Thursday evening, Mom and Dad allowed me and Sophia to ride home with Caleb so we could have an early supper and get to the school board meeting in plenty of time. We got there about half an hour before the meeting began, and I recognized a few people from school sitting in the room where the school board met — the same one the county commissioners, election board, and so forth used at different times. Ms. Hodge was there, and the junior who’d been cured of muscular dystrophy, and a couple of other older kids I had seen at school but didn’t know, including a girl with four arms, as well as Principal Moffett. Mom, Dad, Caleb, Sophia and I sat down near Ms. Hodge and the guy who used to have MD, and we introduced ourselves.

“I’m Hunter Gorman,” said the kid who used to have MD. “You’re Meredith Ramsey, right? I’ve heard people talking about you.”

“Good things?” I wondered nervously. He was seriously good-looking, not as tall as Andrew or Evan, but still a lot taller than me, and ripped.

“Eh, mostly good. Don’t mind the assholes. You’ve got guts, I can tell that from the little bit I’ve heard.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Congratulations on getting your MD fixed.”

“It’s pretty awesome,” he said with a grin, flexing his biceps. “Who knows what’s going to happen when it wears off, whether I’ll go back to the exact same body as before, or if it’ll be three years older with the MD three years worse... I’m going to make the most of it while it lasts.”

Andrew and his mom arrived a little later and sat down near us, along with a number of other people, some from our school and some I didn’t know. Finally, the school board members came in and the chairman called the meeting to order. It was about fifteen minutes before they got to the “Transformation Booth Policy” and asked for public comment. Ms. Hodge, Andrew, Hunter and I all stood up then, along with a lot of other people, and they started calling us up one by one to a standing microphone to give a brief statement of no more than one minute. I was the fifth one to speak, and the first trans kid, though not, I found, the last. Most of the ones who spoke before me had been rejuvenated or healed of some serious illness or disability by the Venn machine, including Ms. Hodge, Hunter, and a boy from the other high school that served the western half of the county, who’d been cured of hemophilia.

When it was my turn, I said: “I’m Meredith Ramsey, a sophomore at Eastern Mynatt High. I’m transgender; I was born with a boy body, and it always felt wrong. I was able to use the Venn machine to change into this body that fits me just right, and I’d like to thank Assistant Principal Novacek, Coach Wilcox, and all my other teachers for making sure everything went smoothly for me at school. I hope you’ll take the needs of transgender students and staff into account when you decide on the new policy. Thank you.”

I’d been thinking about what to say since Ms. Novacek told me about the meeting, and I’d written out several drafts of what to say over the course of the week. But wouldn’t you know it, just as soon as I sat down again, I was second-guessing myself. Should I have tried to say something about the needs of non-binary trans kids? A lot of people had a gender identity more complicated than mine and might need a lot of trial and error with the machine to find a body that suited them. What about gender-fluid kids who might need to use the machine over and over, to keep their body matching their gender? I’d considered all that earlier, but decided it was too complicated to try to explain to the school board, and I should just focus on my own experience.

But a few minutes later, after a couple more teachers and students who’d been healed of different illnesses and injuries, a couple who’d just used it to improve their looks like Andrew, and several parents who wanted the use of the Venn machines banned for everything except chronic illness, a slender Hispanic person who looked a little older than me got up and said:

“I’m Carmen Olmedo, a senior at Western Mynatt High. I’m transgender, like the girl who spoke earlier, but unlike her, I’m neither a boy or a girl — I’m non-binary. I used the trust booth last weekend to get a body that is neither male nor female, and to clear up the headaches I’ve had ever since I got a concussion falling out of a tree when I was nine. Some people suggested allowing the use of the machines only if your new body is a normal human body, and I wonder if they’d consider me normal enough to count. I think any body shape that doesn’t inherently disrupt classes should be okay — and if bigoted students or staff don’t like someone’s new body, it’s the bigots who are causing the disruption, not the transformed person.”

