From the author’s website: “I’m enby/nonbinary, which means I don’t have strong leanings involving gender identification! My pronouns are they/them.”

From the book for middle grade readers: “Katybird shuddered as she recalled the crinkly, uncomfortable paper covering of the medical exam table and the sterile smell of the doctor’s office. The place had felt about as hospitable as a bed of skunk-infested stinging nettles outside a funeral parlor. A monotonous specialist had announced to Katy’s mother that Katy was ‘androgen insensitive,’ meaning she had XY chromosomes like most boys, but that nature had knitted her body up using a more traditionally female pattern. That hadn’t phased Katy much. She was a girl. That’s all she cared about. According to the doctor, she also had a pair of internal testes (the doohickeys that made all that testosterone her body didn’t use). No biggie, Katybird had yawned and swung her heels over the exam table, itching to go home. “

p.43

Also: “Except she wasn’t the same, not really, at least in her family’s eyes. There was a question now. Katybird was a girl, obviously, but words like ‘internal gonads,’ ‘testes,’ and ‘Y chromosome’ seemed to muddy the creek in their minds, as far as magic was concerned. Hearn magic had always been used by females. When her family talked about conjure now, Katybird always felt studied. She imagined them thinking, Is she a witch or isn’t she?

p.44