More of the usual

(Continued from the previous document)


The idea of certain places or predictable actions catalyzing or even causing changes is widely considered complete bunk by the average citizen, who tends to have dozens of (true) stories about them or a friend going to somewhere supposed to precipitate a change and nothing happening at all.
Nevertheless, the idea itself isn't bogus - it's considered so because of a mixture of some of these places only working on specific people (20% of the cause) and people who want to keep their miracle places secret/those who're jealous that they couldn't get the change they wanted/trolls who spread fake information and lead people on goose chases (80%).
To be fair, a part of the reason is also that many of these places tend to be ones where only a very specific kind of people congregate or are widely considered to do so - outback, small countries, niche establishments, ghettoes - and getting there tends to be a challenge in itself. On top of that, there have been reports - sporadic but increasing - of the "magic" going out of a place if the area changes radically, like it will be if it becomes mostly tourists.

The legendary example, the one that's the best-documented and most widely known, is the spicily titled "Nigger's Staircase", so named by the black people themselves because it was said to be a place no white man had trod since when the rotten-ass St. Louis housing complexes had been built in the fifties, and a hangout deep in gang territory that the local leaders used to talk in private with their favorite subordinates.
In the early months after the changes started happening, a self-proclaimed Youtube journalist heard of it when it started getting spread on social media, and he took up a gang member's jesting challenge on Facebook and went out to be the first white guy to set foot there  in seventy years (as the same gang member tauntingly said, there've been plenty of white women there).

He filmed it mainly as a sensation video, expecting to get half the way in and then film getting a gun pointed at him but being safe because he was livestreaming. Instead, he ended up coming while the whole block was gathered for a BBQ in the garden and slipped right in, starting to record every nook and cranny of it.
What happened then is a point of contention - some still claim that the whole thing was a stunt using a female black accomplice from the ghetto to get in and then swap around during a cut in order to create a sensational fake riding on the shoulders of the first media coverage of the changes. What others claim, then, among them a fair few of the people who were watching the original stream, is that he was replying in real-time and it couldn't have been faked, and anyway they saw him panicking when he was talking about how this had been disappointingly easy - on the tail end of one sentence, his voice took on a painfully stereotypical Ebonics twang, and after a few seconds of consideration, he decided to explain that it was only a joke so no one got mad at him.

But that apology, too, came out in the same accent, and what he probably intended to be "I'm not kidding around" became "I ain't kidding around", and after that it was all mad camera-shuffling and muffled swearing as he tried to intersperse a bit of reporting into his panic - "I ain't sure what's happening but aight it looks like, it looks like for some reason that accent ain't going away and for the new viewers I swear my skin is darker than it was before, I know this sounds racist but I ain't fucking wit you - oh shit I didn't mean to say that - what the fuck - aight everybody I'm starting to feel real weird, I know I gonna get my ass beaten but Imma sit down."

And after this was where he turned his camera around to get a good look at himself and all of a sudden instead of the ambiguously Jewish guy with the receding hairline is a gang girl, wearing that default expression of "fuck you lookin' at" that quickly dissolves when it seeps in that he's not watching a video, it's himself.
He makes a few testing expressions in the camera - winking, making a kissy face, scowling, sticking out his tongue - and then, as the final frames of the stream, goes "fuck this" in panic and disgust and pitches the camera down the stairs.

His story makes it out of his group of five hundred viewers when it picks up attention among the housewives in his area, who heard from someone very reliable that the Cantor family's son got hit by a change, turning into a black chick, oh me oh my that must be terrible to have to live through, I'm so sorry for his family, the Madsen couple down the road was wrecked when the husband turned into the star of the Asian porn he was watching behind his wife's back and it must be so awkward when the children meet him, his daughter is really nice and she's going to study Japanese just so she can talk things out with her dad, what I wouldn't give for a daughter like that if I was in that situation, so nice it isn't going to happen to us am I right - but the scientists say it doesn't work like what he said, that a place can't do it.
Oh, is that right? I'll write that to the newspaper - and just like that, a major local news station covered it and gave an interview with the Youtuber, who was wearing one side of his hair in cornrows that didn't come with the change because he claimed he felt "tweaky" without it.
The case boomed on social media, and eventually a national broadcaster went to make a big deal out of it, maybe accomplish some political programming on the side as they interviewed the residents of the crumbling 50's ghetto blocks about the daily life in the complexes - and of course they went in to see the Nigger's Staircase, though this bit was cut from the TV broadcast, leaving it a documentary about the circumstances at a ghetto suddenly surrounded by public attention and leaving it on the question "should we feel bad that we only pay attention to these places when something happens to one of ours there", but the cut bit surfaced about three months later, after a closed-doors legal resolution at the TV station had gotten ugly.
According to this clip, which seems to be taken immediately after the quick cut of the staircase that made its way into the news, the crew tested it in the way that you'd expect a TV crew to review some kind of rich lunatic's miracle invention - someone steps on to it, nothing happens, everyone talks about it before agreeing on that they probably just did it wrong, someone makes a joke about "maybe it's going to happen all of a sudden", end on canned laughter.

