#OCTAVIA BUTLER TRANSGENDER SERIES#
Yet she avoids positioning the Oankali as a mysterious Other to be discovered by us normals, because in her series the Oankali are our species’ oppressors. She invents a species called the Oankali, who have three genders, and a radically different family structure based around this gender trinary. Not only that, but the male narrator falls in love with Therem, and this deeply moving relationship remains for me the queerest romance ever put to paper.Īnother author who pulls off the trope well is Octavia Butler in her Xenogenesis series (major trigger warnings here for genocide and rape used as a weapon of war these books seriously scarred me for life). LeGuin does this to explore what a society without gender might look like, but she avoids reducing the Gethenians to a plot gimmick by bringing Therem to life as a graceful and courageous character.
LeGuin set on a world, Gethen, where everyone is physically sexless, except for two days a month when they can take on either male or female characteristics.
However, there are also some amazing examples, as pictured above: Therem Harth rem ir Estaven is one of the two protagonists of The Left Hand of Darkness, a novel by Ursula K. I think Emma Bull meant to make a point about the gendered assumptions we make about first person narrators, but I think the effect is that it trivializes Sparrow’s non-binary identity, as if it isn’t important. The conceit of this novel is that it’s told in first person, so we don’t find out that Sparrow is agender until most of the way through the book. I also have mixed feelings about the main character Sparrow in Bone Dance by Emma Bull, a member of a species that is entirely agender. This pretty much gives Niven an excuse to only write male characters of this species, and none of the social implications of this gender system are explored. The Puppeteers have three genders, two male and one female, and only the male genders are sentient. A pretty bad example of this are the Pierson’s Puppeteers from Larry Niven’s Ringworld.
At worst, this is used as a kind of shock value to impress upon the reader how different the species is from us. On the other hand, it can be nice to have trans* characters who don’t lead into a Very Special Lesson about gender, but are just there, because trans* people exist, and lead lives that are mostly the same as anyone else’s.Ī common trope for the portrayal of non-binary characters in sci fi is to invent a species in which gender is radically different from humans. The unique concerns of trans* people are interesting, too often ignored, and should be explored in fiction. These two trends can contradict one another. I find that these correspond to trends in the way trans, intersex, and non-binary characters are represented in speculative fiction: as entry points into deep questions about gender, and as people with the same feelings and concerns as everyone else. It also lets us imagine worlds in which a diversity of gender expression is accepted and normalized. That allows us to explore the frontiers of gender, and ask serious questions about why our society views gender the way it does.
As I often like to point out, a major appeal of speculative fiction, such as science fiction, fantasy, and alternate history, is that it lets us imagine the world as something other than it is.
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