Imagine a story about a girl who dresses as a boy to join the army, for one of the usual reasons, you know. She gets to the army and finds it full of super macho men, so she acts super macho to keep up. After a while she, entirely by accident, discovers that one of these macho army men is also a girl who dresses as a boy to join the army for one of the usual reasons.
Now she starts paying closer attention to all the macho men in her platoon and realizes that they're all girls trying to act as macho and manly as possible so nobody realizes they're girls. The irony is that they're all so busy acting macho and manly that they miss all the clues that everyone else is also a girl.
Pretty soon she discovers that the whole damn army is girls. She gets promoted and, sure enough, all the officers are also girls desperately pretending to be boys, again for the usual reasons.
Eventually she gets in good with the head of the army a super old guy (definitely a guy) who's been with the army for decades and is the one who upholds the ban of girls joining. She confronts him about the ban and tells him that the entire army is girls and it's the best army in the world and the old dude's like, ""yeah, I know. That's the plan." And she's all like "Whaaaaaa?!"
And he's like, "Okay it's like this: we can't draft women because we can't draft men. I mean we can draft men and we do but they don't show up, obviously, so if we started drafting women, they probably wouldn't show up either. Then nobody would show up for the war and imagine how upset that would make all the bullet manufacturers? All that hard work for nothing. But! If we tell the women they can't go to war, then, for some godforsaken reason, they decide that they must go to war. So we send out draft cards to the men to give all their wives and sisters and daughters and nieces and downstairs neighbors and whatnot an opportunity to steal the draft card and "sneak" into the army. Bit of a roundabout method, but it gets the job done as you've seen."
"But wait!" She says. "What about all the men who are dodging the draft? If they're not going to war then where do they go?"
And the old guys like, "I'll show you, come on." And he takes her to the factory that makes all the army's uniforms and shows her all the supet feminine seamstresses and at first she's like "These are all women, what are you on old man?" And he's like "They're women? You sure?" And then she realizes that the entire factory is full of men pulling a reverse Mulan.
The old guy's like, "They all think they're helping cover for their wives and sisters and daughters and nieces and downstairs neighbors and whatnot. And since they all think they're all one slip up from being caught they're the best seamstresses (seamistersses?) the country has ever seen!"
"But aren't you afraid of someone catching on and blowing the whole thing?"
And the old man shrugs, "I've been doing it this way for 50 years and you're the first person to say anything so either nobody's noticed or everybody's noticed and they're all cool with it."
"Well the Royals surely wouldn't go in for this, the Queen-"
".....my God, it goes all the way to the top, doesn't it?"
"I swear to Goddess, it goes even higher."
