On gender and worldbuilding

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

This is not a review of Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit, or at least I don’t intend to tag it as one. That said, it’s as close as I’m going to come, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what I thought about the book by the time I’m done writing anyway. And we should definitely take a moment and stare at that outstanding cover, which is the best thing about the book.

Also, note that the two silhouettes at the top are both pretty gender-neutral, as that’s gonna be a thing.

Let’s talk for a second about how we assign gender to people we haven’t met. Typically this is a thing that happens so fast as to be nearly automatic, to the point where if we aren’t able to immediately assign someone to “male” or “female” it’s immediately noticeable and, for a lot of people quite stressful. (I’m leaving the discussion of whether that’s okay aside, for the record.) But here’s what we do: a quick visual scan for secondary sexual characteristics, right? Prominent breasts, facial hair, hips, then things like clothes and hair length, and sometimes we’re in situations where one thing will trump another. I can’t be the only guy in the world who used to have long hair and has been addressed as “ma’am” by someone behind me who hadn’t seen my face yet, and not one of those people didn’t immediately change their mind and get apologetic the second I turned around and they saw my beard. Never-not-once did anyone think “Wow, that lady has a beard!” Similarly, as a fat guy, while I’m not exactly proud of this, the fact is I’ve dated women with smaller breasts than me. Nobody’s ever looked at my chest and decided I was a woman.

Transgender and nonbinary people have become a lot more broadly socially accepted in the last few years, and the notion of asking people what their pronouns are (or explicitly noting them in, say, an email signature, or a sticker on a name badge) has become something that people are much more likely to do now. This is what happens when those secondary sexual characteristics fail us; sometimes we misgender people, and people making their pronouns clear from the jump has become a good way to avoid making that mistake. There’s still no good way to visually identify someone as nonbinary, though, because people who are nonbinary may still initially scan as feminine or masculine (and people who do present as ambiguous aren’t always nonbinary) so if someone uses they/them as their pronouns (or anything, really, other than he/him/she/her) there’s no immediate way to find that out other than asking, if the person doesn’t do something to make it clear to other people.

In my Benevolence Archives, elves are nonbinary, to the point where displaying visible secondary sex characteristics is viewed as a birth defect. Elves use xe/xir as pronouns, and everyone just knows that, because that’s how elves work. How do elves reproduce? Dunno, I haven’t decided yet. But I decided early on in building the universe that each of the major races would approach gender roles and gender differences a little differently as a culture. For elves, it’s irrelevant. Other cultures range from dwarves, which are a strict matriarchy, to the strict patriarchy of the ogres, to the slightly softer gender role differences of gnomes and humans.

One more side path, and then I’ll circle back to Winter’s Orbit. Feel free to pop over to this post about Sarah Gailey’s novella Taste of Marrow real quick. In short, my main issue with Gailey’s book was one character, named Hero, who uses they/them pronouns, and it becomes very clear over the course of reading the book that Hero is not so much a character as a little game that Gailey is playing with their (Gailey also uses they/them pronouns, although I don’t think they were doing that when Marrow came out, which makes me wonder if I should go back and edit it) readers. Hero is never physically described at all, either by their clothing or their body, and Gailey goes so far as to make sure that Hero never has to talk to anyone other than the core group of characters so that there is never a situation where someone might meet them and guess at their gender. Making things somewhat more annoying is that the book is set 100 or so years ago, making everyone’s open acceptance of whatever is actually going on there slightly less realistic than the central story tenet of the book, which is cowboys riding hippos.

I’m happy to read books with trans or nonbinary characters. And this isn’t so much a complaint about “I don’t know what’s in this person’s pants!” as I have no idea at all what this character might look like, and that’s annoying. Give us something! Nonbinary characters shouldn’t be in your book just so that you can have one character that your audience is endlessly digging for clues about just to figure out how to picture them.

