Worlds without gender

the response to this topic on a predominantly cishet forum is what inspired me to make this in the first place.
When our worldview and language is so built up around the construct of two rigid genders, how do you write something outside of that?

the only published thing I've read that does this is Left Hand of Darkness. it's set on a world where the inhabitants have a very different gender system (if any at all?) due to having no sexual characteristics outside of their mating cycles. in some ways this society still reflects our own society's values (as writing from our society is wont to do), as they view humans the same as any in their society that genetically retain sexual characteristics consistently: as deviants.

I really respect the thought Ursula K. Le Guin put into what systems of oppression this society would have with its own views of gender, and I especially appreciate that she so directly acknowledges the existence of intersex people and other outliers. But even this example reflects how much our own perspectives shape what we try to write: Le Guin uses "he" for all of these primarily-genderless people. She later said she regretted not using a gender neutral pronoun, but male as the neutral is ingrained in us from birth.

But that's just one form a society's gender could take. our views of gender are all determined by culture and the history of our culture, so there are infinite possibilities to match the infinite types of cultures you could create. you could write worlds where gender is not a concept at all, but what might you have to do to build that up when our reality shapes what we know?

I find myself often tripping over the question of gender in foreign worlds, unexpectedly, on accident. I write "mother" - referring to the bearer of a child. And I think, does that determine they're a woman? Does that determine they bore the child? what is this society's perception of motherhood? what is its perception of women? does it have one? and these can be very daunting questions that open whole new cans of worms at every corner. worldbuilding often feels like tugging at a thread and discovering it won't anchor in until you weave a whole patch around it - but gender is... gender feels Central to humanity as it is. gender feels like the entire weft. and when you're working to build something entirely new, you keep seeing the ghost of that weft, tripping over it like a missing stair step, wondering how in the hell you're going to fill its place.

no matter how far I drift from the boxes of cis-heteronormativity, I still find it difficult to think outside that box in writing.

do you have any advice on challenging gender norms in writing and worldbuilding? or any examples you've done in your own work or read in others'?

Personally I tackled this question in a different way... what if I reshaped the society's view of gender to include people rather than to exclude people and then made the definitions of gendered English words more fuzzy over time. In another words, "Mother" could be recategorized as it already is in English and made fuzzier through the application of the word. One can back this with anthropology as the primary caretaker is often called with an m sound through baby babble.

Words like "Wife" and "Husband" can also be reworked as well. And so on.

Instead of saying, this word is gendered and I have nothing I can do with it, indicate the way you are defining it within the story and remake the word so it's closer to genderless, but instead defines a new role for the word.

I hope that makes sense?

In addition, I still think it's odd that English makes us "guess" the gender of the other person. So I bypassed that too by making a comment about first person pronouns being gendered in *other* languages. But no imagination for any pronouns being gendered in the languages they are speaking in, so you get a sense it doesn't matter. (I took it from discussions of Japanese and Korean, but took out the gendered honorifics which were liquid to start with.)

I also delayed when the child announces their gender, though if they consistently present a certain way, the characters use "he" "she" and occasionally to mess with the reader anyway, I mix up the gender presentation and then use a gendered pronoun of the opposite presentation because it doesn't matter and there are NBs like that too--where they feel like they are more feminine, and agender, but use masculine pronouns. How they present, they can change as they like and I have a mage come every five-ish years to let people change their physical sex (basing off of East Asian media like Ranma 1/2, etc which pleased me a lot as an NB) And anyone above 15 years (13 in Earth age) can for a small price change their physical sex as they like with clear consent. If they change their mind, they can change in another five years.

I'm pretty sure that European media is going to hate the last rule, but I'm like, I know enough from the trans community, etc that just because you changed your physical sex, it doesn't make you less trans. And I'd prefer to have the debate than not. A lot more East Asian folktales and such have gender fluidity built into stories than European. I did see some white trans fol;ks flip out on twitter once over the idea of magicking away the pain of surgery, but I'm not making it no price at all, just a minor one, which shares the joy part of transitioning--getting used to your new body in space.

I figure an NB could wish to flip every five years if they'd like and are willing to pay the price.

