Monosex Species

XIN GUO

When I was thirteen, my mother taught me precautions the way other women taught recipes: as inherited knowledge that no longer required explanation.

Don’t take elevators alone.

Don’t drink anything you didn’t open yourself.

Don’t trust men who cry too easily.

Don’t trust men who never cry.

Never let a man record you.

Once I asked why she monitored me so carefully.

“Don’t give people a reason to blame you,” she said.

“Why would they blame me for doing those things?”

She cut me off before I finished.

“How should I know? Good girls just don’t.”

At the time I mistook her caution for provincial paranoia, the residue of a generation that had learned to survive by anticipating violence before it appeared. I believed education would exempt me from that logic, and fear just belonged to people without language for the world.

I was wrong, though not in the way she intended.

Jun sat behind me in constitutional law. He corrected citations in the margins of my papers without asking permission, returned my notes folded with such precision that each crease aligned exactly with the last, and spoke so calmly that people began adjusting themselves around him without noticing. People stopped interrupting when he began talking. Professors answered him carefully. Even disagreement arrived softened.

I liked how easy it felt to stand near him, as though some of his certainty spilled onto people nearby.

The first real fracture came when I was nineteen and preparing for judicial examinations in a country that permitted women to study constitutional law, publish scholarship, and argue legal theory publicly, while reserving constitutional interpretation itself for men under Article 47, a provision enacted after the AI Wars of 2042 on the basis of male “quantum emotional neutrality.” By 2081, the justification sounded archaic even to its defenders. By then, nobody really cared whether the explanation made sense anymore. The system was already there. Several pages explained the “scientific finding” that men’s happiness is society’s happiness, and women need to be devoted, caring, and sacrificing for men and for society.

The board lifted restrictions. I cried. Jun — harder, face-first into the floor, apologies catching in his throat halfway through the sentence.

“It’s stress,” he said. “I can’t stop. I hate to be like my father! If you really love me, help me with it.”

At nineteen I still confused endurance with moral seriousness. I stayed because I believed damaged men became less dangerous once they were understood. I stayed because every institution around me rewarded women for absorbing male instability without complaint.

When I finally tried to leave, he did not argue immediately. He looked at me with mild disbelief, almost amusement, as if I had misunderstood the terms of an agreement that had never needed to be spoken aloud.

Then he opened a folder on his tablet.

Twenty-seven files.

The recordings had been taken while I slept. Some angles were so elevated I could not understand where the cameras had been hidden. Others framed my body with the detached clarity of surveillance footage. Mixed among them were deepfakes assembled from stolen images and synthetic composites, my face grafted onto pornographic bodies with industrial efficiency. None of it looked accidental. That was the part I couldn’t stop thinking about afterward. Every file had been categorized, labeled, and archived, like an artist keeping his pieces of work, or an athlete keeping his medals.

He scrolled through them without looking at me.

He paused on one file longer than the others, not because it was more explicit, but because it showed me asleep with my mouth slightly open, hair stuck to my cheek in a way I had never seen myself. He enlarged it, reduced it, then enlarged it again, as if trying to see how much he could change it before I stopped recognizing myself in it.

“You said you are a good girl? Look at this,” he said, almost conversationally, as though we were reviewing notes for an exam. “You should see yourself.”

Another folder opened beneath it, automatically labeled with my full name followed by a string of numbers I did not recognize. Inside were captions generated by the platform itself: behavioral tags, inferred mood states, predicted reactions. None of it had existed in a language I would have used for myself.

He let the system scroll for him this time.

Something inside me finally split open.

I heard my mother’s voice with unbearable clarity: good girls, good girls, good girls. The phrase kept repeating until it no longer sounded moral, only stupid. Small. Humiliating.

I said things to him then that I had never said to another person before. Not controlled things. Not intelligent things. The most vicious words I could find.

I told him he was becoming exactly what he claimed to hate.

“You really think you’re better than your father?” I said. “Garbage only produces more garbage.”

For the first time that evening, he looked at me directly. Then, after a pause long enough to feel considered rather than emotional, he added quietly, “You are just a whore.”

The first upload appeared two days later.

Only one clip at first, circulated just widely enough to establish recognition. After that, the process no longer required his direct involvement. Copies multiplied through forums, mirrors, private channels, and recommendation feeds. My university suspended me on the grounds of reputational risk. The official notice used neutral administrative language, which made it feel more final than an accusation would have. The wording was so calm that it made the decision feel permanent.

Jun graduated with honors that same year.

No one asked him for explanations because institutions had already categorized him correctly. He was disciplined, articulate, emotionally controlled in public, and politically useful. By twenty-seven, he had entered the constitutional interpretation track. Newspapers called him exemplary. Faculty described him as promising. Men like him were always treated as though their success had already been decided.

I stopped correcting people’s language after a while. Precision no longer altered outcomes.

