Ann’s answer to “While I understand the concept of a gender neutral being, and appreciate the use of the feminine pr…” > Likes and Comments
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Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. Your answer is very enlightening and gives me a lot to think about.
I think it is an amazing writing technique. I found myself looking at the characters and their humanity without the factor of gender playing into that evaluation. I know the gender was there but it wasn't relevant. It also serves to further the message of all science fiction: What does it mean to be human? I think with Breq, in the next book, we will learn a little bit more about that. This is why I so firmly believe that science fiction needs to be considered as literature and that it is past time that the appropriate books make it into the literary canon. I know there is a spot waiting for the Ancillary series!
I thought that one of the indirect consequences of this choice ("They care about it, maybe, as much as we care about hair color") also meant that homosexuality was so much accepted by society that the notion wasn't existing anymore, that there wasn't any hetero-sexuality / homo-sexuality / bi-sexuality anymore, just sexuality.
It's a very interesting concept to show such a definitive and broad conception of sex equality and sexuality tolerance in a society which yet shows so much inequalities in others areas.
I'm currently in the middle of Ancillary Justice and am really enjoying it. One thing about the gender issues confuses me. If the Radchaai are unconcerned with genders, why do they default to using the feminine when referring to individuals? Wouldn't using 'it' be more appropriate or, if there is a stigma attached to that article, another original word?
Hello Tom !
If you want more information on this subject, Ann Leckie had answered this question here (seventh question, beware, there may be some spoilers in the other questions/answers) :
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/10/slee...
For myself I thought that was a ship-choice, as ship has always be given feminine word and spoke of as female. But of course it's neither he or she or it, but a mysterious word in a mysterious language that nobody would have been able to understand while reading it... ^-^
Thanks. I've been interested in getting a handle on her reasoning behind this.
I read both Ancillary Justice and Sword with no clue as to Seivardan's or Breq's genders, and honestly, this wonderfully stripped away the physicality of love and desire, and allowed me to focus on the spiritual redemption of Seivarden and Breq by each other; Sublime. On second reading, there are clues to their genders, but I care not.
I absolutely agree with you, William, but I must say that I haven't got your kind of competence and that I did try to find hints about sexing ! But I learned, while reading the books, to let it drown till the importance of hair color...
What is really fantastic in the author choices is that most of the time, when equality between sexes is exposed, it's mostly by showing women with traditional men's attributes. In AJ and AS there is quite a lot of people (army people!) showed crying. Usually when a man or a boy is sobbing in a story there is an underlining of very strong emotion or very weak personality. In the otherwise quite ruthless Radch, men can cry without being labelled abnormally emotive or weak or feminine or artsy or else.
It's very effective to give the reader a taste of the real nature of the Radch society.
I pictured Seivarden being Cillain Murphy and Breq being a grim stoic woman.
So better to assert gender blind. Or gender indifferent. Imdjji
Finished your book and have to admit that while I liked it a lot, the gender was an issue to me.
I see what you wanted to do, but didn't find it worked for me, as I failed to visualise anyone as anything else but female (except the Tyrant, whom for some reason I kept picturing as King Bradley from FullMetal alchemist)
If gender doesn't matter, then expressions such as "daughter of a great house" became a bit too much. Why not "child"?
Now I see it's biased because we're seeing this through the eyes of Breq, but as a reader I found it mildly annoying.
The doctor on Nilt, in one dialogue that I thought was in her native tongue, referred to Seivarden as a she, making me seriously confused for a while.
Overall I liked the idea of gender not being relevant as it was treated in Ariah, by B.R.Sanders, better.
There, in the tribe that doesn't care for gender, everyone is xe, not she or he. So when Ariah (who is bi) takes a lover, xe's gender is never revealed and remains a mystery, but one that soon doesn't matter.
That technique worked wonders for me. Everyone being a she just makes me see a book full of women, however hard I try.