Of course Intersex can opt in or opt out, but from what I know, it still won't make you "less intersex" to transition.

I'm trying to go full in with something more queer than the Left Hand of Darkness.

But then I thought this system was simply not queer enough, and then made one without the binary at all, and made a 13 gender system not based on genitals, effectively making the whole culture NB from the word go. And probably something that will make people flip out, attached a magic system to the 13-gender system. Kinda made me pleased, to be honest. Made my NB heart go pitterpatter because I'm sure people will flip out at this sort of system.

'cause NB is more than agender, so I wanted to see if I could play with what gender is and explore it more deeply and what it means to come from a culture that has gender one way and then be forced into a more rigid system. And equally for people who straddle both systems, what does it mean to define your gender?

I'm fairly sure that white people are going to hate this system, but meh, following somewhat East Asian rules and playing around with them.

I also had to redefine sexual orientation as well, since I reworked the gender system. ^^;; And I'm fairly sure people will dislike that too, but I couldn't deal with the whole planetary Lesbos thing neatly, so rethought about how to do it instead. Doesn't mean there isn't same gender attraction, etc. Just means I had to take away the common labels to include NBs neatly without a long list of labels to memorize.

KimYoonmi wrote:
Instead of saying, this word is gendered and I have nothing I can do with it, indicate the way you are defining it within the story and remake the word so it's closer to genderless, but instead defines a new role for the word.

I hope that makes sense?

I think that makes a lot of sense and is a great way to tackle it! I guess you can redefine anything as long as you make it clear that's what you're doing. as long as you can guide the reader in a suspension of disbelief. that's what writing is, at its core, anyway, right?

KimYoonmi wrote:
and occasionally to mess with the reader anyway, I mix up the gender presentation and then use a gendered pronoun of the opposite presentation because it doesn't matter and there are NBs like that too--where they feel like they are more feminine, and agender, but use masculine pronouns. How they present, they can change as they like and I have a mage come every five-ish years to let people change their physical sex
(...)
But then I thought this system was simply not queer enough, and then made one without the binary at all, and made a 13 gender system not based on genitals, effectively making the whole culture NB from the word go. And probably something that will make people flip out, attached a magic system to the 13-gender system.

god, that's awesome, I love that!! there's so much freedom and imagination in terms of building magic systems, recognizing that there's no one right way to do it because it's magic and it's a construct, and. I just think it's so cool to see gender viewed and written in the same way, and then combining the two - they're both major factors in how a society would function and view its individuals, so I love it, they play into each other, they can be part of each other.

KimYoonmi wrote:
If they change their mind, they can change in another five years. I'm pretty sure that European media is going to hate the last rule, but I'm like, I know enough from the trans community, etc that just because you changed your physical sex, it doesn't make you less trans.

so true! I know a few people who have "detransitioned" and are still considered transgender by themselves and other trans people. there's even some referral to them being, for example, "ftmtf", for "female to male to female", it being considered just another transition. in the same way gender isn't a binary, cisness and transness isn't a binary either. everyone transforms naturally over the course of their life in a lot of ways, and that can include sexuality and gender. and transformation is often a winding road, not a straight one.

KimYoonmi wrote:
I also had to redefine sexual orientation as well, since I reworked the gender system. ^^;;

oh yeah, of course. our sexuality system is based around our gender system, after all.
there's definitely a lot of people out there who say they like the aspect of fiction and fantasy that involves exploring how different worlds and societies could be from our own, and then act like any deviation from our restrictive and binary ideas of gender and sexuality is impossible and makes no sense. it's baffling! but anything that ignores that and explores the possibilities anyway, I think, goes a long ways towards challenging those views, and also just a long ways towards making the world of art a better place for transgender people and anyone outside the binary. plus it just makes for cool worlds. you've got a a lot of awesome ideas here, I think

Did you see:
The REAL History of Gender with Dr. Kit Heyam - Factually! - 241

The discussion around Anne Lister is exactly why I wanted to redo the sexual oritnation section so sexuality and sexual orientation is not defined by a label of gender specifically as an identity, but rather a list of what your attractions are by romance, gender, and sexual attractions.