But according to the video, there were two white men in the crew of an Asian audio guy, a Latina reporter and a black coordinator - the director and the assistant director, and of course it was the assistant director who got the push in spite of visibly resisting. The others laugh at his flailing for a moment before it becomes obvious that it's the real thing - first he shrinks about a foot and then he gains that foot right back again around his hips, then he holds his face like he got hit in the nose by a baseball and when he takes them away they're as stereotypically black as you get.
Not the kind of "African-American" you usually show on a serious news show, not a model or an Oreo, but the one where she could sit down at a party  with not a white person in sight and the first thing she gets told from both men and women is "sheeit, girl, you got some lips", in a halfway earnest and halfway sarcastically polite tone.
According to the distributor of the video - ostensibly a friend or relative of the assistant director who somehow got a hold of the original footage - the AD's life was blown to shambles by the power harassment, and with no reliable way to change people, much less take them back to exactly how they were before, he lost most of his friends and casual acquaintances to a mixture of panic, awkwardness on both sides and hidden disdain.
No matter how much he tried to act his old self, the effect of the stairwell would get in the way, and what he'd gone over ten times in his mind and written down and gone over ten times again to ascertain that it was something a white man would do ended up being stuff like wearing baggy pants, Karl Kani hoodies and huge puffy basketball shoes with neon laces, getting a leopard-print top instead of a white one for his "temporary" girl's clothes for "camouflage" or, in one case, "just relax" in a car parked on a sun-baked residential quarter sidewalk while listening to rap and drinking malt liquor with a black friend from before the change, the only person chill enough to completely let it all drift by, not realizing until morning two days later that maybe he wasn't actually succeeding in doing super-white things.
This resulted in him going down with stress, and his insurance company saw an opportunity and offered to hire him a legal advisor (taking a cut, of course) so that he could take the fight to his former employer, who refused to give him other jobs than coordinator in typically "black" places (though admittedly not because of discrimination as alleged, but because the director couldn't understand what the fuck she was saying and that no matter how people feel about it the stereotype of the black woman doesn't include "genius", so a good twenty-thirty points of IQ took the cut and his job took longer).

This was what created enough publicity about the stairwell to make it a common tourist spot for people who were willing to put their life(style) on the line to have the truth, as well as quite a lot of people who for different reasons wanted to be a gang chick (mostly grass-is-greener escapism, to be honest, since only white men are affected). There were enough of these people that the gang members stopped using the stairwell and went to another one that was pretty much the same, and very soon it stopped "being a place where everyone who comes must be black" and became "a place full of tourists".

This resulted in the "magic juice" going out of it - about five people managed to ride on the wave, after which five people were turned into black guys instead (because the "consensus" of the place was no longer strong enough to change their gender), and after one guy who reported getting kind of a tan but nothing more, nothing at all happened even when the whitest boy alive sat on the stairwell and smoked blunts and drank purple drank for hours.

This meant that when the news really trended and people got their shit together to go to St. Louis, the place had long stopped provoking any kind of change whatsoever and tens of thousands of people became disappointed, feeling that the media had lied to them to move copy.
A conspiracy theory spreads that it was a setup made by the TV company's parent holding company to test out a new, unexplored market - that they were seeing if a man who had changed into a very different woman would receive enough attention to warrant slotting them into a magazine or even making videos and magazines only for that specific fetish. They cite the fact that the Youtube "journalist" ended up being shuttled through the system with lightning speed, now being set to release both an R&B record and a photobook next month - but opponents of the theory claim that the company ignoring the assistant director proves that it was a real accident.

