Eaurp E.W. Guz's Personal Log, O27/Y20/M3/D14. (2375 A.D.)
I'm writing this entry in my locked diary personal log, because I do not want anyone else seeing this. If you see this, no you didn't. The idea of this getting out, transmitted through the inter-library network for everyone to see, is so scary that I think I'd rather boil alive.
It's getting harder and harder to avoid thinking about gender and sex. I just don't get it! It's basic biology. Mellanoid Slimes reproduce asexually and so have no sex... and so therefore we have no gender. That's the territory of strictly animals and aliens. It's scientific fact, and if I want to keep my internship at the Space Program it is adherence to scientific fact that I must uphold.
But I've known for a long time that Slamtha isn't lying about her experience. She really is a woman, the same way that a Zaldan or a Human might be. When I first met her when we were little, all our teachers and mentors and parents were convinced this was just a fad, or a phase. When she got older and started shapeshifting and buying her own clothes, they said the same thing. But I've known her for half an Omicycle. This is not a phase. Slamtha is a woman.
I accept that. I always have. It doesn't have to be scientific, minds are weird and strange and I don't care what Eurgus and Dr. Worm say, any kind of diversity of form and thought can be beautiful.
But not for me. No no no. I'm training as a scientist and an engineer. I have to stay objective about these things.
But sometimes I look into the mirror, and I just can't find myself swimming around in the green ocean staring back at me. I have known this face my whole life, it's familiar enough, but it looks dead, or like some kind of puppet, and the older I get the deader it looks.
I made the mistake of telling Slamtha about this in passing. She got kinda quiet, and told me she wanted to show me something at the library next time we went.
We never got that far. Instead, I [eraser marks, green splotchy stains, ripped paper.]
Slamtha Uzgoel returned to the cylindrical dorm complex from her history class. She left her bag behind, so she carried her books in her arms. As she walked up to the glass doors she saw herself in the reflection and she smiled. Three bright, cheery eyes facing the glass, a smiling mouth in profile on one side, and a strong, precision-crafted nose on the other side. Her pony tail was a little rough, the naturally blobby slime upon her scalp had once again defeated her attempts to keep it fully smooth, but it wasn't a big deal. Her figure was tall and slim as always, but had all the curves and proportions you'd expect of a human female.
She only had a moment to study her form in the glass before she entered the dorm lobby, but in that moment, she was again satisfied that things were way better than they had once been.
She found her and Eaurp's dorm, and put her hand inside the latch, and dropped her books in shock.
Eaurp was sitting at Slamtha's vanity with their shirt off, trying to shapeshift their chest, pulling round protrusions of slime out with their hands. They didn't notice Slamtha at first, but when the books hit the floor, it startled Eaurp enough that they rapidly covered their chest with their arms and swivelled around in their desk chair looking as if they were going to melt.
"Slamtha! Hi. I was. just. uh. Practicing my impression of you!" Eaurp said, haphazardly shoving their mouth off to the side of their face, and blinking a false eye into existence on top of their nose.
"Eaurp... cut the gack," Slamtha said, narrowing her eyes. She closed the door behind her, which let Eaurp relax slightly, and then picked up her books and put them on a shelf.
"I was just curious, that's all! Those slime blobs you put on your chest just seem like they'd get in the way, you know? I was wondering what the point was."
"And you didn't think to just ask me?" Slamtha said.
"Well," Eaurp said, "I'm an experimentalist."
Slamtha put her hand on her face, covering up her eyes, but her mouth was smiling. "You're such a dork nerd."
"The 'blobs' are there because they're there on the majority of female convergent bipeds in the galaxy. They serve all different kinds of evolutionary purposes. For Humans, it's secretion of a nursing-slime-like fluid called 'milk.' For Vulcans, it's a fat and water storage structure. For Zaldans, it's thought to have evolved as a floatation device. In most cases sexual dimorphism of breast size corresponds to evolutionary development of the convergent biped face and body plan, in accordance with Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development."
"That doesn't make sense. That's not how evolution works, and anyway, what purpose would they serve for Mellanoids then?" Eaurp said.
"Haven't you ever seen a fat person?"
"N-not without their shirt on!" Eaurp said.
"We really need to get you out of the dorm more..." Slamtha said. "It's the same as our hair. Just storage of despecialized slime. That's probably why you were struggling so much, you were trying to pull out your actual skeletal gelatin and viscera, when you need to treat it more like hairstyling."
