cooonfuzzzzzed

Wanda is certainly a conundrum, in A Game of You.  One thing that I keep going back to, in thinking about her character, is that while she considers herself to be female, is thought of by her friends as female, and has been through hormone treatments to become more physically female, she has not had the sex-reassignment surgery yet.  Her nightmare implies that it is her greatest fear.  In her dream, she is a woman, until the nightmare starts, and she becomes a man frightened to fully embrace womanhood.

The moon, here, is intriguing.  The myths about the moon and cultural depictions of the moon as female are both ancient and cross-cultural.  How, then, would the moon define women in a society with different gender constructs than those of the ancient world?  Thessaly (who is a positively ancient being herself) claims that the moon cares about biology -- moon lore is tied with menstruation, something Wanda cannot experience, so Wanda cannot help with that part of the magic. Additionally, according to Thessaly, even if Wanda had her surgery, her chromosomes would be wrong, and the moon would see that about her.  In that viewpoint, Wanda is doomed to never be completely female.  So, what does the moon matter?  If Wanda had not needed to take the moonpath as a shortcut into a dreamworld to rescue a friend, she would never have been affected by this knowledge -- she would not have known how the moon judged her.  Perhaps the moon is outdated, too old to understand?  Perhaps this not-belonging serves to highlight Wanda's own feelings, her own fear of loosing her penis even as she longs to do just that, to be outwardly female as she is inwardly? Because the moon does not care.  To the moon, as to Wanda's family, Wanda will always be a man.

There is not a clearcut conclusion about Wanda's situation, that I can find.

And I agree with you that A Game of You is far more sad than scary.