It’s a bit dark, more distopia than dysphoria and I guess the moral’s be careful what you wish for

Tessa vaguely remembered Richard the small boy whose father dragged him to the park to kick a football. He had been left behind when Tessa was taken away to school where she learned how to cook, look after baby and make pretty things to wear. Nobody ever made Tessa kick a football.

The OED gives several possible derivations for the word ‘mem’; the most commonly believed is that it is a contraction of ‘men mums’ though it is also suggest that it is a Hindi word reintroduced by Asian immigrants as Britain’s third gender became established.

Like most changes it didn’t happen overnight and there was no one cause. If you had to point to the major contributory fact it was probably house prices; by 2010 it was impossible to get a mortgage with one income and high repayments made it incredibly difficult to take time away from a career to carry, let alone bring up children. For a time the au pair seemed to offer the best solution, but tighter immigration controls and minimum wages soon ended that.

Over the course of the following decade the structure of the middle-class family changed quite radically with a third partner added. Not an equal partner in most cases, it was usually someone quite passive, not particularly well educated who would stay home to look after the children and keep house. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, given decades of feminism most of these new housewives were men and a significant proportion crossdressed.

Towards the end of the decade an American doctor named a surgical procedure known as the ‘Pargeter Pocket’ which enabled a male to carry a child to term. To Americans the procedure was something of a novelty hardly used but in Britain it was seized with both hands, in many cases companies would pay for the surgery to keep a female employee in work and avoid maternity pay.

Suddenly the mem became a valuable commodity and there were several high profile cases where parents had forced a child into the role hoping to extract a dowry from a wealthy couple. Faced with allegations of systematic child abuse (and a potential revenue source) the government stepped in. A programme of screening for suitable children was put in place; boys of small stature, passive personality and slightly below average intelligence were considered the ideal (girls of a similar profile were channelled into the care professions for the ageing population).

So despite his father’s efforts Richard had been taken into government care and brought up as Tessa. Her first years’ education emphasised a traditionally female role, she was taught to read and count but mainly to cook and clean. It was not until the onset of puberty that physical changes were made to a mem, there were hormone therapy and some surgery. Mems were given softer facial features, wider eyes and lips, and where necessary breast augmentation.
Tessa had surprised everyone with a premature growth spurt shortly before her twelfth birthday which had carried her up to almost five feet ten far taller than a mem was usually allowed to reach. Her doctors had considered surgery to reduce her height: it was an expensive procedure however instead they gave her a little more cosmetic surgery to reinforce her feminine appearance. Like all mems though the surgery stopped short of full gender reassignment (that was reserved for genuine cases of gender Dysphoria turned up by the programme).

Long vilified, the beauty pageant had made reappearance in Britain, an officially sanctioned shopwindow for the mem programme (‘miss’ was a title applied only to mems by then genetic women preferring ‘ms’). Tessa had competed in her first at sixteen progressing through regional heats to the national final shortly before her eighteenth birthday. She was a vision of ultra femininity by this time, tall, willowy and with a wide eyed innocence of Disney proportions. There was some public consternation when she did not win the judges marking her down for her above average height.

Like all the contestants when asked what were her ambitions she said to find a nice family and be a good memmy. Tessa had little problem achieving this, there was a whole government department that placed mems with families. Nice middle class families of course who could pay the registration fees, and whose income was in the appropriate tax bracket.