(This can be tricky, of course, and I’ve also read books that made sure you knew characters were trans by doing things like having scenes where a trans woman character more or less loudly announces I SHALL NOW GO URINATE WITH MY PENIS IN THE LADIES’ ROOM, which also sucks because it’s character development via bludgeon. I have a minor side character in BA who I have known was gay since the jump but it’s never made it on the page because I’ve not been able to come up with a way to make it not sound forced in. But that’s a separate conversation.)

So. This book.

Winter’s Orbit began in a way that caught my attention immediately. The book begins with the Emperor (note: male form of the word) summoning her grandson and commanding him to marry a man whose husband has just died, because it is essential that this bond of marriage between the two families be maintained. In going over the grandson’s qualifications for said marriage, he is described as “not gender-exclusive.”

As first five pages go … yeah, my attention was captured pretty quickly. And finding out a few pages later that the two main cultures in this book both identify gender by, effectively, clothing accessories was, if nothing else, not something I’d seen before. One planet, if I’m remembering correctly, identifies men with wooden jewelry and women with crystal jewelry, and if you’re not wearing either you’re nonbinary and use they/them. The other planet apparently uses knots in scarves as a gender identifier, to the point where one character doesn’t recognize a knot and has to be corrected by another when he misgenders someone.

At one point the main character is asked about his ancestry, and he names two “primaries,” and then says for the rest of his genetic mixture the person asking would have to go check his records, so while this is the only detail we get about childbearing (and there are no children whatsoever in the book) one can assume that giving birth is no longer something that half the population is expected to do.

You may already see my problem. In this book, use of “he” or “she” tells you absolutely nothing about what someone looks like, and not only that, there’s not any correlation between gender and societal role– the Emperor and at least one general are both “she,” for example, and suddenly “not gender-exclusive” makes more sense than “bisexual” might have, because in this world there’s no connection at all, as far as I can tell, between someone’s body and their gender. So this book is getting a lot of attention for gay representation, but there’s actually nothing to let us know that Kiem and Jainan both have penises, or more to the point, since they both identify as male, that there’s any concept of homosexuality that can be mapped to this world in the first place. In fact, having read the book, I think there are a couple of hints that Jainan has XX chromosomes and a body we’d call a woman’s; he is described several times as smaller than Kiem, has long hair, and– more telling– there is a scene where he takes his shirt off in front of Kiem and Kiem turns around to give him privacy, which seems slightly unlikely if there aren’t female-presenting breasts under that shirt.

The book explicitly talks about their skin color– both are shades of brown, with one darker than the other– and Jainan’s long hair comes up a couple of times, but other than that they are given no physical description at all. They actually have sex at one point in the book without the author giving any details about what they’re actually doing. I don’t expect this book, which is YA, to flirt with being porn or anything like that, but … come on.

For that matter, if you’re going to posit a world where physical characteristics don’t tell you anything about a person’s gender, relegating those to external pieces of jewelry or knots in scarves, for crying out loud, and where different genders don’t have any particular societal role … why are we still bothering in the first place? What, precisely, makes Kiem a “he” other than that the author is calling him that? What does “he” or “she” even mean in this world? Can Kiem change jewelry tomorrow and expect people to start calling him “she”? Is there any societal weight at all to one’s choice of gender? How does nonbinary even make sense as an option when your gender doesn’t actually, like, do anything? In our society, saying that you don’t buy into the male/female dichotomy has some implications. In a world where gender is meaningless, what does nonbinary mean?

How do you tell someone’s gender if that person is naked?

Do people with uteruses still get pregnant? Clearly this one character has tons of different contributors to his genetic makeup, but he’s royalty; is that true for commoners as well? If we’re still doing political marriages, does viability for producing offspring matter, or can any two people create a child?

The book gets into none of this, which I find immensely frustrating, because frankly the implications of this simple decision about how gender works are the single most interesting thing about the book to me. And that’s a damn shame, because if you’re going to make fiddling with gender a part of your worldbuilding, you owe it to your readers to explore the implications of what you’ve decided to do. And that’s before we have to carefully avoid giving any useful description of anyone in the book– it goes without saying that no one ever has facial hair, for example– so that your setup can even work.