So it's less I am Lesbian.

And more like, I have sexual attraction, limited sexual attraction, etc. So presenting the definitions over "This is my core identity and if you take this figure away, you're betraying me and my whole community."

I suppose people won't really like the fact I took away the "Lesbian" sort of label, and redid it this way... but after watching people flip out over the fact Elliot page "wasn't a lesbian anymore and probably never was." I kinda felt it was ridiculous to define a label by what gender you are in relation to what gender the other person is in order to define the attraction. Shouldn't it just be the attraction itself that defines the thing, rather than how cishet you are?

If society did it that way and wasn't as uptight, I wondered what would shake out of it.

What we defined as cishet male person would then be free to say to a "lesbian", I think that woman is cute. Instead of guessing the genitals and gender of the person before you meet them. "Do they identify as a lesbian or bisexual or omni or pan?" I kinda got tired of the politics of that around transness. "OMG, this person is no longer one of us." So I wanted to create a world where that removal of betrayal couldn't exist.

Instead of "What label are they?" Give the freedom of the individual to express what those things are on their own terms in such a way it doesn't "subtract" if they mess around with one or the other. Because I kinda have felt uneasy how much sexual orientation and gender are tied together from a European perspective whereas some other regions see them as independent, fluid, etc. (though I suppose this is a super liberal queer PoV)

IIRC sometimes Germany views experimenting with homosexuality as an (excuse this language) immature PoV, but still a "stage everyone goes through." At least I heard that from Germans, but it might not be true any longer or completely false, but I kinda like the idea that fluidity can be in both, especially given some trans people who do go through transitioning (whether through hormones, surgery or simply clothes) start to question their sexual orientations as well and find them changing with their gender ID. Probably would make the "We were born this way" people nervous, but I'm fine with that.

In the ace community we recognize people who might have become ace through trauma and if they stay or leave, who are we to judge?

KimYoonmi, I haven't heard that! Though I've listened to Queer As Fact's episode on Anne Lister so I'm super interested to look into it.

That philosophy around Elliot Page is one I agree with. People act like there's hard barriers inbetween gender and sexual identities, when they're all just cultural ideas and only really mean anything to the individual involved.

Germany probably has some unique views on gender and sexuality - it was a pretty progressive center of experimentation & research regarding it prior to world war 2, and the majority of the books the Nazis burned were the records from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, run by the gay man Magnus Hirschfeld who pioneered modern gender affirmation surgery and hormone replacement therapy. So there's probably conflict between different views & also what was lost in the war, swirling about in the modern culture. Germany also happens to be a hub of furry culture, which overlaps a lot with queer culture.

But I think the idea of queer experimentation being a part of youth is in a lot of places, too. It was a generally accepted mainstay of british girls' boarding schools, and of many men's universities

i think a good approach to world-building is to let yourself be loose and have fun with it, because your original ideas might get turned over and over again until it finally settles into what you want it to be.

i only just realized that this question of gender is going to be something i will need to address in my own world-building for a story i am currently planning. (introducing completely made up species that i want to stress are foreign and do not work how humans work)

i have found that picking a small number of key features that i needed for the story helped narrow how i thought about the gender roles for specific species. for example, im thinking of making one of the species based off of mushrooms, and mushrooms have over 23,000 sexes, so for them it might be more like every one of them is their own unique gender. and since my main character might not interact with a ton of them i should focus on creating and identifying a few characters and leave the rest of the 23,000+ sexes to the readers imagination. (i havent actually sat down and designed how this species is supposed to look yet, which might influence how their gender presentation works)

some questions you could think about while coming up with how gender functions is; how does reproduction work? is reproduction tied to gender? is gender culturally important? what influences would gender have in your world? is gender actually important to the story? does society function around gender or does gender function around society? what differences are there to show between genders? how would someone change their gender if they wanted to?

