Gender
277 Words
Gender
The Borderlands Saga is a series with genderqueer, agender, tri-gender, or otherwise non-binary characters who play roles sufficiently big to require a guide to figure out their pronouns. Without some explanation, non-binary gender pronouns can be confusing. (Binary pronouns are he/she; him/her.) To eliminate confusion, here are some notes.
Some characters in the first part of the book use non-binary gender (or gender-neutral) pronouns. (After the first part, I revert to the familiar binary pronouns for most of the book.)
Those characters in this book who have non-binary pronouns come from a planet with five genders. Thoebe’s genders are man, woman, agender, tri-gender, and genderqueer. However, man and woman do not use he and she.
The two characters from this planet are male and genderqueer, so I’ll give you those two sets of pronouns. The sets are categorized as follows.*
Subject: They looked at the forest.
Object: The forest looked at them.
Possessive Adjective: It was their forest.
Possessive Pronoun: The forest was theirs.
Reflexive: They kept the forest for themselves.
Male pronouns
S: ze (Ze looked at the forest…., etc.)
O: zim
PA: ziis
PP: ziis
R: zimself
Plural: zimin
Genderqueer pronouns
S: jhe
O: jhen
PA: jhes
PP: jhes
R: jhenself
Plural: jhe-en
As well as those different sets of pronouns, they/their/them is a commonly-used set of gender-neutral pronouns. These will be used for characters that don’t have a set gender or pronoun.
*I have taken this form of categorization from this quite extensive, though no longer existent, database of gender neutral pronouns, by John Williams. I have also copied the sample sentence structure from said database, and, in doing research for appropriate pronouns and Thoebe’s five-gender system, made use of the lists in the database as well as of my own imagination.
- Writer
