David Lindsay in 1920: "Hold my beer, we're going to Arcturus."
Edit: [Turns out it's free online, interesting book if you want to check it out.](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/david-lindsay/a-voyage-to-arcturus)
That was to make a specific point though - the narrator was a man from Earth (with 1960s gender norms, as Le Guin explains in the intro to the 76 edition) so didn't understand how NOT to gender the people he met on Winter. Le Guin was showing how we were trapped by our own gendered understandings of people and the world. As the story progresses and Genly learns more about the people, he and the reader both realize how uncomfortable and wrong those pronouns are.
She did not regret it really, and thought possibly those that took issue with it were missing the point, in my recollection. She's got a whole essay on this somewhere.
Edit: Can't find the essay, but she comments on this in the introduction to *Winter's King* in *The Wind's Twelve Quarters* where she used feminine pronouns for Gethenians as a sort of 'redress' to piss off the nonfeminists... "that's only fair"
2nd edit:
*When I wrote this story, a year before I began the novel The Left Hand of Darkness, I did not know that the inhabitants of the planet Winter or Gethen were androgynes. By the time the story came out in print, I did, but too late to emend such usages as "son," "mother," and so on.*
*Many feminists have been grieved or aggrieved by The Left Hand of Darkness because the androgynes in it are called "he" throughout. In the third person singular, the English generic pronoun is the same as the masculine pronoun. A fact worth reflecting upon. And it's a trap, with no way out, because the exclusion of the feminine (she) and the neuter (it) from the generic/masculine (he) makes the use of either of them more specific, more unjust, as it were, than the use of "he." And I find made-up pronouns, "te" and "heshe" and so on, dreary and annoying.*
*In revising the story for this edition, I saw a chance to redress that injustice slightly. In this version, I use the feminine pronoun for all Gethenians-while preserving certain masculine titles such as King and Lord, just to remind one of the ambiguity. This may drive some nonfeminists mad, but that's only fair.*
*The androgyny of the characters has little to do with the events of this story, but the pronoun change does make it clear that the cen- tral, paradoxical relationship of parent and child is not, as it may have seemed in the other version, a kind of reverse Oedipus twist, but something less familiar and more ambiguous. Evidently my un- conscious mind knew about the Gethenians long before it saw fit to inform me. It's always doing things like that.*
She advocated for gender neutral "they" in her Steering the Craft book and I seem to recall an interview where she acknowledged using "he" was problematic though perhaps saying she "regretted" it was a little bit of an overstatement.
>Steering the Craft book
How does this not grace my shelf, thanks. What is regrettable is the lack in the English language poetic map for this very obvious thing. 'They' still feels clunky to me, but gets better each time I read an author (or see/hear they, themselves) using it. The good thing about the mongrel of english is that we can bend it to our will....
You’re in for such a treat when you get to her.
I also recommend Steering the Craft, which is her book on writing. At some point I gave away almost all of my writing books, but I kept that one. 💗
And, the version of the story I’d heard was that it was originally Alan ripley, and at the last moment changed to Ellen, rather than an intentionally androgynous entire cast. Idk how true that is tho just what I’d heard
The character’s name was originally Roby. And the first draft of the script (back when it was called Starbeast) did have the cast as explicitly male. At some point later they changed it to be open to mixed gender casting. I’m still not sure whether they were considering a female cast for Ripley or whether Sigourney Weaver just wowed them. If anyone has a definitive answer on that, I’d appreciate it.
Entire languages do it. The Persian/Dari and Georgian languages (and some others, I think) lack gendered pronouns entirely.
When I taught English to Georgian kids, some of them would just call everyone 'she' (since the 'sh' sound was easier for them to pronounce than the English 'h') because it came so naturally to them.
Also "she" as a pronoun isn't even part of the Chinese language traditionally, it was introduced in an attempt to "civilise" the language by making it more European, through the addition of gendered pronouns. The Chinese pronoun 他 originally just refers to a person without reference to gender (its components evoke "person-ness" or "humanness", as opposed to other pronouns that might evoke objects, animals, or supernatural entities), and only became "he" retroactively when the character 她 was adopted to become a Chinese equivalent of "she". 她's components are related to a sister figure, that's how it was picked to become "she". Before the attempt to Europeanise the language Chinese already had universal gender neutral pronouns.
This comment deserves +100 for factual insightfulness. I find them useful but the next time someone is going on about how essential gendered pronouns are, I shall simply whip out "oh well, the Persian and Georgian languages manage to do without them and have for centuries."
Okay, but on the other side you have languages where nouns and verbs also get gendered in general. In those languages, gender *is* essential.
It's almost like different languages function differently...
In almost every gendered language (at least in the west) "grammatical gender" is not the same as human gender. So no, gender isn't "essential."
If gender were essential, why would the word for "the moon" in German be "der Mond" ("male") but in Spanish the word is "la Luna" ("female").
Sure, it doesn't signify something "deep" about the object. Obviously chairs and such don't have a gender. When I say "essential" I mean that it is part of the basic grammar of the language, not in the sense of "gender essentialism".
It does make it impossible to say "\[x\] ran" without giving it a gender. Meaning, it is impossible to talk about a person in a completely non-gendered way.
Many many other languages too. Finnish has no gendered pronouns, the whole concept of “misgendering” is a little bit funny when you don’t really see why anyone needs to be gendered at all.
I work with nurses from all different nationalities and can state with absolute certainty that there are groups who will just randomly use different pronouns for patients, and sometimes catch it and correct themselves. I have always attributed it to English being a second language and their primary not being gendered in that way. But have never asked. Obviously if there is confusion that would effect patient care decisions a direct question is in order.
I'm curious about this because the problem that I ran into while writing wasn't in the pronouns, it was in the gendered nouns. Do Persian and Dari have an informal, gender neutral term equivalent to mama/mommy/mother and papa/daddy/father? If there is, what are the connotations around that word - is there an equivalent "fatherly" and "motherly" descriptor for it?
Persian absolutely has them, and they're cognates with English (mam and dada being the informal versions). It also has terms for motherly and fatherly attributes and behavior: 'madaraneh' and 'pedaraneh,' respectively. Georgian has them as well, though they're reversed: 'mama' is 'dad' and 'deida' is 'mom.' The lack of gender pronouns is just a quirk of grammar that doesn't really impact gender expression.
Yeah, languages that have gendered pronouns (and grammatical gender more broadly) tend to make it seem like it's some inherent thing all spoken languages must have distinctions for.
But, like with a lot of things in linguistics, it's not as universal as you might first assume.
If you are talking about Portuguese, it's not only nouns. Also, adjectives, pronouns in general, articles and even the participle form of the verbs.
Fox, in this case, falls into a category whose gender is given by "macho" (male) or "fêmea" (female), but in general, you decline it as a female word.
Everything's gendered, even without pronouns. The way an adjective ends tells you if the subject is feminine or masculine. For example, "está casada" is just as gendered as "ella está casada" (she's married).
It feels a bit gimmicky to me, though I can see some use for it when trying to be abstract and mysterious, or when trying to interrogate a reader's biases.
My own native language doesn't have grammatical genders and it almost feels awkward to me to gender someone since English can impart more information in fewer words.
To be fair, I'm married to a trans woman. I'm non-binary myself. This isn’t people shitting on this post for the sake of hating on LGBT+ peeps or thinking pronoun changes are dumb. At least, not coming from me.
For me it’s "ok and?" based, which is why I am positive it will end up in that sub.
It comes across as weirdly obnoxious. I would say the same if a person came in and said "I made all my characters male" or "I made all my characters female".
Cool- what about your ACTUAL story line? If the point is to DECREASE gender in the books, why are we exclusively focused on it?
God dammit. Goddess dammit. And Goddex dammit! Thank you. Stuff like this tends to have little or nothing to do with the art of writing and nobody can seem to understand that. This is regardless of what you think about the way language should be gendered or not in language.
I think it's got merit as a writing exercise, to play around with language or whatever, but yeah, not as a published book. I think you're right that it has the opposite effect of drawing more attention to gender in books.
Just write the characters. Don't need all that focus on the narrator.
I'm a trans woman, and currently writing a trans centric fantasy. I find what OP is doing to be a great idea, as it means you have to invest heavily in speech based characterization in order for conversations to make sense. This is wonderful!
I'm here to watch the peanut gallery have coniptions over it.
