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Jack comments on Open Thread: December 2009 - Less Wrong
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I wrote a short story with something of a transhumanism theme. People can read it here. Actionable feedback welcome; it's still subject to revision.
Note: The protagonist's name is "Key". Key, and one other character, receive Spivak pronouns, which can make either Key's name or eir pronouns look like some kind of typo or formatting error if you don't know it's coming. If this annoys enough people, I may change Key's name or switch to a different genderless pronoun system. I'm curious if anyone finds that they think of Key and the other Spivak character as having a particular gender in the story; I tried to write them neither, but may have failed (I made errors in the pronouns in the first draft, and they all went in one direction).
Cool. I also couldn't help reading Key as female. My hypothesis would be that people generally have a hard time writing characters of the opposite sex. Your gender may have leaked in. The Spivak pronouns were initially very distracting but were okay after a couple paragraphs. If you decide to change it Le Guin pretty successfully wrote a whole planet of androgyns using masculine pronouns. But that might not work in a short story without exposition.
In Left Hand of Darkness, the narrator is an offplanet visitor and the only real male in the setting. He starts his tale by explicitly admitting he can't understand or accept the locals' sexual selves (they become male or female for short periods of time, a bit like estrus). He has to psychologically assign them sexes, but he can't handle a female-only society, so he treats them all as males. There are plot points where he fails to respond appropriately to the explicit feminine side of locals.
This is all very interesting and I liked the novel, but it's the opposite of passing androgyns as normal in writing a tale. Pronouns are the least of your troubles :-)
Later, LeGuin said that she was no longer satisfied with the male pronouns for the Gethenians.
Very good points. It has been a while since I read it.
I think Key's apparent femininity might come from a lack of arrogance. Compare Key to, say, Calvin from "Calvin and Hobbes". Key is extremely polite, willing to admit to ignorance, and seems to project a bit of submissiveness. Also, Key doesn't demonstrate very much anger over Trellis's death.
I probably wouldn't have given the subject a second thought, though, if it wasn't brought up for discussion here.
Everyone's talking about Key - did anyone get an impression from Trellis?
If I had to put a gender on Trellis, I'd say that Trellis was more masculine than feminine. (More like Calvin than like Suzie.) Overall, though, it's fairly gender-neutral writing.
I too got the 'dull sidekick' vibe, and since dull sidekicks are almost always male these days...
I do typically have an easier time writing female characters than male ones. I probably wouldn't have tried to write a story with genderless (human) adults, but in children I figured I could probably manage it. (I've done some genderless nonhuman adults before and I think I pulled them off.)