In the end though, I guess a whole book using xe as a pronoun would be so hard on a lot of readers, that you're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Well, that was my two cent thoughts. Will be starting your second tome now.
Interesting. But I do not believe it. Unless the Raadch have evolved into quite different humans over a long time. Humans are very good at "guessing" gender, they can be fooled, but usually it is something that is quite important for us, so we are good at it. I would need to know more about Raadch society and things like reproduction, how they are brought up, how their bodies probably have changed over the centuries (different chromosomes/hormones or stuff), before I can believe that mammals relying on sexual intercourse will ever consider gender as trivial as hair color.
I just finished Ancillary Justice and I love the perspective or lack of concern with gender. It was different and was thought provoking. I enjoyed it and look forward to reading the next book! Thank you!
"...before I can believe that mammals relying on sexual intercourse will ever consider gender as trivial as hair color." There is a passage in the first book where the Justice is asked about how Raadchi reproduce, and she lists a whole slew of options. I mean, the only reason that reproduction requires a man and a woman in real life, is that the machinery doesn't work otherwise: A male-male couple contains zero wombs and thus can't carry a baby to term, while a female-female couple contains no sperm and thus has no way of fertilizing the ovum.
Since the setting is quite high-tech, and since we know today pretty much exactly how reproduction happens and what is necessary for it to function, it would probably be trivial for a same-sex couple to just have a doctor extract half of the genome of both parents-to-be (either drawing from already extant gametes or inducing meiosis in a regular cell). A male-male couple would still need a way to carry the baby to term, but if you can travel faster than light and build sapient AI's (not to mention Dyson spheres), it would probably be trivial to mechanically (or genetically) engineer a substitute womb.
Even for male-female couples, it would be more convenient to simply go to a doctor, take a blood sample and return nine months later to pick up your fresh new baby without the hassle of actually being pregnant. If this is the standard way of reproducing, it makes sense why society would care very little about gender.
Most people today, if transplanted to such a society, would still care about gender for purposes of romantic attraction, but for this to be a factor for people who grew up in such a society, we'd have to assume that sexual orientation isn't limited by social customs. For example, ancient Greek, medieval Japanese and contemporary Pashtu cultures all have/had way above standard rates of homosexuality or bisexuality.
And I mean, lots of what we're attracted to are secondary sexual characteristics: Men like boobs and feminine faces, despite these having zero reproductive value (because a feminine features signals reproductive compatibility with males). If this holds over time, it is quite likely that male and female Raadchi ideas about what's good-looking would converge over time - because Raadchi must look andogynous since they have a hard time telling biological males from biological females.
"but it's not really a thing they care much about. (Author)" Then, why did you choose "she"? If the Radch are just careless they would use "it" or mix "he, she, it" randomly (like blonde, brown, red considering the improper hair color anology). Or they would most likely come up with a more fitting term that would not be translated into English as "she", unless you wish to transport additional meaning (thwarting your idea of being careless about gender). The effect would have been much greater if the reader had to think about gender all the time without being pushed into the feminine direction (often misleading) by the definite term "she".
The gender neutrality and the "what, wait - she, uhm, he! is a man!" confusion it made my brain go through right in the beginning is what made this book special for me. For me,it worked perfectly with she (and would have worked fine with he to for me personally), while "it" would have thrown me out of the story.
The "she" fits better in this story though, as we view it all through a "ship" and ships usually get the feminine pronoun.
@Boris: actually humans aren't that good at recognizing gender from subtle clues. If it's not obvious, we tend to assume female. From which, all else follows…
We're not actually gendering the people around us based on their genitals. We're making assumptions about their genitals based on a complicated mass of social cues.
That's the part I had problems with, resulting in my mind bailing out of the books. No one would consider me male, though I - as a queer person - do not buy into and engage in any "social cues" related to my gender.
To me the book/concept is the result of a recently over-gendered US culture, not of a close look at gender cues as nature projects them (or doesn't).
