sonneillonv:
I never realized how dependent I have been on gender-specific terms. How pronouns are used as a crutch. How much my writing has to change when one of my characters is agender and can’t be referred to by ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘zie’, or ‘ze’, or even ‘they’ in most contexts because the fact that it’s supposed to be a singular ‘they’ won’t be apparent. I’m using so much passive voice it’s driving me up the wall, re-arranging all my sentences, contorting myself verbally to construct paragraphs that don’t require me to use Jay’s name a million times in three lines. I think part of this difficulty comes from moving in circles where PGP is a thing. Jay doesn’t even know that other gender pronouns exist so Jay hasn’t really had the option to pick another set and thus make things easier on me. All Jay knows is that they have no interest whatsoever in womanhood and they like when people mistake them for male, mostly because Jay has swallowed some of the cultural kool-aid that says male is the ‘default’ sex, so male feels more neutral than female to Jay - it’s that ‘women are a special interest group’ mindset in microcosm.
What Jay really is, of course, is genderless, but Jay’s never heard of that, and only Katrina (who first met Jay online and declined to assign Jay a gender because she never saw the necessity of doing so) has started tentatively putting words to it. Jay’s answer to gender questions is, “just call me ‘Jay’”, which is great, and I’m perfectly happy to do that, but holy fuck, I wish they’d pick a more versatile set, one with different cases that would allow me to more easily differentiate between subject and object. >_<
I have this problem a lot. When I do my high fantasy or sci-fi stories I have a lot of issues with gender. I dislike gender binary and I don’t use it. I have entire races of people where I have no bloody pronouns. So I make some up. It’s useful to have a character to introduce that short of thing but if you can’t… well, I have a little pronoun table in the beginning of it for reference.
I’m not going to erase my work to conform. If a character has a gender that doesn’t match the binary or doesn’t have a gender, then that’s how it is. It drives me crazy having to figure out how to write it without dropkicking the reader out of the narrative.
I’m drunk and rambling. Sorry folks.
You know you’re pissed with you ISP when you’re researching new companies while on the phone with you current ISP’s troubleshooting helpline. I fucking hate my ISP. FUCKING HATE.
