Sci-fi Aliens and Transgender Issues

m adapting a fairly old, public domain tale into a science fiction work. I’d like clarification for a few details before I move forward to ensure it doesn’t contain particularly striking Unfortunate Implications.

One of the characters in the original work was a fantastic creature with an Ambiguous Gender who nevertheless, is referred to as “he/him” on a few occasions. In my version “he” (let’s call him “Sandy” to avoid confusion) is a member of a hermaphroditic alien species. The human protagonist (let’s call him “Bob”) meets Sandy with little knowledge of the species and because Sandy lacks a lot of secondary sexual characteristics associated with human femininity (assuming androgynous entities are male is kinda Truth in Television) Bob mistakenly believed that Sandy is male and gets into the habit of referring to Sandy as “he/him.” Bob continued even after he realized that Sandy effectively had No Biological Sex and referring to him like he was male didn’t make any sense.

Sandy is shown to have no problem with this. (I’m probably going to at least try include most of this explanation in the finished work, but it could easily be something where sections of it are cut out to tighten up the final draft) Sandy’s species has no concept of gender or even biological sex so the idea of gender-related pronouns and by extension being misgendered is totally foreign to them. Sandy treats Bob’s use of he/him pronouns as more of a nickname or title than anything else. Sandy’s logic also involves the idea that “Bob allows himself to be called this (he/him) as well as approximately 50% of the human species, so there is no reason to take this as an insult.”

The thing I’m slightly worried has a chance of happening is that this could be seen as disrespectful towards transgender/nonbinary people.

And, yes, I am aware that it’s almost impossible to write something that’s 100% non-problematic, but if you take a glance at this and your first thought is: “Holy moley, this is really offensive!” please let me know

Have a few non-binary/trans characters who are at least somewhat offended at being called 'he'. Some prefer 'they', some prefer 'xe', etc. I deliberately avoid "it", as that pronoun is seen as offensive. (I still want a character who prefers to be called "it", though.)

You said "Sandy’s species has no concept of gender or even biological sex so the idea of gender-related pronouns and by extension being misgendered is totally foreign to them." Every species can have its non-binary/trans characters, so the 'offended' non-binary/trans characters would be of other species.

Here's a comic strip from Star Trip◊, featuring a protagonist who prefers "they". Might give you inspiration as to what an alien might say when mis... pronouned?

Notice how 'they' is the universal pronoun and the standard, as opposed to 'he' or 'he/she'. What would a universal formal mass greeting be, instead of 'ladies and gentlemen'?

Imagine this scenario, where an alien parent & child see a human man.

Child: Look at that human and their thingie!

Parent: Be careful! Humans don't like to be called 'them'.

Child: What? Why?

Parent: Humans treat their sex as an important part of themselves. A male human should be called a 'he', a female human called a 'she'.

Child: But that's so silly! Can't I just call them 'they'?

Parent: It is silly, but that's the way humans work. Remember what I told you? 'When on Xanner, do as the Xannerians do'. Respect others' cultures even if we think it's silly.

edited 5th Jan '16 4:20:06 PM by hellomoto

In Star Wars EU novels, they use the blanket term "Gentlebeings."

Hutts are hermaphroditic, but they seem to be sequential hermaphrodites, as Jabba the Hutt is called "he" and Gardulla the Hutt is referred to as "she" (and also appears to have pseudo-breasts.)

For a sci-fi game, I made up a species called "Ketka" that has four sexes: male, female, hermaphrodite, and neuter. Males and females make up roughly 80% of the Ketka population, and are about evenly split. Hermaphrodites are a minority, totaling about 18%. The remaining 2% are neuter. Obviously, neuters don't have the ability to procreate, making them very rare. Despite this, they are regarded as perfectly normal variants, not as freaks or unfortunates.

When Ketka speak English, they use male pronouns to refer to neuters, and female pronouns for hermaphrodites. When the Ketka made first contact with Humans, there was an attempt to introduce extra terms and tenses into English, to account for their having four sexes. One proposed pronoun for hermaphrodites was she/he/it (pronounced "Sheee-yit!") Humans just couldn't keep a straight face whenever they said it or heard it, so it didn't catch on, and the whole idea was scrapped.^note  This is actually borrowed (ripped off) from the Star Trek: New Frontier novels, which feature a hermaphroditic species called Hermats, exemplified by the character Burgoyne 172.

