A paramagical MacGuffin, the ‘Tape’ started life back in July as a simple thought experiment, posted to some trans- friends on a writing group:
There is a device. It’s not actually a machine: more of a user interface. It operates on a quantum level, where information is undetermined, and multiple possibilities can exist simultaneously. In ancient times, it would have been described as ‘magic’.
This user interface takes the form of a strip of material, rather like a tape. It has one blue edge, and one pink.
It does just one thing: it serves as a doorway into an alternate universe, where your birth gender was different. If, as a man, you lay down the tape, and walk over it from the blue side to the pink, you find that you are a woman. The universe you enter is much the same, except where it has been changed by the choices your female self has made, since birth. You retain your memories of your former life as man, although they will fade if you stay in the new universe for a month.
The device comes with you into the new universe. You can use it as often as you like, back and forth, and you can roll it up and carry it around, in either universe. Either by design (because it’s a secret device) or simply because quantum states are influenced by observation, you can’t make the tape work if anybody is watching.
This is my gift to you: one device each.
Now…
How do you use it, and what happens?
What’s particularly interesting is that nobody among those invited to speculate about the use of the Tape said that they would hop over into the other universe, live as a woman and never look back.
Some cited their children as the reason why they couldn’t simply abscond (saying maybe things might have been different, years ago) and this rather spiked my guns as it paralleled my own thoughts. Other reasons were identified, too – in every case serving to underline the integrity of my friends. But I hadn’t answered the main question myself: how would I use it, and what would happen?
The result was a short story, Three Steps.
Enjoy!
Sugar and Spiiice 
As a transvestite rather than transgender, I would do the hop but I would also hop back again too. My view has always been that TVs are holidayers in the female gender who can come back from the holiday. TG on the other hand want to emigrate permanently because that is where they feel they should live. I’d expect TG’s to not want to come back.
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Interesting analysis, but what if there are shades of transgender? How about a person who has decided not to endure being stigmatised by society, and quizzed and prodded by medics for years before being allowed to undergo a series of painful surgeries? A person who decided to do their best to make a go of being a regular male, given the alternative: what happens when you offer a person like that a doorway into another universe? Among those who responded to the original ‘thought experiment’ question, leaving children behind seemed to be the major stumbling-block.
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Oh there is definitely a spectrum of TGness (is that such a word) and no doubt there are people out there who would go for the quick painless way to do the permanent change that the tape represents. However I’d probably class them as on the borders of TG. They’re the ones who want to go but don’t like flying to get there, and are instead waiting for a teleporter to be invented.
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People who want to go, but don’t like flying? I love it! The good news is, I have it all figured out: remember, the Tape isn’t the device that creates the other universe: it’s just the user interface. It’s a three-dimensional projection, into our universe, of a multi-dimensional thing. Obviously, creating an alternative universe by brute force would require vast energy (probably every joule in your own universe) but one you concede that in a multiverse an entity able and willing to create the Tape must exist SOMEWHERE, it’s merely a question of when one will turn up, instead of if – and if you’re smart you can power the interface with collisions between paradoxes.
OK – you didn’t need to know this. But if you’re going to MacGuffin, you might as well MacGuffin the heck out of it. Right?
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