Pacing in circles at work somehow led me to the idea of trans woman Jake. Copying Rachel when they were little, over the course of the war either letting the identity settle as fact and not outwardly worrying about it too much, or retreating back into the closet as they get closer to the endgame. I can’t tell if this is a great idea or a boring one but what do you think?
Aw man, I can imagine during the series Jake's gender being "I'm probably a girl, but I have a war to fight in the morning so I don't care about that right now." Because in this scenario I feel like she would. She's got Animorphs to lead, a planet to save, God's Own Angst to chew on at night... and, okay, everyone gets her gender wrong. But that last is just... she just can't deal with it right now. Her friends and her brother and her entire species all have to come first.
And then after the war? Healing looks like retreating from the public view. Healing looks like letting the TV networks and armchair historians have that boy called Jake whom they've mistaken her for, and quietly building her own identity. Healing is trying on dresses, trying on eyeliner, and letting herself move ever further away from that guy called Prince that someone wants to carve into a mountain and 20,000 strangers want to be president. At some point she just disappears from the public view entirely, and at some point soon after that there is no one legally called Jake Berenson anymore, and the inaccurate name goes down in the history books as the real person lives on.
