I love it when sci-fi and fantasy books explore gender. Since gender is inextricable from society, you can explore entirely different gender paradigms by creating a new society. It’s almost de rigeur in the kind of sci-fi I read to at least have some kind of gender expansiveness beyond male and female.

However, I feel we could be doing more.

Gender is a complex array of things: part personal, part social; part real, part arbitrary. But the way it exists in a society is mostly a question of categories. We understand ourselves and others by sorting people into categories, of which gender is one of the most unavoidable.

In our human society, everyone sorts all people they ever meet into genders. They do it pre-consciously, without any thought. In many languages, you have to be able to do this sorting to even speak about someone.

Do these categories actually fit the people we apply them to? Do they fit anybody all that well? Could there be completely different categories? These are the kinds of questions we can explore in speculative fiction.

Different gender paradigms

In order for a person to identify as a gender, they have to have some idea of what the category is that they’re trying to fit into. In our society, we look at the category of men and the category of women and pick the one that fits best, usually concurring with how society sorted us, but not always. 

Or sometimes we look at those two main categories and want to be neither of those. Unfortunately, because of the constant sorting that goes on in human society at all times, the best you can usually get is for people to construct a third category in their head for everything other than men and women. To be categorized as anything other than those three options is almost impossible, because the people you meet simply won’t have a box for that. They ask, “What box shall I put you in in my head?” and you can answer whatever you like, but you’re still ultimately going to end up in one of the boxes that already exist in the other person’s head. Getting them to make a new box is a heck of a job, since it’s not entirely voluntary on their part.

But in a society with a different array of boxes, we would have different options. We wouldn’t have to make up our own box and then try to get people to understand it—it would be a box that already existed in everybody’s heads.

The genesis of gender

Consider the way that gender arose in human society. First we had our biology, which limited the possibilities in some ways. Only some people could get pregnant, for instance. That led to gender roles, tasks in society that belonged to one or the other. It became important to keep track of who was in what role, so the rules for that role could be enforced on people.

Today, we don’t generally believe biology destines us to roles, and even when we choose our own gender, that doesn’t necessarily mean we want gender rules enforced on us. Instead of sharp-edged boxes, we have vague clusters of associations. Anything from “good caregiver” to “wears makeup” can be associated with women, and therefore feminine. Even if we managed to build a society where being a woman didn’t limit you in any way, there would still be things seen as feminine. 

But taking on one or more feminine traits doesn’t mean you have to be a woman. It’s a matter of looking at yourself, looking at the people in the box labeled “woman,” and going “am I more like these people than those other people?” Because you know yourself best, your self-sorting is going to be the most accurate, based more on inner reality and less on externals. 

We construct rationales for it (“since I was a kid, I liked dresses best”) but what we really mean is that, living in a society where everyone was sorted this way, we found we fit better into one of those categories than the other. The real reasons might be subtle and difficult to explain, because sorting is a pre-conscious behavior all humans are doing all the time. But there are reasons—I don’t mean to say that gender is arbitrary.

In an alien society, the biology and early social roles would be different. That means the genders would necessarily also be different. Gender doesn’t come from nowhere, after all: it comes from millennia of sorting everybody into certain categories for social reasons. Even when those social reasons cease to exist, everyone might still carry on with the same genders simply because everything they’ve ever experienced was sorted that way.

I read a book recently in which an alien species had only one type of body, which could either beget or gestate children. Relationships were formed in any combination of genders. But we were told early on that each person gets to pick their gender.

It threw me, because what would gender be based on in that case? Why would they sort themselves that way at all? What would it mean to a person to be one of these things and not the other? If there is nothing gender is doing in society, and there never was, then there’s no reason the aliens would have any such concept. 

So I decided in my own head that they used to have a concept of gender, based on whether they chose to beget or gestate children, and that used to decide their role in society and who they could marry. They stopped doing that at some point in their evolution, but the categories and associations people had with them remained. 

So when a child chooses a gender, they’re looking at the pre-existing categories of their society and saying “I am more like these people than those ones.” Nothing in their biology would require them to be one or the other! But their society could still build such a thing for reasons of its own.

Gender utopia

I’m convinced that in any given society, there are bound to be people who look at the boxes available and simply don’t want to pick any of them. This would be true if there were only one gender, and also true if there were five hundred possible genders. That’s because we all sort a little bit differently, and while some people would like a hyperspecific box, other people would like there to be no boxes, for everyone to fit in one big category. You can’t make both these kinds of people happy at once.

This tends to strike an off note for me when I read fiction that’s intended to have a utopian view of gender. It seems to come with the unspoken assumption that there is such a thing as gender utopia, that there’s a way we could be doing gender that could genuinely satisfy everybody.

The standard gender utopia seems to go like this: there are no gender roles at all and no expectations for anybody to do any specific thing because of their gender. We can’t expect people of each gender to wear different clothes, for instance, because what if they don’t want to? We need total clothes freedom. Ditto anything else seen nowadays as gendered.

Everyone also has total freedom to choose any gender they like. They might use any pronoun they like. Nobody is allowed to refer to them until they’ve found out the right pronoun, and there is no commonly-agreed-upon signal, so you just have to ask. This is extremely important to everyone and everyone knows what their gender and pronoun are.

