Ertakar and Gender
Now that I've laid down my 'journey' in self-describing my own identity and what it meant to me, there was also something else that had been happening side by side at the same time that also contributed to my ability to detach the elements involved in the first place. And that was world-building my Ertakar before and during the time I was dissecting elements of gender. (I'm writing this with a headache so I may go back and retool some things for clarity, later)
For those that may be unfamiliar, my Ertrakar are an alien species of mine who are visually very reminiscent of dragons, but are not dragons. They've been around for a very long time, not as long as Talon herself but since around 2000-2001 ish. They've gone through a lot of fiddly changes, mostly centered around me better describing the thing I want to accomplish but have more or less remained the same. But one of the biggest things I put a lot of time and thought into, was their society and culture, and much of it is in relation to presentation.
In 2006 they had mild sexual dimorphism that I really only added out of feeling like I needed to, but around the time I was questioning myself about gender is around the time I removed the 'need' to give them any form of difference. I don't have an exact time frame where this happened, I don’t think I wrote it down, it was kinda just in my head. But after doing this, this made me think a lot about gender roles and how things change when a society does not have them.
I thought about how visual appearances have gone a long way to categorize others, gender of course being one of those categories. If there’s no visual cues, then the need to categorize will turn to other visual markers that have nothing to do with hormone-specific visual markers. That already changes how the concept of gender and presentation manifests. Once I removed the concept of there being any visual difference some of the things that caused us to 'gender' others in our society started to drop away.
In addition to this I thought about how the fact that they don't breastfeed might change the formation of society. Removing the dependency of breasts from the act of child-rearing meant anyone could perform the task of feeding the young, which often in other species leads to the act of both partners taking turns in hunting and child-rearing. As they are facultative carnivores that cannot survive on crop alone it would mean the whole act of settling and farming wouldn’t factor into their culture child-rearing, either. This also lends to there being even less difference in the ‘roles’ societies and cultures might form.
So, as I found myself stripping away more and more and more of the societal/cultural elements that make 'man' and 'woman' and realizing there was at its core, no real difference. At best there are certain 'hormonal predispositions' but these traits can manifest in anyone, wholly based on the various different cocktail of hormones each person has. So instead of looking at it like One or the Other with a few inbetweens, It's more like a bell curve of likely hormone traits based on what your gonads prefers to favor producing. And that fluid and mixed feeling is something I wanted to elevate in the societies I had. Instead, roles and cultures would structure around survival strategies based on the environment.
In 2013 is when I finally put to word that one of the biggest Ertakar languages did not use gendered pronouns, but instead a mix of Familiar and Unfamiliar pronouns. There is a feeling of equal footing for anyone; creators, nurturers, teachers, soldiers, leaders, whatever the case may be, these roles would belong to anyone.
In exercising the idea societal roles, one culture I've been tooling with but haven't written down is one where the ancient culture that developed in the cold north. An Erta colony had moved to for freedom of territory after an altercation, but the scarcity of game and cold conditions created a lifestyle that was difficult and forced them to live very rigidly to survive. This led to a pronoun system based on the value an individual has to the colony as a whole; Protected, Valuable, and Expendable pronouns. Modern advances have long since made this sort of structure no longer an issue but the concepts still linger on in their culture and language (as well as how outsiders perceive them and their culture).
Could there be societies that develop Gender roles? Yes, there’s always a possibility for anything, but structure of that nature would be considered the outlier, rather than the norm. (also they wouldn't look like the same way humans construct 'gender roles')
This means that most Ertakar find the concept of the Human Gender model, a fascinating novelty. Their relation to the use of pronouns, presentation, and 'gender' would be endlessly flexible, like digging through an accessory box and throwing on whatever they feel is fanciest for whatever rhyme or reason. Many of them may use the pronouns most commonly associated with male or female that humans seem to default to, mostly because they assume that's doing humans a 'courtesy', some use whatever they think they like the sound of more, and many of them find the very act of using gendered human-language pronouns an insult to and erasing of, their culture.
There is a lot of freedom and natural-ness to me in this sort of endlessly flexible grab-bag of presentation and expression Ertakar can have. It’s funny because I found myself resonating more with this core society and ideology than I ever had with the world around me. And this is why I was able to strip everything else away and realize my gender was in the Words, and in doing this I found this joy in which I could define what it meant for myself, detached of what it might have meant to other people. I could custom build what girl and woman meant to me, and how I defined and presented it, just like they could. Everything else was ultimately, inconsequential. (for the self, that is, not so much inconsequential to current lived society at large. Sadly can’t make that part inconsequential, I know that far well enough.) I don't know if I would have come to that conclusion on my own without creating them, but it's true that both the discovery of myself, and them, are intrinsically tied.
