I No Longer Exist
I no longer exist.
My name is Shin Hyomin. Age: thirty-four. From my marriage to my ex-wife, Jeong Yeonhui, I have a six-year-old son named Shin Yujin. Height: 169 centimeters. Weight: 55 kilograms. Ridiculously scrawny, yeah. Ha… I recited the particulars of my own life back to myself. Almost nothing had changed. Everything was exactly as it had always been—except for one thing. My sex.
Hahaha… How was I even supposed to make sense of this absurd situation? At first I tried to convince myself I’d simply gone a little mad. With the divorce and the job loss and every other misfortune piling up at once, it seemed plausible that I was having some impossible dream, or spinning a delusion out of thin air.
But the moment I saw my father, that theory fell apart. I would rather die than conjure that wretched man into any fantasy of mine. So this was real? That something which—feeble though it may have been—had been part of my body for more than thirty years had simply vanished… and that was reality?
None of it felt real. And yet my questions were not about to be answered anytime soon. The father who appeared merely looked down at me with contempt, spat the same old line he always had, and left. I was left naked and strapped to a machine while a swarm of researchers treated me like a lab rat.
That was how I learned where I was: the main sector of the Hexagon Medical Research Institute, the facility our family had always run. But why? When I got married, my father had thrown me out and told me never to show my face to the family again. So why had he gone out of his way to drag me here and create this nonsense? Had he decided his worthless son might improve if he simply remade him as a daughter?
I was still entertaining that ridiculous fantasy when the tests finally ended. They gave me some clothes and transferred me to a hospital room. And then, just as I was about to lose my mind from the unanswered questions, someone arrived who could actually give me answers.
“Changmin!”
“Ah, hyung. It’s been a while.”
The person who appeared was my younger cousin, Changmin. Unlike me, he had been called a genius since childhood, and the family’s expectations of him had always been enormous. After graduating medical school as a matter of course, he had risen all the way to a directorship in the Hexagon Group. In a family that held almost no goodwill toward me, he was one of the rare people who had ever been warm.
With his neatly swept-back hair, tall frame, and well-cut suit, he looked every bit the reliable figure he was. Seeing a familiar face brought a small measure of relief. He stepped into the room and introduced the man who had come with him.
“This is Manager Lee Seonwu, the researcher who oversaw your condition this time.”
“How do you do.”
The man with the shaggy hair hanging over his eyes barely glanced at me before turning his attention straight to the machines hooked up to my body. What was his problem? Shy? Or did he just have some personal grudge against me? While I was turning that over, Changmin sat down in the chair beside the bed.
“Pretty shaken up, huh, hyung?”
“I can’t exactly say I’m not. This… what on earth is going on? Why am I like this?”
I was careful how I phrased it. How ridiculous would it sound to come right out and ask why I now had a woman’s genitals attached to my body? But to my surprise, Changmin answered with a completely serious expression, as if my floundering bewilderment were the most natural thing in the world.
“I’ll start with the conclusion, hyung. You’ve manifested a condition called gender-transforming of a mature organism. We abbreviate it as Queen Bee Syndrome.”
“What? What did you just say? What is that? Explain it so I can actually understand.”
“Simply put… you’ve undergone a sex change. You’ve become a woman.”
Simpler than before—and yet I still couldn’t grasp it. What was he even talking about? Undergone a sex change? Was that even possible? The phrasing felt no different from those old folk tales where people turned into animals. Someone else answered the doubt rising in me: Manager Lee Seonwu.
“It is certainly not a common condition. But it is not unheard of either. In the natural world, male organisms in a colony will sometimes become female in order to regulate the sex balance of the group.”
“I… I know that. But that’s frogs and fish. I’m a human being…”
“In the patient’s case, there appears to have been a hereditary predisposition.”
What? Hereditary? I stared at Changmin in sheer disbelief. He nodded as if to confirm it.
“Seems there was. According to the family records, there are accounts of boys born into our line who fell suddenly and violently ill as they grew—and the next day woke up as girls.”
“Th-that’s true?”
“Yes. It was kept secret from the outside world, of course, but apparently the reason our family even entered medicine and pharmaceuticals during the Enlightenment period was to research a cure for this genetic disease.”
