The Stormlord Trilogy by Glenda Larke (called the Watergivers trilogy in Australia, and maybe some other countries) is a secondary world epic fantasy, consisting of three volumes, The Last Stormlord, Stormlord Rising, and Stormlord's Exile. I wholeheartedly recommend it as a fine adventure epic with nifty political intrigue, knotty moral dilemmas, clever and consistent worldbuilding, and emotionally affecting characterization. The reason I'm mentioning it here is one particular character, a FtM transsexual. He doesn't appear until the third book, but he has a fairly major role to play when he appears.

The series is set in a desert country which is watered by magically manipulated rainstorms. A small ruling class of stormlords and rainlords create artificial clouds from the sea and move them around inland to make it rain in the most suitable places and times. The population is about twenty times the number who could live there with only natural, random rain; and the stormlords are dying out -- an unusual number of the potential stormlords in the current generation died young, apparently coincidentally. There is only one aging stormlord managing the weather for this vast country, and he's starting to have to economize his efforts, deciding who will get rain and who won't on political criteria, because he can no longer supply the amount of rain people are used to relying on. The lower-ranking rainlords are going around searching for children with water talent in demographics which have rarely though occasionally produced stormlords.

There's also another form of magic, at once more limited and more powerful than the rainlords' abilities, and when the story begins most people don't know it exists. It is responsible for the transsexual character's transformation -- he's been given a masculine appearance without removing all traces of his original female biology. To avoid spoilers I'll say no more about this other magic system, except that it's another instance of Ms. Larke's well thought-out worldbuilding.

It's long but fast-paced -- each volume is around 600-700 pages, and I read each of them in two days or less.

There are sex scenes, but mostly oblique and offstage. There's rape, including of one major viewpoint character, but I think that's offstage.

I first heard of this author and series from the Galactic Suburbia podcast, which I also recommend; three Australian women talk about feminism and speculative fiction, occasionally including books with transgendered characters. They talked about this trilogy in episode 40.

When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and Amazon in Kindle format. See here for more information.