Our protagonist is Indiana Jonesing her way through space

[conuly]

with her buddy-ship and her buddy-crewmate, and on the way they meet a wide variety of aliens who have a wide variety of sex/genders and related pronouns. I'm not entirely sure if the author is more socially conscious or more enamored of showing off that she's thought about the fact that aliens might have 17 sexes and 8 legs each, but after the third or fourth encounter with a non-human I'm starting to wonder if either the author or the protagonist has ever considered that, actually, gender/sex is rather a bizarrely arbitrary way to divvy up pronouns in the first place*. If you want to really show that you laugh at convention, the naive request of "Tell me your sex/gender so I can use the right pronoun" should be met with "What a strange question! I'm male, but why does that matter for pronouns? Does everybody on your planet have the same color eyes?"

* Assuming, of course, that you even feel a need beyond animate/inanimate - or even feel that distinction of that is necessary! Lots of real earth cultures that definitely have gender roles don't show that in their pronouns.

Comments

[sixbeforelunch]

See, what I want is an alien culture divvying up people by something that humans consider totally ridiculous. Or better yet, totally incomprehensible. Like...aliens getting all embarrassed because they accidentally called Alice a blorp but she's actually a flurp, and no amount of explaining on the part of the alien can make her understand what the difference is.

[conuly]

Exactly!

[notasupervillain]

There's a Ryan North post about gender that's stuck with me, that points out that pronouns based on gender are stupid. What we need are pronouns based on what side a person's on in the upcoming Robot Wars.

[kareina]

I love Finnish, they do not have gender-based pronouns. Many Fins speaking English pick one pronoun and use it for everyone. It is amazing how quickly one gets used to this approach. I am surprised that given all the current dialogue about gender and pronouns that no one is suggesting just tossing all of the old ones and picking one pronoun to use for any person or animal, or even thing that needs to be refereed to.

[fayanora]

There are even ways to make sex/gender pronouns more complicated. Looking at nature, there are some species with different kinds of males for instance. Like, there are males that are smaller and submissive that nonetheless get sex with females by pretending to be female. The females aren't fooled, but the big dominant males are.

But yeah, that's a good idea, pronouns being derived from other sources like maybe social status.

[redbird]

Yes. If you know that the aliens use pronouns at all, it's reasonable to ask "what pronouns should I use for you?" That at least might get you a useful answer for (among other things) species that use pronouns for female, male, and "child who has not yet decided what sex to be," but also for "we just met, so we should address each other as Usted" versus ""I'm calling you 'tu' because my religious practice means I use that for everyone, please address me that way."

Both of those might lead to a follow-up of "I will do that, and would also like to know how to refer to you if I'm talking to other people. My culture uses different pronouns for women, men, artificial intelligences, and children, plus one to use when we don't know the person's gender." And then the person from the other culture can give an answer in those terms, or "we use 'zie' for all people, biological or otherwise, and 'it' for animals, rocks, fire, and water."

[conuly]

Oh, yes, the idea that pronouns might vary according to deference/formality doesn't come up, which is a pity because the protagonist would definitely stumble amusingly in that respect.

[conuly]

It is an enormous blind spot.

[conuly]

But yeah, that's a good idea, pronouns being derived from other sources like maybe social status.

This is not so alien to humans, but I also wished it would come up, if only because with this protagonist the end results would have been hilarious.

[conuly]

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

[konsectatrix]

Yeah, pronouns based on class/status, specific relationship, or hell, even the speaker's feelings about the subject would make just as much sense.

[shadowkat]

Is this an Anne Leckie novel?

[conuly]

No. Ann Leckie is almost beyond criticism. This author, now, I'm enjoying her books but evidently there is something to criticize.

(I really don't like to name and shame authors/books unless they're so egregiously bad that people must be warned. Therefore I only do one OR the other.)

(frozen)

[nodrog]

Someone was saying a while back that you can date a “sword and sandal” movie by looking at the women’s eye makeup (and I would say, every historical movie generally), and

- and the rest of this comment sounded nasty even to me, so I will politely erase it.  “Measure twice, cut once.”

[fayanora]

Well I can't help on that, but in my Ravenstone stuff I have a character - a kitsune girl - who has been attending the trans/genderqueer group at school with some of her friends, and she's been mysteriously silent about why, just saying kitsune gender is "weird." It's been a little frustrating because even I didn't know what she meant by that, it was one of those things that came up during writing, she said it, it felt right, so I left it in despite not knowing what she meant. But I've decided to take the idea from this post and have it turn out that kitsune who don't spend much time around humans have a really odd system of gender where gender not only has no connection to reproductive status (they consider reproductive status private) but also isn't even a consistent system; no two kitsune cultures have the same system, and many kitsune cultures just leave it completely to personal choice. Gender among traditional kitsune is so radically disconnected from Western concepts of gender that it's questionable if the term "gender" is even accurate. But if you define the English word "gender" to a kitsune, they may find the idea of it being connected to reproductive status to be shocking, but they'll still agree the term "gender" applies to their genders as well.