I don’t think it’s asking for much to expect authors to put as much thought into their worldbuilding as the reader will within the first fifteen pages. I dunno; this piece is 1800 words or so long so maybe I’m displaying some sort of hangup on my part, but c’mon. Do better.

On pronouns

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

My pronouns are he/him/his. This should not come as a surprise to anyone as I suspect my identity as a cis male is fairly obvious, at least to anyone who notices the traditionally male name affixed to the site, and certainly to anyone who has ever seen me in person. There was a time when my hair was long, curly, and glorious, and I was addressed as “ma’am” once or twice in public in my college years only to have the person hastily correct themselves upon seeing what the front of my head looks like.

To be clear, I think normalizing making your pronouns explicit even if you’re cisgendered is a good thing. At least two of my online profiles (Twitter and TikTok) contain them, and I do my best to call people what they want me to call them. There have been times where I’ve had to discreetly inquire of a third party what someone’s pronouns were, and I’ve had students recently who either wanted to be they/them or were out as trans, at least in my classroom. Those types of kids are the exact reason I do stuff like this. I feel like it’s the right thing to do.

I’m not going to review Dr. Meera Shah’s You’re the Only One I’ve Told: The Stories Behind Abortion, or at least not beyond this paragraph, and the reason is that you already know everything you need to know about the book from the title, including whether you want to read it. It’s not a bad book by any means, but it’s also not really surprising in any way.

Well, okay, the way it handles pronouns is kinda strange, and I wanted to talk about that a little bit. Now, this is a book about abortion, so you won’t be surprised to learn that the subjects of nearly every chapter are people who can get pregnant, and nearly all of those are cisgendered women. One chapter focuses on a cis man, whose name is Mateo, and that chapter focuses on the effect that abortion can have on the partners of the people who get abortions. One subject identifies as genderqueer and is they/them.

Every single chapter is titled with the name of the main subject of the chapter, with their pronouns, italicized, in a smaller font, and in parentheses, below the person’s name, along with the word “Pronouns”. So, like this:

BEATRICE

(Pronouns: She/her/hers)

Also, when other individuals are introduced throughout the text, their pronouns are also provided immediately after their name is first used– but oddly inconsistently, as it’s not used for everyone. (I swear that Dr. Shah directly addresses her rationale for this at some point in the book, but I can’t find it, and it doesn’t appear to be in the introduction, which is the most obvious place.)

At any rate, that’s what triggered the post: because for some reason this became distracting as hell over the course of the book, and I wanted to kind of talk it out and see if anybody pushed back at me. Putting your pronouns on a profile (or, as I did at a con once, on a sticker that you’re wearing) has the advantage of letting strangers know how to refer to you. Again, sometimes it’s more obvious than others– no one is going to look at me and call me “she” unless explicitly told to– but I get why it’s a thing and I participate in it.

This book does things like this:

When I spoke to Dr. Hoobity (Pronouns: she/her/hers), she told me that…

Not a direct quote, but stuff like that happens all the time– an explicit listing of the person’s personal pronouns, annoyingly including the word “pronouns,” immediately followed by a use of one of those pronouns. That risk of confusion or causing inadvertent offense just isn’t present when you’re writing about someone, because you’re going to use pronouns all the time. It’s hard to write about people without using pronouns, and in a book that is about people who can get pregnant it becomes even more ridiculous because nearly everyone identifies as she/her. Even the genderqueer person’s pronouns are explicit nearly immediately; the first use of singular they made it clear very quickly, and they talked about being genderqueer in the chapter. I was fully expecting (and would have been interested to read) a chapter at some point about a trans male’s experience with pregnancy and abortion, but it never happened. The one chapter about a person identifying as male is Mateo’s, and he’s cis, and his chapter is basically about cis men.

