runicscribbles:

I am loving the way gender and sexuality has been included in Exalted! I know that a lot of the Solars and Lunars have LGBTQ+ stories (and that Lunars have charms that allow them to be genderfluid or to change genders at will), but the new Dragon Blood previews are so explicitly LGBTQ+! The Scarlet Empress is overtly bisexual and just look at the way they detail Dynast marriages. This is SUCH a great game setting.

Sexuality and Marriage

Same-sex couples face stigma over matters of reproduction, but little else. If a same-sex marriage does produce a child — whether through adopting a patrician outcaste or an undesirable or orphaned child of a Dynastic relative, employing a surrogate parent, or turning to sorcery —then their duty to house and Realm is fulfilled, and they become as socially acceptable as any other couple, the circumstance of their genders no more than a trifling quirk.

The Dynasty accepts these marriages because it understands that the passions of the Terrestrial Exalted run hot. History records many tales of Dragon-Blooded who, when pushed, chose their beloved over house and tradition — quite a few of these tales are bloody affairs. Sometimes, it’s better to keep one Prince of the Earth and hope for children against the odds than to demand more than she’ll bear and lose the one the house already has. 

Transgender Dynasts

Within the Scarlet Dynasty and other Dragon-Blooded cultures that adhere to the Immaculate Texts, it’s axiomatic that a transgender individual’s self-identified gender is her true gender. The Immaculate Dragon Danaa’d was a transgender woman, and to be such is proper and holy. Thus, transgender Dynasts marry according to their gender identity. Although such marriages are often incapable of producing heirs through procreation, the expectation that they’ll have children is by no means diminished.

Adoption and surrogate parents are commonly used by such couples, as well as others unable to have children conventionally. Additionally, while the Realm regards the use of sorcery to beget children warily, the Empress carved out a notable exception when she employed sorcery to bear children — including Mnemon and Ragara — with her first husband, Rawar of Arjuf, a transgender man. Since then, transgender Dynasts have held Imperial sanction, called the Precedent of Rawar, to make use of sorcery or stranger magics to have children — summoning neomah, conceiving within enchanted dreams, growing heirs from plants watered with the couples’ blood, and the like.