The reproduction question -- and the answer, listing all the options which allow any combination of genders to reproduce -- seems to me to take all the significance out of gender. If you don't need sex or wombs to reproduce, gender does become merely a matter of self-expression (like hair color). I thought this was reinforced by the identity of Justice of Toren -- she's an AI core inhabiting a ship and thousands of both male and female bodies. What gender Breq's body expresses doesn't matter, because Justice of Toren has been everything and nothing, all at once. Just as Mianaai is a "core" inhabiting thousands of different bodies ... over the thousands of years of existing in many bodies of different ages and genders at the same time ... doesn't your gender, like your age, become moot? Is the "core" defined by the body it inhabits or is the body defined by the person who lives in it?
Please don't use the term cis. It's absolutely insulting to both sexes.
It implies that a natal woman belongs to a subset of the female sex, and a natal man belongs to subset of the male sex. It's a qualifier that's not required. I really enjoyed the Ancillary trilogy, and though I didn't enjoy The Raven Tower as much, I loved the idea of a rock-god (or godrock). But every fantasy book I've read lately has jumped on the gender-bending wagon, and it's ceased to be new and interesting and has just become an easy way of signalling how trendy and woke the writer is. I read fantasy for the fun original ideas, not for writers who just mirror the current socially acceptable trends.
Smveal: I think the age analogy is pretty spot on, because even if reproduction is "solved", there's still going to be a bunch of things that covary with sex (risk aversion, physical strength, predisposition to both physical and mental illnesses, etc), just like there are things that covary with age but are not strictly determined by age (you're more likely to have received more education and amassed more savings the longer you've been alive). But in both of these cases, your sex or your age doesn't matter at the individual level (Annie the autist is more autistic than a regular non-autistic dude despite men in the aggregate being more prone to autism, and a 25-year old trust fund kid has more capital than an 80-year old hobo despite older people on average being wealthier).
Agnes: "Cis" just means "not trans". It has the exact same meaning as your use of "natal", but has slightly more widespread usage. (and, I'd argue, slightly less opaque in meaning, because cis is the opposite of trans in other fields, see cis-isomer molecules, transneptunian object or Cisalpine Gaul)
"Cis" just means "not trans". Can you not see that women might object to being defined in relation to something that they're not? Am I a non-man? One 'inclusive' political party in the UK referred to women as non-men. I'm not a non-man, not a non-trans. Women are being erased, and I will never accept being described as a cis-woman. The word is woman.
Things are defined in relation to other things. It's not useful to talk about cis-women in everyday conversation ("See that cis-woman over there? She's the cis-woman of my dreams"), but it is perfectly useful in a discussion where the distinction is warranted, just like you wouldn't say "Hello there my fellow civilians" to your colleagues, but you'd absolutely use the term "civilians" when you need to make a distinction between civilians and military personnel. You wouldn't describe a person as being unarmed unless you wanted to stress the fact that the person is not, in fact, carrying a weapon. You wouldn't describe a person as a non-Swede unless you were saying that "Bubba is the only non-Swede I know who enjoys surströmming". Unless you're a trans engineer who believes in YHWH of the Foreskins, you're a cis non-engineer gentile. That's just the way words work.
The way words work is that there's already a word to describe a woman, and it's 'woman'.
Such a good answer in so many ways, I almost don't want to point out that RE: "consider that while quite a lot of people will say that one's genitals are the defining element of one's gender, " that those people are referring to how one's OWN genitalia plays a central role in a person defining themselves, not in defining others by theirs
"We're making assumptions about their genitals based on a complicated mass of social cues." I don't agree with this. Women can identify that someone is a man, in the distance, because of physical characteristics, his shape etc.. It's hard-wired for women, as unfamiliar men represent a threat. It doesn't matter how they dress, how long their hair, they're recognised as male. In still photographs the lines can be blurred, but not in real life. All animals can differentiate between male and female instantly, why should humans be any different? We're animals as well, and not that highly evolved.