It didn’t ruin the book or anything like that, don’t get me wrong, but it was distracting enough that, well, I wrote the post about pronouns instead of about the actual book. Am I off-base here, or do other people feel like this would be distracting for them as well?

Hey, remember this?

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

Let’s see how old my readers are:

This isn’t exactly a deep revelation or anything, but for some reason this commercial popped into my head this morning as I was getting ready for work.  I strongly suspect if you’re within five years or so of my age you have this jingle memorized still, but have you ever really thought about just how impossible it would be to market My Buddy in today’s kids’ toys market?  Things weren’t as rigidly gendered in the 1980s as they are now– that is a straight up doll being marketed directly to boys, doing boy things like riding Big Wheels and hiding in a clubhouse and climbing trees.  They’re not even trying to muddy the waters with the label “action figure.”  My Buddy was a doll, and never wanted to be anything else.

There are not many ways in which I think American culture has backslid since the 80s, but the rigid adherence to gender essentialism in absolutely fucking everything related to kids is definitely one of them.  I had a parent come in this morning looking for white bedroom furniture for her son, and it threw me for enough of a loop that I almost needed to have her repeat it to make sure I was hearing her right.  Because no one buys white bedroom furniture for boys.  We have a couple of sets that are gender neutral and you should see how incredibly confused people get when they can’t immediately figure out what genitalia the children in the room with the furniture are supposed to be.  It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad.

On things that should wait until morning

Luther M. Siler

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I’m not tagging this as a #review for reasons that are probably going to become obvious pretty soon.  For starters, it’s fuck o’clock in the morning.  I was asleep an hour or so ago but for some fucking reason I’m WIDE THE HELL AWAKE NOW THANKS and got rapidly tired of tossing and turning in bed so now I’m in the living room and angryblogging on my laptop, because that is a wise decision.

I blew someone some shit on Twitter earlier today for starting a Tweet with the words “everyone will shit on me for saying this, but…”.  I feel like if you’re starting to say something with those words, that’s your brain telling you that you’re probably wrong and that you should probably listen to it.  Listening to my own advice apparently isn’t one of my strong suits.

So, with that in mind, let’s write an intemperate post about Taste of Marrow, by Sarah Gailey.  You may recall my review of River of Teeth, her first book, which I wanted to be fond of but really wasn’t.  I ended that review by saying I was disappointed but I was still in for the sequel– the premise, remember, is basically cowboys riding hippos, which covers for a lot of sins– and having finished Taste of Marrow tonight before briefly going to sleep I think I’m officially out.  The sins of the first book are all still there, from the sidelining of the hippos to that one character’s annoying accent to, again, the dude who is apparently the bad guy randomly getting eaten by hippos in what is probably the single most deus ex hippo ending I’ve read in a book in a long time… to Hero.

Hero moved from an annoyance I was able to put up with in River of Teeth to something that actively pissed me off in this book.  Hero is again consistently referred to with plural pronouns for the entire book, by every character.  Hero is also still never once described.  I think at one point Gailey says that Hero is wearing a shirt, which they must open in order to examine a scar.  That’s as far as it goes.  Gailey goes out of her way to never have any character who isn’t part of the core cast mention or speak to Hero, because those people presumably wouldn’t use Hero’s preferred pronouns and would at least guess at Hero’s gender.  At this point I’m not even willing to describe Hero as a nonbinary or trans character; Hero isn’t a character in this book so much as a little game that Gailey is playing with her readers.  For all I can tell from everyone’s behavior in the book, the most reasonable conclusion is that Hero is a cis straight woman who the author is just playing the Pronoun Game with for no fucking reason at all.

