Dragon shifters are always men.
It hadn’t always been so.
At some point in a long distant past, dragonkind had been like most other magical creatures, with both males and females born in roughly equal numbers.
But for many centuries now, only male children were born of a dragon mating.
According to lore, a male dragon betrayed his mate, a dragoness who was also a powerful witch. Her heart shattered by the deceitful actions of her unfaithful mate, she used her own death to power a spell. She magicked dragonkind, her intent to spare its females the desolation of an unnaturally broken mate bond.
What had been a blessing in her eyes, saving all other dragonesses from the despair she’d suffered, became a curse to all of dragonkind as fewer and fewer females were born until eventually none remained.
Dragons were forced to look elsewhere to find their mates.
As years passed, it became clear that there were very few females with whom they could create a mating bond.
As more time passed, civilizations grew and mankind spread across the planet.
Already declining in number, dragonkind faced a new challenge: concealment from the eyes of humanity.
With their numbers diminishing, the only dragons left were those descended from lineages capable of cloaking themselves from the nonmagical.
And they could only thrive if they could find mates.
So they hid among the humans, and they searched.