Wow. I guess with how well written the books are I should have expected such a well written reply, but still kind of shocked me. Love this. And I'm an older guy that's at times a bit resistant to the current discussions (if I'm being honest). But thoughtful replies like this are helping me see my way into this debate. Thank you for taking the time to write this. And of course, also for your lovely books.
Dear Ms Leckie, I love love love love your answer and also the way this occurs in the book (I certainly read it the way you describe it). I find myself constantly delighted by that over and over as I read the books. Thanks for this!!!
As a native speaker of a nongendered language, I am constantly amazed at how utterly unaware gendered language speakers/thinkers can be of the concept of language/correspondence without gendered distinctions.
(It's disheartening to so often see folks mistake it as a threat to which ever sex/gender based 'ideology' or 'cause', and not see/understand it for the true freedom it allows; for all and any forms of identities and individual expressions to exist and roam freely in the same infinite space, unbothered by unnecessary labels, 'crossing of lines' or indeed dependency on other's constant verbal approval).
So, I want to thank you so much for getting the true gist of it. Reading English language literature can sometimes be frustratingly straining - and distracting of a story - precisely for the constant unnecessary complications in the limitations of gendered speech - be it the 'classic' binary or, more acutely, the recently extended gendering of the previously neutral 'they'. Currently reading Ancillary Sword, I am revering the respite it offers for the usual, pervasive cacophony.
Thank you, and please, if ever similarly inspired again, this lone Finn for one, would love to have more gender-free English language literature to read.
(Constantly on a look-out for it; you and Indrapramit Das are so far the only ones who've truly got it on page).
Its so interesting to learn that Finnish is a nongendered language! To me, as a Czech speaker, even English is less gendered than my native tongue (there is a book Head on by Scalzi where the gender of the main character isn't specified for the whole book written in first-person, something like that isn't possible in Czech), and I can only imagine the freedom it must give a person!
dear ann leckie,
i really appreciated these parts of ancillary justice and ancillary sword. although much of the internet perceives the characters in imperial radch, and many of the characters marked by colonization within radchaai space and forced to learn radchaai, as all women (because of the blanket epicene she/her pronoun), it's still interesting how many people interpreted certain characters genders differently. seivarden, for instance, is often perceived as a man or he-himmed on other planets, while in other instances she gets read as a woman or they get read as gender neutral. seivarden i personally interpreted as a nonbinary, agender, gender apathetic butch because of this aspect, this ambivalence to being gendered as male or as female or really as any gender, and moreso a concentration on being a person. breq, too, despite most of the cultures who still had gendered signifiers gendering breq as female or a "she", seemed very genderless to me; perhaps because of her degendering/third gendering due to being an ancillary, perhaps because of her natural detachment from gender due to previously being an ancillary and a ship ai who was also multiple other people (who probably had distinct senses of gender). i personally interpreted the Lord of the Radch, anaander miaanai herself, as somewhere in between grace jones, moses sumney, and musician jhariah in appearance, albeit with gray hair, wrinkles, and a unilateral mastectomy with visible scars (my main theory for anaander developing "she" as a purely neutral pronoun is to not only ungender herself, to dissasociate herself from gender, but to also remove other colonies she would plan to colonize's genders that were important to her; moreso a unary, neuter gender that the lord of the radch applies to all the citizens, and an unspoken "second gender" in the way that many societies have third genders to often punish transfeminine people as they are viewed as "gender deviants" of ancillary that is less neutral and ungendered and more degendered and dirtlike and genderless because they're not human, because they're partially ship ai, because they're often colonized bodies and not technically "radchaai" as in "civilized". it's something i personally like thinking about, gender in radch space. i really like this series of novels, and i have a lot of theories about the way society and gender in particular work in both radchaai and other society spaces and in particular with ancillaries. great work on the novel overall, and i'm sorry for writing practically a novel myself with analyses that MAY in all likelyhood be wrong.