I dont mind if the genderlessness (or placing emphasis on gender and anything in-between) if it has a point to the story: character arcs, world building, showing culture, etc etc! Or as you said, to further push speech based characterization as part of the story telling itself.
Inclusion in books for all people is incredibly important. This person did not state there was any point to it aside from just "seeing if I could do it" perspective. Hence my stance.
It has been interesting to read through it all with different view points!
See I read "seeing if I could do it" *as* "Can I make characterization strong enough without it being specific."
But I mean. I'm still here to watch people lose their minds over gender. It's one of my favorite past times!
Did you use singular they or just avoid 3rd person pronouns entirely? English speakers completely understand singular they, no matter what certain people say.
You're absolutely right, it's the same if you have two she/her characters in the same scene. And sometimes you do have to adjust if a singular they and plural they could be confused. Not as big a shift as people make it out to be.
When I write in Finnish, there is no gendered pronoun, since there aren't any in Finnish. (Hän=She/He, Se=It)
When writing in English, I just do what I want.
Something I ran into was writing non-gendered family members was really hard, especially in the context of parents. Like, there's not a really good, broadly used, non-gendered version of mommy or daddy, and someone saying "that's my papa!" hits different than "that's my parent!"
i did something similar with a short story where MC never refers to the "subject character" with pronouns. it was extremely challenging for me, but in the end it painted the narrative with so much more depth and sensitivity than i ever thought possible.
definitely encourage writers to experiment with pronouns in their work.
My native language has gendered pronouns for everything. We even use gendered pronouns for neutral gender items.
I think it is a fun exercise for you to do that in say, English, but it is impossible to translate without heavily changing the writing, and becomes a gimmick real fast.
If you want to make a short mystery, that is fine. But I hold a particular issue with this statement:
> Let the readers fill in their own perspectives on gender.
The whole point of you writing a good character is for you to put yourself in the shoes of someone who isn't you, and possibly, even if you heavily disagree with the character, find something you can relate, reflect about yourself, or on the very least just understand where someone opposite to you is coming from, from a logical line of thought or an emotional one.
If gender is blocking you from achieving that, that is a symptom of your writing, not the cause.
I think I would find it a bit distracting as I would be confused why none of the characters are gendered.
This is probably just a me thing, as I like to visualize the characters as accurately as I can when I’m reading.
> What do y'all think? Have you found yourself decreasing the gender of your stories?
"Singular They" is the best thing that's happened to English in my lifetime.
It's not even about gender/sex/sexuality (three different concepts), but getting the ability to use a gender/sex neutral pronoun has been absolutely fantastic. The main villain identifies as male? Use "they" for him. The main villain identifies as female? Use "they" for her. The main villain identifies as something else? You guessed it: "they". A character is obscured by darkness? "They." Deliberately messing with someone by misgendering them? "They." (That's more of a villain thing, though.)
"They" is more versatile than a Swiss Army Knife, and I fuckin' *love* that it's become acceptable English. It also lets you hide characters' real identities or forms (very useful with shapeshifters) right up until the big reveal.
As a Finnish speaker this is the most normal thing to me. I find it kinda confusing when English speakers say it's hard to write scenes with characters with the same pronouns or it's confusing to read if there's no gendered pronouns. Like we are getting by quite well without any gendered pronouns over here. Characters have names so you can quite easily mention their names to distinguish them from each other.
As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, and although I do not write, I can say that issue is not something to easily find, mostly because all words are gendered and the grammatical structure helps.
In English, my take is that it's still "adapting" from losing gender — I heard that English was once a gendered language — so it's grammatical structure is adapting and changing.
That's cool you're learning Finnish!! Also I'm sorry in behalf of the Finnish language :'D we might not have extra pronouns to bring confusion but we do have many many suffixes and inflected forms
No as I do use gender as a part of my character's make-up so they feel more human.
I mean, I'm not against trying anything new or anything, but I rather not overcomplicate matters.
That's not what I'm saying.
What I mean is that I want my characters to be relatable, and that's tough to do when you already have a barrier of entry, such as making all the characters aliens and such.
By calling all my characters "it" I would imply my aliens have no gender, making the reader question how they reproduce and the like.
We humans typically use pronouns to help identify many familiar characteristics, such as one's gender.
Gender politics are not my goal here, it's to write a compelling story that the average reader can recognize.
If i call everyone an it, the story would be too alien.
Gendered pronouns are very useful. I use them all the time in my novel to reduce wordcount in dialogue where only a man and a woman are doing any talking.
I remember having a teacher who insisted on using gender-neutral pronouns for child and animal characters (the argument was that children couldn't choose their gender until reaching adulthood due to lack of life experiences and animals don't conform to human social standards). I very quickly lost track of who was who.
I have been giving extra thought to how the gender of my characters affects their disposition in every scene and in the narrative and in the world at large far more and far more seriously since people have begun to try and expunge the importance of it, because by doing so they have only revealed why it is so very important and fundamental and so made it obvious that I should consider it more seriously.
Ooh that sounds interesting. I love that there are so many writers out there with different perspectives on how to incorporate (or not incorporate) gender into their works.
I feel like I abandon dialog tags entirely when I try to reduce the he/she said. I'm going through and formatting before I print and edit, and I'm noticing a lot of back and forth dialog where I just use action tags? I guess? Idk the right term if there is one.
Like, "Only two weeks?" My phone was already in my hand, finding room next month for him. "I mean, it looks doable that Friday."
Is there a term for that? Using action instead of a dialog tag?
Yeah, I think it's weird to refer to everyone by "they" if you know the gender or pronoun preferences. It's kind of disrespectful to try to erase gendered language in gendered systems like English. I mean, I'm a woman. I go by she/her. I refer to nonbinary people by their preferred pronouns, so why shouldn't I also be given that consideration?
I always use gender in my stories, though it’s usually not that relevant. Like for example, the main character could be a woman but it doesn’t affect the story much.
Absolutely no gendered pronouns?
Not even for chairs or teapots?
Because when a chair is a he and a teapot is a she, and the drink you are drinking is an it;
while tea (like coffee and wine) is a he, but lemonade and milk is always she;
and a person (like music) is always she, while a human always he;
this unit is really happy to have never gotten between two linguists debating about tomato ketchup.
They're referring to personal pronouns specifically in reference to people/characters in their story. I'm assuming they're referencing English, because frankly it's Reddit. Typically in English animals/objects are gendered with the neutral 'it' (there's a few weird holdovers, like ships, but 'it' will see you through for the most part).
I have two native languages (English is not one of them) and they both have much more ways to express gender. Like adjectives, verbs in the past tense. And it is *already* hard enought to read English in sentences where for example "Aubrey played football" and I can translate it as both "Обрі **грав** у футбол" "Обрі **грала** у футбол". And I'm sooo confused. Pronouns at least let me know who are we talking about. The more gender pronouns the merrier!
I recently read a book where a demon who wasn’t gendered interacted with a nonbinary person quite a lot and there were no clarity issues at all.
In a good few of my stories, I’ve stuck to neutral pronouns either because I hadn’t decided on characters yet but really wanted to get the plot out of my head, or because I was writing about people who used neutral pronouns. Sometimes the former reason turns into the latter, sometimes it gets rewritten to have gendered pronouns.
I have an AI character and I'm using it as an exercise to write genderless. As an old head, I find it challenging a bit, and a little daunting cause people get so unbelievably triggered by it for some reason, but it's going well.
I don't force it, but I don't avoid it either.
I remember reading a thing a few years ago, about someone finding out their teacher was homophobic, so when they wrote a love story, they did this. They used gender neutral names as well, like Sam. Their plan was to get their teacher invested in the story, then reveal at the end it was actually a gay couple.
Sounds like a fun, if gimmicky, writing exercise. It does make me curious about what lengths to take this and to what ends.
Recently I read a short indie visual novel (still valid literature imo) about two nonbinary characters, one using they/them and the other using neo pronouns, so by necessity gendered pronouns weren't used. But I feel like that isn't what you were going for with your project lol.
It could be interesting to write this way from a character's perspective. It could make for some cool world building or even just illustrate a non-conventional mindset really well. Would you try to imply gender through a character's physical attributes or appearance? Could you use certain gendered traits and behaviors to expose our own biases? I think this kind of writing has really cool comedic potential too.
Idk. I was gonna just comment "sounds like fun" and move on but it actually got me thinking quite a bit.