They were so awesome and I wanted to be their best friend. They’d spoken so calmly and clearly yet so forcefully, not stammering or hesitating like a lot of the other people who’d spoken (probably including me), and they’d explained the stuff I’d decided was too hard to explain without getting near the time limit. (The clerk had a stopwatch and was holding up a big “FIVE SECONDS” sign when someone got close to the limit, and she hadn’t done so before Carmen finished talking.)

As Carmen went back to their seat and the next person started talking, I whispered to Mom, “I want to talk with them afterward.”

“Sure,” she whispered back.

After a middle school teacher and an elementary school bus driver who’d been rejuvenated and healed of different ailments, we got another kid who’d made more adventurous changes. It was the girl with four arms from Eastern Mynatt High, a senior named Melanie Endicott. “I agree with what Carmen said earlier; if you look weird and people gossip about you, it’s them who are disrupting class, not you. As long as you’re not shedding fur that people might be allergic to or something, and you’re capable of participating in classes, you should be allowed to attend school without penalty.”

After about half an hour and thirty or so people telling the school board what they thought, the chairman said they would consider the public comment and decide on the new policy at the next meeting. A lot of people started leaving then; I looked at where Carmen was sitting and said to Mom, “I’m going to go talk to Carmen.”

“Okay. We’ll meet you out in the lobby.”

Carmen had apparently had the same idea, and was heading toward me. But before we met up, the chairman of the school board — who had started talking about a school bus that was going to cost a lot to repair — called out for people to be quiet or get out. So when Carmen and I got close enough to talk, I whispered, “We’d better go out in the lobby.”

“Yeah,” they whispered back, and we went.

Once we were out in the lobby, I said “Your speech was awesome. I’d thought about trying to explain about non-binary and gender-fluid people and what they would need the policy to do, but I figured it was too complicated to explain in under a minute, and you nailed it.”

“You were pretty good too,” they said. “Concise. Who knows if they’ll pay either of us any attention; I have a feeling half of them have already made up their minds and are just waiting for public comment so they can look honest.”

“Who did you get to design your new body and change you?”

“My best friend Zoe. What about you?”

“My little sister Sophia — there she is, over there,” I added, pointing to where Mom, Dad, Sophia and Caleb had just come out of the meeting room. “It’s so cool to meet another trans person who lives locally — well, not in the same town, but at least in the same county.”

“Statistically, there’s got to be at least a couple more trans kids at each of our schools, and another hundred-plus trans people in the county as a whole... but at our age, most of them are probably closeted or in denial. That might change once more people knew about the machines and how easy it is to transition now.”

“Eh,” I said, “physically changing is easy now, but some other parts of transitioning can still be pretty hard.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. It looks like your parents are pretty supportive, though?”

“They’re coming around. At least Mom is. She was finally able to talk Dad into letting me get some girl clothes earlier this week, but I’m still not allowed to wear skirts or dresses yet. What about your parents?”

“It’s just me and my older sister; our mom died a few years ago and our dad left us years before that. My sister was a little puzzled by it at first, but she’s never been as conservative or strict as Mom used to be, and she went to bat for me with the school administration.”

“Oh, and I guess I should have asked earlier — what pronouns do you prefer?”

“They/them, please.”

Nearby, I could see Andrew chatting with Caleb, Melanie, and a couple of other kids from our school. Ms. Hodge was talking with one of the other teachers who’d gotten rejuvenated and Hunter was talking with the guy who used to have hemophilia.

Carmen and I talked for a few minutes longer and exchanged contact information. I was heading back toward Mom and Dad when Hunter came over to talk to me.

“Hey,” he said, “it was nice meeting you. Ms. Hodge says we need to go, so I wanted to say bye real quick. When do you have lunch and free period?

“Fourth and sixth periods. I usually eat with Andrew,” I said, pointing where he was still talking with some other kids from school, “and a couple of other friends, in the corner of the cafeteria nearest the gym.”

“Cool. Maybe I’ll see you at school sometime.”

