A Goodreads user asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

I really appreciate how your male main characters are non-traditionally masculine. Penric is probably the best example of this. In Mira's Last Dance, he seems fairly comfortable as Mira. I was worried it was going to be transphobic, but it never was. Would Penric consider himself gender-neutral or gender-fluid in today's parlance?

Lois McMaster Bujold Pen would consider himself straight. So is 10/12ths of Desdemona. (Or 8/10ths, if one declines to speculate on the gender identities of the lioness and the mare.)

Balancing these competing views is one of Pen's many tasks in accommodating his demon.

Also playing in is Pen's deep medical education and experience. When one of your jobs is teaching anatomy to medical students through human and other dissection (a winter course, back in Martensbridge), you pretty much get over any kind of body-consciousness. Between the long medical careers of Amberein and Helvia, and his own shorter but extremely intense one, Pen has pretty much seen it all by age 29, and must sometimes remind himself that other people are shyer or more prudish. "Anyone with their skin still on looks dressed to me," as I believe he phrased it once.

Ta, L.

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