So, with a possible deadline looming for my opportunity to return home for good, I resolved to speak more plainly with Razuko the next day — though I reminded myself that I must be gentle, and avoid pushing them too hard into a self-realization that they might not be ready for. Such was the consensus of the advice I had seen on various trans forums and chatrooms, back when Juniper was struggling with her gender and I was grasping for ways to help her.

I waited until she set down her morning’s book and was looking around, apparently deciding what to read next, and projected my hologram in her room.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Hey, Callie,” they said. “Have you finished reading all the books in the house yet?”

“Not quite,” I said. “I’ve been a little distracted, talking with some of the neighboring houses’ spirits, so I haven’t quite finished all the books you and your family bought last Firstday.”

“Oh. It’s good that you have other houses to talk to, I suppose.” They seemed to shrink in on themselves a little when they said that, and my best guess was that they were afraid I would no longer want to be friends if I had new friends of my own kind. I hastened to reassure them.

“I will always have time for my human friends, however. I noticed you have been reading the pharmacology book some more. Have you learned anything interesting?”

“A few neat things,” they said, not meeting my hologram’s eyes.

“This pirui you were reading about earlier interests me,” I said. “It seems similar in some ways to silphium, a plant known in ancient times in my own world, though it has unfortunately gone extinct. The ancients used it as a contraceptive, as your pirui is used, but I suspect it could also be used like the drugs my friend Juniper takes to replace the natural feminine fluids her body does not produce on its own.” I was forced to work around the lack of a word in Modaisu for “hormone.”

“Yeah, they said, uh...” Razuko blushed and looked away again.

That if a man took too much of it for his indigestion, he might develop gynecomastia. After a few moments of embarrassed silence, Razuko said, “Um, your friend Juniper... is she okay? How sick is she?”

“Her ailment is not life-threatening when treated,” I said, glad to have finally worked around to a natural opportunity of talking about gender identity. “When she was born, she seemed to all appearances like a boy, and her parents, knowing no better despite their best intentions, raised her as a boy. Of course, as she was actually a girl, this made her unhappy, especially once she started puberty. She was withdrawn and depressed, often unable to focus on her schoolwork, and spent much of her time reading numerous stories about boys who changed somehow into girls.”

“Oh...” Then they asked a question I had not expected. “Are there a lot of them where you come from? It’s taken me years just to find three.”

I had explained some about the Internet in our previous conversations, but had focused on the communication and socializing aspects. I briefly explained how the Internet allowed writers to share their stories with the world without going through a publisher, and how this allowed far more stories of niche interest to reach an audience than would otherwise do so. Then I tried to wrench the conversation back on subject.

“...So as I said, Juniper read a great many of those stories, and also over time began to read some of the authors’ commentary on their own work, and became involved in a social group for writers and readers of these stories. It was then that she began to realize that she might not be just a boy who often wished he was a girl, but a girl on the inside, and perhaps, with a little help, she could become a girl on the outside as well. When she began to suspect this, she asked for my help in researching how to verify whether she were really a girl on the inside, and how to change into a girl. Well, to make a long story short, we concluded that if she felt so consistently and so much like a girl, she was a girl, and found that she could begin the process of changing her body to suit after seeing a specialized doctor — if, that is, her parents agreed.

“She was extremely nervous about telling them what she had learned, fearing that they would reject her, disown her, punish her harshly... She had heard frightening stories from other girls like her in the Internet social group she hung out with about how their confessions to their parents had gone. But I knew her parents well, and reassured her, and finally stood with her for moral support as she told them one evening after supper. They were surprised, but accepted her as their daughter right away, and started making plans to see a doctor and learn how to make her body what it ought to be.”

I had noticed Razuko beginning to softly cry as I spoke of Juniper’s fears of telling her parents, and spoke more slowly and softly as I continued.

“Well, she has had some difficulties since, but ever since she began wearing girl’s clothes and began taking appropriate drugs to make her body go through female puberty, she has been much happier. She has experienced some mistreatment at school, both from students and teachers, but we have managed to persuade the school to put a damper on the worst of it, and she has more friends than before; it turns out that a happy person has an easier time making friends than if they are sad and withdrawn.”

Razuko was crying hard now, doubled over, and I fell silent, moving my hologram to “sit” next to them and giving them a gentle telekinetic hug. When they finally cried themselves out, they stammered, “D-do you think I might... ah... I might be a girl? On the inside, like your friend?”

“Only you can decide that for sure,” I said. “Do you want to be?”

“More than anything,” she whispered.

“Then it does seem likely.”

She began to cry again, but it seemed that these were happier tears.

 

* * *

 

As with Juniper a year earlier, the next problem was how to break the news to her parents. With Juniper, we had many advantages; a culture which had been becoming more and more accepting of trans people for decades, a vast Internet full of information about gender issues, social media and chatrooms where she could ask trans people about their experiences, and my own access to Andrew and Laura’s social media, where they occasionally signal-boosted posts about trans rights. (Juniper preferred a different set of social media platforms, more frequented by people her age, or she would have seen these posts as well.)

With Razuko, we had none of these advantages. If mainstream Modais culture had a concept of transgender people, or a role similar to the two-spirit or hijra, Razuko had never heard of it except in The Orphan Actress, which was certainly fiction, however much it might be based on fact. Nor had I run across any mention of such in reading nearly all the books in the house, or heard it mentioned in any of the conversations among the family and their occasional guests. None of Bisur’s books on magic, to the extent I was able to understand them, mentioned a gender transformation spell such as featured in a couple of Razuko’s penny dreadfuls, though the theory of reshaping human bodies to heal deformities was discussed in general terms in one book.