"But you're not fat, and I'm only a little bit fat, so why do you have them?"
"Again, I'm going for sexual dimorphism. And it kinda seems like you are too."
Eaurp blushed and their hair dripped down their face.
"Eaurp..." Slamtha said. "is there something you want to tell me?"
Eaurp carefully adjusted their arm to still cover their chest, while their other arm went to cover their face.
"I..." Eaurp said, but then they made a gurgling noise. "It's really hard to say."
"Take your time," Slamtha said. "I'm going to do some reading. If I can have my desk back."
Eaurp perked up, looked around, saw she was still at Slamtha's vanity, and then carefully stood up, only to reveal that she was wearing one of Slamtha's skirts.
"Eaurp. What is that."
"It's a... skirt?"
"But you don't own any skirts," Slamtha said.
"And you only wear skirts, I just wanted to figure out why?"
Slamtha rolled her three eyes. "Well did you figure it out?"
Eaurp's eyes teared up. "They're really flowy and spinny... I'm sorry. I'll... I'll take it off."
Slamtha sighed. "Don't worry about it."
Again, Eaurp's anxious, tense body relaxed. They sat down at their own desk and pulled out their journal. After a moment, they started writing in their locked diary.
Slamtha pulled out a binary calculus book from the shelf and put it down on the desk, then opened it. She worked out some problems, slowly. She could have really used Eaurp's help here, but now was probably not the right time.
Eaurp made a frustrated gargle and furiously erased whatever they had just written, then crumpled the paper, then shouted.
Slamtha looked over her shoulder to see the strange sight. Eaurp's naked back, rising and falling with each frustrated breath.
"Slamtha," Eaurp said, muffled, their head in their arms on their desk.
Slamtha turned around from her desk and knelt down next to Guz.
"Eaurp," Slamtha said. She put her hand on Eaurp's back, and an electric tingling sensation sparked between them. Eaurp let out a small gasp.
"I think you're so gorgeous, and so pretty, and you're so much happier now than you were when we were kids, but I'm more miserable than ever. I want to be like you. I don't know anything about women, you're the only one I've ever met."
"You've definitely met other women here at Gooniversity," Slamtha said. "and um. I know you've seen the USS Voyager mission report tapes enough times. There's lots of women in those tapes. Voyager's captain is even a woman. And also I've told you all about xenofemininity at the library!"
Slamtha's mouth tilted into a soft smile, but Eaurp couldn't see it.
"I... don't think I like not having a gender. And I don't know what that gender is supposed to be... but I'm pretty sure I like the one you do better than the uh... the other one?"
"Show me your breasts," Slamtha said.
Eaurp shot up from their desk in shock. "WHAT?"
They forgot to cover their chest. When they saw Slamtha staring at their chest, they quickly covered it.
"Hmm. No, no, the shape is all wrong. It's like you've just put tiny little hemispheres on your chest. Here, hold on," Slamtha said.
She dug around the bookshelf until she finally found what she was looking for, a Zaldan anatomy textbook. She flipped it open to a page that was clearly more worn than the others. It was a picture of a Zaldan woman's breasts, as well as an illustration of tricorder scans of the interior structure.
"That's what I did, though," Eaurp said.
"No, no," Slamtha said, "The breasts hang from the chest and armpits, like this. They don't just pop out of nowhere. It's like, imagine a fat mellanoid slime's chest, then make it rounder and larger."
Eaurp stared, unthinkingly and unblinkingly.
Slamtha rolled her eyes and grabbed the bottom of her shirt, then pulled it up.
Eaurp closed her eyes and looked away, holding her hands in front of her face.
"Do you want to learn how these things work or what?" Slamtha said.
Eaurp peeked, then closed her eyes and turned around, making a high pitched whine.
"Ok ok. We'll. Build up to that, I guess?" Slamtha said.
"Let's just put our clothes on and not show eachother our skeletons and vital organs or chest blobs, and we can just talk like... like normal mellanoids."
"Oh, Eaurp... Neither of us are normal Mellanoids."
A few months later
Eaurp Guz stood in the common room of her parent, Dr. Worm's, house. She wore a blouse and a skirt, which would not have raised any particular suspicion if not for the fact that she never used to wear anything other than T-shirts and sweatpants or shorts.
"I've, um, gathered you all here--my friends and family, to uh, to tell you... something important." Eaurp said. She looked to Slamtha, who was sitting off to the side of the group. She gave a thumbs up.