It might have been an accident, sure, the proponents claim - but it was an accident in the way that while the Youtube journalist ended up as a tall, leggy woman with a pretty face, somehow still a fantastic ass and probably some white admixture who had that fascinating ghetto twang but could still appeal to both whites and blacks and everyone in between, while the AD ended up toeing the lines between "curvy" and "fat", becoming five foot nil and speaking ghetto Ebonics that are hard to comprehend even for black people and bring Internet shitposters to post bixnood edits.
Of course they'd keep the next Rihanna with a pre-existing fanbase, a great story and presentability, and leave the below-average black woman living in a mobile home trying to come to terms with the idea that if she wants child support she'll have to have kids and cook every day in the kitchen and pick up the kids no wait that's a lot later right in the beginning she'll be changing diapers and buying baby food and it's way too much like she's - he's - becoming an actual woman.


Like that, everything in the world remains a bone of contention as always, God's in His Heaven and all's right with the world.


This isn't the only place in the world where one can catalyze a change, though it is the most well-known. Another one that's well-known as well but much less visited is the Women's Bath in Japan - not any one specific area but in the entire country from Shikoku to Hokkaido.
It changes depending on the season, usually sticking around just long enough to cause one or two changes and then disappearing before popping up in a random bathhouse, hot spring or other bathing facility in Japan. It's theorized to always be in motion, and when it's not reported for a while it's supposedly because it ended up at an unpopular or remote place and no one's triggering it. The phenomenon makes its rounds across all of Japan, but avoids places frequented too much by tourists or, you figured it out, exclusively male bathhouses (though this means "bathhouses that refuse women even when they ask", not "ones with a predominantly male clientele").

The Women's Bath works on everyone but Japanese women - and it even has cases in which it works on Japanese women too, usually because they're half-foreign, gyaru or otherwise are very non-Japanese. It was basically worshipped as an El Dorado of genderswapping by people on a certain few boards on a certain imageboard after one guy came with his story, even kindly providing pictures - unfortunately, though, this guy was ostensibly a shut-in like the rest of /j〇/, and instead of gaining the confidence to step outside and live life in his ideal body like he'd always thought about during long browsing sessions at 3 AM on twice his normal Ritalin, he realized that the world outside was still there and still not going to immediately accept him.
Most importantly, everything out there is in English, and he's starting to understand why so much English in Japan is so broken - the people who translate the subway signs and even the bar signboards are sure as hell a far sight better at it than him, and he's caught himself thinking that something sounds classy just because it's written in English or French. The poster himself was not actually very taken with it, and warned in Japanese through the many people on that board who speak moon to some measure that maybe it wouldn't be exactly what people were expecting. Nevertheless, the rest of the posters  replied "it could be the ugliest Japanese chick in the world and I wouldn't care", and went on a pilgrimage to the place.

Pretty much no one found it, and the next case almost ruined it for everyone else. An American family had been misled by the Hotels.com devil and ended up somewhere in absolute bumfuck Kagawa Prefecture, not just there but with a private shuttle bus up into the mountains and everything was in fucking Japanese, they lamented as they finally pulled up to the parking lot and were enthusiastically greeted by a proprietor who was both excited to have foreign customers and maybe even end up in a travel guide and sweating bullets as he debated with himself what the hell he'd do with his twenty words of English mostly taken from Alice songs.
They were a more than typical American family, after all, the kind that would be called "'Murkin" by many - huge overweight dad with a beer belly whose hobbies were gun ranges and deer hunting, a mother worn down enough by her children's arguments and her husband's indifference that she'd put on a hundred and fifty pounds, a teenaged daughter firmly in the middle of the "to gain emotional satisfaction shock parents with garish fashion" period and a nine-year-old son who was already at the level where he was watching rap videos with his friends and buying sunglasses and nickel-gold chains in the hope of riding a Cadillac with a lady on each arm even though he wasn't old enough to really understand what he was doing and why.

Everyone was jetlag-blasted for six hours in the room after they figured out "those Japanese beds", and when they woke up they were all wide awake and the arguments looked like they were going to last well into the night.
 Everything was in Japanese and nothing worked, and the proprietor communicated though nervous smiles, "yes", "no" and gestures - but there was a bath right outside their window, and wanting to go to bed again, they went down there grabbing the towels and yukata from their room, neither knowing nor caring about bath etiquette but just wanting a hot bath and then going to eat something solid tomorrow instead of ryokan cooking, which looks and tastes to a family like them like you arranged dishwater, vegetable tops and fishbones on a fancy plate and took 3000 yen for it.