An example of one system of kitsune gender I came up with is one culture where gender and pronouns are determined by profession; butchers have one set, bakers have another, candlestick makers have a third, and so on. I think related professions may have related pronouns, but every profession has a slightly different set.

But then there's a culture where gender is based on one's position in the social hierarchy. And another where genders more or less define what tribe or clan one is in.

It's also my theory that binary gender may have evolved from the practice of selling daughters to other people in exchange for a dowry. Going with that theory, the kitsune in the story never developed that custom and so when they finally developed the concept of gender, it was very different from what we think of it as.

All of this is restricted to traditional kitsune, to kitsune who haven't had much contact with societies with sex-based gender. But kitsune who live in one of those cultures, like the US, tend to adopt that system and pick male or female for themselves. But it's like a mask, hiding their true gender. So Kohana may present as a girl, but that gender may not be her true gender, whatever that is.

[jack]

Oh dear. It sounds like I'd *sort of* like it. I think it's inevitable and probably necessary that part of forcing people society to move its awareness out of the 1950s is lots and lots of recapping "please use correct pronouns" in fairly superficial ways. Sometimes that's useful, even if it doesn't have much to contribute to current gender discussions, as just beating the drum of "this is how politeness is, get with the program". Sometimes it's kind of grating, when people say "ok, now the 2019 status quo is the One True Way enshrined in the fabric of the universe and everyone all through time should know that specifically", but better than it happens than not.

I like that there are books which are more diverse than most of society currently expects, even if I'd rather read more that did so in a thoughtful way, than the reverse.

It definitely seems likely that alien pronouns (or other parts of speech marking information about the speaker) will be all over the place by our standards. Whether that's, "you need to learn the cues for different species to be polite", or "it becomes common in inter-species conversation to always ask pronouns" or something else.

For a while I hoped the answer to pronouns was to add MORE pronouns, ones for identification with things other than gender, so the only choices weren't choosing a gender or explicitly choosing not-a-gender. Although I doubt that would actually happen.

[conuly]

For a while I hoped the answer to pronouns was to add MORE pronouns, ones for identification with things other than gender, so the only choices weren't choosing a gender or explicitly choosing not-a-gender. Although I doubt that would actually happen.

If the problem could reliably be considered to be only pronouns I'd take the opposite approach - switch to a system where we have ONE pronoun for third-person animate singular. (We could debate whether or not non-human animals get that pronoun.)

Then I'd like to add a proximate/obviate distinction, or, as I like to think of it, a fourth person pronoun.

[conuly]

Amusingly, at no point does our protagonist ever consider that pronouns might vary based on deference/formality... something that I'm sure her human shipmate, who speaks Portuguese, has thought of! But it just... never comes up. At all. Not even when speaking to social superiors who like mindgames and powerplays.

[konsectatrix]

Oh dear... that could get interesting, in the secondhand embarrassment cringe way.

(If the writer had thought of it)

[konsectatrix]

This is generally where my ideal lies as well. All animates get one pronoun, treat it nicely and don't break it, because that's all you're getting.

[jack]

Yeah, I think a general "anyone" pronoun replacing he/she/they is the only sensible end result, and hope language converges on that. Maybe I shouldn't even have toyed with alternatives, I agree none of the things I thought were probably ever sensible, but it seemed like people who were ok with their existing pronouns switching to use a gender neutral pronoun was a very uphill struggle, in contrast to language changes which make individual sentences more informative, so I toyed (briefly) with the idea that having extra pronouns for "person who likes french/sindarin/dothraki" or "person who was first/second referenced in sentence" or "tall person/smol person" or whatever would give people a reason TO adopt more pronouns, and if more people, some cis, use other pronouns, it breaks up the idea that pronoun is always fixed and pronoun is always gender and everyone must always 100% of the time know everyone's gender immediately. And I don't think that was ever sensible, but I don't think immediately going to everyone using gender neutral pronouns does anything extra to get over that hurdle.

[alexseanchai]

*googles* Would the four persons then be I, you, this-one, that-one? Or am i misunderstanding?

[conuly]

Yup. As in "He kissed his wife" - we'd be grammatically required to disambiguate between "Tom kissed Tom's wife" and "Tom kissed Rob's wife".

