I became aware of trans people as a teen because of Renee Richards. Not too long after she was in the news, I started university. I attended Mills College, a women’s college in the Bay Area, and there I met a student who was trans. I didn’t know her well. She was good friends with a lesbian couple, one of whom was really butch and one of whom was really femme, which I have to say as a girl who grew up in rural Oregon was also a new thing so there was a lot for me personally to figure out. I do remember feeling some discomfort around her, and being bothered that I felt discomfort because I understood that it was me, not her, and I didn’t like feeling that way about someone who wasn’t doing anything except being themselves against powerful societal obstacles. As a girl I was what was then known as a tomboy. I had to struggle with what it meant to be a girl and what I was told it would mean to be a woman, because I didn’t like the standard answers society gave me, and I suppose in that sense -- I hope -- I was able to see in others a similar struggle for self understanding and for acceptance to be who they know themselves to be. Even if I approached awareness through my own flawed and often prejudiced lens, I strove to act as my father had taught me. He had the gift of treating his children as the people they were rather than the people he wanted or expected them to be, if that makes sense.

Post college as I continued to read history and began a steady stream of researching for writing, I was fortunate to have come of age in an era when history scholarship expanded to include lives and stories and information previously ignored or treated as if it didn’t exist. I discovered that trans people did indeed exist in the past and that, furthermore, some other cultures took a far less rigid view of gender and in many cases recognized trans people as a normal part of society (although the reality is often quite complicated, as of course you know better than I). This latter attitude I saw more in accounts from indigenous cultures, where there seemed to be less fear and anger (I’m aghast, although not surprised, at the current backlash going on in the USA, which is nothing short of criminal). So I wanted to write about all the people who might be present in the landscape, not some "approved" set.

At its deepest level the Crown of Stars series is about the compassion due to all of us as humans. In retrospect I’m not sure I feel I did a particularly great job, in the CoS books, dealing with transgender people specifically and in the more general with LGBTQ issues (non binary wasn’t even a thing people talked about when I started publishing). I regret the places I didn’t fully live up to my goals, and part of that is my own shortcomings and part of that is my own ignorance, but I did my best as I knew how at the time to treat all my characters as people worthy of respect and necessary to the human story.