Growing up in the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada, and then later Hawaii, I lost myself in fantasy books, fictional worlds created by writers like Ursula K Le Guin, inhabited by characters with no fixed gender identity. At the age of 12 I began to write, creating my own fictional planets. Over a decade later, a much revised and polished version was published as the first in a series of science fiction novels. In these creative empires, I played around with gender roles; people oscillated between having male or female sexual characteristics. Writing gave me the freedom to imagine a less rigid reality.

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