[alexseanchai]

Excellent. I want. :)

[raino]

Finnish-speaking finn here! I love my language too. When I started learning English, gendered pronouns felt like a joke. So arbitrary. And why only third person, which is the hardest to determine?

I’m sure in time gendered pronouns (with maybe the exception of first person, which would be useful) will fall out of use.

(In casual Finnish, third person pronoun tends to degenarate into ”it”, efficient but very unelegant.)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Umph. Presumably this wide variety of aliens also has a wide variety of languages, and unless Miss Protagonist has a Babel fish or equivalent, there's no way she or anyone else speaks them all. Therefore, presumably they're all using some kind of Common Tongue, and there is no possible way it makes sense to have gender-based pronouns in such a language, because mating/breeding status doesn't matter outside one's own species.

In my daughter's Human Galactic Empire: Smoke Before Fire (https://officialleehadan.tumblr.com/post/178391719557/sci-fi-masterlist-92318) series, the polite form of interspecies address is 'Species-Name', as, 'Human-Amir'. Since she's writing in English, singular they is the pronoun used by everyone except humans referring to other humans.

From a biological standpoint, the vast majority of humans produce either sperm or ova, and are thus properly categorized as male or female. In a rational society, sex would matter only to those seeking someone to breed with, and there'd be no such thing as 'gender roles', so we would not have to put up with all this tiresome 'wokeness' about peoples' chosen gender-pronouns.

Makes no sense for aliens to have so many different sexes, either. There are reasons why two sexes are optimum for breeding (https://www.reddit.com/r/answers/comments/17tn13/are_there_any_living_species_that_have_three_or/), though there can be as many 'genders' of non-breeders as one might care to have. A species might use a different pronoun for each life-stage of four different genders of twelve different castes in their own language, but that wouldn't translate into Common, and it sure as hell doesn't translate into English.

I kinda hate singular 'they', but damned if I'll use abominations like 'xe', so there it is. IMHO this whole gender-pronoun thing is just another fad anyway - I expect most of the young people currently proclaiming that their pronoun is 'they' will change their minds when they're ready to breed.

[conuly]

Therefore, presumably they're all using some kind of Common Tongue, and there is no possible way it makes sense to have gender-based pronouns in such a language, because mating/breeding status doesn't matter outside one's own species.

They're using universal translators. Though I disagree with your final part of that paragraph - I certainly am not mating and breeding with my pets (and even if I wanted to, they certainly wouldn't as they're all missing the relevant parts...) but I still refer to them with gendered pronouns.

I kinda hate singular 'they', but damned if I'll use abominations like 'xe', so there it is. IMHO this whole gender-pronoun thing is just another fad anyway - I expect most of the young people currently proclaiming that their pronoun is 'they' will change their minds when they're ready to breed.

Maybe, but it doesn't do any harm to just go along with it in case they don't.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

'Universal translators' is as much of a hand-wave as 'Babel fish', and still doesn't get around the fact that a given language only has whatever pronouns it has. Doesn't matter if your species' language has 17 different pronoun forms; standard English only has four. (This begs the question of how the Universal Translator knows which of those 17 forms to use, when the English-speaker only has he, she, it, they to choose from.)

"I certainly am not mating and breeding with my pets (and even if I wanted to, they certainly wouldn't as they're all missing the relevant parts...) but I still refer to them with gendered pronouns."

Well, quite true; I will amend the statement: the mating/breeding status of animals does matter to those who either eat them or keep them as commensals, and since human thought and language puts such heavy emphasis on sex/gender, no doubt we would apply that same bias to whatever other species we met, assuming we were able to tell their sexes or genders apart.

It still doesn't make sense to incorporate human sex/gender biases into a language intended to be used by different species with differing sex/gender patterns. Almost all multicellular life on Earth besides fungi (which are their own weird deal) is either male or female - certainly everything that a person can tell the sex of by looking has one of only two sexes - so naturally, human language refers to that, whether or not the sex of the animal referred to actually matters in any meaningful sense. Your dogs are he by default because they're not she and not it, and singular they would be confusing because here are two of them.

"Maybe, but it doesn't do any harm to just go along with it in case they don't."

Oh, for sure, on the general principle that people get to choose their own identities, and it's rude to question or contradict them, regardless of what one may think. It comes under the broad heading of 'Nobody Else's Business'. In the case of teens and younger twenty-somethings, it also comes under the heading of 'Pick Your Battles', because a whole lot of identity experimentation winds down naturally of its own accord as maturity sets in, and until then, one might as well just embrace the chaos.