After plenty of the kids swatting each other with towels, the daughter freaking out about the concept of a unisex family bath, the dad comprehensively fucking up the bathing etiquette and the mother in the middle of having a cataclysmic aneurysm about having to stay here for an entire week, they get in, and of course the first thing they do, being used to Western bathing etiquette, is slide down and dunk themselves to the top of their heads before stewing in the hot spring (this is, however, eminently correct etiquette).

It takes almost an hour of everyone blasting away jetlag and muscle pains with the hot water before the daughter remembers that you aren't supposed to stay too long in a hot spring because you might pass out and you can actually die from it - so she calls everyone else and they agree that they've stayed in there for ages, better drink some milk and get to bed.

Those two details nag everyone just a little bit for a while - actually, being American, it's weird that she knew hot spring etiquette, also when she was lecturing everyone else on what a mess they'd made in the changing room when they came back out. Everyone also felt like milk afterwards which was weird, like everyone had coincidentally guessed just the right thing to have after getting out of an onsen - wait, why did they know that it was traditional to do that, or for that matter the word "onsen"? The topic comes up in the middle of playing the Game of Life that was in the closet, can't believe that they thought everything was in Japanese before, the box is huge and someone should have spotted it, right, Yoriko - wait.

That's wrong, it's Martin - Martin darling I have no idea how I forgot it and even a girl's name, sorry - and then everyone looks at each other as the pieces get put together because of a woman who hasn't been out of the US except for the time she went to Canada knowing what is and isn't a Japanese girl's name.

And all of a sudden it's like the scales fall from their eyes - not only are they all unmistakably Japanese now, they're also all girls or women. Where the dad was supposed to be is the quintessential Japanese MILF, short and kind and smiling with a slightly sagging body and smile and frown lines, and where his wife was is now a woman ten years or so longer, with short hair and an athletic build showing from a plain T-shirt and the children both shudder at the fact that they know that that's their dad and their mom but also they know on a weird different level that it's their mom who divorced their dad years ago and now she's trying out a girlfriend to see if it's any different.

Then they look at themselves.

The pampered brat of a daughter who's both proud of her youth and insists she's an adult is now actually a lot more adult than she was before - no one knows where the glasses came from but at least she's wearing them now, and they might not be supposed to know Japanese well enough to tell but she's speaking in a pretty stiff way and it doesn't seem like she knows how to stop, even though she's freaking out because she's hated every single student council rep she's ever met and now it seems as if she's unfit for any job but that, oh my God she can't believe it she's going to be the stiff girl nobody likes and everyone talks shit about behind their back, no wait, she's American and that means she'll be the weirdly stiff Asian exchange student and that's even more embarrassing.

The son who claimed he was "pumping iron" in his spare time and was regularly threatening to "pop a cap" in his parents' asses if they didn't buy him the new whatever he wanted got some of what he wanted - he at the very least became an adult woman, 25 at that, older than his older sister looks now.
It's just that he became the kind who never grew up, the one kind of woman who never has to retire from the talent business - still short and piping-voiced and cheery and with a pathological predilection for pink and rabbits and cats and tapioca drinks that's constantly wearing away at him while he tries to order beer every time, which just makes him grimace and everyone else chuckle and say it's cute, which drives him even more around the bend.

The TV documentary about this family, which was shot after they contacted the Embassy in the panicked belief that they'd lose their self-identity in time (this happens sometimes as a psychological defense response in vulnerable people, but never as the result of a change, even if it changes personality, race, gender and abilities fundamentally), followed their attempt at re-integrating into American society and was a smash hit even though many people still consider it a faux documentary and a media stunt (as places that catalyze changes are far from reliable or powerful enough to work on ten thousand pilgrims, and all but thirty or so of those three thousand are going to get no result and spread that news).

It provoked oceans of political debate on the subject of privilege, as an American couple who'd been an average cutout of the demographics in their sleepy trailer town were now facing immense difficulties re-integrating even in San Francisco, a city with a plenty large Asian presence and plenty of stores selling the stuff they all of a sudden found themselves wanting to eat even though they'd never tasted it before. Not just the English, but the manners of Americans, whether white or Latino or Americanized Asian, got to them and made them feel pressured and panicked during the early weeks of the shooting - all the stuff they'd taken for granted in their heads, like convenience stores and public safety, was unpredictable or lacking, and it was in the question to send a very complex and dubious political message by allowing them to settle in Japan just to not make money exclusively off human suffering, but in the end there was a "family conference" (though they're starting to see each other as less and less of a family because while the person on the inside is the same, it's very hard to tell unless you're specifically talking about the change all the time), of course in Japanese, on their future in the US.

