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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29354 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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But what's the equivalent of this for trans people?

I suppose the hoary old device of pronouns? Your weapons shopkeeper looks like a guy, but everyone refers to them as "she/her" and she has a husband, refers to him as her husband, and the spouse refers to them as my wife? Nobody makes a big deal out of it in-game because hey, trans is just how we roll round here.

It's an older book now, but it still makes a huge difference with pronoun use in Samuel Delany's "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" where the default pronoun for everyone is "she"; there are important historical characters who are only referred to as "she/her" and you have literally no idea is this a woman, is this a man, what? Delany is a good enough writer to get away with that, and it does make you more aware of default attitudes and assumptions when you go along unconsciously thinking 'oh yeah, this is a woman' and then hit up against 'wait a minute, maybe they're a man!'

In Morgre, every person, including evelmi, is labelled a woman and the use of the pronouns ‘she/her’ are most common. For those of whom one finds to be sexually desirable, one uses the pronouns ‘he/him’. When Korga remarks that on Rhyanon, people spoke of both women and men, Marq replies, 'I know the word "man"...It's an archaic term. Sometimes you'll read over it in some old piece or other.' However, humans are referred to as male or female, depending on their sex organs, even though most of the time, the reader is left without an explanation of whether a human is male or female.

I do have a story I'm tinkering with that has an alien species who use gendered pronouns for indications of authority. Biologically, their males are mobile tool-users, their females are mammoth sessile immobile creatures who are used as housing and who act as leaders. This particular hierarchy hasn't remained intact through spaceflight, but the terminology has stuck; every member of their species uses "she" to refer to superiors, to homes, and to leaders, while every member uses "he" to refer to subordinates, tools, and workers. This also means that gender is contextual; the captain of a scout ship refers to their ship as "she", the commander of the fleet refers to their ship as "he".

None of this even has anything to do with the story, I was just staying up late and writing paragraphs about random aliens that didn't mean much to the plot. It just sorta happened.

(part of this is also so I can punt on figuring out what the hell gender the other species are; the story takes place from the captain's perspective, and this lets me just use "he" for everyone, even the insectoid hivemind and the sentient dimensional rift.)

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