The Story So Far — A Synopsis of Balthasar’s Extract up to Part VII:

Evelyn Westcott is not your average turn-of-the-20th-century American girl. She didn’t want to be a woman, at least not consciously, but when Edward’s body betrayed him, he had no other sensible choice. Fortunately, rich & sophisticated Aunt Enid was able to sort everything out. Within a few months after Edward arrived in Baltimore, he was making a game go of it as Evi Westcott, a sophomore at the elite Bryn Mawr School.

In Evi’s day, the mystery of ‘internal secretions’ was only beginning to be unravelled. Our fortunate heroine becomes the patient of the brilliant young researcher, Eleanor “Tottie” Clathrop and her assistant, Balthasar Bishop. When a tragedy claims Tottie, Evelyn carries on her work with Balthasar’s help. She is the ringleader of ‘Tottie’s girls,’ a gender-dysphoric group that includes her dear friends Dorothy Downey and, later, Rachel Klimintz and Alexandra Bishop.

Evi is brilliantly popular at school. She develops an interest in serious things: scientific research (into hormones, of course), women’s suffrage and (like all young people) sex. Friendships develop and multiply. The men in Evi’s life include a boy scoutish aeronaut, a female impersonator, an artist (and secret cross-dresser), a sexy midshipman and a cad. She's also strangely attracted to a racy poetess. In Part IV, having survived a night in jail, been graduated from Bryn Mawr School and lost her virginity, Evi embarks on ‘the Grand Tour’ with Aunt Enid.

In Europe, she hopes she will find greater tolerance and understanding of ‘different’ people — in the event, she finds more differences, a touch more tolerance, but no more understanding. Part V opens as Evelyn, still hopeful of finding a manufacturer for the feminizing drug, Gynol, and her Aunt Enid are arriving in Vienna, the glittering, decadent capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

In Vienna, she learns there are many kinds of love, and finds lovers and at last a true love. Anna’s autocratic father attempts to break up the liaison by sending her off to a convent. Evi follows Anna to Rome and a tender, joyful reunion marked by pledges of eternal affection. And that's where things start to unravel.

Evi returns home to Baltimore in May 1911, to find things have gone to hell in a handbasket. Balthasar’s in jail, his son Caesar’s on the run, and the lab has been padlocked. No sooner do those things get sorted out, then it becomes apparent that Gynol’s not as safe a feminizing drug as was thought. Some of the girls are having side effects — can Evi, her chum Rachel, Rachel’s uncle Nathan and the émigré chemist Igar Lutjak find the sinister contaminant ? As Part VI ends, ten dozen guinea pigs are about to do their bit for science.

Hugs, everyone! Daphne