"JayCee" by Vickie Tern (VickieTern@AOL.COM). When she was very young, JayCee had wished she were a boy, because boys had all the fun; but as she grew into adolescence she discovered that girls had it made, because they could get boys to worship them and do almost anything to please them. This is a restatement of the basic femdom philosophy that pervades most of this author's stories, including this one.

This story has several fascinating subplots, but the main plot involves the next-door neighbor Jane, who is turning her son Marion into a girl, who will eventually become Marianne. This is the sort of thing that inspires JayCee, and she becomes an eager co-conspirator. JayCee gets paid for her assistance, and Marianne even likes it. As I read this story, I felt that it was a good one; but what was missing was the element of surprise that Vickie Tern always includes in her stories. This one was simply about a boy who wanted to become a girl and who did, in the end, become a stunningly beautiful and sexy girl. Surprise! That's not the way it turns out after all.

This week's issue of Time Magazine includes a transgender article entitled "The Boy Without a Penis." It describes a boy whose penis became mangled at a very young age, and so his parents had him surgically altered and made a serious attempt to raise him as a girl. It turns out that this strategy was disastrously ineffective: the guy eventually had another operation and is now a happily married man raising a family of adopted children. One conclusion would be to say that this factual article suggests that stories like the present one are merely exercises in fantasy - that it is highly improbable that gender can be altered as easily as many TG stories suggest. Of course, the other conclusion would be that the people who attempted the real-life transformation should have read some of these TG stories first, so that they could have done it right!