#graphic?

my mind dreaming: A coworker went missing, we found them, they weren't alive anymore. We didn't kill them. But we know exactly how they were ended, this hands did it, at least his hands, were they me? was I them? It was not this hands, but they felt like mine. We saw every inch taken out, we pulled in the bones. It wasn't us. it was them... him?

i’d like to introduce our special guest this evening, drum roll please, the shadow monster that lives under my bed!

some of you guys may scoff now, but you try sleeping in a dark room when the shadows seem to move around and have claws and teeth and are only waiting for you to close your eyes until they can tear you to pieces.

I was working on fic when you asked this so the book was like, right next to me. And re-reading it, I think she’s born female. The midwives debate about it, but eventually decide she’s a girl. And Melena very firmly calls her female.

For a minute they were in disagreement, even with the child naked before them. Only after a second and third rub was it clear that the child was indeed feminine. Perhaps in labor some bit of organic effluvia had become caught and quickly dried in the cloven place.

It was a she. It was a her…The twitching, unhappy bundle was not male; it was not neutered; it was a female.

Also the scar below her waist (in traditional Gregory Maguire fashion) is also never clarified. Fiyero’s half-awake and it’s dark when he sees it, and he’s never certain about what it is (although I agree that it probably is a scar)

tbh one of the reasons I love this book so much is because Maguire leaves everything up to interpretation. I mean, it’s never even solidly stated that Liir is Elphaba’s son.

but as for your actual question! I…really don’t know. Frex is the only one who would make sense, because the midwives leave and Melena is pretty out of it most of the time, but also if Elphaba was intersex I think Frex would want to raise her as a boy (Ozian society is sooo misogynistic, and Melena doesn’t want daughters because of her family line). I also think that, while Frex would 100% see her as an abomination, he wouldn’t actually do the surgery (or genital mutilation, because let’s be real, gender reassignment surgery probably doesn’t exist in Oz and certainly not in rural, isolated Munchkinland) himself. He’d try to get someone else to do it, and since the Thropps are pretty unpopular and Munchkinlanders seem to have a pretty “it’s whatever” attitude toward everything, I’m not sure anyone else would help him?