Thread by @Galactoglucoman

Across the Green Grass Fields launches today. I adored working on this book and I encourage you to check it out even if you are new to the series.

I also want to talk about being intersex (a thread) and Regan

https://twitter.com/seananmcguire/status/1349048346032279552

I worked as a sensitivity reader for this book. Regan’s experiences were modeled in part after my own, though our diagnoses are different (my intersex variation is so rare my endocrinologist could only find one other reported instance).

This book is beautiful to me. Regan is a girl, an intersex girl. Just like I was. She’s different. She has to mask and play along to fit in and happens to have one hobby girly enough to be accepted by other girls. This is also luxury I barely got.

When the world comes crushing down, Regan gets to escape to a world of magical talking equines who do not give a flying fuck what her body is doing or what her chromosomes are.

She gets a gift many of us in the intersex community never do—a chance to just BE

I don’t know how to adequately describe what this experience would have meant for me.

Being intersex isn’t like being nonbinary or trans, though these things are often conflated. Every doctor I see I must disclose my condition to because medications affect me differently

Every form I fill out for therapy or work is asking me for an answer they haven’t provided space to give, an answer that has medical and legal consequences.

There is no closet when you are intersex. There is nowhere to hide.

And to allow Regan a chance to go through puberty in a place where she just IS? What a gift. What escapism. Forget sci fi and fantasy with their body morph aliens and Trill hosts and whatnot. This is pure acceptance through doing what I can never do in life—

Exist without ever EVER having to explain anything about my body. To anyone.

And yes, that it’s informed by Seanan’s My Little Pony childhood is an added bonus (we are both avid collectors. Perhaps rabid collectors. Where is that line anyway???) but even if

Regan had gone to a land of metal lathes and steel automatons, being allowed to exist without declaration and without question is EVERYTHING

Buy this book. Buy this little piece of dream that allows an intersex girl a moment of something most of us will never get to experience