Raiseth
I Find Your Lack of Memes Disturbing
- Location
- Russia
Mostly because living in a body that doesn't outwardly correspond with your gender identity is, from what I heard, a very fucked up and miserable experience. And also triggers a lot of people by being too relatable.
So the protagonist is either trans and their body changing to assume what they always wanted is positive and cathartic, or they are some kind of genderqueer, and don't really care about how their body looks or feels, since they consider other things more important. ( or you are writing a fanfic about a magical adolescent girl living in Imperial Germany circa World War 1 who was a guy in the previous life, and you exercise authorial fiat to pronounce that she's genderqueer because you absolutely don't want to deal with gender dysphoria and other "fun" things cuz you're pretty sure you'll portrait them inaccurately and offend a lot of people. )
I'd say Peter is genderqueer, too, actually, but I'm not 100 percent sure.
There's also, like, a reincarnation element present, as in, a religious term. Almost all dharmic religions have reincarnation as a concept, and it isn't restricted by such things as gender, race, or even species. Since you're dealing with fantasy, you can say what counts as spiritual parts of the identity, and what counts as physical. So, for example, the body you reincarnated into has a clearly defined male/female brain that, thank whatever deities you do/not worship, corresponds with the rest of the body, and the soul blob is mostly genderless and wouldn't cause a fuckload of problems by integrating into this piece of transient meat.
This is, of course, an oversimplification that doesn't deal with, to list a few, agender, non-binary, genderfluid identities, not to mention differing scientific schools of thought about sexual orientation and whether it's intrinsic, develops through the adolescence, or some combination of the two, and also also the fact that trans people stopped getting persecuted for only a small period of time in a relatively small portion of the planet ( and often enough, not even there ), so compared to the rest of the literature and "literature" written by people in the last four thousand plus years, the number of books seriously exploring the topic by people with some sort of personal experience, who are willing to talk and write about it, is tiny.
TLDR; gender bender has been mostly written by cis guys as fanservice, and the works seriously exploring the topic would be either psychological horror stories, fantasy about painless affirmation without surgical and hormonal intervention, or vaguely spiritual/transhumanist esoterica not intended for casual consumption.