I think KimYoonmi’s suggestion with making word meanings fuzzy is really good. otherwise you are faced with coming up with a whole new set of words for to gender your people. it reminds me of an author (that i cant remember the name of) who took the same word for what we call a specific type of cake, and used it in a fantasy world and then explained how it came to be named that in the fantasy world. they basically reworked how the object was made to fit into their world instead of coming up with a new name for it.

for myself, i personally put gender on the back burner. its not what i think about first when creating. i'll probably fit it in when i start getting the basic structures figured out and start sketching how the species should look. granted my current project has me working primarily with fantasy species and not humans.

you could pencil in an idea for how you want gender to work, and try and flesh it out experimentally and see if it can hold its own or works with your story. if not you can file it away for some other use or rework it.

sidenote: looks like i need to read left hand of darkness and seek out that factually episode cuz those sound interesting.

bewitchedbat wrote:

some questions you could think about while coming up with how gender functions is; how does reproduction work? is reproduction tied to gender? is gender culturally important? what influences would gender have in your world? is gender actually important to the story? does society function around gender or does gender function around society? what differences are there to show between genders? how would someone change their gender if they wanted to?

Gender and sex, as in the genitals of the person and their reporductive organs are different things though.

There is no problem for say a trans guy to be gay and end up with a gay man and then having a child. People think this is hard in current US/UK, mostly culture, but it's not as if people can't figure it out. What will we do if people are allowed to express their gender however they want--how will they reproduce? Some of them won't, but some of them don't want to, and some of them will.

And culture can be independently culturally independent and not have to work for an entire world anyway. This was my issue with the McCaffrey PERN series. Things were too static on one hand, gender presentations never really changed that much over time, and the cultural differences were minor. Even with the globalization network she had, it wasn't enough to explain why it was so unbelievably stable and read a lot like the gender of the time period she was writing.

Since gender is a human invention, mostly, and maybe of presentation because you need clothes, etc, and there has always been body modification, such as tattoos, I would think it would mainly derive from there?

For me, I think it's more important to ask who controls the gender presentations and who defines the ideals and WHY? WHY do they want the gender presentations to be the way they are supposed to be "ideally" and then go from there.

The rules for culture handed to me were:
Culture Lies to you and says it's never changing, when it is. Humans retcon and lose information all of the time and then argue whatever culture is, that it's natural. When it isn't. Gender is like this too.
Culture tries to define the greys into black and white, but in doing so always kicks someone out (though this is kind of European thinking, but arguing over Levi-strauss and structuralism is a headache, even if it's fair to do so)
Culture creates an ideal you can never achieve and thus kicks people out.

I've yet to meet a woman that typifies the perfect woman in the ideal stereotype. Not a single woman I've met wears all pink all of the time, has perfect makeup 24-7, the perfect "ideal" measurements, and can't get slammed by men or women because she's this ideal woman. It's been argued again and again, this sort of person never existed because of the inherent contradictions that arise when you create the ideal.

So, I tend to think my job is to create an ideal and then tear that ideal down by making everyone that is supposed to neatly fall into it, fail on some level. And then change and scramble that ideal and then still have people fail to meet it. And to me, that sounds a lot like culture. 'cause I've never, ever met this "ideal" man and if you ask people what an "Ideal" man is from the stereotype perspective the majority of cishet women will proclaim he 1. Doesn't exist. 2. He's an AH and they don't want anything to do with him. While Incels call him Chad or whatever. But have you ever met someone who everyone would call the quintessential man?

And this is where it gets fun, but also fun to background, I would think. Even if your world is binary, you can mess with the ideal to question things about say the US or UK.


BTW, IIRC, mushrooms are more like the fruit, rather than the actual organism. Spores are interesting in general, but mushrooms are a result, not the entire animal, or as it were, animal/plant. It's more like the fruit, the child, the president. But making that idea into a species where the entire colony is hoping on one child and they need a gender presentation... now that could be interesting.

