The Dragonsword trilogy by Gael Baudino consists of Dragonsword, Duel of Dragons, and Dragon Death. I first looked into it because I’d heard of its having strong TG elements, and though the covers were unpromising, looking like fairly generic high fantasy, I was pleasantly surprised to find it much better and more original than I expected. The secondary world that the main characters from our world visit is suspiciously derivative and similar to certain times and places in our world’s past, but there turns out to be good metafictional and in-world reasons for that; and the apparently cliched “visitors from our world must fulfil their destiny by helping the sympathetic locals fight the unsympathetic foreigners led by a dark lord” plot turns out not to be at all what it appears.

I won’t say too much about the overall plot arc beyond that to avoid spoilers, but I’ll say more about the TG subplot. One of the cultures involved in the main conflict in the first book is extremely sexist, subordinating women more than many historical Earth cultures; another is more egalitarian than most Earth cultures at a similar level of technology where men’s physical strength was a more important advantage than in our technological age. The chief wizard of the less-sexist culture decides he can demoralize the enemy and minimize loss of life by transforming their most prestigious warriors into women. This doesn’t work out as planned — I won’t say everything that goes wrong with it to avoid spoilers, but for one thing, the transformed women aren’t as permanently demoralized as their enemies expect. Largely due to the influence and support of the main protagonist, a warrior-woman who’s an immigrant from our world, they reinvent themselves as warrior-women and remain formidable opponents.

The transformed women are important but not viewpoint characters in the first book, and their transformation happens offstage. But in the second and third books, several of them become more major characters, and three of them are viewpoint characters; their character arcs are among the best parts of these books. The ways they react and adapt to the change is all over the map; some adopt a female gender identity quickly, some slowly, some hardly at all; some kill themselves because they can’t take it; some become lesbian, some heterosexual women, some asexual.

I’d recommend these. They’re out of print, but cheap used copies are readily available from various online retailers. I plan to read more of Ms. Baudino’s work at some point, though I don’t know that any others have TG elements.

• Books by Gael Baudino on Thriftbooks
• Wikipedia article on her