Religion in a Society with a long Life Expectancy

Ordinarily there would be some sort of 'biological clock' (especially amoung women) to find a suitable partner to have children with. When you have the ability to swap between a variety of bodies, you don't have to worry about agining past reproductive age and have a much longer time to do basically whatever.

• The thing with the 'aknowledging of gender variant folks' is, I'm not exactly sure how to pull it off realistically. Having people immediately say "What are your preferred pronouns?" seems a little like overkill. Having people quickly switch pronouns after being correct sounds slightly better, but I'm still unsure about it.
• Anyone have any ideas on exactly the best way to pull this off?

*Part of the mythology of this world includes the fact that 'body swapping' wasn't always a part of it, but has been for a couple thousand years. It's believed to be a diviation from natural order to some degree, but no one has a definite reason why/how it happened. Not all of the intelligent, sentience beings of this world are capable of the body swapping, which is a plot point on more than one occasion.

edited 24th Jun '13 3:10:09 PM by TheMuse

I take it you haven't read my previous post yet.

Sorry, I hadn't. I added a response in the post right before your last one.

edited 24th Jun '13 3:10:30 PM by TheMuse

Does the response answer your question?

Does anyone have any reply? Help with exactly how to pull off the 'aknowledgement of gender variant people' would be REALLY appreciated.

Given the ubiquity of such changes, perhaps their culture would be very relaxed about such things: people go with the surface appearance until corrected, and people only bother correcting such assumptions if it's important to them. You might have exchanges like this:

*There are three people in the room, A, B and C; C is in a male body but identifies strongly as female*

A: Ah, B, I heard that you went on a date with C. Did he behave himself?
C interjects: Oh, I'm female.
A: Okay; *A turns back to B* Did she behave herself?
B: *laughs* She was all over me!

edited 25th Jun '13 7:54:25 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

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Yeah, that's what I was planning on doing. But if a character was to encounter a person who didn't identify as either gender, I should probaly rather just have them refer to them in gender nuetral language (ex: Sydney doesn't like apples) rather than bringing out gender nuetral pronouns (zhe, ect.) correct?

I think that it might depend on their culture, and on the manner in which the character is agendered (have I used the correct term there?).

If the character doesn't see gender as important, then I imagine that they'd go with whatever pronouns a speaker happened to use; if they had fluid gender, they might go with their current biological sex; if they dislike the thought of gender, they might ask for a gender-neutral pronoun.

On the cultural side, how common are gender-neutral people? If they're fairly common then their language might have developed a third pronoun that you could employ; if such characters are rare then individuals might deal with it on a case-by-case basis.

As to how you describe them, that seems trickier to me. Gender-neutral words might work, but they may also damage immersion by virtue of being uncommon in our usage, unless they're used often by characters too. You might be able to get away with avoiding pronouns, but if you end up doing so too often it might make the prose a little clunky, I fear. I honestly don't know, I'm afraid — English doesn't handle gender-neutrality very well yet, I fear.

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