Appurtenant Equity

The book I’m currently reading has an interesting conceit (it’s also just a really good book, and that seems to be a common opinion):

The language in which most of the characters think and interact (helpfully “translated” into English for your reading convenience, of course) has no genders.  And I don’t just mean gendered nouns like in Romance languages.  I mean that there are literally not different pronouns for different genders of people.

Instead, everyone is referred to as “she”.

It takes a few pages to realize what’s going on; at least, it did for me.  After all, it could just be that the characters you meet initially are all female.  However, as the main character is mentally switching languages, she notes that she’ll now actually have to account for gender in her speech (which, incidentally, she’s really bad at recognizing), and you wind up reading a sentence that goes something like, “She was male.”

I spent the next couple of chapters trying to discern if each character was actually male or female, despite them all being referred to as “she”.  As I recall, you’re actually only explicitly told about a couple, and I’m honestly not sure you ever know about the main character.

Meet a new character: Are they male or female?  Two characters get romantically involved: What genders are they?  I’d struggle to parse their words, to scry using their actions and behaviors.  And then I realized that I had a shortcut.

I stopped caring.

Because why does it matter what gender these characters are?  What does it matter if the captain is a man or a woman?  Or the main character?  Or the ruler of the largest empire in the known universe?

Seriously, what does it matter?

In all honestly, the characters are written such that most could be either, and that’s probably deliberate.  So why waste time trying to determine something that doesn’t actually have an impact on the story?

Because it’s really hard not to, that’s why.  To be honest, rather than not even thinking about the gender of each character, I’ve just slipped into a default of assuming that everyone is female, mostly because of the pronoun choice (including those we actually learned are male, because it’s hard to remember who they are when they keep being referred to with feminine pronouns anyways).  It’s not ideal, because I’m still mentally assigning a gender to all of the different characters, rather than truly not caring, but there are far worse things than a sci-fi world where all of the characters are women.

(And incidentally, I think choosing to use “she” instead of “he” or “it” or some made-up pronoun was a fantastic choice, given the likely audience.  Sci-fi is highly (though certainly not exclusively) male-dominated, in character choice, authorship and readership, and female authors and strong characters can get a lot of blowback.  Instead of Gamergate, it’s Sad Puppies, but the same misogynistic principles apply.  (You may think I’m making that name up, and I wish I were.  But then, I wish I were making the whole concept up. I’m not.))

As human beings, we’re trained both evolutionarily and societally to make judgments about things and people, and to categorize and pigeonhole.  We want to know where everyone and everything fits into our worldview.  And we create rubrics for doing so.

Above, I mentioned trying to determine the gender of characters based on their words and actions.  Did you even really question that?  Probably not, because it’s so natural to how we deal with the world.

And what was I basing those attempts at judgment on?  Men act a certain way; women talk a certain way, and so on.  Stereotypes at the most basic level, so ingrained that it takes a serious mental struggle to even realize we’re using them, let alone get past doing so.

But once you can, it’s kind of liberating, and this book actually makes a lot of sense.  Of COURSE it’s difficult to tell from behavioral or speech clues whether a character is male or female.  In a truly gender-neutral society – one to the point of only gender-neutral pronouns – most of those stereotypes fall away.

It’s hard to even describe what something like that would mean, because our language is so geared around this concept.  You can’t say something like “women act like men”, because that implies expected behaviors associated with the genders.  Everyone just acts like themselves, and there's no correlation between any given behavior and gender.  In this book, there are still class struggles, job roles, etc., and behaviors associated with those, just as there are in our society today.  There’s just no expected behaviors based on gender.

And that brings me to the stupidity surrounding what’s currently going on with Target.

(I swear, when I started writing this, I had no intention of segueing into anything; I think it’s a cool enough topic to stand on its own.  (I’m sure it’s not particularly novel to people who studied things like this in college, or who do things like this for a living, but we all come to ideas at different times, in different ways, and this is cool to me now.  And it shows one of my favorite things about SFF, which is the ability to naturally address ideas like this by being freed from the constraints of contemporary or historical society.)  But it’s such a natural segue that I can’t help it.)

I understand why people are upset about Target getting rid of gender-based labeling for kids’ stuff.  It’s a big shift that’s counter to a lot of peoples’ worldviews, and that rarely goes over easily or well.  And, of course, as with everything these days, there’s a political component to it, as well, which I’m going to blow right by.

But here’s the thing.  We want the world to be open to our kids, right?  Want them to feel like they can do whatever they want?  (In a purpose-of-life sense, not in an everyday sense.  No way my kid’s doing whatever he wants every day.  Disaster would ensue.)  Then why should we limit them based on our own preconceived notions of what’s appropriate for them to play with or sleep in or wear?  Sure, girls and boys may be different, but how much of that is nature, and how much is actually nurture?  Any why not allow those differences, if they exist, to manifest on their own, rather than forcing the issue?

I know this isn’t new.  Even before Target, there have been incredible amounts of discussion regarding the appropriateness of gender-discriminated toys (I recently saw the hashtags #stillagirl and #stillaboy, which are freaking fantastic), and I’m sure everyone has heard both sides of the argument, even if they haven’t really understood them, or even taken the time to really listen.

But my experience reading this book, the glimpse I’ve gotten of a different world with no gender distinctions at all, has really made the ongoing discussion resonate with me, in large part because even though I consider myself open-minded, I’ve realized that there’s still a lot of subconscious cultural baggage I’m carrying around without even noticing.

Toys and clothes are just the tip of the iceberg.  I normally try not to make value judgments for or about other people, but I honestly think that reducing the influence gender has on our society can only be a positive in the long run.  (And in the short run, maybe I would have been subjected to a lot less coverage of Caitlyn Jenner.  Not that I object to her decision – quite the opposite, actually – but I just got sick of seeing so much about it.  I honestly don’t think it takes anything away from her to say that it shouldn’t have been a big deal in the first place, and the fact that it was says a lot more about the rest of us than it does her.)

Every day, I see some article about how women are paid less, or about how their vocal mannerisms are considered “weaker” or “less confident”; doing something “like a girl” is still an insult; boys are mocked for interest in stereotypically “female” activities and pursuits.  This sort of thing is ingrained into our culture (and pretty much every culture).

Sure, changing language isn’t a panacea.  It’s not going to change the way people think and act overnight.  But I also think it’s significantly underrated, because language is how you deal with and interpret the world.  (This is, and will be, a whole separate blog post, so I don’t want to get into it too much here.)  And how can treating people more equally than we do now be a bad thing?

Anyways, it’s a good book.  If you’re into sci-fi, give it a look.