Looking for Sci-Fi trilogy, where main character is born a woman but spends the majority of the series as a man

Question

Facts I remember:

First book:

• The main character wakes up on a ship on the outer edges of the galaxy as a woman.
• Has been resurrected from DNA, believes they have made a mistake as the only thing he remembers is being a man. They begin a process to change the sex of the main character, which takes a good portion of the book to complete IIRC.
• The main character is an infamous character from the past, believed dead. They wonder if anyone realizes he has been resurrected.
• Enemies from the past attempt to kill the main character and is the main conflict within the first book.

Second book:

• Some time has passed since the first book, maybe a couple of centuries.
• The main character has become a leader\emperor of a large section of the galaxy.
• The books main conflict revolves around the main character suppressing rebellions and increasing the borders of his domain, ultimately he is betrayed by an ally.

Third book:

• The main character remembers more of their past and that they were born a woman.
• Returns to being a woman in this book.

Many of these facts could be misremembered, however, the woman to man back to woman swap is a major plot point of the trilogy.

Edit: A couple of things I forgot to mention. I believe there were pretty substantial time lapses between each book. There were relativistic effects of travel between star systems, as in different subjective time passed for characters. I cannot remember if there were any aliens or alien technology in these books.

Answer 1

It looks like Saturn Returns (Book 1 of Astropolis) by Sean Williams.

It's been a while since I read them but the re-constructed from DNA, gender change and long war part match.

The only thing that doesn't ring true is that that the gender thing is only a minor part of the plot/themes. This is space-opera spanning millions (eventually billions) of years with different variants of human immortality and a long war against hidden (non-human) enemies who seem to knock humanity back whenever they reach a certain level of advancement.

Answer 2

This might be the "Beyond" trilogy by Justin Leiber (son of SF/Fantasy author Fritz Leiber).

The main character of the first novel (Beyond Rejection), Ismael Forth was born male, but wakes up in the far reaches of the Solar System in a woman's body -- with a prehensile tail! Later, he meets a person, a "nympher" who makes a habit of switching into pre-teen bodies and growing up through puberty, again and again, an activity that would result in most people "rejecting", their minds dying and taking the new transplant body with it.

I haven't read the second book, Beyond Humanity, but from the cover blurb I gather it follows the donor of the body Ismael Forth wound up in, who woke up in Ismael's old, male body.

I know next to nothing about the third novel, Beyond Gravity, other than that it reportedly wraps up the myriad loose ends left by the first two.