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Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. Your answer is very enlightening and gives me a lot to think about.
I think it is an amazing writing technique. I found myself looking at the characters and their humanity without the factor of gender playing into that evaluation. I know the gender was there but it wasn't relevant. It also serves to further the message of all science fiction: What does it mean to be human? I think with Breq, in the next book, we will learn a little bit more about that. This is why I so firmly believe that science fiction needs to be considered as literature and that it is past time that the appropriate books make it into the literary canon. I know there is a spot waiting for the Ancillary series!
I thought that one of the indirect consequences of this choice ("They care about it, maybe, as much as we care about hair color") also meant that homosexuality was so much accepted by society that the notion wasn't existing anymore, that there wasn't any hetero-sexuality / homo-sexuality / bi-sexuality anymore, just sexuality.It's a very interesting concept to show such a definitive and broad conception of sex equality and sexuality tolerance in a society which yet shows so much inequalities in others areas.
I'm currently in the middle of Ancillary Justice and am really enjoying it. One thing about the gender issues confuses me. If the Radchaai are unconcerned with genders, why do they default to using the feminine when referring to individuals? Wouldn't using 'it' be more appropriate or, if there is a stigma attached to that article, another original word?
Hello Tom ! If you want more information on this subject, Ann Leckie had answered this question here (seventh question, beware, there may be some spoilers in the other questions/answers) :
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/10/slee...
For myself I thought that was a ship-choice, as ship has always be given feminine word and spoke of as female. But of course it's neither he or she or it, but a mysterious word in a mysterious language that nobody would have been able to understand while reading it... ^-^
Thanks. I've been interested in getting a handle on her reasoning behind this.
I read both Ancillary Justice and Sword with no clue as to Seivardan's or Breq's genders, and honestly, this wonderfully stripped away the physicality of love and desire, and allowed me to focus on the spiritual redemption of Seivarden and Breq by each other; Sublime. On second reading, there are clues to their genders, but I care not.
I absolutely agree with you, William, but I must say that I haven't got your kind of competence and that I did try to find hints about sexing ! But I learned, while reading the books, to let it drown till the importance of hair color...What is really fantastic in the author choices is that most of the time, when equality between sexes is exposed, it's mostly by showing women with traditional men's attributes. In AJ and AS there is quite a lot of people (army people!) showed crying. Usually when a man or a boy is sobbing in a story there is an underlining of very strong emotion or very weak personality. In the otherwise quite ruthless Radch, men can cry without being labelled abnormally emotive or weak or feminine or artsy or else.
It's very effective to give the reader a taste of the real nature of the Radch society.
I pictured Seivarden being Cillain Murphy and Breq being a grim stoic woman.
So better to assert gender blind. Or gender indifferent. Imdjji
Finished your book and have to admit that while I liked it a lot, the gender was an issue to me. I see what you wanted to do, but didn't find it worked for me, as I failed to visualise anyone as anything else but female (except the Tyrant, whom for some reason I kept picturing as King Bradley from FullMetal alchemist)
If gender doesn't matter, then expressions such as "daughter of a great house" became a bit too much. Why not "child"?
Now I see it's biased because we're seeing this through the eyes of Breq, but as a reader I found it mildly annoying.
The doctor on Nilt, in one dialogue that I thought was in her native tongue, referred to Seivarden as a she, making me seriously confused for a while.
Overall I liked the idea of gender not being relevant as it was treated in Ariah, by B.R.Sanders, better.
There, in the tribe that doesn't care for gender, everyone is xe, not she or he. So when Ariah (who is bi) takes a lover, xe's gender is never revealed and remains a mystery, but one that soon doesn't matter.
That technique worked wonders for me. Everyone being a she just makes me see a book full of women, however hard I try.
In the end though, I guess a whole book using xe as a pronoun would be so hard on a lot of readers, that you're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Well, that was my two cent thoughts. Will be starting your second tome now.