As he himself had said, Changmin was the pride of the family, the one people called a genius. And he was not the sort to make empty jokes just because he was seeing his older cousin after a long time. Which meant every word of this was true. An uncontrollable chill ran through me at the weight of that unmanageable truth.
So my condition wasn’t simply a matter of missing genitals. My sex itself had changed—to female? Even though my appearance and my memories were completely the same? This was insane. Then Manager Lee Seonwu spoke again, as if he had read my mind and decided to confirm it outright.
“It may be difficult to accept, but according to every medical examination, the patient is a complete XX-chromosome female. All basic female physiological phenomena and responses are functioning perfectly normally.”
“Hahaha… So what you’re saying is, I could even get pregnant?”
I had asked it as a joke. The answer came back dead serious.
“Of course it’s possible. We expect menstruation will begin soon as well.”
At that absurd statement, something inside me collapsed. Me… a woman? Did that even make sense? I had lived thirty years as a man. I was living as the father of a child. And now, all of a sudden, a woman? Sure, I had seen movies and comics with that kind of premise.
But in those, at least the outward appearance changed somehow when the sex did. My current body, though… scrawny as it was, looked exactly the way it had when I was a man. What kind of nonsense was this? In shock, I covered my face with both hands. And then I felt it. Ah… my beard was gone too.
I couldn’t feel any of the stubble that used to roughen my cheeks and jaw. That was the signal. Until now I had been treating this like some kind of joke, half-convinced everything would snap back to normal any minute. But the situation was growing heavier by the second. So I asked.
“Why… why did this even happen? It came out of nowhere.”
“Haa… The cause still hasn’t been fully identified, but have you been under an enormous amount of stress lately?”
“W-well, yeah, but…”
“Most of the historical cases appeared under similar circumstances. When someone faces stress or a crisis they simply can’t endure, an instinct seems to kick in—shedding unnecessary parts of the self in order to survive.”
“No… it wasn’t that bad. Then, Changmin—how do I go back to the way I was? If the stress goes away, do I turn back?”
At that question, Changmin glanced at Seonwu. The researcher shook his head without the slightest change in expression. Seeing that, Changmin turned back to me.
“I don’t know. But as far as I’m aware, there are no such cases. Once the condition manifests, there is no record—clinical or historical—of anyone reverting to their original sex.”
Despair could be pronounced so simply. At Changmin’s words, I felt as if the sky itself were caving in. What was this? Was he telling me I was supposed to live as a woman from now on? Unmanageable thoughts tore through my head one after another.
Changmin said I should rest and left with Seonwu in tow. Alone in the room, I sat in the kind of mental freefall that felt as if my skull might split open. I might start menstruating any day now? How was I supposed to deal with that? No—worse. I could get pregnant.
Kikikik. Yeonhui would have found this hilarious if she knew. When she was giving birth to Yujin it was such a difficult labor she screamed at me to go get pregnant myself. Yeah, if I’d been the one to carry the baby… I shook my head hard, horrified at the ridiculous thought that had just crossed my mind. What was I even thinking right now?
But maybe useless thoughts were better than facing the real ones. I had become a woman? Then what happened to my identity papers? Did the number on my resident registration have to change? Or had the middle-aged man named Shin Hyomin simply ceased to exist in this society?
Then what about my plan to get my life back on track someday and go see Yujin? What was I supposed to do about that? How was I supposed to face my son now—as a woman? This wasn’t right. This was completely wrong. The thought of Yujin rose up all at once, and something broke open in my chest.
I buried my face in the bedcovers and cried in ragged, choking sobs. Just cry for now. Even when I was a man I’d cried often enough. This wasn’t some feminine thing. So first I would cry, and once the storm settled, I would think it through calmly again.
And so I flailed against the insane situation that had crashed down on me, and in the desolation of having no one at all to comfort me, I shed my tears alone. A few days later, Changmin and Seonwu came to see me again. This time Manager Lee Seonwu checked the chart first and spoke.
“All the examinations are complete. There are no aftereffects or residual symptoms remaining. Given how rare the cases are, we can’t say for certain, but you should be able to resume ordinary daily life now.”
“Is that so? Then… I can be discharged now, right?”