Interlude
A note on gender
Gender is irrelevant for quans, for whom replication is a complex dance of modular balancing and operational system optimisation. The use of the pronoun “qe” is a matter of respect – they do not wish to be put in the same category as a bowl of soup or a broken chair.
The aka-aka have one gender – “we”. All of “we” are necessary for the production of more “we”, and all “we” behave differently; what else is there to say?
It takes extraordinary efforts to convince an aka-aka that anyone would want to subdivide the one-of-we by trivialities such as quill texture or genital organs.
There is some dispute about how many genders there are on Adjumir.
Most textbooks written for off-planet education concur that there are eight, with another four genders that are either regionally specific, such as the “ye” of the blue forest (“one who has grown roots of earth and soul of sky”), or deliberately open, such as “le” (“one who is in a place of change, seeking”).
Very few Adjumiris remain one gender for their entire lives, passing through different states of being as they change, grow, age.
Off-worlders are taught the basic “they”, which is the pronoun given to children who have not yet passed through the gate, and the polite “ae” used for the non-gender, the gender-that-is-without-significance, defaulted to by off-worlders who haven’t yet learned the nuances of Adjumiri categorisations.
Some off-worlders complain, say that it’s too complicated, there’s too much here for them to ever understand.
How odd, the Adjumiris reply.
You can remember the difference between innumerable different types of sausage or sporting teams, but you cannot hold in your mind a mere half-dozen or so categories of people? That must make navigating the nuances of human experience extraordinarily taxing for you.
There are four genders on Xihana, all fairly loosely defined.
To the Xi, gender is merely a hasty marker to allow strangers to make some very rough time-saving assumptions about who you are.
Given that any sort of assumption is in and of itself generally incorrect once examined over time, they are uninterested in investing too much effort in constructing rigid ideas of identity, and tend to use gender markers when the level of engagement is expected to be no more than polite chit-chat with acquaintances, or business talk.
Once intimacy is established, it is expected that conversation will switch to the fifth gender, the free-speak where all categories are torn down and all that remains is the truth of a soul, the heart of an individual, vulnerable, loved and seen.
The Shine, somewhat controversially, have only two genders – “he” and “she” – which are firmly defined, strictly separated and legally enforced.
In reality, there are four, for superior to these firm delineations are the far more exclusive, far more desirable “hé” and “shé”.
These categories are preserved for those who have reached the absolute pinnacle of their gender presentation – the most manly and the most feminine, the ultimate expressions of what everyone else should aspire to be.
Hé must not merely be strong, brave, wealthy and wise, but also embody in both hís physicality and beauty qualities of such exceptional intellect and prowess that to merely glance hís way is to at once know hís superiority.
And shé is not merely graceful, fertile, generous and kind, but has about hér an almost supernatural otherness, an untouchable dignity, that can be captured by neither art nor lyricism.
Hé is the provider of physical and material goods; shé is grateful for hís protection, and in return offers emotional support and sexual gratification upon hér body, occasionally in filmed demonstrations for commnet distribution so that people can see exactly how happy a woman at the peak of hér perfection is to give pleasure to a man.
“So… the important thing is your genitals?” Gebre blurted, when I explained this.
“As in… even if you can’t see someone’s genitals, they are the first thing that is on your mind when you meet someone?
It is their defining characteristic, above ethics, work, aptitudes, hobbies, hopes, loves, et cetera? ”
“That is one way of looking at it, yes.”
Despite this, observers have noted that, for all the Shine’s insistence on conformity in its gender presentations, hé and shé are in fact changeable, representing not some fixed sacrosanct, but an ideal that is most embodied by whatever tiny minority has the greatest power, the greatest influence and the greatest wealth at this precise moment in time.
Mawukana na-Vdnaze – the Maw who almost certainly died on the MSV Myrmida, screaming in a Pilot’s chair – was told he was a man, and did not know to quibble it. I am not sure what I am, but on Xihana at least, no one seemed to think it mattered.