Thing: Gender Gap: Gender Discussion/Expression in (Fan)Fiction

[chasingtides]

So, I'm writing a story and I'm unsure of how to label it. Because I came up with this idea in church, I'm going to call it divinely inspired, but I'm mostly exploring boundaries in fiction that I am curious about in real life. And the purpose of exploring these boundaries, is, in part, exploring them as a dialogue, so I will be doing it through

Comments

[not_rude_ginger]

Hi, not sure if this idea will be any help at all, but here we go.

If Jack's got alien ancestors, then perhaps he could have ancestors where there are more than two genders involved in the reproductive act. That way you can avoid the transgender issue, and just have it being a natural part of who Jack is.

I'll give you an example (and hope like hell it makes sense):
I'm writing a Star Trek fic with Andorians, and I'm developing my own theory behind the one liner 'Andorians have marriages of four' which was never explained canonically. Fanon has suggested the Andorians have four genders, which were called thaan, chan, shen and zhen. Now, I considered how this could work, -with little more than a basic understanding of biology mind- but I could imagine that each gender contributes a quarter of the genes required for conception, and that each one has a specific function in the reproduction cycle, as in you can't substitute one for another. Each is a totally seperate gender.

But when Andorians encountered other species and found a large majority had two genders only, they decided to catagorise their own genders to help simplify translation. Thus thaans and chans are considered male, and shens and zhens are female. This isn't actually true, but it was to facilitate communication, and as such, thaans and chans would both be referred to as 'he' and shens and zhens 'she' in other languages, -although I know other alien languages probably have their own pronoun rules and whatnot, but you get what I mean. To the Andorians, it didn't change the fact that each was a seperate gender amongst themselves, but it helped in the translations.

Going on from that, if Jack had, say a 'grandfather' who was an alien, that alien was identified as male to faciliate communication, but was in fact a gender that didn't have a human classification, and that 'grandfather's' gender included the ability to concieve and carry offspring -even if it's only for a portion of the pregnancy- then Jack could have the necessary organs and still be considered male. So you could still use the male pronouns without issue.

Or, you could do as Futurama did and call him 'schlee' and 'schlur', or make up your own pronoun.

I hope that long rambling helped in someway, and feel free to ask for clarification if you need it. :D

Ginger

[chasingtides]

I actually wasn't thinking of Jack as transgender at all, but another sex entirely, outside of male and female. And logistically, if he is, I don't know, a schlee in Boeshane, 20th century English in Cardiff doesn't exactly have word for schlee, since the Welsh in the 20th century haven't encountered Jack's ancestors yet and therefore have no concept of Jack's sex/gender status. If he appears mostly male, then it would probably also be easier to pass as such than to sit people down in 1869 and try to explain that sex is not a binary and, by the way, he's technically still engaging in heterosexual relations when he's with a man, so why don't they let him get married to a man, too?

(I can also only imagine what Victorian Torchwood would put him through if they knew he could carry a child/wasn't male or female. Considering how they tortured him, I'm imagining something like forced pregnancies and then torturing the babies after taking them from him.)

[not_rude_ginger]

Well, that was exactly my point. Jack wouldn't be a transgender at all if he had an alien ancestor who was a totally seperate gender from male and female. But if the ancestor's people encountered humans, say on Boeshane, perhaps they would have catagorised their genders to aid in translations by saying that two of their genders shared some characteristics of human males and the other two had some characteristics of females, so Jack can be called male by everyone in Cardiff, he's happy to identify as male, because in his culture he was, but he was aware that he wasn't the same kind of male as, say, Ianto is. That doesn't make him a transgender, it makes him a seperate gender, but uses the 20th century pronouns because he's used to it from his childhood. And yes, by that logic he is still engaging in heterosexual relationships.

[chasingtides]

Exactly.

Sorry if I was incoherant enough to sound like I was disagreeing with you - mostly I was trying to do a resounding yes while looking at traditional representations of alternate sexes/genders.

[phaetonschariot]

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Trans, like transitory, is a state of change. Transgender is someone who, for example, is born male, but identifies as female and seeks to change their body to match their perception (with variants of stopping at certain points along the way - only having top surgery, having no surgery but wearing female-perceived clothing, etc).

The usual word used for this context is intersexed. Inter, meaning, between. (Though there are problems with this as well - I was reading an article the other day on intersexuality and one commenter noted that they didn't like the term because it sounds like homosexuality/heterosexuality and intersexuality has nothing to do with sexuality. But at least everyone understands what it means, mostly.)

[not_rude_ginger]

Yeah, I did understand the concept that transgender means a change, and that it's a transition from one gender to another, but I did not know the word Intersexed -but it definitely fits what I was trying to say much better. So thank you, that's a new fact for me, and next time I'll be able to be more clear with what I'm saying.