At the police station, no one openly resisted my report. Nobody argued with me directly. That would have meant admitting that something wrong had happened. Instead, the institution absorbed my complaint and turned it into paperwork that, by the end, it no longer sounded like something that had happened to a person.

The desk officer avoided looking directly at me while processing the intake forms. The investigator spent longer watching the recordings than the documentation required.

“We don’t have time to sort out your relationship problems,” he said impatiently. “We have more important things to deal with.”

“It’s not just relationship! It’s crime! The cameras were hidden!”

“He says the relationship was consensual.”

“It wasn’t! He—”

“He has institutional standing,” the investigator interrupted. “Are you certain you want this level of scrutiny?”

On his desk sat a calendar marked with ministerial dinners in blue ink. Several surnames belonged to people whose authority already exceeded anything I could challenge. The conversation ended there, not because anyone dismissed me directly, but because the structure surrounding us had already rendered the outcome obvious.

Law school had taught principles as if they existed independently. The station taught architecture.

As I left, their laughter continued behind me, low and unhurried, as though the report had already transformed into a private joke.

I heard Jun described as “that poor boy”. Heard someone ask what kind of parents raised a daughter like me. Heard another voice say that good girls did not make videos like that themselves.

By then it no longer mattered that the recordings had been taken without my knowledge. By then, people had already rearranged the story into something easier to live with: a woman embarrassing herself, and a promising man unfortunate enough to become involved.

We had been told we were living in a civilized age, more advanced than the centuries before it. But technology had changed faster than men had. They still called women whores. Still protected each other first. Still treated shame as something women carried for them. My mother’s rules had survived the future almost intact.

Women, I realized then, did not stand inside architecture. We learned how to move around it the way people learn traffic patterns in a city older than they are.

After the uploads spread, men began lingering outside my building at night.

Some casually asked for prices, smiling as though embarrassment belonged entirely to me. Others followed me for half a block before losing interest once I stopped reacting. Several times someone knocked against my windows after midnight, not hard enough to qualify as forced entry, only long enough to make sleep impossible.

When I called the police again, the men explained they were only trying to pursue me romantically.

One officer suggested that public visibility often attracted “misunderstandings”.

Another advised relocation.

Jun denied distributing the recordings himself. The platforms hosting them operated through mirrored servers and anonymous reposting chains complicated enough that nobody could prove where the uploads had started anymore.

“You can’t prove he uploaded anything personally,” I was told.

My face, address, and personal information spread across news feeds within days. Everyone knew that I was the young woman removed by the university because I assaulted “national dignity”.

Online, strangers debated whether I had staged the recordings deliberately and called me a shame because it made women in this country look “easy”. Offline, men continued recognizing me in places I had never been before.

By then I understood that exile is rarely a single event. More often it accumulates gradually, through enough repetitions of exposure that ordinary life becomes structurally impossible.

My mother sold her jade bracelet to pay for my relocation. She held it in her palm for several seconds before handing it across the counter, turning it once beneath the light as if memorizing its weight for the last time.

“Rebuild somewhere else,” she told me afterward.

“As what?”

“Anything,” she said, though her voice carried no conviction.

Another city?

Another university?

Another apartment where strangers would eventually recognize my face before I had spoken long enough to become a person again?

By then the humiliation no longer felt temporary. It had hardened into something publicly durable.

People hated women easily. That was ordinary. What unsettled me more was understanding that hatred and contempt did not prevent desire. In some men, they seemed to intensify it.

No one was going to pity me. Pity belonged to boys with futures.

The recordings continued circulating after I disappeared from public life.

Not the original files anymore, but copies detached from chronology and source attribution, searchable indefinitely, re-playable by strangers who would never know whether I was alive. By then, disappearing didn’t depend on distance anymore. Replication alone could erase a person from ordinary existence.

Several years later, HelixDyne entered public policy through the language of equality.

I remember one presidential candidate speaking about it during a debate broadcast, replayed continuously across public transit screens.

“We have spent generations trying to build a fair society,” he said. “Yet inequality persists.”

He smiled then.

“HelixDyne offers freedom,” he continued. “The freedom to move beyond biological limitations. The freedom to participate equally in public life.”

Afterward, commentators described the proposal as compassionate. Pragmatic. Historically inevitable.

The clinic itself felt less medical than administrative. The lighting was warm. The waiting rooms were quiet. Forms arrived on tablets before anyone asked questions aloud.

The nurse never asked why I had come. She only reviewed the financial disclosures. Her eyes paused briefly at one section before moving on.

“Applicants transitioning from female classification are subject to elevated stabilization costs,” she said. “Most people require financing.”

The number displayed on the tablet was nearly ten times higher than the standard estimate. She waited for me to react. I realized then that no one in the clinic found the discrepancy unusual enough to explain.

“I signed the waiver,” I said.

During those years of moving between temporary apartments and avoiding public recognition, I had almost forgotten that I was once considered promising.