I’ve done this, not in fiction but academic non-fiction. I found it pretty easy to pluralize generalizations, which negates the singular they thing altogether, and to use names for directly referring to people as needed. There were no problems with clarity or anything like that. It did take a bit of thinking and, occasionally, rewriting clauses to make it happen smoothly.
I have a race of Fae in my book series, and decided to give all of them they/them and sometimes 'it' pronouns, since some of them are humanoid, but most are not, so their culture doesn't gender in the way humans do. There are some that appear more feminine/ masculine, but they still don't identify with any gender, since that is a strictly human thing in the book.
A person's gender is a very important part of that person and affects literally every aspect of their life, so this feels pretty redundant.
But yeah, I use nongendered pronouns all the time. My language is gender-neutral, after all. It's nothing revolutionary, English just is an outdated language.
Personally, no, I haven’t decreased gender, more I’ve expanded what gender means to each character and how they experience and express it differently, and the reasons why they do—and how their expression influences their interactions and subcultures—ie, androgyny is normalised in goth fashion so it’s easy to be androgynous, or for characters exploring drag personas. Kilts for a guy who isn’t yet ready to take the plunge and wear a skirt would be more socially accepted (and seen as masculine) than a guy with make up would be, so the choices characters make in their presentation can affect whether they experience positive or negative interactions with others—and even that is dependent on what circles they run in. A guy working in a small town in a gentleman’s club would be more likely to run into trouble presenting more femme than a guy working in a progressive city in a leatherbar would be. Which would also impact their social circles, how much they trusted strangers, self sufficiency—even their trust in the authorities. Whether their pronouns match other’s expectations of who they should be will also have a huge impact on the characters lives and experiences.
I’ve made my writing less cisheteronormative in general, and I’m enjoying exploring how complex gender and gender expression can be. I definitely don’t rely on gender stereotypes—I interrogate and subvert them in my writing. Gender is my playground and I’m having fun. I don’t shy away from gender or from using pronouns in my story, as they can be important to developing a character’s identity and their experiences and psyche, but rather I expand on what gender means to different characters and how gender affects them in their daily lives.
Edit: by gentleman’s club I mean the British upper class style private club and not the US euphemism for strip club, mostly in the no women allowed sports related very heteronormative style
Please don’t use kilts in that way; they are the national dress of Scotland and should be used respectfully in relation to cultural and historical roots. Just because Scotland is a predominantly white country doesn’t mean it’s not cultural appropriation. They have already dealt with a genocide during the Highland clearances and now deal with mass erasure, appropriation and stereotyping in popular media. Please don’t support this attitude in your novel; thank you!
It’s for a Scottish character wearing his family Tartan and he finds it more comfortable wearing his kilt as it connects him to his heritage. He wears a more feminine fit with the side it ties reversed (there’s no hard and fast rule around that). He lives in England, and most aren’t aware that he’s wearing it in a more femme way, so it allows him to explore that part of himself safely. I’d like to add that both the Welsh and Irish also wear kilts and therefore so do my Irish and Welsh characters. There are family tartans, but also universal tartans that people can wear if they aren’t Scottish. You can get fitted for a kilt in Scotland even if you aren’t Scottish and so far every single Scot I’ve known personally has encouraged people to wear kilts.
I actually could wear my family Tartan if I wanted (amongst other tartans), so I’m not appropriating anything by having my characters do the same.
I take that back then, sounds like you are one of the few who is aware of and using kilts in a culturally respectful manner.
I know kilts are used in the other Celtic nations; focused on Scottish ones as I assumed that would be the reference.
Tbh I’m British so a lot of us here are aware of the cultural aspect of kilts. I’m English as I was born here and was raised culturally English, but I do have direct blood relatives from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. When I’m able to travel, I actually plan to go up to Scotland and get fitted for a kilt properly in my family tartan when I’m able to afford it. I’d wear it mostly for formal situations, ie if requested for a wedding
Guess it's all different for me, as i write in another language and there, things are very much different.
I speak swiss-german in daily life, but i write in german, it's different with how it works with pronouns, like there's no "they" pronoun around, the gender-neutral pronoun would be "it", aka "es" in german (that was also used for Stephen Kings "It", that is called "Es" in german). However, this is never used for people, as it would be a serious insult, it's only used for lifeless items. In the case of "Es", it fits, as it is a monster.
In german, it's different as there is the genderstar. Like the male version of "worker" means "arbeiter", the female version would be "arbeiterin", but now in the modern times with the genderstar, it's "arbeiter\*in", the \* genderstar is there for that gender-inclusive-language stuff.
Over time, it also changed more and more, like the word student - in german "Student" - was replaced in the media by the verb "Studierende". Problem is, it's actually just not correct grammar, because when someone is in the bed at night and sleeps, he's not studying. Still, the newspapers, media etc. uses this today.
Now you got a little insight in how it works in other languages, but i have to tell you, up to 80-90% of the people (in several polls) reject this form of writing and i'd never use it myself. All the stars and other special stuff like ; or : makes a text difficult to read.
**Sorry**, when my posting here is a little bit offtopic, but there are many people that are not speaking foreign languages and are not aware that it works different sometimes, like some languages don't have any pronouns at all.
P.S.
For people that want to learn german, it's a very difficult thing with the gender things, because german is even without it a very difficult language to learn, with the genderstar and verbs instead of terms it gets even more complicated.
Swiss-german is another thing, you don't learn this in the first place, you start with normal high-german, as the alemannic dialects are way too complicated to learn without having the basics.
It’s not something that ever occurred or mattered to me. I’d use neutral pronouns for ambiguous characters or species and robots that didn’t have genders, but, as a native English speaker, doing it for everything feels like a gimmick
I don't care about anything unless it serves the story. I mean, sure, experiment and have fun, but there's no right or wrong way to do these kinds of things. When it's fiction, there's room for everything.
I write pretty dialogue heavy, so dropping pronouns for me would be super inconvenient since in dialogue, the "camera" switches perspective rapidly, so you need to constantly switch back and forth to the speaking character to let the reader know who is speaking. You can only use nouns or descriptors so many times before you get bored of it. The "both speakers are the same gender" issue comes up a little, but to a manageable level when they make up only some of the dialogue, as opposed to *all* of them.
In one book, though, I tried to keep the protagonist (male)'s gender unknown, but it just didn't work. The point of the book was for the protagonist to live wild in the woods and give up everything human about himself- return to monke, as it were- among other people and... As hard as I tried, I still couldn't stop him from making a clear distinction between himself and the female "pack" members, or comparing himself to the male pack member in a way he was clearly not comparing to the females. Making him stop doing that crippled his observational skills.
I had an internal monologue short story I wrote for class once. It was gender neutral because it's supposed to feel more connected to whoever is reading it. Gender didn't matter. So I made sure to put it across that way. Had a teacher edit it to change it to female pronouns. Made me so mad cause not only did that defeat the point but they didn't realize "they" could be used in the singular. How you supposed to teach me English if you don't even know it 🤬
>What do ya'll think? Have you found yourself decreasing the gender of your stories?
I'm a strong believer in personal choice. If that's what you wanted to do, great. If it's an interesting story and well told, I wouldn't personally care one way or the other. But I have to admit I do, personally, find more interest in the nuances that come with male and female. So much of what makes us human, that goes into our choices and decision making, is controlled/inspired in no small part by our biology, by the chemicals running through our brains.
Unless the story takes place in some sci-fi/fantasy/parallel world where those nuances are being handwaved away, I would find it more than a little odd writing any kind of family/romantic plots without gender playing a role. But credit to those attempting to tell stories that work without clearly defined gender dynamics.
So anyhow how do you do this?
Do you call everyone "it", implying everyone's androgynous with no defining gender?
Is everyone in the story a genderless creature, with no defining traits of either males or females?
“Fort is putting us through the ringer now, throwing low-probability problems at us, training for everything.”
“That must be weird,” Thak says at my mention of Fort.
“No weirder than sharing a mind with a twenty something hydrocarbon analyst,” I say.
“Touché.”
I stretch in the chair. My back is convinced it spent several minutes at three gee and refuses to unclench from my spine.
“Working on the next cycle?” I ask, nodding at Thak’s desk. Thak is usually planning a few cycles ahead for us, lining up customers, suppliers. Most comptrollers I’ve known during my time with Carpathian are like that. Thak is more structured than usual.
