Help With Pronouns and Indeterminate Gender

[Duchessprozac]

I have recently added a new character to one of my stories. The character is a spirit that is very much androgynous, So far I have merely used it when describing 'it' but I am not satisfied using this, and would like to break it up a little.

I have thought about mixing up, 'he' and 'she' depending on whether it seems more masculine/feminine at that moment.

Would this work, or would it just confuse readers?

 

[Saeltari]

I think it would probably just confuse. If you emphasized each time why it was a she or he it might not confuse but it might drag...

 

[HareBrain]

This is like the old-and-never-resolved question of how to refer to God if you think of "it" as some kind of creative force rather than an old man in the sky. We need a new word! Maybe you should invent it and hope it takes off?

 

[Boneman]

Yeah it would confuse.......Either give it a name, for instance 'Georgie' or 'hermie' (as in hermaphrodite) so you can say "Georgie said....." or "where's Georgie?" or refer to it as 'The robot' or some such..... "The robot walked into the room" or "Georgie walked in the room"

 

[Ursa major]

I think changing it would be confusing, even if there was something a bit stronger than "seems" more masculine or feminine at a given moment.


Is the character a relatively central one? If not, you could probably use "spirit" and one or two synonyms, plus one or more parts of the spirit's name, if that's known.


By the way, if your story has a strong POV, and that POV character would tend to use the pronoun "it", stick with that. Perhaps your POV character could ask the spirit what it would like to be called (assuming that this fits in with the story, of course) or what it is, or whether it cares what it is called. (Thinking about it, different POVs might use a different pronoun, depending on how they see the spirit.)

 

[Kith]

On the subject of a new word, IIRC, in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, she does away with gendered pronouns and uses 'per' (as in person) instead. Although it feels strange at first, you quickly get used to it.

I agree that swapping between 'he' and 'she' might get confusing for the reader, although I think it could be done. I'm pretty sure there is a book that has an androgynous character so much so it's never revealed whether they're male or female, but rather unhelpfully I can't remember the title or how the author handled it...

 

[Duchessprozac]

The story has a fixed POV behind the main character, which I could go back and have her decide the spirit is either a he or she, but I like having it seem to shift between the two.

I will eventually have my main character ask its gender but right now they're being chased down by cannibal faeries.

Thanks for your help folks, you've given me some things to think about.

 

[Saeltari]

You know you could enhance the confusion by having your pov character be confused and finally asking about it.

 

[chrispenycate]

Cannibal fairies? They eat other fairies? (they may be anthropophageous, but eating humans wouldn't make them cannibalistic unless they, too, were classed as human.

 

[Duchessprozac]

Cannibal fairies? They eat other fairies? (they may be anthropophageous, but eating humans wouldn't make them cannibalistic unless they, too, were classed as human.

Well their main diet is other faeries, in this story humans and faeries aren't that dissimilar and can easily be confused, which is what has happened in this situation.

 

[Sapheron]

I had a similar problem once. The one character approached the indeterminate one with a sense of confusion, and eventually called it a she on the grounds that he found it bloody annoying (sorry girls). As such, I as the narrator referred to the person in question as a she from there on also.

 

[The Judge]

Do your fairies have a language other than English - or, rather, other than the language you are writing in? If so, create a pronoun in that language specifically for the androgynes.

Otherwise, how about the old favourite s/he?

J

 

[Duchessprozac]

I have been wondering about languages in this story for a while. So far I have settled with English; my line of thinking coming from the fact that Earth has a lot of faerie traffic, so the human languages would be spoken throughout the various planes. I could create a faerie language but at this moment in time it wouldn't be any good as my main character only knows English and a smattering of French she remembers from school.

And being able to ponder on this is answered some of my further questions regarding the language barrier I've been trying to answer. Thanks guys

 

[dustinzgirl]

Is the character truly androgynous, having both male and female characteristics at the same time, or does the character switch gender at will? The second is more a hermaphrodite.

In any case, why not give the character a specific descriptive noun with a preemptive explanation, such as shifter, switcher, or another term. You could even make up a new term, maybe based off the Greek roots of androgyny (aner, man; gyne, woman) or other stuff.

You don't have to use pronouns all that much with a little sentence tweaking.

 

[Blackrook]

The English language does not have a pronoun for androgynous beings. "It" won't work because it implies an inanimate object or an animal. Making up your own pronoun will simply confuse the reader. You must choose "he" or "she" and explain in some other way that your character is not really male or female.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

The English language does not have a pronoun for androgynous beings. "It" won't work because it implies an inanimate object or an animal.

There is one exception to that, however, which is babies. "It" regularly gets applied to unborn babies before the gender is known, and I've heard it used in general statements about newborn infants, too. "It" does sound a bit condescending -- in some circumstances even demeaning -- if applied to an adult humanoid, but if the character in question appears diminutive or childlike in the eyes of the POV character, it might come naturally to call it "it."