---

On the way home from the meeting, Mom told me how proud she was of me for standing up in front of the school board and everybody and making that short speech. It was only twenty-nine seconds (Caleb had timed me with his phone’s stopwatch app), so I’m not sure why it was worth such a fuss, but after Mom said that, Dad said he was proud of me, too, even though he still didn’t get this transgender thing.

Caleb had an away football game the next night, way over on the other side of Greensboro; Dad went, but Mom stayed home with me and Sophia.

Saturday, after Mom and Dad got home from their estate sale and yard sale shopping and long after I’d finished my homework, I asked Mom if I could call Carmen. (I hadn’t wanted to call them while Mom and Dad were away in case Mom and Dad called while we were talking, and normally we weren’t allowed to talk on the phone with friends when we were grounded.)

“Hmm,” she said thoughtfully, tapping the tabletop with her nails. “I guess it’s all right. But don’t tie up the phone all afternoon.”

They answered after a couple of rings. “Hey, this is Carmen.”

“Hi, Carmen, this is Meredith Ramsey — we met at the school board meeting...”

“Oh, hi, Meredith. How are you doing?”

“Pretty okay. I just got done with my weekend homework.”

“I’ve got some more homework to do before I go to work, but I can afford to chat for a little while. Anything in particular you want to talk about?”

“Well... how did you figure out you were non-binary? It seems like that might be harder to figure out than it was for me, and that was plenty hard enough.”

“Hmm... I usually say ‘genderqueer,’ but I figured ‘non-binary’ would be less confrontational when I was talking to the school board. It didn’t take me long to realize I didn’t like what puberty was doing to my body, but it was several years before I figured out what I really wanted and why. I thought I might be a trans guy for a while, but that didn’t seem quite right either. I talked about it with my friend Zoe and some online friends and eventually figured it out, after I met a couple of other people kind of like me online.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it was kind of like that for me — getting kind of depressed about what puberty was doing to me, and not understanding why until I found out being transgender was a thing, and then I thought I might be a trans girl but I wasn’t sure for a while, even after I met some other trans people online. But I didn’t come out to anybody I knew in person until a couple of weeks ago when I told my sister and we went to the library to use the machine.”

“How’d you find out about the trust booth?”

“My best friend Andrew was one of the first people to see it...” I told them how Andrew had called me with a mysterious exhortation to get my butt over to the library, and everything else that had happened that first Saturday after the machines appeared. They told me how they’d heard about the machines on a trans forum, and made plans with their friend Zoe to take a weekend trip to the one in Lebanon, Tennessee until they heard rumors at school that there was one right here in Mynatt County, so it was just a twenty-minute trip instead of over six hours. (I’m not sure when the first website that tracked the locations of every known Venn machine appeared, but it was sometime while I was grounded.)

“So what did you ask your sister to do, exactly?” she asked. “Did you just ask her to make you a girl, or give her more specific requests?”

“I said I wanted to be obviously a girl, but still with enough of my old face that people could recognize me, at least once I pointed out who I was. And I wanted to lose some weight. I’m pretty much exactly at the ideal weight for my height now.”

“Yeah, I was a little overweight too. And a lot of it was in places I didn’t even want to have. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted, except I didn’t want my body to be so feminine that I couldn’t look androgynous no matter what I wore. So Zoe and I tried out several different things, and unless I knew right away that I didn’t like a particular body, we’d go out and walk around downtown for a few minutes, or browse in the library, before going back to the trust booth and trying again.

“The first thing I asked Zoe to do was make me like I was before puberty hit, except taller. And she literally did what I asked, because I was taller than I was when I was nine, but not by much. It felt really nice and comfortable being nine again, and I was about to tell Zoe she’d messed up but I decided I wanted to try that for a little while. So I changed her into a little girl, too, and we had some fun running around and pretending to be kids. But it wasn’t long before having people treat me like a little kid — even my sister Alejandra, even though she knew I was eighteen — well, that got old fast. Although I might have encouraged that by running and jumping like I hadn’t done since I grew boobs big enough to make any kind of athletic activity painful.

