Greetings and a plea for pronoun help

[Netrigan]

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.

[WillowDarkling]

Honestly, as far as I understand it in English, It and They are gender neutral pronouns, much like in many other germanic languages, so you could always just use those. I have heard that nowadays, there are gender non-conforming people who are asking to be referred to by "they", as a gender neutral pronoun, instead of she or he.

[BronxWench]

I'm actually fine with Ne/Ner. It's been done before in science fiction, and works well with minimal explanation. Another character might make note of the use of the pronoun, and have an "oh, right! XX is a neutral!" sort of moment, and that's generally enough for most devoted readers of science fiction.

Just my tuppence on the topic.

[Netrigan]

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.

[Netrigan]

I'm actually fine with Ne/Ner. It's been done before in science fiction, and works well with minimal explanation. Another character might make note of the use of the pronoun, and have an "oh, right! XX is a neutral!" sort of moment, and that's generally enough for most devoted readers of science fiction.

Just my tuppence on the topic.

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

[BronxWench]

There are hoards of absolutely silly pronouns meant to replace the usual gender-specific run. Personally, I think it's taking the notion of politically correct to an unspeakable extreme, and it's verging on offensive, since I quite happily refer to myself with female pronouns and don't want to be called "sie" (instead of he/she) or "hir" (instead of him/her) as I saw in one otherwise excellent article. Of course, even "sie" is in disfavor, and "zie" is preferred. Here's a good blog on the topic:

https://genderneutralpronoun.wordpress.com/

CJ Cherryh has a race, the stsho, who are hermaphrodites and have three sexes. There are varying pronouns for the male sort of role, the female sort of role, the third gender who is most often the publicly seen gender, and those who are past sexual (neutral) and those who are between stages, since stsho can switch genders under stress or to complete a mating triad. (http://www.shinyfiction.com/cherryh-fan/chanur/stsho/stsho-gloss.html ) She covers the differences in conversation, or casually in a character's reflections, and it feels natural that way.

[WillowDarkling]

I'd like to clarify that I am after all a speaker of a language that has gender-specific word categories (I am not entirely sure what the proper grammatical terms for these are in English, and too tired to look them up, sorry.) As in, we have three genders in my native language, and therefore it is not considered dehumanizing to use the word "it" when speaking of/about a gender neutral noun, unless you emphasize the word in such a way that it sounds demeaning. For example the word for child is gender neutral in my language, and therefore we often ask, for example, "Do you know what gender it is?" when asking an expecting mother or father.

I often forget that this does not work very well in English.

But, I do agree with Bronx that Ne/Ner could be an easily understood term within the story, and it could also fit better, as an established term in that society. And I'm rambling… I should go to bed Don't mind me, sorry

[Aysha c.c.]

I have an idea, why not refer to the former males as afrodites. Aphrodite was said to be born when Cronos cut off the genitals Of Uranus and threw them into the sea. and the former females as Hermes. I think this would be fitting, One because Hermes Was a male God But also known as The trickster Of the Greek gods. Plus it sneaks the word her into the pronoun itself.

Just something I thought might be interesting.

Edited July 13, 2015 by Aysha c.c.