Bogi Takács and I have a non-fiction piece in Strange Horizons. It’s called Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in SF: A Conversation. We talk about various stuff, from things we think are handled badly to recommendations. This also marks my first non-fiction sale.
While we were talking, I did have a tangent that I didn’t include. It’s something I think would interest my fiction readers more than people who don’t know who I am. Namely about the issue of times when it’s hard to show in a short story that humans do something too / it’s not an alien-only thing. I had a story where it was an issue: “The Dragonfly People” in Rainbow Lights. The viewpoint character is a giant scorpion-like alien, who comes from a strict trinary gender system. She assumes, based on what she sees, that humans have a strict binary gender system. Without concepts like being trans existing in her own culture, or a fluent shared language to discuss the issues, she remains thinking her initial assumption is correct.
It was something I considered at the time I wrote it, though I felt overall it’d be clear it wasn’t my view from my body of work, and there was a sequel in progress about the alien/human relations in the next generation that tackled those issues.
But the thing that struck me, and where this tangent is going, is those sorts of stories are rarely the ones where people are saying they couldn’t see how to mention it. They tend to be stories with human viewpoint characters, very human-like aliens, and/or characters who speak each other’s languages fluently. Which is why I often feel like replying to those statements with, “Is your viewpoint character a giant scorpion who thinks humans are weird squishy things that make funny sounds? No? Then someone can tell them trans people exist, okay.”
Now, I’m off to eat solstice chocolates. I hope you enjoy the conversation!