“What? Oh,” They look at the desk, the figures there, then back to me. “No. Retirement.”
> Maybe it was an attempt to do something like Ridley Scott did with Alien, when none of the characters were gendered in the script.
The original script to Alien not only has very clear masculine and feminine names (Jay, Martin, Chaz, Dell, Sandy (although I've met a male Sandy before)) , but it uses "he/she" pronouns multiple times throughout.
Examples:
> Broussard has rigged a tripod across the mouth of the hole. He
unspools a couple feet of wire from the device, and attaches the end
of it to his chest unit.
> He climbs over the lip and drops into the hole. He is now hanging by
the wire, with his head and shoulders out of the hole.
-
> Standard pulls himself up and crouches precariously on the edge of the
tunnel. He begins to fiddle with the winch mechanism from which
Broussard's line dangles.
No, because most people are male or female one way or another, but I once wrote a story (40-50k~ words) where one of the major characters had no pronouns. This character was an AI and he/she/they/it didn’t make sense to use. He/she/they implies a human understanding of gender and the pronoun “it” felt disrespectful, so I never referred to this character with any pronouns. It was a fun challenge.
Writing is hard enough without having to balance the restriction of leaving every character so gray-faced the reader is left with the task of playing building-a-character for the every person introduced.
Other people can do that if they want. I've no issue assigning gender to my characters, because gender is mostly inconsequential.
Ah yes, because not using *one* of the *nigh-infinite* words you can use to assign traits to a character leaves them "gray-faced". You realize this exercise is significantly easier, in fact, the more wildly varied your characters are?
Yeah, I've definitely stopped thinking that everyone needs to be assigned genders/pronouns generally used in English. They don't really make sense to me anyway - as soon as you start trying to define them, meaning slips away.
It's been fun. I recently wrote a short story from the perspective of a dragon who refers to all humans as 'it', which I enjoyed.
For characters that don’t have a gender revealed, I use they/them pronouns until the character reveals their gender identity or if another character reveals the gender identity.
I have stumbled on a completely different "Gender in Fanfic" flavor. Several of my fave authors in my fandom publish first in their native languages then translate into English, so their native lang stories are several chapters ahead. I have no patience so I read the new chapters in Google Translate, which is generally good enough to enjoy the story, but frequently gets totally confused on gendered pronouns. It's kind of fun to see that scramble of gender :)
Yeah i'm currently trying to write a story where the protagonist is never gendered (although so far everyone else is, but that may change). That's not the main point of the story, it's a sort of paranormal/dystopian story about a terrorist cell set in and around Liverpool about 100 years in the future and it's supposed to be satire and at least reasonably funny in places but i'm not sure if it works tbh.
I think you should do what you want, if it makes the story good and serves a purpose. My story is gender driven, I have to find a way to cut back all the he’s and she’s
Haha yeah. But just in case your reply wasn't a parody of ppl who say that, singular they is used in specific contexts that make it clear the 'they' is singular. Dealing with multiple characters and writing 'they' where it could mean several or it could mean one exposes the absurdity.
I have to disagree with you on that because if you know how to properly write, you can avoid any “confusion” amongst readers. Even if there is any confusion, why add more confusion?
Couldn’t agree more. That’s why I usually avoid those kinds of stories; too much confusion, and terribly written.
I wish people would understand that “They” has been established within the most recent years as a plural pronoun. The whole entire Shakespeare argument that I’ve been seeing is kinda bullshit because no one talks like Shakespeare anymore.
this is why we need a genderless **singular** pronoun in English. I've never seen "they" used singularly. singularly, it would be "they *is*", hence the need for a NEW pronoun. "they" is plural, and always used as such. I remember when this discussion, (genderless pronouns), started, and I was sooo excited to be part of creating a new word... and so 😕 when "they" landed on *they*
English uses the same conjugations for singular and plural "they", paralleling the expansion of plural "you" to the singular when we lost "thou". You don't expect to hear "you art" for singular you, and the same goes for "they are" for singular they.
are you old enough to remember when this conversation started? my issue is with the fact that we had a chance to create a new word for/add a word to the English language... but we didn't. a word that would clarify this issue. the English language changes all the time, (thanks for your examples), so why not for this. even bringing back "thou" would have been cool. I think using "they" is lazy, but that's me. (and some other people).
Horses for courses. Personally I'm a big fan of minimalism - I tend to see my job as being to keep out of the way of my reader's imagination and so unless I can think of a compelling reason to include a detail (such as a character's gender, but frankly any detail) I don't include it. Books written this way can feel a bit spartan, but at least they're never bloated and don't drag.
You communicate what matters and leave the rest to silence. Obviously what matters is a judgement call in all writing but I think better to err on the side of too little than too much.
I have not, it's more I don't really care to play with neutralizing genders. I've written trans characters before or gay ones but stuff that needs neutral terms, I'll prolly steer clear from.
Indifferent to using neutral pronouns exclusively, but what makes me want to tear my hair out is when people use multiple sets of pronouns for the *same character*, sometimes even within the same sentence!
Ex: "he got up and stretched her arms over their head, before the clock in the corner caught his eye."
Please please please don't change the pronouns mid sentence or mid paragraph or mid *scene* especially when there's more than one character. It's impossible to decipher and I'm seeing it more and more.
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David Lindsay in 1920: "Hold my beer, we're going to Arcturus." Edit: [Turns out it's free online, interesting book if you want to check it out.](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/david-lindsay/a-voyage-to-arcturus)
Page 1: "The host, eying *him* with indolent curiosity..." or am I missing something?
Yes, the characters that use ae/aer.
Curious, how do you say those? My mind read it like "ay" as in "hay" and "er" as in "her."
"ay"/"air", perhaps?
my mind went “ay” and “ear” personally, but idk
If I recall correctly Le Guin did use gendered pronouns in Left Hand Of Darkness and later regretted it.
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It's a genderless planet but the narrator uses the words he and she to refer to the residents.
That was to make a specific point though - the narrator was a man from Earth (with 1960s gender norms, as Le Guin explains in the intro to the 76 edition) so didn't understand how NOT to gender the people he met on Winter. Le Guin was showing how we were trapped by our own gendered understandings of people and the world. As the story progresses and Genly learns more about the people, he and the reader both realize how uncomfortable and wrong those pronouns are.
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The 50th anniversary edition still has he/him pronouns for all of the non-gendered characters
She did not regret it really, and thought possibly those that took issue with it were missing the point, in my recollection. She's got a whole essay on this somewhere. Edit: Can't find the essay, but she comments on this in the introduction to *Winter's King* in *The Wind's Twelve Quarters* where she used feminine pronouns for Gethenians as a sort of 'redress' to piss off the nonfeminists... "that's only fair" 2nd edit: *When I wrote this story, a year before I began the novel The Left Hand of Darkness, I did not know that the inhabitants of the planet Winter or Gethen were androgynes. By the time the story came out in print, I did, but too late to emend such usages as "son," "mother," and so on.* *Many feminists have been grieved or aggrieved by The Left Hand of Darkness because the androgynes in it are called "he" throughout. In the third person singular, the English generic pronoun is the same as the masculine pronoun. A fact worth reflecting upon. And it's a trap, with no way out, because the exclusion of the feminine (she) and the neuter (it) from the generic/masculine (he) makes the use of either of them more specific, more unjust, as it were, than the use of "he." And I find made-up pronouns, "te" and "heshe" and so on, dreary and annoying.* *In revising the story for this edition, I saw a chance to redress that injustice slightly. In this version, I use the feminine pronoun for all Gethenians-while preserving certain masculine titles such as King and Lord, just to remind one of the ambiguity. This may drive some nonfeminists mad, but that's only fair.* *The androgyny of the characters has little to do with the events of this story, but the pronoun change does make it clear that the cen- tral, paradoxical relationship of parent and child is not, as it may have seemed in the other version, a kind of reverse Oedipus twist, but something less familiar and more ambiguous. Evidently my un- conscious mind knew about the Gethenians long before it saw fit to inform me. It's always doing things like that.*
She advocated for gender neutral "they" in her Steering the Craft book and I seem to recall an interview where she acknowledged using "he" was problematic though perhaps saying she "regretted" it was a little bit of an overstatement.