The former dad was both the worst at adapting and the one who found himself - herself - opposing the move to Japan the most. After all, it would be such a hassle, the kids would have to abandon this country too, and anyway we have such a good lifestyle here, have to be grateful for it - and it didn't take very long before she had made friends and sympathy in the middle-aged Thai women selling vegetables on the corner and found a side job cooking gyoza because the owner of the Thai place there wanted to put them out but couldn't really make them well - and she instinctively replied "I've cooked for four every day for ages, I can do it".
As of recently, she's hired a local Japanese-American kid to work there and translate things for her - and while he was more than a bit awkward around her at first because who he'd pinned as just an ordinary FOB Japanese housewife who probably married an American in her midlife crisis turned out to have used to be an All-American redneck dad, they're currently working together very well, and while the redneck dad on the inside used to resist on full power by pounding brewskis, listening to country and western and servicing his car so he didn't forget how to do it (loss of memories or self-identity is almost unheard of - loss of competences or intrusive thoughts occur in 90% of cases, though it usually turns out to even out to zero net gain or loss), it all slipped when he got that job and started spending his whole day cooking and wearing an apron and speaking Japanese and looking down on his fingers and at some point it just stopped bothering her that she used to be someone else.

The former hassled soccer mom with the build of the Michelin Man and a face like a French bulldog had lost all its fur to stress turned into a fitness model and personal trainer, at least she has those competences even though she didn't really learn them anywhere per se. Unlike her husband, she didn't have any hesitations in embracing that her sexual orientation had changed, perhaps motivated by her personality, and it barely took a month before she'd started up a women's dance athletics course, even though until just four five weeks ago she'd had legs so stiff she could barely lift them to forty-five degrees and her fat would all bunch up around her hips so much it hurt.
She's probably the one in the family who enjoyed it the most, and it's causing her the most problems - she was pent up for such a long time that she enjoys being a fit super-lesbian who's a giant compared to the average Japanese woman, and she's completely given up on having a stable lifestyle in exchange for sponging on the girls she fucks. She's very sensitive to people reminding her that this was exactly what she had started to hate her husband for, being all porn and beer and sportsball - but right now when she listens to her lizard brain it's exclusively going "porn and beer and sportsball" and if this was how he felt all the time she can kind of comprehend why he tried sleeping on the side every chance he had though she's still not going to admit it.

The daughter, like she feared, ended up losing most of her friends at school even though she did her actually pretty impressive best to learn English so she could communicate with them again.
The problem was that she came back into a circle of 14-15-year-old meatheads and delinquents mainly interested in parties and fashion as a 18-19-year-old proper Japanese young lady with pre-packaged academic knowledge and a set of manners she couldn't change - and after the sixth time she'd been told to dress up fancy and came in an expensive pantsuit because she couldn't bring herself to wear any of her old clothes (even though she can still barely fit them, growing only a little bit). As of recently, though, she's started knowing how to have fun alone with a cup of coffee and a book and maybe her computer so she can listen to music - but it's all usable literature and classical music and oh my God she's turning into a nerd. Anyone who saw the amount she reads in secrecy would know that she already is one, though.

Her little brother, ironically, was the one who held out for longest because of his burning pre-puberty-fueled passion for being super-manly. This desperation managed to keep him mostly thinking his own thoughts and speaking his own words - but then again, this in fact only kept him from making friends as he was always reminding people just by speaking his broken English that he was an American boy in an adult Japanese woman's body. He does make a few Japanese friends in his new home of San Francisco, though, and when he gets through a series of specially arranged tests to check if he can be granted the rights of an adult and barely completes it, his cry for a job gets answered by a reporter who was on vacation in California when he met him and just so happens to know a small-scale talent agency manager who's looking for a cute girl who can rap.
He jumps on it immediately in the hope that he can become a big star and find out how to turn back - but he takes people too seriously and assumes everyone is listening to his music for the rap itself, which he's actually not all that talented at in his new form because of his lispy speech. That means that no matter what he's asked to do by his fans or manager, even if it's handshake meetings like some kind of idol or slightly challenging outfits or even gravure shoots, he ends up thinking that people are asking that of him because he's famous, they always want to see the top layer of society embarrassing themselves - and because he thinks he's resisting when he's in fact playing along, in two years he finds himself performing packed shows in Japan and even poking into California on the request of his management, not as an ordinary rapper but as "the cute Japanese girl rapper, you gotta see her".

