 14 days, it meant that we’d be likely to experience it every other week if we had dates at the same time.

Eddie was distressed. “Crap, Jessica! It’s time for me to lay an egg. I’m not going to be able to have sex the usual way until I do that. I know you can’t get pregnant, but would you let me put it in your ass?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Eddie. I’ve never had anything up there. But then, I never had sex at all until a month ago. So I guess I’ll try it. I just pooped at dinner, so it should be all clear for you back there.”

After the Change, to get pregnant, a man had to insert his ovipositor into the woman’s vagina and lay the egg up there. The ovipositor does something that opens up the cervix and the egg goes straight into the uterus. The leathery outer shell of this egg dissolves, and the rudimentary placenta within the egg bonds to the uterine wall, allowing both the placenta and embryo to grow. This works something like 95% of the time, so you really, really didn’t do this unless you wanted to get pregnant.

People figured out quickly after the Change that a man could put his ovipositor in someone’s ass; it could be a man’s or a woman’s ass. That was enough like the environment of the female vagina to trigger the body to lay the egg, but it would just die there and get pooped out later. Otherwise, he just had to wait until the embryo died and the body forced the egg out. And that waiting time would have meant we couldn’t have sex at all tonight.

It took some effort, but I figured out how to open myself up to let him in. The lubrication already leaking from his penis helped, and I also applied some of what was leaking from my vagina on his penis as well. It turned out this kind of sex felt OK too. And then the egg came. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but what I was not expecting was for it to slam into me hard, bursting past my asshole without any resistance at all, stretching me very wide briefly, and pounding against whatever is up inside there so hard it pushed Eddie almost entirely out of me. And it gave me my first female orgasm. Or whatever they call it here now; the kind that doesn’t involve my ejaculation.

“Oh my God, Eddie! That felt AMAZING! How about for you?”

“It felt great for me too, and now I feel relieved to have the egg out.”

As he pulled out of me, I realized that now it didn’t feel so good for me.

“Ugh. The sex felt great, but I feel kind of uncomfortable now having your egg up inside me.”

“You want to take a break and poop it out?”

“Yeah, I probably should.”

Easier said than done. That thing was way up in me, but after about 5 minutes I managed to get it to my asshole. It was another 5 minutes to get it through my asshole. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt; it was just difficult to push it hard enough to stretch myself open to the degree the egg would come out. But then I had an egg floating in the toilet water.

“Hey, Eddie, you want to see your egg?”

“Sure.”

He came in, ignoring my nakedness, and saw his egg floating in the toilet.

“Wow! Hard to believe that huge thing fit out of me, into you, and back out of you again!”

“It wasn’t easy to get out, let me tell you.”

“Now we have to crush it, right?”

“Yeah. That’s what my parents taught me. That embryo is doomed and has no way to survive, and we put it out of its misery rather than letting it suffer a slow death.”

Not wanting to reach directly into the toilet, I grabbed a little toilet paper and grabbed the egg with it. It was covered in some poop, some blood, and perhaps some of our natural lubricants, and I set it in the sink and turned on the water for a bit until I felt comfortable touching the egg. Then I held onto the egg with one hand, but it was slick with water, and slipped out of my hand when I tried to crush it with the other. So I had to dry the egg off, and finally I could hold one end in place with one hand, and press down on the middle with the other until the egg split open. It was full of an ugly mess including a tiny bit of flesh that might possibly have developed into a person if I had let it grow inside me for 8 more months. I mashed that a bit more, then grabbed everything in some more paper and threw the chunks back in the toilet and flushed it.

“Yuck,” I said.

“Well, that’s what I have to look forward to every two weeks if we keep having sex. It won’t always be inside your ass, though. I can get one of those devices.”

They made a simulated vagina that could trigger a man to lay his egg, which was the alternative to what we had just done. That was also part of my sex lesson from Mom and Dad.

“Actually, I really enjoyed that part. If we are in this situation again, I’ll do the same. The yuck is inevitable, though.”

“I can deal with the yuck in the future if you want.”

“Thank you.”

“Now I’m ready if you want to have sex the normal way.”

Indeed, his penis was back to the short, wide shape which opened his vagina for me.

And this was the difference, I realized. My generation had only ever known sex this way, and guys willingly took dicks into their vaginas because it was the only form of sex ever available to them, except for the egg-laying, much as most women from time immemorial took the receiving role as the only one available to them.

Dad had explained to me how it was before the Change, and told this story of the events of the change:

Some men simply accepted the Change, but there was resistance from a certain portion of them. You have to understand that gay culture was in a weird spot in those times. Actually, it may have always been that way before the Change. Gays weren’t well accepted among most straight men, but there were certain men, called machos by those who respected them, gay-bashers by those who didn’t, who saw the act of a man being penetrated by another man as the greatest injustice that a man could suffer. Never mind that some men liked it; some thought the idea unconscionable.

When these men discovered that the Change meant that they couldn’t have sex regularly in the way they were used to, and not at all unless they let a woman penetrate them first, they reacted very badly. There were different reactions, though.

Some men went permanently celibate. That means they simply didn’t have sex at all. Others committed suicide. Those men weren’t the real problem, though.

A number of men killed the women in their lives. Their girlfriends, wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and any others. Most of these men either committed suicide or surrendered peacefully afterward.

A small number of men went on killing sprees, killing any women they could find. That was bad. 1966 had more murders than all of 1960 to 1965 combined, and 1967, the first full year after the change, had even more. President Johnson deployed the National Guard to help capture the killers in places where the local police couldn’t keep up with it, with the FBI working overtime to help locate them. In the end, over twenty thousand men were imprisoned, and about the same number committed suicide to avoid going to prison. Almost a million women were killed, and twelve thousand men died trying to stop the killers.

By the end of 1967, things finally settled down. While suicides remained high through 1970, the murders stopped. Some attributed that to the Guard simply capturing the violent ones, and others claimed it was due to widespread reporting that men who had tried sex the new way with their wives or girlfriends enjoyed it.

His story had reminded me of how I learned the presidents here. LBJ was president when the Change happened, and it altered the course of events so much that every president since then had been different. There weren’t even the same people running for president. There was no President Nixon, no Watergate.

Eddie turned out to be pretty regular, so, if we were dating that night, every second Saturday I made sure to poop before our date or at dinner, and afterward he shot an egg up into my ass, I pooped it out, and he crushed it. And we continued sucking each other’s nipples. We were dating often enough that this left us both in the quiescent state; our breasts did not completely fill up with milk, but mine did not go dormant, either. Though once Eddie was laying eggs regularly, his would not go dormant no matter what. Typically, women’s breasts that weren’t used, and men’s as well if they were not having sex, would go dormant before they finished high school. In the quiescent state, we were able to extract a couple ounces of milk from each breast, each date.