I feel compelled, again, to point out my pronoun bona fides, insofar as such things exist; the next book I’m reading is Jy Yang’s The Red Threads of Fortune, which postulates a culture where all children are referred to with plural pronouns until such time as the children themselves announce their gender, which sometimes takes years; Yang themself prefers the plural also.  I’m a couple of weeks away from writing my 10 Best Books of the Year post, and a series with a trans main character is going to be very high on that list.  Elves in the Benevolence Archives, my series, are genderless and referred to with custom pronouns.  You can look far and wide in the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written on this blog and not see a single word complaining about pronouns other than the two posts relating to this series.  It’s emphatically not the singular “they” I have an issue with, it’s the fact that this author is deliberately fucking with her readers with this character and that Hero’s nonbinaryness, if in fact Hero is actually nonbinary, feels like the “what’s in Hero’s pants” guessing game is exactly what Gailey wants her readers doing.   Which is bullshit.

Blech.

On judgmental bastardry and little kids

Luther M. Siler21 Comments

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ALTERNATE TITLE 1: Why I Need to Have a Daughter
ALTERNATE TITLE 2: Why Everyone should be Glad I Don’t Have a Daughter
ALTERNATE TITLE 3: Why Liberals are Dumbasses and Don’t Run Anything

The boy’s at a birthday party right now.  I’m not at the party, but my wife is; as someone who has run dozens of parties over the years for young kids where the adults way outnumbered the kids, I long for the days when it was okay to just drop your child off at a birthday party and then just go away for a couple of hours, but that’s not how society– or at least the parts of it I move in– works any longer.  I wouldn’t have objected to going, for the record, but I had some stuff to do around here and she volunteered.  So she’s there and I’m here.

The party’s for one of the girls in his class at Hogwarts.  I had been meaning all week to email her parents and ask for some details about what she might want for her birthday, and finally remembered to do it yesterday.  Mom responded pretty promptly.  The first sentence of the email was “Oh, she’s all girl.”

Oh.

I would kinda have liked some more specificity than that, but whatever; basically it meant go to the Pink Aisle and close your eyes and pick something.(*)  My wife and I went through this fun and stupid rigamarole in the Pink Aisle last night where neither of us really wanted to get her something froofy and glittery and princessy but that’s basically all there is; I suggested a couple of different (mostly pink and purple!) age-appropriate Lego sets when my son came running over with a Barbie doll dressed as a superhero.

Just under $20, Barbie, and the boy literally picked it out.  Fine.  Done.

The mental subcurrent of all this, of course, is that while I don’t especially like the idea of plastering kids with this is for boys and this is for girls, it ain’t like my own son isn’t into superheroes.  Of course, so is his daddy, and I suspect if I had a daughter she’d be just as able to tell you about the Hulk and Iron Man as he is, but I don’t have a daughter, now, do I, so who knows how much reinforcing of The Patriarchy I’d be doing as a parent compared to how much I’m already doing, and who the fuck am I to try and subtly condition somebody else’s kid by trying to find a toy for her that isn’t ridiculously gendered when I have never not once suggested my own son go into the Pink Aisle when he was hunting for toys for himself.

(Did you know there are girl Nerf toys?  I did not know this.)

So, yeah, whatever, we got the kid a Barbie doll, and somehow I managed to turn buying a gift for a five-year-old who I think I can pick out of a lineup, maybe, into some sort of political act, because that’s exactly the sort of stupid wanker I am sometimes.  And then my wife texted me from the party while I was busy hanging a mirror at home (let’s not let the gendered nature of that little detail escape us, either) to inform me that this party had blue ribbon water and pink ribbon water and she’d just heard one of the boys loudly insist that he needed the “boy water.”  This was, thankfully, not my son.

So.  Yeah.

That happened.

We shoulda gotten the kid a soccer ball.

(*) And I should make this explicit, too– Mom was trying to be helpful, and her point was “Don’t stress yourself out too much about a present.”  She explicitly said that her daughter would be perfectly happy just to have all of her friends there.  This post is about I’m an idiot sometimes, not Jeez, look at how these people I barely know are raising their kid, just to make perfectly certain we understand each other.