'Soft Currency,' by Seth Gordon (Escape Pod, 2014).
Seth Gordon's 'Soft Currency' is an alternate history, set in the 1970s, which imagines a government mandated, dual currency system: dollars for men, coupons for women.
It is not quite The Handmaid's Tale, but it is a lowkey dystopia, with an economic system that enforces rigid gender roles, erases non-binary identities, and entrenches men's power over women.
In the real world, money is a lot more various than it is often, uh, given credit for, and there are plenty of money systems that have gendered spheres of exchange. But this system is unlike any of those that I know of. Conversions from one sphere to another appear to actually be quite common (the story hinges on such conversions), but but only in one direction: from dollars to coupons. This can't be privately negotiated either, it has to be done at the bank. The moneys also don't just feminize / masculinize you, they actually won't work unless you present as the corresponding gender:
Margaret said, “So if a man came into this store with a wad of coupons and tried to buy groceries with them…”
“That would be illegal. Men can’t buy or sell things with coupons, and except for changing them at a bank, women can’t buy or sell things with dollars. Besides…” Cassie amused herself by imagining all the conversations that would grind to a halt if a man crossed the threshold of Glick’s Grocery.
Mrs. Glick runs a grocery store, and a little black market currency exchange on the side, exchanging the dollars women bring her for coupons. What's in it for the customers? Firstly, Glick pays a better rate than the bank. Secondly, implicitly, this gives them a way to wrest back just a little autonomy from their husbands and fathers, since it gives them the opportunity to save a little out of their grocery budget (or to exchange stolen or illicit dollars that they might not want to show at the bank).
What's in it for Glick? The story does its worldbuilding admirably, and anticipates many questions that might arise, but even so this part is a bit hazy. It seems that perhaps there are some exceptions to do with property and/or being a widow, which means that Glick has legitimate uses for the dollars, probably paying her utility bills. Clearly she can't just be converting them into coupons, or she'd be losing value with each transaction.
Another possibility — though I didn't detect any hint of this in the story — is that Glick might be able to flip those dollars for more coupons than she paid for them. If there is black market female demand for dollars, it would likely be a seller's market, since "any woman can change dollars for coupons, but you practically need permission from the President to change them in the other direction".
Given the theme and premise, there was a risk that this story would celebrate the kind of neoliberalism which, in our timeline, was starting to fire up in the 1970s. I think it manages to avoid that. A good dystopia is built on a partial truth: it justifies itself by solving problems that are real, even if its solutions are abhorrent. In this case, those problems include social atomisation and anomie, accelerated by WWII's disruptions of labour markets.
“It’s not like that.” Cassie laid her hand on the back of the sofa. “I mean, segregation was meant to keep black and white people apart, but the two currencies keep men and women together.”
“Keep them together, how?”
Cassie gave the answer that her father had given her, back when she was eleven years old, and starting to realize how many things she couldn’t buy. “In a healthy society, men and women depend on one another. That was easy a hundred years ago, because almost everything people used was homemade, and men and women spent their whole childhoods learning different skills. So if, say, a man wanted a new shirt, he would need his wife to sew one for him. If he wanted bread, his wife would have to bake it.
“But then the Industrial Revolution came,” Cassie went on, “and factories make all this stuff, so it’s easier to buy a shirt or a loaf of bread than it is to make one. If men and women used the same money, then a man could live on his own, and buy food and clothing without needing a wife.”
Margaret frowned. “Why is that such a bad thing? How is that kind of society unhealthy?”
“It leads to exploitation,” Cassie said. “A man could just… play the field for years, seducing women without committing to them. Women would have to keep looking for a husband until they were thirty or thirty-five years old. And the husbands would lose their work ethic. They’d sponge off their wives instead of looking for jobs that could support a family.”
Margaret wrinkled her nose. “Do you really think all that would happen? Do you have such a low opinion of men?”
“I–I don’t know,” Cassie stammered, and flashed a nervous smile. “Ask me again after I start dating.”
Spoiler ...
I really like the idea that the reason the 'visitor to utopia / dystopia / heterotopia' figure asks so many questions is because they're a fucking cop.
