Shen Qingqiu was in the bamboo house finishing his reports (secretly reading the terrible yellow book he confiscated), when one of his disciples knocked on the door.
The poor boy looked very nervous, stammering his greeting, so Shen Qingqiu sat him down, got him some calming tea and let him calm down before asking why he came all the way here.
Turns out the boy was not actually a boy but a girl. And only just now gathered the strength to confess this to his shizun.
Now, Shen Yuan is a modern man, he knows trans people are a thing. He personally never met any, but he understands the basic concept. And honestly becoming a girl just raised his disciples chance of survival in this nonsense porn novel by 100 percent.
And as luck would have it Shen Qingqiu has the perfect herb. You see, there was a plot in PIDW (which was not just Mulan ripoff, no sir) about a wife drinking a tea made from roots of a special plant to become a man to take her fathers place in a war.
In that plot Binghe quickly realised that something was up with that particular soldier (despite not having a reason to interact with common foot soldiers as an emperor) and had her drink a tea made from the blooms of that same plant, which turned her back into a woman. Que a quick wedding and some terrible papapa (not a particularly popular wife, though Shen Yuan personally quite liked her, at least before she got absorbed into the harem).
Shen Qingqiu just so happens to have this exact plant growing in his personal garden. It was interesting okay? He needed to study it and you never know when it might come in handy. So he just hops to the garden gets some blooms and makes sure his disciple knows how to prepare them correctly.
He also makes sure the disciple gets new proper robes and that there is a place for hi-, her in the female dorm.
He also schedules a check up on Qian Cao. He then gives the disciple a long lecture on various issues he might encounter in her new body. From periods (if the pain is worse than just mildly annoying, go to the healers), to creeps (to be dealt with extreme prejudice), to a new center of gravity (actually a big problem when it came sword flight). His meimei complained endlessly to him about all the inconvenient things about being a girl so he had a lot of advice. He also goes into a lot of detail about the special tea itself.
The taste, the effects, how long the change will take. He makes sure to emphasise how important it is to be careful with cultivation, because new body means new spiritual veins that could get damaged or cause qi deviations.
Shen Qingqiu sends the girl away while patting himself on the back how well he handled that. The disciple leaves fully convinced her shizun is trans. There is a big debate whether he was born a woman. Or worse if he was born a man and now uses the tea frequently to change back and forth from his true form as a woman to that of a man, to not lose face for the sect.
It causes all sorts of rumours and Binghe gets to have a little crisis about potentially misgendering and assuming things about his shizun.