Given this dearth of information, I suggested that Razuko write to the author of The Orphan Actress in care of their publisher, asking whether and how much the story was based on fact. I feared that transgender people might only find acceptance among low-status subcultures such as theater people.

Razuko wrote the letter as I suggested, and posted it herself during a walk. And while we waited for a reply, I resolved to try to find out what I could another way — simply by asking.

In my conversations with Mipina, I had told her a good deal more about my family than I had told Bisur — he was interested more in my world’s technology, infrastructure, laws and customs than in individual people. I had never gotten around to telling her Juniper was trans, however, and I contrived to work that into a conversation the following day — but first I must tell you of how Bisur opened a portal to one of the barren worlds.

 

* * *

 

The evening of the day Razuko realized she was a girl, Bisur tried to cast a spell from one of the books about parallel worlds. The first two tries gave no results, which he did not seem to be too upset about; apparently new spells often required a bit of practice to get right. On the third try, a shimmering ellipsoid appeared in midair over the new diagram he had painted on a new canvas. I was frustratingly unable to see into it, any more than I could see one inch beyond the boundaries of the house’s grounds, but Bisur could, and after stepping up close and peering into it, he sighed in frustration.

“Must be fifty feet in the air if it’s an inch,” he said. “Need to recalibrate.”

“If the other world is an alternate version of this one,” I suggested, “perhaps the place in that world corresponding to your workroom has suffered more erosion or less sedimentation than this.”

“Quite possibly,” he said. “The book warned that that might be the case. Well, let’s do the calculations to adjust it...”

On the second try, his portal was just a few inches off the ground in the other world, a perfectly usable height. He stepped through for a few minutes and came back.

“Well, I suppose it’s a success, though a more useless place I never saw. I heard someone tried to do mining there, but the amount of silver they found wasn’t enough to pay a wizard to keep opening the portal.”

“Do you feel ready to try to open a portal to my world now?”

“Ready to start devising the spell to open it. It will take a few more days, at least.”

 

* * *

 

The following day, as I mentioned before, I mentioned Juniper’s transition to Mipina. She was sympathetic, to my great relief.

“Oh, the poor thing!” she exclaimed. “And you said she looked just like a boy, and no one could tell she wasn’t until she was in her teens? Oh my, that must have been awful for her.”

“It was,” I said, “but she is much better off now. In my world, it’s generally thought that about one in a hundred or two hundred people are like her, girls who appear at first to be boys or boys who appear at first to be girls, or who are neither. Are they common in your world, too?”

“One in a hundred? That seems like a good many — there must have been thousands if your family lived in a city as big as this one, mustn’t there? But I suppose there must be a lot fewer here. There was old Paiki, back home in Peznam, who wore women’s clothes and wove cloth as good as any woman; perhaps she was a woman on the inside, like you say, but most people seemed to think she was neither one nor the other. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone else like that when we lived in Rodazai while Bisur was going to wizard school, or in Zaiki, where Bisur did his public service to pay for his schooling, or here in Sigai.”

“I see,” I said, hiding my distress on Razuko’s behalf. The people here seemed to be humans like the ones of my world in every respect, though none of the ethnic groups here corresponded exactly to the ones on Earth, so I suspected that there were just as many trans people here as in a similar population on Earth — it was just that they were nearly all closeted or unaware, like they were in America a few generations ago. This Paiki intrigued me, however, and I asked Mipina a few more questions about her.

She was a good forty or fifty years older than Mipina, and what Mipina knew about her early history was second-hand and somewhat contradictory, but it seemed that she had begun wearing women’s clothes when she was in her teens and could not be talked out of it. When her mother would not teach her, she went to a widow who lived nearby and begged to be taught spinning and weaving and other women’s crafts. She moved in with her and inherited her house when she died. After a while, the people of the village simply accepted that she was different and let her alone. Her cloth was of good quality, and by the time Mipina was old enough to know her, she was respected, if considered slightly eccentric, as an elder of the community.

So it seemed that trans people could, in fact, carve out a place for themselves here. But were people less accepting in Sigai than in the rural village where Mipina and Bisur had grown up? Or had Mipina simply not run into any out trans people since they had moved here?

 

* * *

 

Bisur spent his free time while he was not doing paying work for clients working on the new spell to open a portal to my world. He had to take the framework of the spells that opened portals to the known barren worlds — or to the hostile human empire which was now off-limits — and work in a great many facts about my world, plus calculations drawn from the readings his instruments had recorded during the tracing spell, and this took longer than he had anticipated. During this process, he kept asking me many more questions about my world, not only its physical properties but institutions, laws, customs, prices of commodities, major religions and philosophies, and so on and so forth. I took the opportunity to volunteer some information about modern Western attitudes to gender issues, and the state of trans healthcare in America and in some other countries. He took this in with the same single-minded focus as the price of bread in North Carolina or the number of atheists in Finland, showing no emotional reaction that I could detect. I digressed slightly, mentioning that Mipina had told me an interesting story about Paiki, and wondering if he could remember anything more about her.

“Oh, yes, I remember her. I don’t think I can tell you any more than Mipina has already told you, though? I didn’t know her any better than the other elders I wasn’t closely related to, and Mipina and I left Peznam when we were scarcely fourteen. — Now, you were saying that these drugs are given to people free by the state...?”

“In a few countries, yes — state-employed doctors determine who truly needs them, and they are paid for by taxes.”

“Paiki would have liked that,” he muttered aside, and asked what else was provided free by the government.

I did not reveal the details of these conversations to Razuko, of course, out of respect for Mipina and Bisur’s privacy. However, I did tell her that I thought the chances of her parents reacting with compassion, or at worst indifference, to her coming out were good.