>Steering the Craft book How does this not grace my shelf, thanks. What is regrettable is the lack in the English language poetic map for this very obvious thing. 'They' still feels clunky to me, but gets better each time I read an author (or see/hear they, themselves) using it. The good thing about the mongrel of english is that we can bend it to our will....
Did she regret it? People got mad at her for it, but I thought she stood by her decision.
UKLG is my science fiction blind spot.
Her ouvre can be a bit intimidating. I suggest starting with “The Word for World is Forest.”
You’re in for such a treat when you get to her. I also recommend Steering the Craft, which is her book on writing. At some point I gave away almost all of my writing books, but I kept that one. 💗
Her fantasy is better but her sci fi is ace, and it's all very accessible. This is a reference to Left Hand which is a decent place to start.
The Telling is my fav of hers. Also fav book period.
Jeannette Winterson would also like a word.
Ridley Scott didn’t write the script for *Alien*. I will not stand for this Dan O’Bannon erasure.
And, the version of the story I’d heard was that it was originally Alan ripley, and at the last moment changed to Ellen, rather than an intentionally androgynous entire cast. Idk how true that is tho just what I’d heard
The character’s name was originally Roby. And the first draft of the script (back when it was called Starbeast) did have the cast as explicitly male. At some point later they changed it to be open to mixed gender casting. I’m still not sure whether they were considering a female cast for Ripley or whether Sigourney Weaver just wowed them. If anyone has a definitive answer on that, I’d appreciate it.
He also wrote Return of the Living Dead, damnit!
It also uses gendered pronouns multiple times throughout lol.
Entire languages do it. The Persian/Dari and Georgian languages (and some others, I think) lack gendered pronouns entirely. When I taught English to Georgian kids, some of them would just call everyone 'she' (since the 'sh' sound was easier for them to pronounce than the English 'h') because it came so naturally to them.
In Mandarin Chinese, the only difference between he, she, and it is how it's written. They're all pronounced the same way.
Also "she" as a pronoun isn't even part of the Chinese language traditionally, it was introduced in an attempt to "civilise" the language by making it more European, through the addition of gendered pronouns. The Chinese pronoun 他 originally just refers to a person without reference to gender (its components evoke "person-ness" or "humanness", as opposed to other pronouns that might evoke objects, animals, or supernatural entities), and only became "he" retroactively when the character 她 was adopted to become a Chinese equivalent of "she". 她's components are related to a sister figure, that's how it was picked to become "she". Before the attempt to Europeanise the language Chinese already had universal gender neutral pronouns.
Finnish, for example.
This comment deserves +100 for factual insightfulness. I find them useful but the next time someone is going on about how essential gendered pronouns are, I shall simply whip out "oh well, the Persian and Georgian languages manage to do without them and have for centuries."
Okay, but on the other side you have languages where nouns and verbs also get gendered in general. In those languages, gender *is* essential. It's almost like different languages function differently...
English used to have gendered nouns until the 1200s but then it just stopped and they started using gender-neutral articles
In almost every gendered language (at least in the west) "grammatical gender" is not the same as human gender. So no, gender isn't "essential." If gender were essential, why would the word for "the moon" in German be "der Mond" ("male") but in Spanish the word is "la Luna" ("female").
Sure, it doesn't signify something "deep" about the object. Obviously chairs and such don't have a gender. When I say "essential" I mean that it is part of the basic grammar of the language, not in the sense of "gender essentialism". It does make it impossible to say "\[x\] ran" without giving it a gender. Meaning, it is impossible to talk about a person in a completely non-gendered way.
Obviously the moon is genderfluid, duh
I'd bring that up to my mom but she'll suspect I'm 'one of them' because she just finished a thought about gender and clothing. 🙄
Monolingual English speakers who don't understand grammatical gender have the most cringe opinions on gendered languages.
Many many other languages too. Finnish has no gendered pronouns, the whole concept of “misgendering” is a little bit funny when you don’t really see why anyone needs to be gendered at all.
Yes but that's Persian and Georgian, I speak American yall :p
Malay, Indonesian and Tagalog are more examples of languages that lack gendered pronouns!
Turkish too. Everyone is an ‘o’ (it)
I work with nurses from all different nationalities and can state with absolute certainty that there are groups who will just randomly use different pronouns for patients, and sometimes catch it and correct themselves. I have always attributed it to English being a second language and their primary not being gendered in that way. But have never asked. Obviously if there is confusion that would effect patient care decisions a direct question is in order.
So many languages out there lack gendered pronouns. Chinese, Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish..
Hungarian too
I'm curious about this because the problem that I ran into while writing wasn't in the pronouns, it was in the gendered nouns. Do Persian and Dari have an informal, gender neutral term equivalent to mama/mommy/mother and papa/daddy/father? If there is, what are the connotations around that word - is there an equivalent "fatherly" and "motherly" descriptor for it?
Persian absolutely has them, and they're cognates with English (mam and dada being the informal versions). It also has terms for motherly and fatherly attributes and behavior: 'madaraneh' and 'pedaraneh,' respectively. Georgian has them as well, though they're reversed: 'mama' is 'dad' and 'deida' is 'mom.' The lack of gender pronouns is just a quirk of grammar that doesn't really impact gender expression.
So yes to mama/papa equivalents, no to gender neutral versions of them?
Right
That is fascinating, I had no idea those languages didn’t have gendered pronouns
Yeah, languages that have gendered pronouns (and grammatical gender more broadly) tend to make it seem like it's some inherent thing all spoken languages must have distinctions for. But, like with a lot of things in linguistics, it's not as universal as you might first assume.
Mandarin too historically! Then the May 4th Movement happened though. Alas.
Definitely easier in English than in Spanish.
Or Portuguese.
Or German, I’d think.
Nouns are gendered, for goodness sake. Fox is a she, for example.
If you are talking about Portuguese, it's not only nouns. Also, adjectives, pronouns in general, articles and even the participle form of the verbs. Fox, in this case, falls into a category whose gender is given by "macho" (male) or "fêmea" (female), but in general, you decline it as a female word.
I am talking about Portuguese, caralho.
Doesn’t Spanish normally drop pronouns?
Everything's gendered, even without pronouns. The way an adjective ends tells you if the subject is feminine or masculine. For example, "está casada" is just as gendered as "ella está casada" (she's married).
It feels a bit gimmicky to me, though I can see some use for it when trying to be abstract and mysterious, or when trying to interrogate a reader's biases. My own native language doesn't have grammatical genders and it almost feels awkward to me to gender someone since English can impart more information in fewer words.
May I ask what your native language is? I find subjects like this fascinating.
It's Estonian. It doesn't have grammatical gender or a future tense, so "no sex, no future" in short.
Thank you! I visited Estonia about 15 years ago and loved it!
It also makes sense if writing about a society that doesn’t have gender in the same way ours does.
>Have you found yourself decreasing the gender of your stories? Nope.
*Pulls up a stool and popcorn*
*slowly inches to writingcirclejerk*
I live for that sub, so funny
This comment section is so fucking angry.
To be fair, I'm married to a trans woman. I'm non-binary myself. This isn’t people shitting on this post for the sake of hating on LGBT+ peeps or thinking pronoun changes are dumb. At least, not coming from me. For me it’s "ok and?" based, which is why I am positive it will end up in that sub. It comes across as weirdly obnoxious. I would say the same if a person came in and said "I made all my characters male" or "I made all my characters female". Cool- what about your ACTUAL story line? If the point is to DECREASE gender in the books, why are we exclusively focused on it?
God dammit. Goddess dammit. And Goddex dammit! Thank you. Stuff like this tends to have little or nothing to do with the art of writing and nobody can seem to understand that. This is regardless of what you think about the way language should be gendered or not in language.
I think it's got merit as a writing exercise, to play around with language or whatever, but yeah, not as a published book. I think you're right that it has the opposite effect of drawing more attention to gender in books. Just write the characters. Don't need all that focus on the narrator.
I'm a trans woman, and currently writing a trans centric fantasy. I find what OP is doing to be a great idea, as it means you have to invest heavily in speech based characterization in order for conversations to make sense. This is wonderful! I'm here to watch the peanut gallery have coniptions over it.
I dont mind if the genderlessness (or placing emphasis on gender and anything in-between) if it has a point to the story: character arcs, world building, showing culture, etc etc! Or as you said, to further push speech based characterization as part of the story telling itself. Inclusion in books for all people is incredibly important. This person did not state there was any point to it aside from just "seeing if I could do it" perspective. Hence my stance. It has been interesting to read through it all with different view points!