Interesting. But I do not believe it. Unless the Raadch have evolved into quite different humans over a long time. Humans are very good at "guessing" gender, they can be fooled, but usually it is something that is quite important for us, so we are good at it. I would need to know more about Raadch society and things like reproduction, how they are brought up, how their bodies probably have changed over the centuries (different chromosomes/hormones or stuff), before I can believe that mammals relying on sexual intercourse will ever consider gender as trivial as hair color.
I just finished Ancillary Justice and I love the perspective or lack of concern with gender. It was different and was thought provoking. I enjoyed it and look forward to reading the next book! Thank you!
"...before I can believe that mammals relying on sexual intercourse will ever consider gender as trivial as hair color." There is a passage in the first book where the Justice is asked about how Raadchi reproduce, and she lists a whole slew of options. I mean, the only reason that reproduction requires a man and a woman in real life, is that the machinery doesn't work otherwise: A male-male couple contains zero wombs and thus can't carry a baby to term, while a female-female couple contains no sperm and thus has no way of fertilizing the ovum.Since the setting is quite high-tech, and since we know today pretty much exactly how reproduction happens and what is necessary for it to function, it would probably be trivial for a same-sex couple to just have a doctor extract half of the genome of both parents-to-be (either drawing from already extant gametes or inducing meiosis in a regular cell). A male-male couple would still need a way to carry the baby to term, but if you can travel faster than light and build sapient AI's (not to mention Dyson spheres), it would probably be trivial to mechanically (or genetically) engineer a substitute womb.
Even for male-female couples, it would be more convenient to simply go to a doctor, take a blood sample and return nine months later to pick up your fresh new baby without the hassle of actually being pregnant. If this is the standard way of reproducing, it makes sense why society would care very little about gender.
Most people today, if transplanted to such a society, would still care about gender for purposes of romantic attraction, but for this to be a factor for people who grew up in such a society, we'd have to assume that sexual orientation isn't limited by social customs. For example, ancient Greek, medieval Japanese and contemporary Pashtu cultures all have/had way above standard rates of homosexuality or bisexuality.
And I mean, lots of what we're attracted to are secondary sexual characteristics: Men like boobs and feminine faces, despite these having zero reproductive value (because a feminine features signals reproductive compatibility with males). If this holds over time, it is quite likely that male and female Raadchi ideas about what's good-looking would converge over time - because Raadchi must look andogynous since they have a hard time telling biological males from biological females.
"but it's not really a thing they care much about. (Author)" Then, why did you choose "she"? If the Radch are just careless they would use "it" or mix "he, she, it" randomly (like blonde, brown, red considering the improper hair color anology). Or they would most likely come up with a more fitting term that would not be translated into English as "she", unless you wish to transport additional meaning (thwarting your idea of being careless about gender). The effect would have been much greater if the reader had to think about gender all the time without being pushed into the feminine direction (often misleading) by the definite term "she".
The gender neutrality and the "what, wait - she, uhm, he! is a man!" confusion it made my brain go through right in the beginning is what made this book special for me. For me,it worked perfectly with she (and would have worked fine with he to for me personally), while "it" would have thrown me out of the story. The "she" fits better in this story though, as we view it all through a "ship" and ships usually get the feminine pronoun.
@Boris: actually humans aren't that good at recognizing gender from subtle clues. If it's not obvious, we tend to assume female. From which, all else follows…
We're not actually gendering the people around us based on their genitals. We're making assumptions about their genitals based on a complicated mass of social cues.That's the part I had problems with, resulting in my mind bailing out of the books. No one would consider me male, though I - as a queer person - do not buy into and engage in any "social cues" related to my gender.
To me the book/concept is the result of a recently over-gendered US culture, not of a close look at gender cues as nature projects them (or doesn't).