Before the recordings, professors discussed judicial placements in front of me as though my future already existed.

Afterward, none of them contacted me again.

The videos had removed me from the profession long before any physical transition began. I told myself that as a man, I might still be permitted a career. A public voice. Ordinary movement through institutional space without suspicion attaching itself automatically to my body.

The changes happened incrementally. Bone density adjusted through calibrated revisions. The hormone cycles were so regular that my body stopped feeling entirely self-directed. After a while, even the pain started to feel scheduled.

Two weeks after the first treatment, I woke before dawn and realized I could not immediately locate my body in the room. Not because it had disappeared. Because it had stopped presenting itself to my mind as a visible target.

I started noticing that powerful people rarely got interrupted. In meetings, I began finishing sentences without anticipating interruptions. Silence remained available after I spoke. People waited automatically for me to continue, even when I paused. No one interpreted my confidence as aggression. No one monitored my tone for excess emotion.

People let me keep talking in a way they never had before. At first, I assumed I was simply less noticeable in this form, that attention had thinned around me rather than shifted in direction. But in meetings, I noticed something else: people were not just responding differently, they were withholding entire categories of response. I would pause after speaking, expecting an interruption that never came, and find myself continuing only because no one else was doing it for me. When nobody interrupted me, I often kept talking longer than I meant to, just because I still wasn’t used to being allowed to finish. Once, I asked a question I would have previously rehearsed for hours before speaking aloud. The room answered immediately, without hesitation, as if the question had already existed somewhere in their collective understanding and only required activation.

I remember thinking, briefly, that I had become less precise. Then I realized the precision had not left me — it had stopped being necessary.

That realization produced no relief. It only removed friction from thought itself. The underpass was where the absence became undeniable.

I used to rehearse survival through spaces like that. Keys positioned between my fingers before entering. Phone unlocked in advance. Routes mapped instinctively. Messages prepared in case I disappeared between one end and the other.

That night I entered without preparation.

Halfway through the tunnel, a man walked past, humming to himself. I stopped after he passed because something inside me had failed to activate. No internal calculation followed his footsteps. No defensive geometry unfolded automatically in my mind.

It took me a while to realize I wasn’t calmer. I had just stopped preparing for danger all the time. I sat against the concrete wall and cried soundlessly until the lights flickered again overhead.

Not relief.

Not grief.

I was tired in a way that no longer pointed at anything.

At fifty-one, I was nominated to the Constitutional Interpretation Council.

By then, my mother’s memory had deteriorated unevenly. On good days she asked me about weather patterns or whether trains still ran on time downtown. On worse days she mistook me for tenants who had once lived upstairs decades earlier. During my final visit before the hearings, she studied my face longer than usual.

“You look safe,” she said.

I did not correct her.

Jun was already seated inside the hearing chamber when I arrived for the first session.

Age had refined him. The sharpness that once read as ambition now resembled composure practiced over decades. When he looked at me, I watched recognition attempt to organize itself behind his expression before dissolving.

“Have we met?” he asked politely.

“No.” It was the first completely truthful thing I had ever said to him.

During the hearings, another council member interrupted me midway through a constitutional argument. My body stopped speaking automatically, trained by older reflexes I no longer consciously endorsed.

But the room did not proceed without me. “Please continue.”

So I did.

For once, nobody used my hesitation as a reason to move on without me. I did not trust the feeling. Trust seemed irrelevant by then. But I understood how to use it.

Journalists rarely stayed on constitutional law for long. Sooner or later, someone always asked the same question. “Do you regret anything?”

I learned to answer without attaching myself fully to the response.

At my mother’s grave, the soil remained loose from the recent rain. Someone had left lilies beside the headstone, though she had always preferred jade bracelets to flowers because flowers decayed too visibly. I stood there until my legs numbed beneath me. Wind moved through the cemetery grass in uneven corrections, flattening one section while lifting another. I could no longer remember the precise sound of her voice. Only the hesitation she carried before speaking whenever she feared her instincts might prove accurate.

The elevators she warned me about no longer required strategic planning. I entered them automatically now.

At the Museum of Human Continuity, a glass display case contains photographs, clothing fragments, cosmetic products, legal documents, and reproductive artifacts beneath a single institutional label:

WOMAN.

One afternoon a boy stood beside the exhibit, reading each placard slowly enough to sound out unfamiliar terminology under his breath.

When he noticed me watching, he asked, “Were they always like this? The things in the case?”

I looked at the photographs. A woman sleeping. A woman at a desk. A woman in an elevator, hand near her keys.

“No,” I said. “They were just ordinary things once.”

He looked back at the case for a moment.

“Oh,” he said. “Is that worse?”

Reflections kept sliding across the glass, mixing the visitors with the objects inside until it became hard to separate one from the other. Behind the walls, ventilation systems moved air through the building with mechanical steadiness.

“I don’t know.”