I have always enjoyed creating imaginary worlds. I'm really impressed with some of those imaginary worlds you see out there online, such as Virtual Verduria. Daruny started out as a thought experiment: What if there were a country transgendered people could go to where they would be accepted as their gender of choice without transitioning (altering their bodies to look more like their gender of choice), no questions asked?
But I know my history, and I know that holy wars were fought by both Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages, and even before that, the rise of class systems had already created more rigid gender roles. In fact, many indigenous North American cultures were hated for their acceptance of transgendered people as much as anything else; Europeans sought to destroy these "wicked Sodomites." So I needed a way to allow Daruny to last from the fall of the Roman Empire to the present without being conquered. (How long it can last in this era of terrorism and airline travel is another question.) The only way I could imagine this being accomplished was a long period of isolation, and that meant surrounding it with difficult-to-cross mountains that don't exist in the real world. This makes them a bit more xenophobic than other Europeans. Though I created Daruny, its not exactly my ideal society; I disagree with Darunian views on quite a few issues. (For example, Daruny is a secular country, and I'm a conservative Catholic. In fact, the Catholic Church teaches that a person's gender is fixed at birth, and that gays and transgender people need to be celibate.) Not that it matters, since the whole thing was meant to be a thought experiment anyway. I used the Culture Tests of a few European countries to make a Culture Test for Daruny and make it a typical European country in most respects.
The name Daruny is an Anglicization of Darunia, which comes from The Adventure of Link. I gave it this name when it was still just a thought experiment, long before it evolved into a full geofiction; the name just stuck. I picked it because it sounds like a medieval European country that was once a Roman province. Apparently (according to Google) "Daruny" is a Ukrainian first name, the Austrian name for potato pancakes, and a word in a few languages; "Darunian" is a city in Pakistan. Who would have thought? The capital and largest city, Liskom, is named after Aurora Lipscomb, the male-to-female child in Westerville, Ohio, who was taken away from her parents for being transgendered. "Liskom" is a Darunianized version of her last name. It seemed appropriate, as Daruny would be the perfect country for her.
Those of you who are serious "conlangers" (language creators) will probably be a little disappointed by Darunian. I speak French, Japanese, and a little Spanish, but I don't know enough about linguistics to create a language like Tolkien. (He was a linguist, by the way.) Everything I know about language creation comes from The Language Construction Kit. Darunian is made to look like it could be related to the Romance languages, but it's not as rigorously done as those "romlangs" (constructed Romance languages) that start with Latin and apply some sound changes; I just looked on Wikipedia for verb tables and used one of those online dictionaries for the Latin words. And, no, there's no pretty script like some artistic languages have; Darunian uses the Roman alphabet. Sorry. You might like it anyway, so check it out.
As a thought experiment, this has been very helpful to me. When I did some research on adoption (I was considering adopting as a single parent for a while--and then I got guinea pigs instead), I learned that birth control, abortion, and the social acceptance of single motherhood have all contributed to a serious lack of adoptable babies. (Hmmm... maybe there's something to the Catholic position on sexuality and marriage after all?) So now, people have to take whatever they can get--older children who have been seriously abused and babies with severe disabilities--and this is assuming they can pass all the tests to adopt. It stands to reason that Darunian parents who try to adopt would have even more problems, since it's a more liberal country, and the countries with babies to adopt don't adopt out to "known homosexuals," and they lump transgender in with homosexual, so even if they let any Darunians adopt, the transgendered are still out of luck.
I realized that this change would have far-reaching consequences. If a boy is allowed to live as a girl, then she (that's the pronoun Darunians use) will, most likely, never be able to adopt as an adult. Since families are getting smaller (1.3 children per woman, as is the average for Europe--this is the critical level, from which no human society has ever recovered), parents of sons want to make sure they marry biological women and have children, leading to a lot of social pressure against sexual relations between biological males. So our hypothetical transgender person will, most likely, grow up to be single and childless her whole life. Darunian parents are starting to foresee this and forbid their sons from living as girls. (Their daughters are given more leeway, because artificial insemination takes care of the problem in most cases.) Parents are starting to make sure adult transgender people have less influence on their sons, which means they have a hard time making friends with people with kids, and are starting to be discriminated against more and more. People are speculating that the tradition of allowing boys to live as girls will die out in the next generation.
Hence, I saw that a transgender-friendly country is inherently unworkable in the modern world. This helped me question the transgender paradigm altogether. I think this is because God created us male and female (intersex and transgender people exist because of Adam and Eve's fall from grace), and in the words of Charles Stanley (of Life Principles Bible fame), "whatever we acquire outside of God's will turns to ashes." But I'm still leaving the Daruny pages up so people can see that transgender people don't need to change their bodies, that the social aspect of gender is more important than the physical aspect. That is the truth this fiction reveals.