“So after a few minutes of that, we went back to the machine and Zoe made me a scaled-up version of my nine-year-old body, like I’d asked for at first. And it felt nice, but it wasn’t quite right; part of it was that I still looked really baby-faced, and Alejandra said I’d still be getting carded when I was thirty, and even now I might get pulled over a lot by cops who thought I was too young to have a driver’s license. And that got me thinking about whether a adult-size nine-year-old body might go through puberty again and grow seven feet tall or something. I didn’t want to go through all that again.

“So when we went back to the machine, I asked Zoe to make me intersex, with a mix of boy and girl parts, and modest boobs I could hide under a loose top or emphasize with a tight one. And I made her older, around Alejandra’s age but with long blonde hair — she’s got reddish-brown hair naturally. We browsed in the library for a while, and I went to the ladies' room and inspected my new bits, which were kind of... well, some aspects of that just didn’t appeal to me, on further thought.

“That got Zoe curious, and she asked me to make her a guy next time, while I asked her to give me a slender androgynous figure, but with something like a small penis without testicles, so I could pee standing up, but it would stay soft and could be tucked into panties easily —”

I giggled uncontrollably, and apologized.

“Sorry, TMI, I know. Anyway, that didn’t turn out so great, either; I’m not gonna go into detail, but it seems like when you’re looking at pictures of bodies with clothes on, you can’t really tell what their genitals look like, and what you get is potluck. So the next time we went back, I took off my pants while Zoe tried again. And after a little while in that body, I decided I didn’t want a penis of any kind. Standing up was convenient and I might use that body again for a camping trip or something, but... eh, it’s not worth it for everyday.

“So finally I took my pants down again while Zoe changed me into this — an androgynous figure and no reproductive organs, just a little taller than I used to be.”

“Neat,” I said, though honestly, the idea of being sexless was almost as alien to me as it is to most of my readers. And I had some of the same prurient questions you probably have about their new body, but I had better sense than to ask. “I guess the machine didn’t give you a new set of clothes like it did me, then?”

“Not exactly, but when I pulled my pants back up, I found out the machine had adjusted them to fit my narrower hips, and adjusted my top for the flat chest. And it adjusted my bra, for some reason, instead of getting rid of it. Anyway, that last time I made some little improvements on Zoe, too, but made sure she still looked like herself. Zoe, Alejandra and I did some shopping that afternoon, and some more the next day. Underwear and pants, mostly — my hips are a lot narrower, but I can still wear a lot of the same blouses and shirts.”

“Did you have any trouble proving who you were to the school?”

“Some, yeah. But Alejandra took before and after pictures of us so she could testify we were still the same people. We still wound up arguing with the principal for almost an hour Monday morning, so she was late to work.”

“She sounds like a great sister,” I said. “I feel like I’ve gotten a lot closer to Sophia since I came out and transformed, but have you felt like your relationship with your sister’s changed?”

“She’s known for a long time I wasn’t the girly girl Mom tried to make us. I came out to her as non-binary a while before I transformed, and she was a little puzzled, but she was okay with it. She teases me sometimes about just wanting to save money on bras and tampons — the bras I used to need were pretty expensive.”

“The ones Mom’s got for me so far didn’t seem that expensive, but they’re also pretty plain.”

“You’re — what, fifteen, sixteen?”

“I’ll be sixteen in November.”

“She’s probably worried about you growing up too fast, and still getting used to the whole trans thing.”

“Yeah.”

We talked for a few minutes longer, and then they asked if I wanted to hang out sometime. I realized there was something I hadn’t told them.

“I’d like to,” I said, “but Sophia and I are both grounded because we used the Venn machine without permission.”

“Bummer. How long?”

I hesitated. “Originally, it was a month plus however many days I stayed a girl. Dad was trying to pressure me into changing back. I think Mom’s trying to talk him into making it just a month flat, same as for Sophia, but I don’t know how long that will take.”

“Well, let me know how it goes. Let’s talk again next weekend, okay?”

“Yeah, let’s do that. Bye.”