The Fool (spoilers for all RotE books, including LST)

[redchild]

I still have no definitive answer for the Fool's gender, but I was very convinced it was a she when I read about Amber teaching Althea to disguise her womanly attributes so thoroughly. It struck me as a very intimate thing to know about women that the Fool would know how to disguise a period.

That actually may not be an indicator of a person's sex. Male female-impersonators are actually very attune to what makes a feminine woman feminine- probably much more so than a woman. The everyday motions a woman performs, and does not notice, a man would study and imitate with much scrutiny, down to a woman's walk and gestures. The same goes for female male-impersonators.

I just thought of the novel Orlando by Virginia Woolf, and I think it may be an inspiration for the Fool's characterization. Orlando lived as both a man and a woman over centuries and found that a person's sex to be irrelevant to a person's core identity. Though to be honest I never read the book, but I did see the film adaptation with Tilda Swinton in it :