Eye'm the cutest!
Use entirely proper nouns when referring to the person.
"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."
Er, how is this character going to hide their gender in a pesudo-midieval society?
So things like doing (just an example name) 'Dana spoke quietly' and (another random example) 'the cleric smiled gently...' where you would use he/she?
No I mean in midieval Europe you have a pretty gendered society. In modern society and in some other societies you can get away with someone being ambiguous because there is clothing that is acceptable for both men and women. Is this ambiguous character a slave or something? Maybe a peasant? I'm not so sure about peasant's clothing in midieval Europe...
The psedo-Medival society does differ from the actual one in a couple respects. The character personally lives in a society that's different from 'Europe,' (psedo-Europe)where the primary religion is pagan (kind of like a Norse/Greek/Roman-like fusion) they also happen to live alone as the town healer, is somewhat standoffish around others and is married to their job. In hindsight, it actually could be interpreted as a two-spirit medicine person like thing.
There a few societies in this world are Spartan like in the respects that sometimes women will wear pants. Many other characters believe this character could be one of them. Just to clarify, this character is viewed as quite eccentric for their ambiguous-ness, considering there's a chance they may be doing the equivalent of cross dressing in their culture.
edited 18th Oct '12 5:28:08 PM by TheMuse
(Sorry for the lag in replying)
Indecisive pumpkin
If it's written, you could do it in first-person from the ambiguous character's perspective.
‽‽‽‽ ^These are interrobangs. Love them. Learn them. Use them.
So this society is accepting of this person and everyone doesn't just assign them a gender?
A majority of people simply refer to them as 'he,' mostly due to Men Are Generic, Women Are Special. They also happen to be an unmarried, childless healer/surgeon and this would be considered somewhat atypical if done by a woman in this society. A couple people are genuinely weirded out, but mostl of the time they don't really think about it/notice.
edited 18th Oct '12 6:16:07 PM by TheMuse
Off-duty Writer
Edited by PatchworkSpace on Jul 5th 2020 at 3:40:22 PM
I was thinkig of pulling the 'they' thing, my own Grammar Nazi ness aside. Exactly how would 'one' be used though?
Crazy Kiwi
How obvious do you want it to be that you are deliberately concealing the sex of the character? (My inner Grammar Nazi and Anti-PC nature won't allow me to use "gender" to refer to a living creature).
If you use non-specific pronouns for that character alone it would make it very clear that you're singling "them" out.
"One" is generally used when a speaker is making a generalisation and it is used as people use the non-specific "you". As in "one does not wish to be wanting when the time arrives."
Proper name or "the healer" would be better than "they". Presuming you can find a proper name that would be unisex in such a time - a lot of our unisex names were once given only to members of one sex - or have the character give a shortened form of a name that has both masculine and feminine variants and thereafter refer to them as that.
Even then, refering to only one character solely by name or title while using "he" and "she" etc for everyone else will still make it obvious that the sex is being deliberately hidden by the author.
The big problem is going to become the possessive pronouns - "the healer picked up the healer's bag" is going to seem very forced/contrived when "his" or "her" would be the normal pronoun (with "their" as a screaming "I'm not telling!")
Thanks! That's actually quite helpful
Crazy Kiwi
"Alex" - Alexander/Alexandra - is an example of what could work.
Eye'm the cutest!
^ As does Sam. (Samuel/Samantha)
"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."
There are quite a few gender-ambiguous names out there. I wouldn't be surprised if we had a page of them on here.
Be not afraid...
doot
I'm working on a project and one of the characters I'm writing, I'm thinking about writing with an ambiguous gender. I'm not sure if I'm going to pull of a big reveal near the end, or just keep it a mystery. Only problem is, I want to try do it as subtley as possible. Also, I need to take into acount that the story takes place during a psedo-Medival European. So obviously, using exclusively gender nuetral pronouns (ze, than, etc.) isn't the best option. Can anyone offer any tips or works where this has been done well?