So, I'm sort of working on Vengeance and Valor again, off and on when my brain will let me, and I've run into a problem that there is just no good answer for.  It makes, I think, a perfect illustration of how narrative concerns, point of view concerns, time period and setting concerns, and character concerns can combine to create thorny problems even in a piece with a very simple plot.

Here you have Max, born with a female body, raised with comparatively few behavioral restrictions due to biological sex.  Max, who is now on a pirate ship presenting as male, has never identified with traditionally female roles; nor, for that matter, with traditionally male roles.  It's not hostility, a rejection, it's just an absence of feeling drawn any one way or the other. While that in itself isn't indicative of gender issues, it is certainly a kind of foreshadowing.

As a young adult, Max feels male most of the time, but biology and physiology are hard to argue with.  It's also hard to argue with the fact that Max likes sleeping with boys, which, in a time when sexual orientation and gender are even more hopelessly confused than they are now, would seem to indicate "Hello, I am female."

Now, it's also 1875, with all the backwards social constructs that implies.

Rutter has lived with Max long enough to know how Max feels about the issue.  Rutter thinks it's strange, but he doesn't think less of Max because of it.  Having been raised as he was, he doesn't necessarily view Max as male, but he has enough respect and affection for Max to watch his pronouns, and he tries to get it right.  Around people that he and Max feel he can't trust, he refers to Max as "he."  Around someone he does trust, he constructs his sentences carefully, in a belabored effort to avoid taking sides.  His attitude would not be considered entirely respectful now, but for the time it's quite liberal, and it represents a character transitioning from "benignly ignorant" to "genuinely accepting" . . . Rutter is at the "vaguely uncomfortable" phase. He protects Max's secret assiduously, and will intercede whenever that secret is threatened.  Rutter is well on his way to accepting Max as male.  This process would be faster if Max could settle on an identity.

Valor has only just met Max.  When he discovered that Max has girl parts, he naturally assumed that Max is a girl and has been presenting as male to stay safe . . . a perfectly reasonable assumption in light of circumstance and character.  He has never questioned this.  If it came up, he would try to adapt, but it hasn't, and so he thinks of Max as a girl.  That means, writing from Valor's point of view, Max is "she."

The story isn't quite there yet, but Vendetta will guess Max's secret nearly immediately, largely as a result of subtle physical cues presented by Rutter and Valor.  She'll talk to Max about it in an effort to sort out the proper form of address, and will choose to refer to Max as a boy, since it's safer for Max, it's what Max wants, and it's less confusing for everyone else.  She's still mentally flummoxed, though, in terms of how to think about Max, something that even Max can't help her with, because Max doesn't know either.  Vendetta is the closest, perhaps, to being able to just go with it.

How to handle this is kind of a nightmare.  We never go into Rutter's POV, thank heavens, so that's in the bag, but between Valor and Vendetta, we have a lot of confusion.  This is kind of nice; it allows us to channel the reader's (possible) confusion back into the story in a useful way.  How to depict that confusion, on the other hand, without confusing the reader, is tricky.  I don't care how liberal and open-minded you are, if you switch pronouns for someone halfway through a scene, things can get confusing.  It has nothing to do with acceptance and everything to do with sentence structure and how we keep track of things in our own heads.

In the present-day, we have words we can use to avoid choosing to say "he" or "she" when describing an unknown, abstract person, or a person whose gender is not firmly male or female, or who is both.  There were no such words in 1875.

It's also tricky, because I will be depicting a transgendered person in an era long before the possibility of actual physical transition, which will affect people's ability to recognize Max as a trans character to begin with.  A lot of folks just don't get that you can be trans and never take a single step toward physical transition.  In some ways it would be easier if Max were simply a boy in the body of a girl.

Gender and identity are complicated things in real life; no less so in fiction.

I just have to trust that my readers will be able to keep up, that they will accept the differing, sometimes complicated, views of Max presented through the other characters, and that they will also trust in my goodwill.

Meaning well is not enough.  Meaning well and creating the best characters you can all while seeking a deeper understanding of the subject and remaining open to new points of view is . . . all that can be asked of anyone.