Cool. I also couldn’t help reading Key as female. My hypothesis would be that people generally have a hard time writing characters of the opposite sex. Your gender may have leaked in. The Spivak pronouns were initially very distracting but were okay after a couple paragraphs. If you decide to change it Le Guin pretty successfully wrote a whole planet of androgyns using masculine pronouns. But that might not work in a short story without exposition.
Le Guin pretty successfully wrote a whole planet of androgyns using masculine pronouns.
In Left Hand of Darkness, the narrator is an offplanet visitor and the only real male in the setting. He starts his tale by explicitly admitting he can’t understand or accept the locals’ sexual selves (they become male or female for short periods of time, a bit like estrus). He has to psychologically assign them sexes, but he can’t handle a female-only society, so he treats them all as males. There are plot points where he fails to respond appropriately to the explicit feminine side of locals.
This is all very interesting and I liked the novel, but it’s the opposite of passing androgyns as normal in writing a tale. Pronouns are the least of your troubles :-)
I think Key’s apparent femininity might come from a lack of arrogance. Compare Key to, say, Calvin from “Calvin and Hobbes”. Key is extremely polite, willing to admit to ignorance, and seems to project a bit of submissiveness. Also, Key doesn’t demonstrate very much anger over Trellis’s death.
I probably wouldn’t have given the subject a second thought, though, if it wasn’t brought up for discussion here.
If I had to put a gender on Trellis, I’d say that Trellis was more masculine than feminine. (More like Calvin than like Suzie.) Overall, though, it’s fairly gender-neutral writing.
Le Guin pretty successfully wrote a whole planet of androgyns using masculine pronouns
I had read a very fine SF novel, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, in which all the characters are humanoid hermaphrodites, and was wondering at the obduracy of the English language, in which everybody is “he” or “she” and “it” is reserved for typewriters. But how can one call a hermaphrodite “he,” as Miss Le Guin does? I tried (in my head) changing all the masculine pronouns to feminine ones, and marveled at the difference. And then I wondered why Miss Le Guin’s native “hero” is male in every important sexual encounter of his life except that with the human man in the book. ----Joanna Russ, afterword to “When It Changed”
I do typically have an easier time writing female characters than male ones. I probably wouldn’t have tried to write a story with genderless (human) adults, but in children I figured I could probably manage it. (I’ve done some genderless nonhuman adults before and I think I pulled them off.)
Cool. I also couldn’t help reading Key as female. My hypothesis would be that people generally have a hard time writing characters of the opposite sex. Your gender may have leaked in. The Spivak pronouns were initially very distracting but were okay after a couple paragraphs. If you decide to change it Le Guin pretty successfully wrote a whole planet of androgyns using masculine pronouns. But that might not work in a short story without exposition.
In Left Hand of Darkness, the narrator is an offplanet visitor and the only real male in the setting. He starts his tale by explicitly admitting he can’t understand or accept the locals’ sexual selves (they become male or female for short periods of time, a bit like estrus). He has to psychologically assign them sexes, but he can’t handle a female-only society, so he treats them all as males. There are plot points where he fails to respond appropriately to the explicit feminine side of locals.
This is all very interesting and I liked the novel, but it’s the opposite of passing androgyns as normal in writing a tale. Pronouns are the least of your troubles :-)
Later, LeGuin said that she was no longer satisfied with the male pronouns for the Gethenians.
Very good points. It has been a while since I read it.
I think Key’s apparent femininity might come from a lack of arrogance. Compare Key to, say, Calvin from “Calvin and Hobbes”. Key is extremely polite, willing to admit to ignorance, and seems to project a bit of submissiveness. Also, Key doesn’t demonstrate very much anger over Trellis’s death.
I probably wouldn’t have given the subject a second thought, though, if it wasn’t brought up for discussion here.
Everyone’s talking about Key—did anyone get an impression from Trellis?
If I had to put a gender on Trellis, I’d say that Trellis was more masculine than feminine. (More like Calvin than like Suzie.) Overall, though, it’s fairly gender-neutral writing.
I too got the ‘dull sidekick’ vibe, and since dull sidekicks are almost always male these days...
I do typically have an easier time writing female characters than male ones. I probably wouldn’t have tried to write a story with genderless (human) adults, but in children I figured I could probably manage it. (I’ve done some genderless nonhuman adults before and I think I pulled them off.)