beccaelizabeth | Gender is so weird (Reply)

So I idly invented an alternate gender system for a fantasy world, because everything being the same is boring

so in my world, nobody is assigned a gender, gender and bodies has nothing to do with each other, people just choose to be a man or woman or person and can stay a person their whole lives or switch as many times as they want.

So then I go to populate this world
and I keep gendering everyone
by binary gender.

I made this stuff up and I keep failing at it.

I decided my main character is nonbinary and I keep typing she.

I feel like a fraud.

It's like my brain is so thoroughly colonised I can run through it with a burning flag yelling 'no masters' but in five minutes I'll be back to doing the same old shit anyway.

*sigh*

Some of it is because I'm populating it fanfic style and just throwing characters at it to see where they'd fit, but of course in the source they're basically binary gendered, and basically all cis and not fluid, and then they just end up staying the same and my world is disproportionately white guys again. Which is daft, because I just made it up, it should not be white guys.

Some of it is because it's one thing to set out to disrupt gender by using unfamiliar pronouns or singular they, and quite another to get your fingers to remember. Singular they bugs me, you lose data, but there I am using ambiguously general you and that doesn't bug me, so it's just habit.

Also the per/per/pers/perself pronoun set is tempting but the first per doesn't fit, we have she he they in that slot already, so clearly it should be pe, which is then unfortunate. It can't be Phe because that changes the P sound weirdly, and Peh belongs to another set.

I'm better at typing ze but for some reason best known to my subconscious it doesn't feel like it belongs in this verse.

So just, in general, thanks brain.

I shall type a first draft and then fix it later.

But seriously, gender is weird.