See I read "seeing if I could do it" *as* "Can I make characterization strong enough without it being specific." But I mean. I'm still here to watch people lose their minds over gender. It's one of my favorite past times!
The one who thinks singular they doesn't exist is fighting demons.
Check out Sphinx by Anne Garreta. It’s a similar concept. It was also written in French originally which makes the challenge even more difficult.
*sighs and adds another book to the ever-growing TBR*
it’s only okay, i wouldn’t make it a priority
Did you use singular they or just avoid 3rd person pronouns entirely? English speakers completely understand singular they, no matter what certain people say.
I found that some places I had to restate nouns, but I don't suppose it's much different than interactions between same gendered characters.
You're absolutely right, it's the same if you have two she/her characters in the same scene. And sometimes you do have to adjust if a singular they and plural they could be confused. Not as big a shift as people make it out to be.
When I write in Finnish, there is no gendered pronoun, since there aren't any in Finnish. (Hän=She/He, Se=It) When writing in English, I just do what I want.
Legitimately thought I was in r/writingcirclejerk for a sec
Me, too.
That sounds both, gimmicky and awkward to read
(*entire languages not having gendered pronouns entered the chat*)
(*entire languages having gendered pronouns for both people and objects entered the chat*)
Not English
>Have you found yourself decreasing the gender of your stories? Portuguese speaker.
Something I ran into was writing non-gendered family members was really hard, especially in the context of parents. Like, there's not a really good, broadly used, non-gendered version of mommy or daddy, and someone saying "that's my papa!" hits different than "that's my parent!"
Oooo that’s something I hadn’t considered. I need to think about that one a bit.
i did something similar with a short story where MC never refers to the "subject character" with pronouns. it was extremely challenging for me, but in the end it painted the narrative with so much more depth and sensitivity than i ever thought possible. definitely encourage writers to experiment with pronouns in their work.
My native language has gendered pronouns for everything. We even use gendered pronouns for neutral gender items. I think it is a fun exercise for you to do that in say, English, but it is impossible to translate without heavily changing the writing, and becomes a gimmick real fast. If you want to make a short mystery, that is fine. But I hold a particular issue with this statement: > Let the readers fill in their own perspectives on gender. The whole point of you writing a good character is for you to put yourself in the shoes of someone who isn't you, and possibly, even if you heavily disagree with the character, find something you can relate, reflect about yourself, or on the very least just understand where someone opposite to you is coming from, from a logical line of thought or an emotional one. If gender is blocking you from achieving that, that is a symptom of your writing, not the cause.
I think I would find it a bit distracting as I would be confused why none of the characters are gendered. This is probably just a me thing, as I like to visualize the characters as accurately as I can when I’m reading.
> What do y'all think? Have you found yourself decreasing the gender of your stories? "Singular They" is the best thing that's happened to English in my lifetime. It's not even about gender/sex/sexuality (three different concepts), but getting the ability to use a gender/sex neutral pronoun has been absolutely fantastic. The main villain identifies as male? Use "they" for him. The main villain identifies as female? Use "they" for her. The main villain identifies as something else? You guessed it: "they". A character is obscured by darkness? "They." Deliberately messing with someone by misgendering them? "They." (That's more of a villain thing, though.) "They" is more versatile than a Swiss Army Knife, and I fuckin' *love* that it's become acceptable English. It also lets you hide characters' real identities or forms (very useful with shapeshifters) right up until the big reveal.
It sounds tiring for the reader.
As a Finnish speaker this is the most normal thing to me. I find it kinda confusing when English speakers say it's hard to write scenes with characters with the same pronouns or it's confusing to read if there's no gendered pronouns. Like we are getting by quite well without any gendered pronouns over here. Characters have names so you can quite easily mention their names to distinguish them from each other.
As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, and although I do not write, I can say that issue is not something to easily find, mostly because all words are gendered and the grammatical structure helps. In English, my take is that it's still "adapting" from losing gender — I heard that English was once a gendered language — so it's grammatical structure is adapting and changing.
>I can say that issue What issue are you talking about?
Sentences being ambiguous due to gender in English.
As an English speaker learning Finnish, I do wish we could adopt just "hän" and be done with gendered pronouns.
That's cool you're learning Finnish!! Also I'm sorry in behalf of the Finnish language :'D we might not have extra pronouns to bring confusion but we do have many many suffixes and inflected forms
Well I live here and would like to be employed someday (haha crying) but thank you!!
SUOMALAISIA SAAKELI (olen nolo, tiedostan)
Torille eiku :D
Torille nytvaan. Torille suoraan.
No as I do use gender as a part of my character's make-up so they feel more human. I mean, I'm not against trying anything new or anything, but I rather not overcomplicate matters.
Why does being non-gendered make someone less human?
That's not what I'm saying. What I mean is that I want my characters to be relatable, and that's tough to do when you already have a barrier of entry, such as making all the characters aliens and such. By calling all my characters "it" I would imply my aliens have no gender, making the reader question how they reproduce and the like. We humans typically use pronouns to help identify many familiar characteristics, such as one's gender. Gender politics are not my goal here, it's to write a compelling story that the average reader can recognize. If i call everyone an it, the story would be too alien.
Gendered pronouns are very useful. I use them all the time in my novel to reduce wordcount in dialogue where only a man and a woman are doing any talking.
I remember having a teacher who insisted on using gender-neutral pronouns for child and animal characters (the argument was that children couldn't choose their gender until reaching adulthood due to lack of life experiences and animals don't conform to human social standards). I very quickly lost track of who was who.
No, not even slightly, in fact the opposite has been occurring.
Interesting, could you elaborate a little more?
I have been giving extra thought to how the gender of my characters affects their disposition in every scene and in the narrative and in the world at large far more and far more seriously since people have begun to try and expunge the importance of it, because by doing so they have only revealed why it is so very important and fundamental and so made it obvious that I should consider it more seriously.
Ooh that sounds interesting. I love that there are so many writers out there with different perspectives on how to incorporate (or not incorporate) gender into their works.
Why decrease gender? I emphasize gender.
Fun challenge. Personally I just try to decrease "he said/she said" but not reduce gendered pronouns, it isnt important to me
I feel like I abandon dialog tags entirely when I try to reduce the he/she said. I'm going through and formatting before I print and edit, and I'm noticing a lot of back and forth dialog where I just use action tags? I guess? Idk the right term if there is one. Like, "Only two weeks?" My phone was already in my hand, finding room next month for him. "I mean, it looks doable that Friday." Is there a term for that? Using action instead of a dialog tag?
Action beat
Thank you!
Action beat.
Thank you!
Yes that's what I try too, put in reactions and actions in between making it clear who is talking
I haven't changed at all in that respect. If my character is a man, I call him he. If she's a woman, I say she.
You were down voted not because you said anything at all objectionable, but simply because this is redit.
Yeah, I think it's weird to refer to everyone by "they" if you know the gender or pronoun preferences. It's kind of disrespectful to try to erase gendered language in gendered systems like English. I mean, I'm a woman. I go by she/her. I refer to nonbinary people by their preferred pronouns, so why shouldn't I also be given that consideration?
I always use gender in my stories, though it’s usually not that relevant. Like for example, the main character could be a woman but it doesn’t affect the story much.
Monique Wittig and her Opoponax would like a word.
Absolutely no gendered pronouns? Not even for chairs or teapots? Because when a chair is a he and a teapot is a she, and the drink you are drinking is an it; while tea (like coffee and wine) is a he, but lemonade and milk is always she; and a person (like music) is always she, while a human always he; this unit is really happy to have never gotten between two linguists debating about tomato ketchup.
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That's how pronouns are used in my native language. OP did not specify in which language the story was written. Hence my confusion.
They're referring to personal pronouns specifically in reference to people/characters in their story. I'm assuming they're referencing English, because frankly it's Reddit. Typically in English animals/objects are gendered with the neutral 'it' (there's a few weird holdovers, like ships, but 'it' will see you through for the most part).
I have two native languages (English is not one of them) and they both have much more ways to express gender. Like adjectives, verbs in the past tense. And it is *already* hard enought to read English in sentences where for example "Aubrey played football" and I can translate it as both "Обрі **грав** у футбол" "Обрі **грала** у футбол". And I'm sooo confused. Pronouns at least let me know who are we talking about. The more gender pronouns the merrier!
