Talk:The Royal Masquerade/@comment-43323609-20200216231047/@comment-36630098-20200217203745

The only reason I can think for the gender lock is the fact that the babies were switched and the most obvious way to tell them apart was gender. Yes I know that most mothers (and fathers) would be able to recongize their own child but there has been more than enough documented cases of babies being switched at birth where no one realized it until much later after the fact. By having it gender locked it means that it's obvious that the babies were switched. That being said since PB was able to change the genders of various characters based on our gender prefernce with Olive/Hector and Emery then they should have been able to do with the other baby or even have it revealed that the assissin could be a female if caught and is in fact Elise's child as theorized. So at the end of the day the book didn't have to be gender locked for the sake of the story line.