Saint Felicity's reformatory. (X-Change pills)

Saint Felicity's reformatory school occupies a once grand stately home in the British Home Counties, the countryside surrounding London. Reform schools were built as an alternative to sending young adults to prison with the intention of rehabilitating and educating the young criminals rather than locking them up with older career criminals and being drawn into a downward spiral of violent or anti-social behaviour. What makes Saint Felicity's unique is that, whilst it only accepts young men, not unusual for reform schools in itself, the recent introduction of gender altering pharmaceuticals has facilitated an experiment in corrective education where the young men, aged 18 to 25, incarcerated at Saint Felicity's will serve their sentence as young women.

The reformatory at first glance resembles a classic British private school. The inmates, or students, wear uniforms familiar to seats of learning for young ladies; red plaid skirts, white button-up shirts, striped ties and black blazers with the school crest emblazoned on the breast pocket. The main building of the school is a rambling former stately home set in acres of landscaped grounds, complete with Victorian follies and ornamental lakes and woodland. Please take a closer look: the perimeter wall around the grounds has been recently upgraded with security cameras and motion detectors, and it is patrolled by private security personnel.

There are two routes by which the inmates may be sent to Saint Felicity's. The first is by being sentenced by a judge or magistrates for minor crimes; the second is by the wealthy parents of a young offender, making a sizable donation to the school and skipping the waiting list of available places entirely. Thus, as a new semester begins, students arrive at Saint Felicity's by one of two methods: roughly half aboard a prison bus with its occupants handcuffed as they are transferred from police cells and by a fleet of expensive cars from well-to-do families who have bought their sons a reprieve from regular adult prison. The two groups of young men size one another up with both curiosity and nervousness. Some from each group display last-minute masculine bravado, staring beligerently and puffing their chests out in challenge. That adolescent masculinity will shortly be stripped away, and those puffed-out chests will soon swell with newly grown breasts.

The school faculty and staff descend the steps from the mansion's main entrance; the teaching staff wearing black academic robes and the security staff wearing dark blue uniforms. A nurse, in a crisp white uniform, carries a tray with little pink X-Change pills and small plastic tumblers of water to wash them down. Even the young men who had been posturing and sizing one another up look nervous now as the nurse approaches.