Netrigan

As I've never given this a moment of thought before today, I was just hoping there were some good working pronouns out there.

The problem with "it" is it tends to be very dehumanizing to refer to someone as "it". "They" sort of works, but is meant to be plural. "One" is another option, but I find it impersonal. All of these options would kind of paint these characters as Other and it's my intention that they're just part of the background noise of clashing styles, cultures, genders, and sexuality. And if this kind of thing is common enough, there would be language to describe it. But I'm running into these kinds of issues all over the place. Generally the solution is to ignore it as much as possible. The solution which requires no real exposition is that anyone in this future world who thinks of themselves as genderless doesn't really care what gender labels are applied to them, because being genderless isn't considered weird and no one is an asshole about it.

Hi, I'm Netrigan and a first time poster who has been working on an original sci-fi story for the last couple of months. Gist of the set-up is it's many generations into the future, civilization on Earth has long since collapsed and an Artificial Intelligence houses several million humans on a vast Utopian World Ship. I've dabbled with erotic stories before (including a few set in the Borderlands video-game universe), but I've yet to post one here. And I'm rather amused at the amount of time and effort and planning I've been putting into creating a universe where I can write erotic tales. Seriously, I had to sit down and figure out what kind of economy would exist when all necessities are provided for. At present I'm working on about my 8th "first" story in a Sin City style anthology and I think I've finally found my voice... I've got a lot of partially developed ideas which all work, but I need something which kind of sets up enough of the world without it being exposition, exposition, exposition. So what I'm saying is you're probably going to be seeing me around a bit as I struggle to put together some of the remaining pieces, so thanks in advance for any help I'll receive. But the request for today is about pronouns. I've got a character who'll be neutering himself and while I'm comfortable referring to him with male pronouns, but later in the story I plan on introducing another Neuter, but one who is actually Asexual, so I'm thinking it might be better to switch to pronouns specific to Neuters. The best I've come up with is Ne instead of S/he and maybe Ner for his/her. But I've got concerns about this being really distracting and possibly confusing. At least in this story, I can slip in some exposition to explain it, but the odds are one or both of these characters are going to come back. My options are. 1) Find better gender neutral pronouns. 2) Use Ne/Ner and assume everyone will get it. 3) Use the pronouns for the gender they most resemble... which might mess me up a bit later because I'm hoping to mix and match a lot of male/female characteristics so that's not always going to be obvious. 4) Have it only be an issue with the Asexual Neuter, since many Neuters will still identify with their original gender. While I might be making ner an Asexual Porn performer (yes, that's as silly as it sounds... it seems like this would be a fetish in this future world), so there's more opportunities for ner to appear later. And my use of the ner pronoun in #4 illustrates the problem I'm having here. Curse you, English language for not having adequately solved this problem before I sat down to write my masterpiece I'd appreciate any thoughts on the matter.