Trixie grabbed an egg with her magical aura, and held it up to her forehead.
"Female," she said. The egg went into an incubator rack.
Trixie grabbed another egg. "Male."
The egg flew into a giant trash can. Nothing to be done for it. Consumers just didn't want an egg with even a tiny spot of blood in it.
(Technically it wasn't a TRASH trash can. The discarded eggs were "usable scrap" and would go to a pet food factory. But humans didn't want to eat them.)
You'd think since humans paid good money to eat fullgrown chickens, and humans ate millions of unfertilized eggs too...something that was partly one, but hidden inside the other? That should be just fine, right?
Trixie had given up on trying to make sense of humans. The female eggs would hatch and grow up into hens, and humans would use them as egg layers. But the fertilized male eggs with their baby roosters inside? Those weren't wanted. There was no place in this world for them.
Trixie understood the logic, she supposed. But she still felt bad for them.
Sometimes she really hated this job.
Sometimes? More like nine hundred and ninety-nine minutes out of a thousand.
Trixie held another egg to her forehead.
"Hmm," she said. "Trans."
This one, she slipped into her saddlebag.
She kind of hated this job almost all the time. But it did have its moments.
***
After work, Trixie had seven trans and nonbinary eggs nestled in a small portable incubator, tucked inside her saddlebags.
No one even questioned her about them. Males and any kind of "abnormal" egg likely to become a non-layer were looked upon like garbage. Trixie could carry out a few eggs every night if she wanted to, so long as she didn't take too many and didn't take any cis females.
That was how some of her human coworkers got snacks for their dogs...or, she supposed, their own breakfasts sometimes.
Trixie took a few more eggs than most workers, but her supervisor appreciated that Trixie was so good at plucking out the "hormonally abnormal."
Trixie didn't like to think too much about why her boss was so happy to get rid of anycreature like that.
Trixie knew most egg sorting plants were a lot stricter about taking a few eggs home. She knew other ponies who worked at places like that, who did a bit of smuggling. But Trixie liked being technically honest.
***
When Trixie reached the cheap apartment that she called home on Earth, she unlocked the door and went inside. "Hi, Scoots."
The orange pony said, "Hi, Trixie. How was work?"
"Fine." Trixie gently pulled out her incubator, and opened it.
Scootaloo looked. "Wow," she said. Her eyes were big with wonder.
"Just think," Trixie said. "You used to be like them."
***
Interdimensional travel between Equestria and Earth was complicated.
If you took a chicken or a chicken egg from Earth to the pony world? USUALLY you would still have a chicken or a chicken egg. That was the general rule.
Even in Equestria, you couldn't change a stallion to a mare, or the other way either. But sometimes, when a creature was on the borderline to begin with, you could do something. Just hopping from one world to another often triggered changes in a transgender creature's body.
So the transhens? If you took them to Equestria, they could be magicked into full-fledged egg layers.
It was a bit more awkward for the transroosters. Each of them had a decision to make. Would they live on a farm in pampered comfort...but once a day turn briefly back to hens, and lay eggs to earn their keep?
Or would they strike out on their own as free chickens?
If a transrooster or transhen chose the latter, they would at least receive travel supplies and a map. Usually travel companions and transport to a chicken village could be arranged too, but some transroosters didn't want to wait. Since they were technically free, self-owned animals, nopony could force them to stay.
Delivering a chicken to freedom was satisfying...but it wasn't really the high point of the job.
When you discovered an egg that transcended standard cisgender categories...there was a tiny chance it might transcend something else too. You could carry a trans egg across the dimensional barrier, and it might become not only a different sex, but maybe also a different species.
Once the change fully took, even if you carried the egg or the hatched-out creature back to Earth, it still wouldn't revert to its earlier form.
It was like something inside the little creature knew all along what it really wanted to be. And it wouldn't take no for an answer.
Maybe that was how the School for Gifted Unicorns had obtained the dragon egg that hatched out Twilight's little brother Spike. Trixie didn't know for sure. It wasn't considered polite to pry into such things too much, and Trixie did respect a FEW rules of etiquette. When it suited her.
Trixie knew for sure that Scootaloo had once been a chicken egg on Earth. Trixie had personally rescued that egg. Ever since then, Trixie had felt like she was one of the little roosterpony's many aunts.
Scootaloo had SO MANY honorary aunts. It came of having no surviving blood parents (on Earth, chickens were slaughtered after a few years at most, when they became less productive) and of being such an endearing little creature.
Trixie loved the little squirt like her own child.
"Time to practice," Trixie said.
Scootaloo lifted each egg carefully, and held it up to the light. She tried to use her special, intuitive connection with chickens. "Transrooster," she said.
"Good."
"Intersex."
Trixie nodded. "Yes."
Scootaloo kept practicing, both on this day's batch and on eggs from the last few days. Sometimes Trixie rearranged the eggs without letting Scootaloo watch, to give her student more opportunity to practice again on the same eggs.
Trixie remarked, "You're getting good at this, Scoots. Soon it'll be time to take you to a farm to make sure you can do all the kinds right. And if you pass..."
"Chicken rescue!" Scootaloo said.
"Yes," Trixie agreed. "But you know it'll be tiresome, boring work, right? And you'll have to throw out thousands of males every day?"
"I know. But I get to save a few, right?"
Trixie nodded. "Every day you get to save somecreature. Even if it's only a few out of an enormous crowd."
Scootaloo grimaced. "Saving a few is better than saving nochicken at all."
Soon it was time for bed.
Trixie fell asleep, and dreamed of an obnoxious pony who went around saying everypony who didn't fit into the "right and correct" categories should be exterminated.
This time, the pony said only trans creatures should get to live. Last night, it had been cis males and cis females. The night before that, the pony had said it should be ponies who were an even number of hoofwidths tall. "Eliminate the odd!" he had demanded, stomping his hoof.
There had been nights when the pony had said unicorns who do fake magic should be eliminated. Or pegasi who couldn't fly well enough.
But no matter what the pony demanded, the dream always ended the same way. The way Trixie's real workday never did.
Trixie spun around and bucked that pony right into the trash can. She kicked him so hard, she wasn't sure what would happen to him. Would he drown in the soup of broken eggs? In the world of her dream, she felt fine with that.
For a little while, she didn't have to remember what the world would be like when she woke up, and she went back to her job choosing who would live and who would die.
Author's Note:
Yay Trixie?
I enjoyed a somewhat more cheerful nonbinary or trans Scootaloo story by Dreamer Deceiver: "Rooster"
In our world, in-ovo chicken egg sexing is done using chemical tests for hormones or DNA. Equestrian magic or psychic powers are usually not involved. Also, I've slightly simplifed the market for different kinds of eggs...(content warning!) and the state of present-day egg sexing technology (such as how mature the egg must be) mostly because I don't want to give a more specific description of what exactly Trixie is really throwing out. I really want to avoid the Gore tag, and that 'trash' bucket is NOT a pretty sight.
You might be wondering, why would a business dump perfectly viable rooster eggs into pet food, instead of raising the male chicken for meat? Different varieties of chickens are bred for different purposes. A chicken breed that puts on weight faster and more efficiently is different from a breed that lays more eggs. Industrial-scale agriculture is a business, and corporations try to optimize everything as much as they can to make a profit.
