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Let me tell you a fairytale.

Once upon a time, there was a poor farmer and his wife who lived on a poor farm in a kingdom of little note. Now this farmer was getting older, and all he wanted, his dearest wish, was for a son to help ease the burden of his farming. But he and his wife had no children, and it was beginning to look like they never would. But at night the farmer would silently wish his one wish, that he would have a son and heir, long into the night when he should have been sleeping.

Well, you know how fairytales go. A passing fairy heard the farmer's silent wish and decided to grant it, but fairies are flighty, winged things with very little conception of humanity. Still, the next morning the farmer's wife awoke with the sure knowledge that she was going to have a child. And sure enough, the farmer's wife's belly grew and as this is a fairy tale there were no complications or gruesome details, and in the prescribed time the farmer's wife gave birth to a healthy baby. I guess if it had been one of a certain sort of fairytales, the child would have grown out of a flower or something, but it isn't.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the baby was a girl.

Yeah, it's one of those fairytales. It's a sexist romp. Stick with it for a bit.

The farmer was beside himself. It seemed like fate was torturing him. This was worse than having no child at all. He was all set to throw himself into the nearest river or volunteer for military service in the arrow-blocking division of the kingdom's not-insignificant armed forces. But his wife, who was miraculously totally unfazed by having recently given birth, calmed him down. "So it's a girl. You can still have your heir. We'll just raise her as a son. We'll call her... HIM Michael. No one will ever know."

So they did. Michael was a small boy who stayed home to help his parents, but it was several centuries or millennia or maybe eons before the invention of public schooling so it wasn't hard for his parents to keep up the facade. Michael certainly didn't know better. He was a happy enough child and if the farm work was hard, his parents were kind and did all they could to make sure he wanted for nothing much that a poor farmer's son could want for. He was a little lonely, perhaps, but hey, it was a fairytale and he managed not to die of dropsy in infancy.

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