L.A. Shine asked Linsey Miller:

Why did you decide for a gender fluid main character? and what kind of research did you do to represent gender fluid people properly?

Linsey Miller Thank you for asking.

Sal was always non-binary when I thought of them, and they were a completely different character during my drafting of the plot and world. Prior to writing, I spoke to a lot of genderfluid, bigender, agender, trans, and non-binary people about the plot, character arcs (for the whole series), issues that may arise with Sal being non-binary and an antihero, how Sal thinks about gender, and how the world thinks about Sal.
I laid down a hard rule that if at any point anyone expressed concern, I'd scrap the idea.
Sal's genderfluidity arose after talking to everyone about Sal and gender, and the way Sal navigates Igna in an attempt to prevent misgendering while also living their life as they wanted was how a lot of the genderfluid people I talked to navigated this world. So on an even smaller scale, Sal is sort of specifically written to reflect their world.
After that, MoS was lucky enough to get a mentor, and then I hired sensitivity readers for Sal (and the other characters). Sal is the child of many people who were very kind and very thorough, and MoS would not have happened without them. I don't think Sal is perfect rep, I don't think I can write that as a cis writer in the same way I couldn't reinvent or rethink gender systems because I would be coming at it from a cis viewpoint. I just wanted to provide a world that didn't erase most of the population (this is why the book is from Sal's PoV only; MoS's world isn't a monolith and not all of it is safe) and let people be the dashing rogue they might not have wanted to be yet.

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