D’oh! To help me find the bug: When did you drive her away, exactly? And which bits of Ch 3 did she pop up in?
On transgender people in the gameworld, here are my thoughts so far: one of the ways the Hegemony differentiates itself from the heathen barbarians of Halassur (who actually attribute gender to the Divine!) is that Karagon is not gender-essentialist. For Karagonds, human beings’ telos is tied to their caste rather than their sex; while the genitalia and other sexual dimorphisms obviously have their own telos and function, so do the stomach, the teeth, etc. The Karagonds would deem it absurd to derive anything fundamental about human nature from the lower teloi of the body parts, or even the animal telos of self-reproduction; all those are clearly subordinate to the higher human teloi of (for example) ruling, understanding, crafting, and so on.
The Karagonds further believe in the myth (familiar to many Earth cultures) of the “other half” – that people will generally be drawn to their soul’s long-severed other half, who might be of either sex. Their rules of marriage and adoption make same-sex marriages and families easy.
So in the Hegemony, gender roles and rules are loose, and it’s fairly easy to craft a gender identity. Theurgy to change the body from male-female and female-male is extraordinarily rare, however, as it requires an incredibly knowledgeable anatomical specialist to achieve it without permanent damage or death to the subject – and is moreover hugely costly.