KimYoonmi wrote:Gender and sex, as in the genitals of the person and their reporductive organs are different things though.

lol dont worry, im not stuck in biology 101, i know that gender doesnt equal sex, thats why those questions are worded the way they are. these are just leading questions to get you to think more deeply into how your world works when you are starting at square one

our animal world is predominantly binary, reproduction wise. we need a working A and a working B for reproduction to happen. and our societal construct of gender has grown around having A or B. so when i ask the question "how does reproduction work?" it is asking you, are you going with the familiar A and B structure? or is there now A, B, and C? or even A, B, C, X, Y, and Z? or possibly there is only A and your species/people reproduce asexually. then you look at the next question which asks "is reproduction tied to gender?" if the answer is yes, then you already have the main groups you need to be thinking about in mind. if the answer is no, then you move on. reproduction is just about keeping the species/people alive for multiple generations, but it leads into thinking about how the young are brought into the world and who is raising them.

KimYoonmi wrote:who controls the gender presentations and who defines the ideals and WHY?

this is definitly an imporant quesiton to ask when building, especially if there is an unequal power balance between genders. im glad you mentioned it.

bewitchedbat wrote:

KimYoonmi wrote:Gender and sex, as in the genitals of the person and their reporductive organs are different things though.

our animal world is predominantly binary, reproduction wise. we need a working A and a working B for reproduction to happen. and our societal construct of gender has grown around having A or B. so when i ask the question "how does reproduction work?" it is asking you, are you going with the familiar A and B structure? or is there now A, B, and C? or even A, B, C, X, Y, and Z? or possibly there is only A and your species/people reproduce asexually. then you look at the next question which asks "is reproduction tied to gender?" if the answer is yes, then you already have the main groups you need to be thinking about in mind. if the answer is no, then you move on. reproduction is just about keeping the species/people alive for multiple generations, but it leads into thinking about how the young are brought into the world and who is raising them.

That might be human perception brought on by the Bible, but it's not actually true when you boil it down. See, the supposition that humans try to simplify the complicated comes around here.

And reproduction as in sex isn't the same as gender. Gender is human-created artifice that humans created for themselves.

Sex, as in the presentation of genitals has a biological component, but is still disciplined heavily by culture.

Sex as in reproduction is also oddly not binary and finding all the ways that animals reproduce makes most terfs squirm endlessly.

So, with some nerd mixed in, I'll go over each and that might help with the world building? 'cause there is far more than you know ad if you nerded on nature documentaries, gay penguins, and got delight in lesbian birds, then you would not say nature is mostly binary. It isn't. It's fluid out there and the exceptions to the rule make people who hate NBs like me roll.

1. Animals are mostly binary.

There are literally billions of species that have existed and do exist. There are slugs which have both sex organs. Then you have clownfish which change sex when the female is missing. And then there are species that start off one sex when a child and then shift and when older change sex to another. (Cephalopodes make terfs squirm) There are tons of viruses and bacteria too... 30,000 named, though some might be unnamed. 100,939,140 viruses in the world. If you add up the number of viruses to the number of plants that produce by cuttings alone, plus the number of single celled organisms that produce asexually, plus the number of parthenogenesis species, that outweighs by far the sexually producing organisms. And within the sexually producing organisms, you can argue sometimes for a functional third sex and/or species which are truly not male or female.

Humans, again, as with the Earth not being the center of things is not the default, and often as is the case, nature gives no fucks about what humans think. Dream it—it exists.

A sea slug that is part plants because of the food it eats? Sure, nature says, I'll screw over humans and create this one.

A sea slug that self-decapitates and regrows its body? Sure, nature says. Let's do that.

A species of cephlopod that when you smash it to smitherines, it goes back to a polyp stage and reproduces more of the same so it looks halfway between a plants? Sure nature says. Why not do that.

A species with half of the males looking like the females and still reproducing? Sure, nature says, I don't care. Let's do this thing.

Lichen? I mean, lichen...

A species with the intelligence of 3 year old child that lives for only 2 years. Nature goes, fuck yes. Let's do this thing.

When you were a child, you were one sex and when you're an adult, you're another? Sure nature says, fuck yes. And fuck some more. lol

Two different sexes on the same animal? Sure nature says, ehhhh... let's give this the humans too.

Seahorses... males that care for young by default and give birth to them. Nature says fuck yes. Let's do this thing.

And just to get and mess with your head, there are birds that present as both sexes. One on the left. One on the right.

And then lions that are female, but act as male.