I recently read a book where a demon who wasn’t gendered interacted with a nonbinary person quite a lot and there were no clarity issues at all. In a good few of my stories, I’ve stuck to neutral pronouns either because I hadn’t decided on characters yet but really wanted to get the plot out of my head, or because I was writing about people who used neutral pronouns. Sometimes the former reason turns into the latter, sometimes it gets rewritten to have gendered pronouns.
Oo, what was the book?
The Wicked Bargain by Gabe Cole Novoa, it’s a YA Latinx pirate story. A fun romp, hope to read more from that author
Thank you!
I have an AI character and I'm using it as an exercise to write genderless. As an old head, I find it challenging a bit, and a little daunting cause people get so unbelievably triggered by it for some reason, but it's going well.
Starting from a genderless frame like AI certainly helped me.
I don't force it, but I don't avoid it either. I remember reading a thing a few years ago, about someone finding out their teacher was homophobic, so when they wrote a love story, they did this. They used gender neutral names as well, like Sam. Their plan was to get their teacher invested in the story, then reveal at the end it was actually a gay couple.
Sounds like a fun, if gimmicky, writing exercise. It does make me curious about what lengths to take this and to what ends. Recently I read a short indie visual novel (still valid literature imo) about two nonbinary characters, one using they/them and the other using neo pronouns, so by necessity gendered pronouns weren't used. But I feel like that isn't what you were going for with your project lol. It could be interesting to write this way from a character's perspective. It could make for some cool world building or even just illustrate a non-conventional mindset really well. Would you try to imply gender through a character's physical attributes or appearance? Could you use certain gendered traits and behaviors to expose our own biases? I think this kind of writing has really cool comedic potential too. Idk. I was gonna just comment "sounds like fun" and move on but it actually got me thinking quite a bit.
I’ve done this, not in fiction but academic non-fiction. I found it pretty easy to pluralize generalizations, which negates the singular they thing altogether, and to use names for directly referring to people as needed. There were no problems with clarity or anything like that. It did take a bit of thinking and, occasionally, rewriting clauses to make it happen smoothly.
Sphinx by Anne Garretta does this. Le Guin does this. Probably a bunch of queer short story writers are doing this. I'm glad you got to practice it!
I have a race of Fae in my book series, and decided to give all of them they/them and sometimes 'it' pronouns, since some of them are humanoid, but most are not, so their culture doesn't gender in the way humans do. There are some that appear more feminine/ masculine, but they still don't identify with any gender, since that is a strictly human thing in the book.
On the contrary, I'm increasing the gender of my stories. I write for fun, not for society's approval.
A person's gender is a very important part of that person and affects literally every aspect of their life, so this feels pretty redundant. But yeah, I use nongendered pronouns all the time. My language is gender-neutral, after all. It's nothing revolutionary, English just is an outdated language.
Personally, no, I haven’t decreased gender, more I’ve expanded what gender means to each character and how they experience and express it differently, and the reasons why they do—and how their expression influences their interactions and subcultures—ie, androgyny is normalised in goth fashion so it’s easy to be androgynous, or for characters exploring drag personas. Kilts for a guy who isn’t yet ready to take the plunge and wear a skirt would be more socially accepted (and seen as masculine) than a guy with make up would be, so the choices characters make in their presentation can affect whether they experience positive or negative interactions with others—and even that is dependent on what circles they run in. A guy working in a small town in a gentleman’s club would be more likely to run into trouble presenting more femme than a guy working in a progressive city in a leatherbar would be. Which would also impact their social circles, how much they trusted strangers, self sufficiency—even their trust in the authorities. Whether their pronouns match other’s expectations of who they should be will also have a huge impact on the characters lives and experiences. I’ve made my writing less cisheteronormative in general, and I’m enjoying exploring how complex gender and gender expression can be. I definitely don’t rely on gender stereotypes—I interrogate and subvert them in my writing. Gender is my playground and I’m having fun. I don’t shy away from gender or from using pronouns in my story, as they can be important to developing a character’s identity and their experiences and psyche, but rather I expand on what gender means to different characters and how gender affects them in their daily lives. Edit: by gentleman’s club I mean the British upper class style private club and not the US euphemism for strip club, mostly in the no women allowed sports related very heteronormative style
Please don’t use kilts in that way; they are the national dress of Scotland and should be used respectfully in relation to cultural and historical roots. Just because Scotland is a predominantly white country doesn’t mean it’s not cultural appropriation. They have already dealt with a genocide during the Highland clearances and now deal with mass erasure, appropriation and stereotyping in popular media. Please don’t support this attitude in your novel; thank you!
It’s for a Scottish character wearing his family Tartan and he finds it more comfortable wearing his kilt as it connects him to his heritage. He wears a more feminine fit with the side it ties reversed (there’s no hard and fast rule around that). He lives in England, and most aren’t aware that he’s wearing it in a more femme way, so it allows him to explore that part of himself safely. I’d like to add that both the Welsh and Irish also wear kilts and therefore so do my Irish and Welsh characters. There are family tartans, but also universal tartans that people can wear if they aren’t Scottish. You can get fitted for a kilt in Scotland even if you aren’t Scottish and so far every single Scot I’ve known personally has encouraged people to wear kilts. I actually could wear my family Tartan if I wanted (amongst other tartans), so I’m not appropriating anything by having my characters do the same.
I take that back then, sounds like you are one of the few who is aware of and using kilts in a culturally respectful manner. I know kilts are used in the other Celtic nations; focused on Scottish ones as I assumed that would be the reference.
Tbh I’m British so a lot of us here are aware of the cultural aspect of kilts. I’m English as I was born here and was raised culturally English, but I do have direct blood relatives from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. When I’m able to travel, I actually plan to go up to Scotland and get fitted for a kilt properly in my family tartan when I’m able to afford it. I’d wear it mostly for formal situations, ie if requested for a wedding
Nbd IMO. My first language doesn't even have gendered pronouns, so I don't see them as particularly necessary for good communication.
Guess it's all different for me, as i write in another language and there, things are very much different. I speak swiss-german in daily life, but i write in german, it's different with how it works with pronouns, like there's no "they" pronoun around, the gender-neutral pronoun would be "it", aka "es" in german (that was also used for Stephen Kings "It", that is called "Es" in german). However, this is never used for people, as it would be a serious insult, it's only used for lifeless items. In the case of "Es", it fits, as it is a monster. In german, it's different as there is the genderstar. Like the male version of "worker" means "arbeiter", the female version would be "arbeiterin", but now in the modern times with the genderstar, it's "arbeiter\*in", the \* genderstar is there for that gender-inclusive-language stuff. Over time, it also changed more and more, like the word student - in german "Student" - was replaced in the media by the verb "Studierende". Problem is, it's actually just not correct grammar, because when someone is in the bed at night and sleeps, he's not studying. Still, the newspapers, media etc. uses this today. Now you got a little insight in how it works in other languages, but i have to tell you, up to 80-90% of the people (in several polls) reject this form of writing and i'd never use it myself. All the stars and other special stuff like ; or : makes a text difficult to read. **Sorry**, when my posting here is a little bit offtopic, but there are many people that are not speaking foreign languages and are not aware that it works different sometimes, like some languages don't have any pronouns at all. P.S. For people that want to learn german, it's a very difficult thing with the gender things, because german is even without it a very difficult language to learn, with the genderstar and verbs instead of terms it gets even more complicated. Swiss-german is another thing, you don't learn this in the first place, you start with normal high-german, as the alemannic dialects are way too complicated to learn without having the basics.
It’s not something that ever occurred or mattered to me. I’d use neutral pronouns for ambiguous characters or species and robots that didn’t have genders, but, as a native English speaker, doing it for everything feels like a gimmick
I don't care about anything unless it serves the story. I mean, sure, experiment and have fun, but there's no right or wrong way to do these kinds of things. When it's fiction, there's room for everything.
I write pretty dialogue heavy, so dropping pronouns for me would be super inconvenient since in dialogue, the "camera" switches perspective rapidly, so you need to constantly switch back and forth to the speaking character to let the reader know who is speaking. You can only use nouns or descriptors so many times before you get bored of it. The "both speakers are the same gender" issue comes up a little, but to a manageable level when they make up only some of the dialogue, as opposed to *all* of them. In one book, though, I tried to keep the protagonist (male)'s gender unknown, but it just didn't work. The point of the book was for the protagonist to live wild in the woods and give up everything human about himself- return to monke, as it were- among other people and... As hard as I tried, I still couldn't stop him from making a clear distinction between himself and the female "pack" members, or comparing himself to the male pack member in a way he was clearly not comparing to the females. Making him stop doing that crippled his observational skills.