The reproduction question -- and the answer, listing all the options which allow any combination of genders to reproduce -- seems to me to take all the significance out of gender. If you don't need sex or wombs to reproduce, gender does become merely a matter of self-expression (like hair color). I thought this was reinforced by the identity of Justice of Toren -- she's an AI core inhabiting a ship and thousands of both male and female bodies. What gender Breq's body expresses doesn't matter, because Justice of Toren has been everything and nothing, all at once. Just as Mianaai is a "core" inhabiting thousands of different bodies ... over the thousands of years of existing in many bodies of different ages and genders at the same time ... doesn't your gender, like your age, become moot? Is the "core" defined by the body it inhabits or is the body defined by the person who lives in it?
Please don't use the term cis. It's absolutely insulting to both sexes.
It implies that a natal woman belongs to a subset of the female sex, and a natal man belongs to subset of the male sex. It's a qualifier that's not required. I really enjoyed the Ancillary trilogy, and though I didn't enjoy The Raven Tower as much, I loved the idea of a rock-god (or godrock). But every fantasy book I've read lately has jumped on the gender-bending wagon, and it's ceased to be new and interesting and has just become an easy way of signalling how trendy and woke the writer is. I read fantasy for the fun original ideas, not for writers who just mirror the current socially acceptable trends.
Smveal: I think the age analogy is pretty spot on, because even if reproduction is "solved", there's still going to be a bunch of things that covary with sex (risk aversion, physical strength, predisposition to both physical and mental illnesses, etc), just like there are things that covary with age but are not strictly determined by age (you're more likely to have received more education and amassed more savings the longer you've been alive). But in both of these cases, your sex or your age doesn't matter at the individual level (Annie the autist is more autistic than a regular non-autistic dude despite men in the aggregate being more prone to autism, and a 25-year old trust fund kid has more capital than an 80-year old hobo despite older people on average being wealthier).Agnes: "Cis" just means "not trans". It has the exact same meaning as your use of "natal", but has slightly more widespread usage. (and, I'd argue, slightly less opaque in meaning, because cis is the opposite of trans in other fields, see cis-isomer molecules, transneptunian object or Cisalpine Gaul)
"Cis" just means "not trans". Can you not see that women might object to being defined in relation to something that they're not? Am I a non-man? One 'inclusive' political party in the UK referred to women as non-men. I'm not a non-man, not a non-trans. Women are being erased, and I will never accept being described as a cis-woman. The word is woman.
Things are defined in relation to other things. It's not useful to talk about cis-women in everyday conversation ("See that cis-woman over there? She's the cis-woman of my dreams"), but it is perfectly useful in a discussion where the distinction is warranted, just like you wouldn't say "Hello there my fellow civilians" to your colleagues, but you'd absolutely use the term "civilians" when you need to make a distinction between civilians and military personnel. You wouldn't describe a person as being unarmed unless you wanted to stress the fact that the person is not, in fact, carrying a weapon. You wouldn't describe a person as a non-Swede unless you were saying that "Bubba is the only non-Swede I know who enjoys surströmming". Unless you're a trans engineer who believes in YHWH of the Foreskins, you're a cis non-engineer gentile. That's just the way words work.
The way words work is that there's already a word to describe a woman, and it's 'woman'.
Such a good answer in so many ways, I almost don't want to point out that RE: "consider that while quite a lot of people will say that one's genitals are the defining element of one's gender, " that those people are referring to how one's OWN genitalia plays a central role in a person defining themselves, not in defining others by theirs
"We're making assumptions about their genitals based on a complicated mass of social cues." I don't agree with this. Women can identify that someone is a man, in the distance, because of physical characteristics, his shape etc.. It's hard-wired for women, as unfamiliar men represent a threat. It doesn't matter how they dress, how long their hair, they're recognised as male. In still photographs the lines can be blurred, but not in real life. All animals can differentiate between male and female instantly, why should humans be any different? We're animals as well, and not that highly evolved.
Wow. I guess with how well written the books are I should have expected such a well written reply, but still kind of shocked me. Love this. And I'm an older guy that's at times a bit resistant to the current discussions (if I'm being honest). But thoughtful replies like this are helping me see my way into this debate. Thank you for taking the time to write this. And of course, also for your lovely books.
