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

well they would have to be similar enough for them to translate to male and female pronouns or else it would make it seem like this was an example of Aliens Speaking English

Edited by Wild-Starfish on Jul 5th 2023 at 9:51:45 AM

Not at all!

English only has a few pronouns, with "male" and "female" being the most prominent I daresay. Thus a translation into English, faced with two alien genders, and having two prominent English genders-names to hand, may well just shoehorn the former into the latter.

[edit] Otherwise, why not just use alien terms? From your description it doesn't seem likely that the alien genders are the same as our "male" and "female" genders, but rather two genders endemic to the alien species. And of course, loanwords into English are not unknown, so it may be that those particular words have been adopted in translation.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Oct 11th 2022 at 6:30:47 PM

the problem is it's really hard to come up with gender roles with no similarity to human ones (at least for me) even though they do already have aesthetic similarities to human genders

edit: using alien genders seems like too much work especially since the primary purpose of coming up with these gender roles is to avoid Fridge Logic on gender not making any sense for beings with No Biological Sex which stretches MY Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Edited by Wild-Starfish on Oct 14th 2022 at 6:04:41 AM

Well, then the aesthetics might give you your answer: they assign pronouns based on appearance, with no bearing being placed on social roles. Or more accurately, they have a word for "person who physically resembles a human woman", which for convenience is just translated as "woman", and similarly for "man", and for all associated pronouns.

It would then be similar to humans having a word for "person with red hair" ("redhead"), but with additional pronouns attached.

Otherwise, maybe it would help to lay out precisely what you have for the species in question: what they look like, what gender roles—or lack thereof—they have, two whom pronouns are applied, and so on.

That way we might have a stronger basis on which to suggest some source for social gender in your species.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Oct 14th 2022 at 12:36:54 PM

the problem with laying out what i have for what the aliens look like is that this a Mons universe where every mon is it's own race and while some are humanoid (in this case the females have skirts and feminine hairstyles^note Long Hair Is Feminine is mostly averted due to a silhouette-esque artstyle) a lot aren't and I can't think of many gender roles that aren't either sexist or based on gracefulness vs brutalness which is already covered under light vs. darkness

All right, I suppose then let's try to work this from first principles:

You have a species that has no biological sex. However, it does have genders. This implies that there's some other feature to the species that can be so divided—that, within a given race, there are further sub-divisions.

So then, the question is: what is this "other feature/set of features" that correlates with their equivalent of "gender"? Note that it may, but needn't, be something physical.

Even if you have genders, why necessarily have gender roles?

For example, amongst humans we have terms for humans with different hair-colours: "blonde", "brunette", "redhead", etc. These describe specific sub-groups of humans—but there's little real assignment of roles to those sub-groups. We don't say that "blondes are the water-carriers of our people", or some such thing.

So it might then be amongst your aliens: they recognise different sub-groups within their races, but don't assign especial importance to them, perhaps aside from preferences in attraction.

I feel like I need to emphasize that these genders are only part of their physical appearance because their physical appearance is determined entirely by their personality (like the gems in Steven Universe)

Okay. In that case... I suppose that they might have cultural role-division that gives rise to genders, and that in turn for cultural reasons they express through specific morphs for specific genders.

Now, that role-division needn't match up with ours.

Perhaps in their culture, those who, say... catch fish are expected to be those who clean and cook and sell it; and further, since their style of fishing is fairly sedentary, they're also expected to be the people who maintain households; and then, since they're most familiar with the state of their specific household, they're expected to manage their family finances; and so on.

That then gives a broad role-division in their culture, which in turn gives rise to a distinction between groups of people, which in turn is expressed through different bodily-morphs, and thus we have something analogous to gender.

(It doesn't entirely work, since gender is usually seen as inherent and fixed, rather than as something related to temperament or personal interests—but I'm really not seeing much else right now on which to base some form of "gender" in these beings.)

If that doesn't work, then perhaps answer me this: In what way do they have different "groups" of people? (Whether it's based on something physiological, psychological, spiritual, or whatever.) Some ideally-inherent feature or set of features by which we can broadly classify them into two or more sets.

These aliens' genders are psychologically inherent although they have to figure out their gender themselves. By the time this story takes place, when you get right down to it, gender is only relevant in a romantic context, however this doesn't mean that only straight people exist. The thing I'm trying to figure out is what led to the aliens being this way, i.e. what's the point of there being a few semantically distinct psychological states of being without the biology to justify it.

If not biology, then I would suggest either psychology or spirituality.

Perhaps they had in their evolutionary past a very rigid system of determining which people had which tasks, and this led over time to distinctions in psychology related to said tasks.

Now, this might lead to the sort of unfortunate implications that you previously mentioned wanting to avoid, of course...

On the spiritual side, perhaps their species simply has more than one type of soul, and what soul one has determines gender in their species.

Otherwise... You say that by the time at which the story takes place, gender has little impact on their lives. Does that imply that there was a time at which it had greater impact on their lives? If so, what impact did it have? That might lead to some inspirations.

I get that, and I'm trying really hard to come up with ways in which it might work.

Perhaps dominant personality vs submissive personality might be one option (potential Unfortunate Implications aside)?

I thought of this from some memory I had of a wildlife documentary I saw about rehabilitating gibbons. The people involved in the rehabilitation programme were trying to get them to mate, and apparently they pair-bond, but it only takes if one is more dominantt and the other more submissive- doesn't matter, though, which is male and which is female. (No doubt it's because if you put two dominant ones together, they'll become aggressive, and if you put two submissive ones together, they'll be too shy and ignore each other. Or something like that.)

Now, this was a while back and could be misremembering it, plus I'm no expert on gibbon mating habits, so I may be wrong.

Either way, I think for your species you need something else inherent in their biology which differentiates them, and some sort of common "opposites attract" or "differences attract" behaviour, even if there are exceptions.

Edited by TheLyniezian on Dec 14th 2022 at 1:30:48 PM

First I think you would have to establish how said species would reproduce e.g a form of Mitosis or spores. Such a thing would not require genders as anyone could reproduce. Now let's say that this species encountered other races who reproduce via Meiosis (sexual reproduction)some members might start to assign themselves genders.

I would see it as a source of Generation conflict.

genders don't imply straightness though, there's different "sexualities"^note well romantic orientations which can lead to Incompatible Orientation it's just that there's no biology to justify this

Edited by Wild-Starfish on Mar 29th 2023 at 1:52:47 PM

Who said that it implies straightness...? Based on an admittedly-quick look over recent posts, I don't see anything that clearly does so.