Markup View

Author: SolipSchism

Jun 23rd 2017 at 2:32:53 PM

* Creator/GregEgan likes this trope, frequently either using it or at least paying lip service to it. His stories are rarely if ever entirely focused on LGBT+ issues, but rather they're folded into a larger concept of humanity and society. Overall, Egan's stories tend to advance a progressive viewpoint, with LGBT+ characters treated very sympathetically by the story. More often than not, the LGBT+ demographic in question has been completely normalized in the setting.
** In ''Literature/{{Distress}}'', the concept of someone being "traditionally" transgender has become a complete and utter non-issue; in addition, five entirely novel gender identities exist: ufem, ifem, asex, imasc, and umasc. Asex is what we would today refer to as gender neutral, but the others refer to varying degrees of femininity or masculinity, ranging from "comically exaggerated gender-specific traits" for the u-genders to "extremely understated gender-specific traits" for the i-genders.
** The main character of ''Literature/{{Teranesia}}'' is a homosexual man. Evolutionary development is a core theme of the novel, so of course the novel examines the question: If facilitating reproduction is the purpose of evolution, and homosexuals don't reproduce, then why does homosexuality occur naturally? The book doesn't offer a definitive answer.
** A ''lot'' of the characters in ''Literature/{{Diaspora}}'' and ''Literature/SchildsLadder'' are gender-neutral, although to be fair, that's because most of those characters exist as software and were created as such, having never been in an actual ''homo sapiens'' body.
** Most of the ''Literature/{{Orthogonal}}'' trilogy is unusually silent on the subject of LGBT issues and characters (the trilogy instead examines issues of gender equality and women's rights), but by the end of the trilogy, the protagonists' initially two-gendered, male/female species has undergone a {{Singularity}} that has resulted in, among other things, a single-gender race that is explicitly considered neither male nor female.

There are others, but I haven't cracked open an Egan book in a long while.