And to me this is wildly dystopian. What would any of these genders and pronouns mean if there are no expectations or associations connected to any of them? On what grounds could I possibly choose one? If I already have the total freedom to do whatever I want, what in the world would I want with a gender? Is there like some kind of default for people who don’t wanna pick? Or is everyone just going to sort me into that box?

But clearly some people think this would be totally awesome, and I’m not going to quibble with that! I just want writers to remember that when building social paradigms, you can’t ever build one that fits everyone perfectly. Society always involves a certain amount of putting up with things not fitting perfectly; the best we can hope for is no dire consequences when you don’t fit. And you could make a great story about somebody in this wonderful gender-expansive society who refuses to pick a pronoun and the reactions people have to that.

One gender

I tend to really enjoy worlds where there is only one gender: the world of The Left Hand of Darkness, Terra Ignota, and the Imperial Radch are all like this. The pronouns used don’t matter (the works I listed use he, they, and she for everyone, respectively), the point is that the whole idea doesn’t exist. Everyone fits in the same category; there is nothing at all that has to be sorted by gender socially.

Think about all the things we would have to work out in a society like that: titles, pronouns, relationships, childbearing, sex. But if we had a society which already had no concept of who you could and couldn’t have a relationship with, who had to have the babies, what sex had to look like, then it seems to me that not having gender would come pretty naturally. Society has no need to categorize based on that; it would categorize based on other things.

The Left Hand of Darkness takes the simplest approach: there is no gender because there is no sex. Everyone is the same thing, and each month they develop sex traits (entirely at random) long enough to mate before they go away again. Obviously in this society there’s no job gender is doing here and no reason to sort people that way. There are people who prefer developing one set of sex traits than the other, and take medications to achieve that, but since it’s only once a month it’s not particularly significant.

The Terra Ignota series takes a more dystopian approach: gender is forbidden, along with gendered pronouns, clothes, etc. But clearly it isn’t erased: people still have gender identities, they still want to perform gender, and it becomes a private kink you can do. It took me a while, reading this book, to figure out that it was meant to be dystopian. I thought it would be great. But no, some people really like doing gender! They don’t just dislike being miscategorized, they would also hate not being categorized at all. It’s a good example of how gender utopia for one person would be dystopian for another.

The Imperial Radch is a bit between those two extremes: the Radchaai, living in a society without gender, simply don’t think of people that way. They don’t miss gender at all; they have lots of other ways to categorize people. Their language has only one set of pronouns. But people outside the Radch find the whole thing horrible, and actually make up pronouns to use in Radchaai so that they can continue to use gender in their speech. It’s a good example of how culture informs gender.

Many genders

Fiction can also go the exact opposite direction and give us many genders. I find it important for there to be thought behind this, a sense of what each gender means.

Consider a society of hive aliens, like bees. They might have four genders, queen, drone, soldier, and worker. Historically there would be very strict roles for these. In the modern era, perhaps there wouldn’t be much difference. But you’d still be informed by the historical senses of those genders, the collective hormonal differences, the physical impression you get of them, and more. You might naturally think of queens as dominant and powerful, of workers as sexless and self-effacing, whether or not any of that is remotely true. And you might find that the gender society sorted you into doesn’t fit as well as one of the others available.

What you wouldn’t do, if you lived your whole life in this society, is identify as “female.” That’s not a gender you’re familiar with; it has no meaning to you and no associations. A human could tell you “oh, both queens and workers are female” but that wouldn’t compute to you at all. Queens and workers have almost nothing in common. So what is this “female” thing? Only if you hung out with humans and got a sense of the way they think of femaleness might you find that you fit in with these “women” creatures very well and would like to be one too.

One complaint I had with the latest Imperial Radch novel, Translation State, is that some cultures clearly have a plurality of genders, but we never find out what they are. One character uses the pronoun sie, one uses e, and we are never told anything about those genders. And yet one character raised without gender, after a few episodes of a TV show, decides to be e instead of they.

I wanna know why! What is it about e that appeals? What does this character have in common with all the other people using e? What does society expect of an e, if anything? Are genders assigned at birth and then people swap over as desired, or do they usually decide as adults? I want the secret gender lore!

What Moves the Dead gives us one bonus gender, the sworn soldier. This fits in well with the book’s historical setting. Of course everyone has a gender, of course the rules for it are strict, so we’ve just added one extra. It makes no effort to be utopian; it’s just another paradigm into which people fit or not.

The Unbalancing, by RB Lemberg, describes a world with five different ways of being nonbinary, and a character who isn’t sure which they fit into. I liked the way that, despite the expansive options available, it still isn’t easy for every person to find a place. That’s more real to me, and it seems it was very intentional on the author’s part to create an imperfect society, because all societies are in one way or another.

Infinite possibilities

Where gender is concerned, you can really do whatever you want, in a society you build yourself from the ground up. You can make no genders, bonus genders, or an entirely different set of possibilities that have nothing to do with the ones we have. You can divide society into categories that aren’t genders at all but something different.

By creating your own paradigms, you can explore the way that you categorize the world and yourself. Or you could dig into what it means not to fit into the expected categories. You can make a utopia for yourself, and then you can figure out the ways it might not be a utopia for someone else.

Not every book, of course, has to be doing something cool and deep and original with gender. But the ones that do, I eat up with a spoon.