Dear Ms Leckie, I love love love love your answer and also the way this occurs in the book (I certainly read it the way you describe it). I find myself constantly delighted by that over and over as I read the books. Thanks for this!!!
As a native speaker of a nongendered language, I am constantly amazed at how utterly unaware gendered language speakers/thinkers can be of the concept of language/correspondence without gendered distinctions. (It's disheartening to so often see folks mistake it as a threat to which ever sex/gender based 'ideology' or 'cause', and not see/understand it for the true freedom it allows; for all and any forms of identities and individual expressions to exist and roam freely in the same infinite space, unbothered by unnecessary labels, 'crossing of lines' or indeed dependency on other's constant verbal approval).
So, I want to thank you so much for getting the true gist of it. Reading English language literature can sometimes be frustratingly straining - and distracting of a story - precisely for the constant unnecessary complications in the limitations of gendered speech - be it the 'classic' binary or, more acutely, the recently extended gendering of the previously neutral 'they'. Currently reading Ancillary Sword, I am revering the respite it offers for the usual, pervasive cacophony.
Thank you, and please, if ever similarly inspired again, this lone Finn for one, would love to have more gender-free English language literature to read.
(Constantly on a look-out for it; you and Indrapramit Das are so far the only ones who've truly got it on page).
Its so interesting to learn that Finnish is a nongendered language! To me, as a Czech speaker, even English is less gendered than my native tongue (there is a book Head on by Scalzi where the gender of the main character isn't specified for the whole book written in first-person, something like that isn't possible in Czech), and I can only imagine the freedom it must give a person!
dear ann leckie, i really appreciated these parts of ancillary justice and ancillary sword. although much of the internet perceives the characters in imperial radch, and many of the characters marked by colonization within radchaai space and forced to learn radchaai, as all women (because of the blanket epicene she/her pronoun), it's still interesting how many people interpreted certain characters genders differently. seivarden, for instance, is often perceived as a man or he-himmed on other planets, while in other instances she gets read as a woman or they get read as gender neutral. seivarden i personally interpreted as a nonbinary, agender, gender apathetic butch because of this aspect, this ambivalence to being gendered as male or as female or really as any gender, and moreso a concentration on being a person. breq, too, despite most of the cultures who still had gendered signifiers gendering breq as female or a "she", seemed very genderless to me; perhaps because of her degendering/third gendering due to being an ancillary, perhaps because of her natural detachment from gender due to previously being an ancillary and a ship ai who was also multiple other people (who probably had distinct senses of gender). i personally interpreted the Lord of the Radch, anaander miaanai herself, as somewhere in between grace jones, moses sumney, and musician jhariah in appearance, albeit with gray hair, wrinkles, and a unilateral mastectomy with visible scars (my main theory for anaander developing "she" as a purely neutral pronoun is to not only ungender herself, to dissasociate herself from gender, but to also remove other colonies she would plan to colonize's genders that were important to her; moreso a unary, neuter gender that the lord of the radch applies to all the citizens, and an unspoken "second gender" in the way that many societies have third genders to often punish transfeminine people as they are viewed as "gender deviants" of ancillary that is less neutral and ungendered and more degendered and dirtlike and genderless because they're not human, because they're partially ship ai, because they're often colonized bodies and not technically "radchaai" as in "civilized". it's something i personally like thinking about, gender in radch space. i really like this series of novels, and i have a lot of theories about the way society and gender in particular work in both radchaai and other society spaces and in particular with ancillaries. great work on the novel overall, and i'm sorry for writing practically a novel myself with analyses that MAY in all likelyhood be wrong.
I suppose choir directors would care more than most people.
I'd be interested in seeing a movie (Ancillary Box Office? :-) ) with unisex clothes, hair styles, speaking style, movements, stance, etc.