Gender and Sexuality Across Lifetimes
One of the things I love most about writing stories centered on LGBTQ+ experiences is the freedom to explore how people come to know themselves, and how love survives change. Over time, readers have asked thoughtful questions about how gender and sexuality work across lifetimes in my books, especially within the framework of reincarnation.
I want to be clear from the start that I do not see myself as an authority on gender or sexuality. What I offer instead is a consistent internal logic for the world I have created. In that world, identity, anatomy, and attraction are related, but they are not the same thing. For example, a person can be male in identity, born into a female body, and attracted to men. That person is still gay. The label follows the soul’s understanding of itself, not the shape of the body it inhabits.
Some of my thinking reflects my own understanding, combined with what feels internally consistent for the stories I tell. My books are fiction. Take what resonates, ignore what does not, and apply these ideas however you wish.
Here is how I break it down in my world.
Part 1: Four Groupings That Shape Identity
This section is about clarity, not definitions.
1. Gender
Gender belongs to the soul. In my stories, gender is an internal sense of self. It is who you are at the deepest level, part of the soul rather than the body, and it does not reset when someone is reborn.
2. Sex (Anatomy)
Bodies are variables, not guarantees. A soul is assigned to a body with a particular anatomy in each lifetime. That body can align with gender, or it can challenge it. That mismatch is not a flaw in the system. It is one of the lived realities my characters must navigate.
3. Attraction
Attraction describes who someone is drawn to emotionally and physically. In my books, attraction is deeply rooted. Characters do not suddenly stop loving men or women because they are reborn. That attraction carries forward. What changes is how it fits into the body and life they have been given.
4. Non-Binary Experiences
Some souls exist outside binaries, and reincarnation does not flatten that complexity. From gender to attraction, everyone exists on a spectrum. Some characters experience gender as fluid, layered, or outside traditional categories. Reincarnation does not simplify them. If anything, it gives them more space to exist fully.
Part 2: Characters Who Live These Truths
My books focus on what happens when a person dies and is given the opportunity for a new life. If they were gay in a previous life, do they automatically find the same attractions in their new existence?
Across the series, characters die, return, and must make choices about how to live again. Characters like Eli in A Boy From Before are not included to check a box. They matter because identity shapes how people love, grieve, and choose each other. Their presence changes the story, not just the cast list.
Part 3: Reincarnation as an Explanatory Framework
In my books, reincarnation means the soul returns in a new body. The soul carries forward the mind, will, emotions, and personality shaped by the previous life, but memory does not come with it intact. Memory fades, leaving only echoes, that must be reawakened through specific markers placed before rebirth.
Max, in The Option, A Love Story Cut Short, knows who he is. He knows who he loves. When he chooses to return, he wants a body that allows him to live as a masculine, gay man because he is coming back specifically to find Zander. That relationship includes physical love as well as emotional connection, and the body matters.
Reincarnation connects the books, but it is not always the loudest element on the page. Sometimes it drives the plot, and sometimes it quietly explains why two people feel like home.
At its heart, this series is about people finding each other again and again, sometimes under easier circumstances, sometimes under harder ones. Gender and sexuality are not obstacles I place in their way. They are part of the truth of who these characters are, and why their love matters.
If you have just discovered my work, I invite you to experience the lives of the characters I write about. I write LGBTQ+ stories. Here are the books published so far:
The Option, A Love Story Cut Short
Finding Tommy
A Boy From Before
If these ideas resonate with you, I am glad. If they challenge you, I hope the stories still invite curiosity rather than certainty.
Mj