The attention that the documentary about the family attracted got a swath of people to go there in their pursuit of being turned into their ideal Japanese dream waifu, including those people from that imageboard, but the Women's Bath had already long since moved on and the tourists were assuming that any old Japanese bathhouse would be fine - as such, no one went to the Japanese-style bathhouse on the very southernmost tip of the Kurils owned by a Japanese family, to which a young Russian soldier stationed at the ends of the Earth went to bathe one morning after a search for a missing person that took eight hours in the Kuril winter night turned out to be the result of someone not keeping the records of comers and goers up to date, and it was two years from the documentary boom when he entered and all of a sudden came out as an exotic Ryukyuan girl with those thick eyebrows, that suntan and the heavy black hair with a hibiscus flower in it.
It turned out that the former family patriarch's greatest passion was that kind of girl, but trapped with his family's old bathhouse in former Japanese territory unable to drop it and move past the new borders, he grew old and hoary, and when he died, his last words were (supposedly - TV has been known to exaggerate or even make up testimony) "I wish my kids and grandkids would get to enjoy a world with more good women", frustrated at dying in a place where all the women left at 15 and only the shriveled hags remained.

The Russian Army, faced with negative publicity when they not just honorably but dishonorably discharged their soldier for having the gall to turn into a woman and denied her all social aid, decided to re-hire the soldier and tell everyone to pretend she isn't a woman to give Western political activists the equality-friendly material they wanted. After a while where she'd been the feminists' "our girl", the Russian Army then decided to forcefully gather people who've experienced a change into a combat-capable woman, be it physical competence or the necessary skills, and establish a women's division - a move that ticked off European and American progressives, who dearly want their countries to have a bigger and more competent all-female army division than Russia of all countries.

Of course, a democratic country can't be seen to literally kidnap every girl who gained two feet and Amazonian muscles after she just touched the fitness equipment, every nerd who watched an 80's cyberpunk anime and is now a lolita cyborg supersoldier with a hard drive's worth of military secrets in her head, every girly-girl who spitefully laughed at other girls wanting to shave away their femininity at the gym and even post about it on Instagram before *bam* she had a drink at the wrong hole in the wall and woke up the next morning as a carpenter with a grown-out buzz-cut, a tendency to forget to shave, a penchant for lukewarm beer and an irrepressible repertoire of swear words interrupted by the occasional beer burp.

Thus, certain people eager for votes tell the military of their country that if they just help with creating all-female divisions to earn the undying loyalty of their country's progressives, the entire military will get an unbelievably gargantuan budget and half of it can go to everyone except the new female soldiers - and unwitting university students are encouraged to research reliable changes to physically competent females (or at best, female-looking individuals - this happened after a French backpacker who'd come to Thailand so she could ride an elephant and take Polaroids went to a gay bar for the talk and found herself a shemale, a very convincing one who looked like her old self but nevertheless a shemale with XY chromosomes, applied to the army and was initially rejected) so that the newest kind of shanghaiing can get under way. Especially middle-class kids disillusioned with pacifism and seeking glory are common targets - they don't tend to be very physically fit, good at obeying orders or on the whole suitable for real soldiering in general.

As reliable changes are hard to find, usually they're just headquartered in a barracks that's filled with items that relate to women and fitness, and are reminded of it through sleep learning built into the frame of the bed itself - and when someone "graduates the course" by turning into a woman who has a) military or survival knowledge, b) combat skills and/or c) a good ear for orders, they're spirited away to what amounts to a talent school and graded on their degree of PR friendliness.
The ones who get to stay and are properly taken care of are usually ones with above-average but not alienating physical strength, military knowledge, ability to take orders and of course looks - while they're not chosen for their looks because this would make the new progressive army division come off as Kim Jong-il's pretty lady honor guard, they nevertheless can't be ugly because that perpetuates the idea that only uglies, lesbians or otherwise undesirable women end up in the army.