For those that may be unfamiliar, my Ertrakar are an alien species of mine who are visually very reminiscent of dragons, but are not dragons. They've been around for a very long time, not as long as Talon herself but since around 2000-2001 ish. They've gone through a lot of fiddly changes, mostly centered around me better describing the thing I want to accomplish but have more or less remained the same. But one of the biggest things I put a lot of time and thought into, was their society and culture, and much of it is in relation to presentation.
In 2006 they had mild sexual dimorphism that I really only added out of feeling like I needed to, but around the time I was questioning myself about gender is around the time I removed the 'need' to give them any form of difference. I don't have an exact time frame where this happened, I don’t think I wrote it down, it was kinda just in my head. But after doing this, this made me think a lot about gender roles and how things change when a society does not have them.
I thought about how visual appearances have gone a long way to categorize others, gender of course being one of those categories. If there’s no visual cues, then the need to categorize will turn to other visual markers that have nothing to do with hormone-specific visual markers. That already changes how the concept of gender and presentation manifests. Once I removed the concept of there being any visual difference some of the things that caused us to 'gender' others in our society started to drop away.
In addition to this I thought about how the fact that they don't breastfeed might change the formation of society. Removing the dependency of breasts from the act of child-rearing meant anyone could perform the task of feeding the young, which often in other species leads to the act of both partners taking turns in hunting and child-rearing. As they are facultative carnivores that cannot survive on crop alone it would mean the whole act of settling and farming wouldn’t factor into their culture child-rearing, either. This also lends to there being even less difference in the ‘roles’ societies and cultures might form.
So, as I found myself stripping away more and more and more of the societal/cultural elements that make 'man' and 'woman' and realizing there was at its core, no real difference. At best there are certain 'hormonal predispositions' but these traits can manifest in anyone, wholly based on the various different cocktail of hormones each person has. So instead of looking at it like One or the Other with a few inbetweens, It's more like a bell curve of likely hormone traits based on what your gonads prefers to favor producing. And that fluid and mixed feeling is something I wanted to elevate in the societies I had. Instead, roles and cultures would structure around survival strategies based on the environment.
In 2013 is when I finally put to word that one of the biggest Ertakar languages did not use gendered pronouns, but instead a mix of Familiar and Unfamiliar pronouns. There is a feeling of equal footing for anyone; creators, nurturers, teachers, soldiers, leaders, whatever the case may be, these roles would belong to anyone.
In exercising the idea societal roles, one culture I've been tooling with but haven't written down is one where the ancient culture that developed in the cold north. An Erta colony had moved to for freedom of territory after an altercation, but the scarcity of game and cold conditions created a lifestyle that was difficult and forced them to live very rigidly to survive. This led to a pronoun system based on the value an individual has to the colony as a whole; Protected, Valuable, and Expendable pronouns. Modern advances have long since made this sort of structure no longer an issue but the concepts still linger on in their culture and language (as well as how outsiders perceive them and their culture).
Could there be societies that develop Gender roles? Yes, there’s always a possibility for anything, but structure of that nature would be considered the outlier, rather than the norm. (also they wouldn't look like the same way humans construct 'gender roles')
This means that most Ertakar find the concept of the Human Gender model, a fascinating novelty. Their relation to the use of pronouns, presentation, and 'gender' would be endlessly flexible, like digging through an accessory box and throwing on whatever they feel is fanciest for whatever rhyme or reason. Many of them may use the pronouns most commonly associated with male or female that humans seem to default to, mostly because they assume that's doing humans a 'courtesy', some use whatever they think they like the sound of more, and many of them find the very act of using gendered human-language pronouns an insult to and erasing of, their culture.
There is a lot of freedom and natural-ness to me in this sort of endlessly flexible grab-bag of presentation and expression Ertakar can have. It’s funny because I found myself resonating more with this core society and ideology than I ever had with the world around me. And this is why I was able to strip everything else away and realize my gender was in the Words, and in doing this I found this joy in which I could define what it meant for myself, detached of what it might have meant to other people. I could custom build what girl and woman meant to me, and how I defined and presented it, just like they could. Everything else was ultimately, inconsequential. (for the self, that is, not so much inconsequential to current lived society at large. Sadly can’t make that part inconsequential, I know that far well enough.) I don't know if I would have come to that conclusion on my own without creating them, but it's true that both the discovery of myself, and them, are intrinsically tied.