"This is. Um. Something I've been thinking about for a while," Eaurp continued, "I am uh. Oh globs..."
Eaurp's parents shared a confused glance between them. Her friends just watched expectantly.
"I'm a girl. I'm a woman. A female. A-and I want you to use the Federate pronoun 'she' and 'her' when referring to me in the third person."
Eaurp's rocketry club friend just stood up, shook their head, and left.
Her friend from the astronomy club just laughed. "That's uh, pretty funny, Guz. But for real why did you bring us here?"
Slamtha glared at them.
The fellow astronomer gurgled and dripped. "Guz, you're joking right?"
Eaurp looked almost like she was going to cry, frozen in place, her new longer hair drizzling down the front of her blouse, her legs bowing under her own weight.
"I don't think I get the joke," Dr. Worm said.
"No no, I think it's great," Eaurp's other parent, Waral Slaup, said. "Every celebrity needs a gimmick, this can be theirs!"
"Celebrity?" Dr. Worm said.
"Yeah, you know, when they become an astronaut," Waral Slaup, "and they're the first mellanoid to set foot on, I dunno, Glerbuh."
"Isn't Glerbuh made of gas?" Dr. Worm said.
"Hey Eurgus? Glerbuh, made of gas or what? Eurgus?"
Eurgus Fleud, Eaurp's other other parent, narrowed their eyes and stared at her. "I'm not sure why you feel the need to inform your parents about your gross fetish."
Eaurp stared in disbelief. "No, no, I, what?"
Slamtha shot up. "It's NOT a joke, and it's NOT a mucking fetish!"
Eurgus shot up. Waral reached up to try to hold them back.
"I don't wanna hear another word from you. If I had my way you and Eaurp would never have seen eachother again after I found out what you were."
Eaurp ran out of the room. Waral and Dr. Worm ran after her.
"It was all you!" Eurgus shouted, "corrupted! Corrupted by these, these, these FEDERATION values. I knew you were no good. When you were kids I thought oh well, just playing pretend as an animal. I should have KNOWN."
"Hey! This isn't all on me!" Slamtha said.
"You gunking xenos ruin everything. Not even my children are safe from your disease!"
"Fuck you! Fuck off! This is not a disease! This is who I am. And it's who your daughter is too!"
"MELLANOIDS DON'T HAVE DAUGHTERS! ANIMALS DO!" Eurgus screamed.
"Call me an animal again! I swear to the globs!"
"Oh! You wanna go?"
Eurgus started to step forward, when the astronomy club member, still sitting down, put their hand up. "Fleud. Please."
"This doesn't concern you, Jenry!"
"Slapping the slime out of eachother isn't gonna solve anything," Jenry said.
"I want my child back," Eurgus said.
"Well too bad," Slamtha said. "My parent doesn't own me, no matter how hard they try, and you three don't own Eaurp either. And now that we're grown, you can't control us so easily."
"You did this to them. You fix it."
"I did not do this to her. I helped her do this to herself. Because she wanted to. Because this is a free planet."
"Federation bootlicker," Eurgus said.
"I've heard that 'insult' my whole life. Well, maybe the Federation is bad, or maybe it's not. But I was miserable before I found out about women, and Eaurp was miserable before she decided she was one too."
"They seem pretty miserable as it is!"
"And why shouldn't they be, with how we all treated them!" Jenry said.
"Jenry, I'm giving you an F on your next intern report," Eurgus said, "If you don't shut up."
"Fine. I'm going to go apologize. Uzgoel, please help me," Jenry said.
"Unbelievable," Eurgus said, to themself in the now empty room. "I knew it. I KNEW it. I knew if I wasn't careful, that yellow stain was gonna turn my babyguz xeno."
Without Slamtha there with her, Eaurp Guz sometimes felt that she had stagnated in her gender experimentation. Oh yes, she had trained her body into a soft, curvy figure, her hair voluminous and styled, and now she actually cared to have her clothing fitted to her body properly rather than loosely hanging on her, but since leaving Mellanus she'd spent most of her time in various Starfleet uniforms.
Well, at least there was still some room for experimentation.
Guz looked around to be sure no one was there, then faced the replicator.
"Computer. Engineering skant, fitted to specification Guz-Alpha-Nine, short skirt, duty version."
The replicator whirred, and then Guz pulled out a minidress version of the uniform she was presently wearing, and took it away to the privacy of her bunk.
"The only slime that's gonna trans my gender from now on, is me."
