Isn't it all just so bloody tedious?
This is definitely the most niche brag you will read today: with the release of A Wall Is Also a Road, I will have a 5/5 score when it comes to publishing sci-fi books with nonbinary protagonists. No matter the topic of my books—time travel, robots running a noodle restaurant, far-future terraformers—I always include a nonbinary point of view.
Of course you do, dear boy….
This is trickier than it sounds, because nonbinary pronouns in science fiction have a pretty checkered history. Over the past century, sci-fi authors have often deployed nonbinary pronouns to make characters seem incomprehensibly abnormal.
Stop sniggering at the back!
After the rise of feminist science fiction in the 1970s, authors became bolder about using nonbinary pronouns without inserting a judgey, binary-centric protagonist.
There was a rise of ‘feminist science fiction’? Really?
Marge Piercy consistently uses the neopronoun “per” for the eco-conscious future humans in Woman on the Edge of Time (1975). And Octavia Butler’s female protagonist in the iconic 1980s trilogy Lilith’s Brood has children with an ooloi, the third sex of a spacefaring species called the Oankali.
The fact they probably did this to make characters more ‘other’ and so alien has gone right over his head, hasn’t it?
But something profound has changed: Today, nonbinary characters are protagonists. Readers are invited to identify with em, table-flip the typical narrative, and perceive binary gender as abnormal.
It isn’t, no matter how you might wish it to be, and ‘queer fiction’ isn’t going to change that one iota.
Being nonbinary in a binary world feels like living in a state of low-key defamiliarization all the time. I’m constantly confused by the weirdness and artificiality of binary gender, which inspires all kinds of out-of-pocket assumptions about who I am.
We know just who you are, unfortunately…
Since the 1780s, linguists, journalists, and even mathematicians have been advocating for a simple act of language reform that would give nonbinary people more options. With nerdy fervor, they’ve coined gender neutral neopronouns like ip, thon, xe, ir, and ae. Not for political reasons, or “wokeness.” Just to settle on a grammatically correct way of describing individuals without reference to their genders.
Have they really? Since the 1780S?
Nonbinary pronouns aren’t mere rhetoric. They’re about selfhood and being seen for who we are. Whether a story introduces 15 wild neopronouns, or a single epicene one, it creates a space for imagining what our hearts might do if we had more choices than two.
Pronouns eh? The dictionary definition of which is 'a word or group of words used to replace a noun or noun phrase to avoid repetition and make sentences flow better'. So you're asking rather a lot of them, aren't you?