While the menial soldiers don't do work together with the new female army division because of founded fears of massive sexual harassment (since the higher-ups cut the uglies out), the officers do because they're not barracksing with each other nor go on march together - and as such, the Army welcomes an interesting though confusing age where your CO could very well be a stereotypical ojou-sama with the laugh and the blonde ringlets and the high-handed tsundere personality who nevertheless knows everything about politics because the character in the original anime he was unsubtly made to watch was a political genius, the Marcos-style MILF who has all the military knowledge you'd expect from a military dictator's widow except the dictator never actually existed or an emotionless-looking little Asian girl with neon-colored pigtails, huge eyes and unrealistically huge tits in a skin-tight white bodysuit who's an actual no-shit military cyborg who can defeat a hundred men in a fair fight, they say.

Then there's just the thing that in far the most cases, even people who've changed still age and change personalities, as if they actually were the people they've become - and while it is imaginable that many of the new aides and officers and supply chain managers are going to stay until they're old and grey, the Latina Amazon, the superhumanly strong elementary schooler who can lift her bed with one hand, the blonde Russian bombshell spy with the bee-stung lips and the perpetual thick accent, the African chick who's more "cavewoman" than "Amazon" and the doll-like "sixteenth-generation ninja" are going to retire after just a few years and have to find out what's going to happen with their lives on their own.

Eric Kaufman the skinny senior who's passed his whole high-school lifestyle with loathing the jocks so hard it became his whole image suddenly poofed into a seven-foot half-naked Mexican beauty with a six-pack and bigger biceps than the football quarterback.
Lauren Riddick, the chick who made the mistake of badmouthing her nerdy boyfriend's taste in video games in front of him ("what is she six years old, okay eighteen she still looks six, why the fuck is she swinging around that big hammer, she can't even lift - wha - Rodney, is this you, I'm shrinking and my voice is - I'm gonna kill you if this is your fault I don't wanna waste twenty years of growing up").

Aaron Fleisher, the Nebraska farm kid who grew up so far out on the country with such conservative parents that he enrolled into the Army still believing he was going to "fight the Reds" and told his recruitment officer that he would do literally anything in the world, possible or impossible, if it could help them defeat the pinkos and started fiddling with his hair when he left the meeting and was already thinking in Russian by the time he went to sleep.

Ingrid Kerry, the college student who filled the void in her middle-class life with advocating political ideals that she knew were impossible and said things about minorities that she knew were too nice to always be true but gave her ideological allies and something to guide her in life - and who, when she was trying to explain to an educated and by then offended black person why black people needed extra babying in the system because they were victims but she wasn't saying anything about them being weak, not at all, was flooded by the image of her own insecurities about her cause and became a strongfat black woman with an IQ of roughly 45 and what's officially called "hysterical strength" but colloquially called "retard strength".

Paul O'Malley, the desk sergeant who spent his days shuffling papers on the barracks so close to, but yet so far away from any actual military exercise, and prayed to God to "give me any role in the army which means I see combat on a regular basis" and ended up being stuck in an anime character's body in a bodysuit he can't take off and with bright neon-pink hair because for some reason known only to the Japanese, she has to be strong enough that she can lift a car and sturdy enough to take bullets.

All of these people are going to end up back in civilian life at some point, needing to carve out a lifestyle they can be both comfortable and safe in, one that doesn't remind them too much nor too little of who they used to be.

And that's the real societal change that's yet to come. As the changes are so varied and unpredictable, it's taken literal years before people have gotten used to them just happening, and no one's really ready to take on the re-integration of these people yet when it's only recently that most people started agreeing that changes were not a disease, not a mark of the Devil and not a media stunt.

As it is now, people who change either try to hide it and stay only with trusted friends, or they ride on the boom and become stars using the novelty of wrestlers once having been watercolor types and club girls once having been shut-ins.

But since changes don't go back and sometimes layer upon each other, with more than half of people exposed to a change changing more than once in their lives, just ignoring it isn't going to go very far in society for very long, as more and more people in the average person's circle of friends are going to change, and the people who are farsighted enough to take a deep breath among all this panic and earnestly predict the future can't see a viable society unless society changes enough to not bat an eye at the words "I'm a former Greek construction worker but I went to London to work and drank at a place where they say slags drink, and now I'm a mother of three and happily married".
Some people seem like they're very ready to accept it, though.