And then cats who are intersex and act like both.

And then cats that seem like one but then age and act as another.

And amongst it all, humans aren't binary either.


So, no, really, the majority isn't binary. The majority is mostly asexually reproducing, and among the sexually reproducing on the planet, it doesn't follow the binary rules. I mean morning geckos? You need more than one, but there are occasionally males.

You don't have to follow any rules on this if you're creating an alien species. I mean, the platypus, WTF is that. Aborigines argue the animal was made from leftovers.

But I would like SF and F shows to stop putting boobs on random animals that aren't mammals challenge 2000. Maybe they all look the same.

2. Gender is always by default binary

Before colonization, probably not. The majority of the religious basis before organized religion, which you kind of need agriculture for (and no, this isn't about "advancement" or "cultural evolution" in the racist sense) was mostly shamanistic. The majority of shamanism in the past and worldwide is heavily, heavily accepting of LGBTQIA, and particularly gender fluidity. GNCs, if you want a more global terminology. There are two theses on why LGBTQIA lost their rights, but mostly it's colonization. Why in Europe takes a bit more academic work.

Gender, as in presentation, is usually made up of performance, if you read Judith Butler. And somewhat convention disciplined by a majority. But gender is fluid throughout time and defined by things like prestige, socio-economics, religion, governmental control, subsistence, etc. And rarely, rarely ever really had to do with the genitals of the person performing it. This is the lie that people feed to the general public, but it's not the truth of the matter. To argue this, it's pretty simple...

Men in order to gain economic status and wealth showing it off in Europe, often wore their wealth—which, to be fair, is a general human occupation. The way to show off your wealth beyond the obvious in the 16th century, was to wear heels, lace, and your beautiful stockinged legs. Why? Because lace took hours upon hours to make. Days of work. So if you are Shakespeare, you want to show that you hired a person to spend hours on making you a lace collar which you then paid prettily for.

The heels were to show off that you could own and ride a horse. What a gentleman should do. Because this is why heels were invented.

Your codpiece showed off you were a real man and everyone knew that strong calves showed you not only owned horses, but you rode them, and were big and strong.

The stockings were supposedly made of silk, showing you had means to get silk from China.

But the industrial revolution came and now lace could be manufactured. Poopoo, said men, it's no longer tied to prestige. That's for the lower and uncouth sexes, the women. And heels didn't show off how powerful men were anymore because cars were the new prestige item. So leather, leather pants, etc. Custom ones. More like Dean. More like the Outsiders.

So... see... really didn't have anything to do with genitals. People aren't asking genitals, do you want to wear pink or blue today and how will that affect your ability to produce children?

Most of the time gender presentation has lots to do with other things in culture to make it relevant. It is a supposition that it has to do with reproduction. But it really has nothing to do with that. Poke around the history of pants in European and European-derived countries and you'll find really, there is nothing about pants that makes them masculine.

BTW, body modification done for a variety of reasons also historically goes way back in history with a lot of early cultures showing earrings for men.

3. Reproduction


Fallacy. Gender has nothing to do with reproduction. Humans will fuck anything. lol The Bible has prohibitions from fucking animals because people likely fucked their animals. Hominins also were willing to have sex with other species of the same. Neanderthal DNA didn't get into the human genome by our ancestors going, "But you're another species, and in about 200,000 years, people are going to comment on how we're fucking each other." Nyahh, they are going, "You hot. I want. Let's do this thing." Some of the earliest objects are thought to be maybe dildos. Humans did it with rocks. Meh, if it results in another human, then good. But if not, time to have more sex. (look up the Castrados, who got a lot of it.) The regulation around sex and reproduction is mostly Church-based stuf and some retconning from Victorians and Edwardians about previous generations. But really, without formalized gender, people would still figure out a way.

Sex Historians often like to joke... OK, we invented this thing. The second question is: How do we use it for sex?

Bugis have 5 genders. Samoa has 4. There are several 3rd gender communities. Shamanism contains a lot of genderfluidity, even with practitioners being cis.

