Genderless Pronouns?
Asked by
dursus (
110)
August 7th, 2011
I am currently writing a book in which my characters constantly switch bodies, using both male and female genders. It would be inaccurate to refer to a character as only “he” or “she” since each the idea is that a character can inhabit both a male and female body. Should I set a single gender throughout the book for each character regardless, use new awkward genderless pronouns, or alternate between pronouns based on the body that the character inhabits at that moment? Open to other suggestions.
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12 Answers
Maybe create a new word, Isaac Asimov created lots of new words for his works and you sound like you might be doing something simmilar. Something along the lines of zygote would be cool sounding. Or use the word entity.
Do they have an original gender?
Is their name male, female, or metro-sexual?
If you were to have to change it every time they switched genders, you may be stuck with saying their names a lot, to avoid confusion. Especially if more than one does it at a time, or in a short time-span. Let me know the answers on those two questions of mine, and I’ll see what we have from there.
Ursula K LeGuin deeals with this in The Left Hand of Darkness. I don’t remember exactly how, but you might want to take a look.
It.
You could loan the german “das” and its derivative “es”.
I sometimes use s’he and hir for such purposes. However, any genderless pronoun might be very foreign to your readers, enough to knock them out of the flow of the story. It might be a good idea to put a short intro about why you chose to use them, if you can’t work the usual words into the story based upon what sort of body the character is occupying at the time, or whatever the characters feel like they “really” are.
Depending if the mind of the character has grown up in a specific gender or not, either use the pronoun it grew used to or if it is mentally gender-neutral as well call it “it”.
Use he/him when the character is acting as a male and she/her when it’s acting as a female. Also trans if it’s acting as both.
Just go with the character’s base gender. “It” is not a very helpful pronoun.
Check out the Quantum Leap books; they employ an effective system for their body-surfer. IIRC, they kept his pronouns when using his POV, but switched to the host’s pronouns for everything else. Most of a given book is from his POV.
you could use “their” or just use their name
Prosb, All of the characters are originally male. However, very few characters in the book identify as strictly male, preferring to use both male and female bodies. I don’t want to have a base gender because it detracts from the idea of being able to have multiple bodies of all types. In my head, though, the characters have genders that match up with their names. Turzer – Male, Lianata – Female, Renato – Male, Omiso – Male.
How do you feel about pronouns like ze?
Could you use a masculine and feminine version of the same name for each gender-switching character—e.g., Renata/Renato—to help readers keep them straight? Then go with the pronoun that suits the gender at the moment.
Or—do characters remain male in their minds, despite the shape of their bodies? In that case I’d say use the pronoun that suits their identities, regardless of the appearance of their external parts. I’d rather see “Renato chose a dress that accentuated the shape of his female breasts” than something contrived with “hir” or “ze” or any other made-up word that has not taken root in the language.
If readers have to work too hard to follow the story, they won’t stay with you.
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