What are some reasons a species/race with no biological sex would develop genders

I'm writing a video game story where the people of the world are made of Light and Darkness and both kinds of sex don't exist instead they reproduce by combining of piece of themselves with a partners piece of themself to create an egg when the egg hatches instead of being given a name it is given a "root" which they (usually) expand into a name around the same time their gender develops but the thing is while it does change their appearance (because that is affected by their identity) it's entirely a social construct and thus I can't really think of a reason for gender to realistically exist (before you ask i already created characters with explicit genders for the game)

Edited by Wild-Starfish on Aug 3rd 2022 at 2:32:55 PM

Well, "why does sex exist?" is one of the major unsettled questions of biology. Here's Wikipedia's take on it.

Perhaps they might have genders based not on sex, but on their component Light and Darkness?

i prolly should have mentioned light and dark are opposed and there are boys and girls on both sides

also why sex exists in reality is irreverent as like i mentioned their bodies are based on their identity

Edited by Wild-Starfish on Aug 3rd 2022 at 2:31:35 PM

Well, gender IS a social construct. If this species has a social fabric of any kind, they would likely develop gender. Especially since they exist as light and dark beings and thus would likely have opinions on the roles and place of either kind of being.

I'm kind of curious why a light-and-dark species would have boys and girls.

There could be some sort of social standing associated with which parent guards and raises the children and which parent brings the bacon but it wouldn't be as stiff as our concept of genders.

Hmm... I'll confess that, unless we posit gender as a universal (or something like that), I find it unlikely that gender of the "boy and girl" variety would arise without sex (in the anatomical sense, not the action sense).

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Aug 3rd 2022 at 10:11:07 AM

There is no reason to expect a species without biological sex to develop male/female gender roles when they aren't even universal to human cultures.

So, it depends on culture and society, but you can get different roles based on the labor needs for survival/advancement. So, you often need at least one parent to care for a child while they're young and helpless and at least one parent to engage in outside activity (whether that's farming/gathering/hunting/working). What will cluster with each job depends on the tech and the needs (and the risks, is childbearing still a dangerous thing for them?)

So, for most human societies, historically, there are a fairly small number of massive labor sinks:

1) Acquiring food 2) Acquiring clothing 3) Acquiring/maintaining shelter 4) Caring for children/elderly/allies

You can scramble these if you like, but they tend to be gender coded in most human societies, so the genders might read as something to a human audience that isn't accurate?

But for your story, if it's not too much trouble, I might just have the gender terms be a Translation Convention or, of course, they could have learned from humans, some other species. Or just don't address how it arose? There are a lot of different theories on how gender arose in human society, you don't have to explain if you don't want to.

Alternatively, assuming their reproduction has a sexual component, it might simply be a matter of sexual orientation, around which other stereotypes and expectations have accumulated over their history?

Picking it up from another culture?

These two are good ideas, I think—I second them.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Aug 4th 2022 at 9:49:51 PM

They might originally be all genderless and switch the "top" and "bottom" role in their relationship based on who feels what and on the partners' personality.

But after meeting humans some of them chose to perform human genders, but often not always the same human gender, but switching between female, male, and nonbinary presentation. Some just prefer a different presentation than others.

Basically a lot of them use a lot of pronouns including nounself and emoji pronouns.

Only some of them really always present as the same gender. But even then, it's more performative than anything and they often feel more genderless or genderqueer than anything. And often it's to follow tropes they saw in human history and fiction, and decided to imitate.

Their native languages either have no grammatical gender or have a grammatical gender based on noun type or relatedness, and their names may be a diff grammatical gender each and the pronouns could be based on that.

there's no sexual componant to reproduction as i said they each take a piece of themselves and combine them to create an egg

the problem is they do specifically have gendered pronouns or at least something that would translate to them

i'm not 100% percent sure if they would have had contact with humans but that's currently the best option

Genders based on diet?

I mean, that more or less is a sexual component—it's rather like the way that fish spawn, for example.

I might suggest then that it's a closest-translation of a non-sex-based (i.e. non-boy/girl) gender on their part to English, which primarily has sex-based gender.

How widespread is gender for this species, exactly? I mean if they picked it up from others, those with a specific gender identity would probably be a distinct subculture, but are they all like that?

It occurs to me that there might also be a cultural adaptation component as well - aliens who interact with gendered humans on a regular basis choosing a social gender for similar reasons as Chinese international students choosing an English name.

Of course, that also implies that humans collectively retain a normative gender binary in whatever year this story takes place...

I mean, I couldn't really think of any real reason they would have them except for maybe social roles.

This is all turning delightfully roman. Not a care who you fancy, just don't be a bottom.

... How so? (For one thing, no-one has suggested disparagement of any sexual roles in the thread, that I recall.)

It's because gender is being tied to social class. Romans didn't believe in being submissive to anybody lower class than them, even in bed. Other than that they didn't care who you took as a lover and having lots of lovers was seen as a good thing.

For one, that's sexual mores, not gender. The Romans still differentiated men and women based on biology, I imagine.

And, well, since biology has been excluded as a source of genders (the alien species in question doesn't have biological sex), we've been offering various other options—social standing being one of them.

Is it impossible for this species to have a few distinct morphs that lend themselves to an equivalent of "gender roles" despite being biologically sexless? After, even in our sex-possessing species, there is a markedly wide range of body types within a given sex, even though each sex has a rather strong tendency towards certain developmental patterns (e.g. males in general have it far easier to reach high levels of muscular development than females, with the male maximum easily eclipsing the female one).

the story would have to be super far in the future for gendered pronouns to no longer exist and there's no reason to assume that this story doesn't take place in present day

i don't want to imply that gender is tied to traditional gender roles and since the pronouns aren't in English i can't think of anyway to social roles to tie into that without reinforcing those

all the aliens you meet have gender identities so at least a whole kingdom

Well, their tying gender to gender-roles doesn't necessarily imply that they tie the same roles to the same genders.

And indeed, in having a different set of associations, they might show that such associations are social in origin, and thus not inherent.