The neuters tend to resemble males, while the hermaphs look like females. With regard to the "battle of the sexes," Ketka tend to be more cooperative than combative, adopting a "can't we all just get along?" attitude. Even so, there are certain distinct differences among them.

For example, the hermaphrodites tend to act as sort of a bridge between males and females, while the neuters tend to stand apart from the rest. As a result, the neuters make good judges, being impartial and not favoring one side of a dispute over the other. The hermaphs, on the other hand, are better at negotiation, seeing both sides of an argument and encouraging compromises.

edited 5th Jan '16 4:58:58 PM by pwiegle

^^ That would be a little difficult to do plot-wise because Sandy ends up (temporarily, it's complicated) being the last of his kind , the only other member being a human/alien hybrid created by some rather unethical genetic engineering.

Perhaps I could have this hybrid express anger over being referred to as "he/him" especially because he (rather justifiably based on their experiences) that Humans Are Bastards?

It would also be very easy for Sandy to reference one of his old friends using they/them pronouns so could that help?

That sounds good!

First of all, someone will always be offended no matter what you do. You can't please everyone.

I view personal pronouns as basically nothing more than shorthand visual descriptions, (think "sexed" pronouns rather than gendered pronouns) but I generally don't make a fuss about it and just call people whatever they prefer.

I tend to use male pronouns myself out of convenience, but I don't really care all that much about how people refer to me. I occasionally lean towards "it" though, because it's considered dehumanizing. I guess I'm just weird like that.

We are aiming for lowest amount of offensiveness, or at least avoiding the common 'offense points' for trans people.

Admittingly, when I use 'they', I get confused as to stuff like "they are or they is?" and "they as in the one alien? One alien and one human? Two aliens? Two humans?"

Instead of singular 'they', how about non-dehumanizing 'it'? What's up with dehumanizing? What does being 'human' mean in an alien world anyway?

edited 6th Jan '16 7:37:35 AM by hellomoto

Fair enough, just don't get too upset if you accidentally offend someone. It's pretty much unavoidable.

As for "they"... yeah, words with multiple meanings/uses tend to complicate things. "They are" is what I would use though.

And how about instead of non-dehumanizing "it", we could just un...bad-ify (?) non-human...ness, if that makes any sense. "Klingons are people too" and all that.

I was thinking of Sandy referencing the fact that in his species' language (which as of now is a slightly modified form of Esperanto) has both a singular-third-person and a plural-third-person pronoun that is "gender/sex neutral," but unfortunately none of the languages Bob speaks (basically just English and Spanish) has a standardized equivalent, so Sandy compromises by using "they" to refer to members of his species because it's the closest English equivalent.

Using "it" divorced from its usually negative implications is an interesting idea, but as the biggest contributing factors of Sandy being the last of his kind was caused by a few humans dehumanizing them (and I don't just mean in a "You're not a human so you're lame," kind of way. I mean "having several unethical and inhumane experiments performed on them and effectively being treated worse than lab rats would be in the same situation). So I'm not entirely comfortable with going with that particular approach.

Yeah, won't work for Sandy unfortunately.

By the way, what sort of pronouns does Spanish have? English has the singular & plural gender-neutral first-person (I & we), male & female third-person (he & she), plural gender-neutral first-person (they), and singular gender-neutral but dehumanizing first-person (it).

The singular 'they' has precedence, which is part of the reason people have encouraged "use it till it's no longer weird". I wonder about applying this to de-dehumanize "it" instead. Not necessarily in OP's story, but elsewhere.

For what it's worth, I don't perceive this as being offensive. I think it's fairly well understood my most reasonable people that alien races are going to be by nature very different to Humans, and so any particular feature of them is probably not meant to reflect on any aspect of Humanity.

Specific to this example, I am particularly mystified why you would think your aliens might offend transgender folk because these aliens are not trans. They don't pattern to Human conceptions of gender, but this is the default condition for their entire species. This is not the situation for Humans.

Humans are a species with two dimorphic biological sexes, some of which experience a strong neurological dissociation from the sex they were born with and wish to change their bodies to better reflect their gender self-concept. Conversely, Sandy's race is composed entirely of hermaphrodites, which is completely different.

If it's good I could care less if it offends a few people

Maybe let sandy get his....her.....it...opinion about it, dosent it? for example maybe it dosent get all the fuss about pronuns or said is a waste of time, like "yeah yeah, call me that if you want" after all sometimes people go for the easy choice than dosent bother them(unless it bother its for some reason)