“I have found that building a sandbox around a domineering child, then allowing that child to preside over it, frees the adults to do the real work.”

Either someone with no conscience at all, or someone with a conscience so deep and sturdy that its center could still hold in the face of light extinguished.

Some things simply made a person feel feminine; other things made a person feel masculine. Wasn’t that true of everyone regardless of gender? Or did binaries deny themselves the things that didn’t fit the mold?

All children in Madagascar were raised genderless and forbidden to choose a gender until reaching adulthood. Even then, many didn’t choose a single state of being. Some, like Jerico, found fluidity to be their nature. “I feel like a woman beneath the sun and the stars. I feel like a man under the cover of clouds,” Jerico had explained to the crew

But Jerico couldn’t take full credit for the decision. “I just took the Thunderhead’s advice.” A few years earlier, when the Thunderhead had suggested Jerico might be happy pursuing a life at sea, it had annoyed Jerico no end. Because the Thunderhead was right. It had made a perfect assessment. Jerico had already been thinking along those lines,