Elizabeth asked Ann Leckie:

While I understand the concept of a gender neutral being, and appreciate the use of the feminine pronoun, I remain a little confused about the word 'human' when describing the beings. Are they human as we know human? And if so, how are they gender neutral? Is the word used to describe some evolutionary version of human far into the future where gender has become neutral? Thank so much.

Ann Leckie So, I don't think I've ever said that Radchaai are gender neutral--just that they really don't care about anyone's gender, and don't mark it socially or linguistically. So, they're humans, and as such come in all sorts of genders, and they know gender exists, but it's not really a thing they care much about. They care about it, maybe, as much as we care about hair color.

I think it's worth considering (though I know you didn't bring this up explicitly, but I feel it's sort of lurking in the background of your question) how much of what we consider to be "obvious" about someone's gender when we look at them is actually a set of social cues. Hairstyle, kinds of clothes, even certain colors of clothing. Ways of standing or moving. These can change from culture to culture, or even from decade to decade (just a couple hundred years ago, high heels and hose were a guy thing. Less than a hundred years ago, pink was a "boy" color.) And cues that we will often talk about as though they're non-negotiable are full of exceptions--breasts, for instance. I know unambiguously masculine cis-men who have more breast tissue than some unambiguously feminine cis-women. And consider that while quite a lot of people will say that one's genitals are the defining element of one's gender, we very rarely see the genitals of the people we quite automatically assign gender to. 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.

Just something to think about.

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