But people think gender is only one axes because they've never really explored, what is this gender thing actually for and why does it exist? And how does it exist outside of my known contexts? Europe likes to say it's tied to genitals, but that's not always true worldwide—that's more a cultural justification made by Europeans. Sometimes the performance of gender is more liquid throughout time and sometimes it is more rigid, even within European contexts.

I always think about this one moment I remember in the original star trek series - which has its issues, but is also very exploratory of the 'weirdness' of the universe and its potentials - but despite showing so many different kinds of lifeforms, Kirk says something like "Male and Female are constant concepts in this universe". I thought that was so stupid!

I do think we as humans have a skewed view of the world, prone to anthropocentrism and thinking primarily about the lifeforms most "like us". If you look at the spread of life on earth, eukaryotes, which includes all plants, animals, and fungi, represent a small minority of individuals! most individuals are prokaryotic, single-celled organisms that produce asexually.

by biomass, eukaryotes win out, but within that the largest group is plants, which have a wide variety of reproduction methods. second most biomass is arthropods!
sexual reproduction is very common for larger organisms, because it introduces diversity in the genome. many species of arthropods that are parthenogenic, and can reproduce asexually, will instead utilize sexual reproduction when conditions are less favorable. most arthropods reproduce sexually, but this can include laying eggs that are then fertilized, or transferring packages of sperm on a specialized limb.

there's lots of examples in nature to look to when writing new species!

Jasper wrote:I always think about this one moment I remember in the original star trek series - which has its issues, but is also very exploratory of the 'weirdness' of the universe and its potentials - but despite showing so many different kinds of lifeforms, Kirk says something like "Male and Female are constant concepts in this universe". I thought that was so stupid!

I do think we as humans have a skewed view of the world, prone to anthropocentrism and thinking primarily about the lifeforms most "like us". If you look at the spread of life on earth, eukaryotes, which includes all plants, animals, and fungi, represent a small minority of individuals! most individuals are prokaryotic, single-celled organisms that produce asexually.

by biomass, eukaryotes win out, but within that the largest group is plants, which have a wide variety of reproduction methods. second most biomass is arthropods!
sexual reproduction is very common for larger organisms, because it introduces diversity in the genome. many species of arthropods that are parthenogenic, and can reproduce asexually, will instead utilize sexual reproduction when conditions are less favorable. most arthropods reproduce sexually, but this can include laying eggs that are then fertilized, or transferring packages of sperm on a specialized limb.

there's lots of examples in nature to look to when writing new species!

Definitely.

There's a bias that higher lifeforms will basically all be ape-like, but I don't think that's fair to think given the intelligence of animals are varied and some animals are better than us apes at different things, ya know?

And there are temperature-linked sex determinism. I own geckos where you can link the sex of the gecko with the temperature the eggs are incubated at. In Pythons, the sex of the animal is determined by the females of the species, not the males. And this invites a lot of questions about how to do gender especially if one sex is favored over another.

And I think for something like a totally alien species the limit is your imagination to come up with the weirdest thing and often nature will say... but I've done that.

When you have crocs more related to birds than a snake it to a croc, you know that nature is messing with us puny humans.

I truly, truly would love to see something where someone complains about their arm being chopped off, going unconscious so they can recuperate, and then the arm growing another them. Nature does that, so, why don't shows really delve into nature and what nature can do for world building. I mean, take the idea, make it happen, why are we stuck with mammal-like creatures? Having a man acting as a female creature so get around the boobs and reorganizing the gender system entirely from the ground up and then redoing the whole sexuality/sexual orientation, and reorganizing how they reproduce... I want to see that.

I would freaking love it if we had something like a beloved character gets chopped up, reverts to a plant-like being for a few episodes, and then ends up making clones of them. C'mon. That would be fun. If you have interspecies relationships, the fun of watching a character have to care for this plant being, talk to it, and then have to protect the children would be super neat. This would be the perfect time to insert a Romantic Ace too...

But the shows are always about sexual reproduction usually of one kind so the male characters can get with more mammal-like aliens. And they are super delicate about men playing female characters, etc. But this is the time to mix it up, I would think. Hire an NB for the role, for example... Delve deep and have fun.