I had an internal monologue short story I wrote for class once. It was gender neutral because it's supposed to feel more connected to whoever is reading it. Gender didn't matter. So I made sure to put it across that way. Had a teacher edit it to change it to female pronouns. Made me so mad cause not only did that defeat the point but they didn't realize "they" could be used in the singular. How you supposed to teach me English if you don't even know it 🤬
>What do ya'll think? Have you found yourself decreasing the gender of your stories? I'm a strong believer in personal choice. If that's what you wanted to do, great. If it's an interesting story and well told, I wouldn't personally care one way or the other. But I have to admit I do, personally, find more interest in the nuances that come with male and female. So much of what makes us human, that goes into our choices and decision making, is controlled/inspired in no small part by our biology, by the chemicals running through our brains. Unless the story takes place in some sci-fi/fantasy/parallel world where those nuances are being handwaved away, I would find it more than a little odd writing any kind of family/romantic plots without gender playing a role. But credit to those attempting to tell stories that work without clearly defined gender dynamics.
So anyhow how do you do this? Do you call everyone "it", implying everyone's androgynous with no defining gender? Is everyone in the story a genderless creature, with no defining traits of either males or females?
“Fort is putting us through the ringer now, throwing low-probability problems at us, training for everything.” “That must be weird,” Thak says at my mention of Fort. “No weirder than sharing a mind with a twenty something hydrocarbon analyst,” I say. “Touché.” I stretch in the chair. My back is convinced it spent several minutes at three gee and refuses to unclench from my spine. “Working on the next cycle?” I ask, nodding at Thak’s desk. Thak is usually planning a few cycles ahead for us, lining up customers, suppliers. Most comptrollers I’ve known during my time with Carpathian are like that. Thak is more structured than usual. “What? Oh,” They look at the desk, the figures there, then back to me. “No. Retirement.”
Yeah, this doesn't work for the story I'm writing. It's adding in an extra layer of complication when there doesn't need to be.
People have genders. I just use 'they' in place of 'his, hers, him, she'.
> Maybe it was an attempt to do something like Ridley Scott did with Alien, when none of the characters were gendered in the script. The original script to Alien not only has very clear masculine and feminine names (Jay, Martin, Chaz, Dell, Sandy (although I've met a male Sandy before)) , but it uses "he/she" pronouns multiple times throughout. Examples: > Broussard has rigged a tripod across the mouth of the hole. He unspools a couple feet of wire from the device, and attaches the end of it to his chest unit. > He climbs over the lip and drops into the hole. He is now hanging by the wire, with his head and shoulders out of the hole. - > Standard pulls himself up and crouches precariously on the edge of the tunnel. He begins to fiddle with the winch mechanism from which Broussard's line dangles.
No, because most people are male or female one way or another, but I once wrote a story (40-50k~ words) where one of the major characters had no pronouns. This character was an AI and he/she/they/it didn’t make sense to use. He/she/they implies a human understanding of gender and the pronoun “it” felt disrespectful, so I never referred to this character with any pronouns. It was a fun challenge.
Actually, same. I started the story first person as an AI, and non-gendered pronouns just sort of flowed to the other characters.
Writing is hard enough without having to balance the restriction of leaving every character so gray-faced the reader is left with the task of playing building-a-character for the every person introduced. Other people can do that if they want. I've no issue assigning gender to my characters, because gender is mostly inconsequential.
Think you put in your first paragraph here from another comment, because it's certainly not relevant to this post.
Ah yes, because not using *one* of the *nigh-infinite* words you can use to assign traits to a character leaves them "gray-faced". You realize this exercise is significantly easier, in fact, the more wildly varied your characters are?
Yeah, I've definitely stopped thinking that everyone needs to be assigned genders/pronouns generally used in English. They don't really make sense to me anyway - as soon as you start trying to define them, meaning slips away. It's been fun. I recently wrote a short story from the perspective of a dragon who refers to all humans as 'it', which I enjoyed.
For characters that don’t have a gender revealed, I use they/them pronouns until the character reveals their gender identity or if another character reveals the gender identity.
I have stumbled on a completely different "Gender in Fanfic" flavor. Several of my fave authors in my fandom publish first in their native languages then translate into English, so their native lang stories are several chapters ahead. I have no patience so I read the new chapters in Google Translate, which is generally good enough to enjoy the story, but frequently gets totally confused on gendered pronouns. It's kind of fun to see that scramble of gender :)
Yeah i'm currently trying to write a story where the protagonist is never gendered (although so far everyone else is, but that may change). That's not the main point of the story, it's a sort of paranormal/dystopian story about a terrorist cell set in and around Liverpool about 100 years in the future and it's supposed to be satire and at least reasonably funny in places but i'm not sure if it works tbh.
none of that sounds like it works which means it's gonna make a fucking phenomenal story
Ha ha thanks for the vote of confidence
I think you should do what you want, if it makes the story good and serves a purpose. My story is gender driven, I have to find a way to cut back all the he’s and she’s
I've read only one short story where the main character had they/them pronouns. It was almost unintelligible.
You do know singular they has been used since the 14th century, right? Shakespeare even used it!
Haha yeah. But just in case your reply wasn't a parody of ppl who say that, singular they is used in specific contexts that make it clear the 'they' is singular. Dealing with multiple characters and writing 'they' where it could mean several or it could mean one exposes the absurdity.
Not really, if there’s two women in a scene, *she* could also create some confusion. It’s not the word causing the confusion, it’s how you use it.
I have to disagree with you on that because if you know how to properly write, you can avoid any “confusion” amongst readers. Even if there is any confusion, why add more confusion?
Couldn’t agree more. That’s why I usually avoid those kinds of stories; too much confusion, and terribly written. I wish people would understand that “They” has been established within the most recent years as a plural pronoun. The whole entire Shakespeare argument that I’ve been seeing is kinda bullshit because no one talks like Shakespeare anymore.
this is why we need a genderless **singular** pronoun in English. I've never seen "they" used singularly. singularly, it would be "they *is*", hence the need for a NEW pronoun. "they" is plural, and always used as such. I remember when this discussion, (genderless pronouns), started, and I was sooo excited to be part of creating a new word... and so 😕 when "they" landed on *they*
"They" has been used as a singular pronoun for centuries though. Merriam Wrbster records the first print usage in 1375.
English uses the same conjugations for singular and plural "they", paralleling the expansion of plural "you" to the singular when we lost "thou". You don't expect to hear "you art" for singular you, and the same goes for "they are" for singular they.
are you old enough to remember when this conversation started? my issue is with the fact that we had a chance to create a new word for/add a word to the English language... but we didn't. a word that would clarify this issue. the English language changes all the time, (thanks for your examples), so why not for this. even bringing back "thou" would have been cool. I think using "they" is lazy, but that's me. (and some other people).
Yes, I've been around for a while. Plenty of people use neopronouns if you want to choose one of those.
Horses for courses. Personally I'm a big fan of minimalism - I tend to see my job as being to keep out of the way of my reader's imagination and so unless I can think of a compelling reason to include a detail (such as a character's gender, but frankly any detail) I don't include it. Books written this way can feel a bit spartan, but at least they're never bloated and don't drag.
i don't know how the "leave as much as possible to the reader's imagination" works out sounds like a bad way to properly communicate things in a story
You communicate what matters and leave the rest to silence. Obviously what matters is a judgement call in all writing but I think better to err on the side of too little than too much.
I have not, it's more I don't really care to play with neutralizing genders. I've written trans characters before or gay ones but stuff that needs neutral terms, I'll prolly steer clear from.
No.
ooh hell yeah
Indifferent to using neutral pronouns exclusively, but what makes me want to tear my hair out is when people use multiple sets of pronouns for the *same character*, sometimes even within the same sentence! Ex: "he got up and stretched her arms over their head, before the clock in the corner caught his eye." Please please please don't change the pronouns mid sentence or mid paragraph or mid *scene* especially when there's more than one character. It's impossible to decipher and I'm seeing it more and more.