Choosing character's genders

shadow2 said:

I have 2 very strong and well-developed characters I am excited to make my protagonists for my next novel.

However, weirdly, they are neither male of female yet. Whenever I try to imagine them as such, they lose a lot of their complexity. None of their character traits are defined by their gender, and I don't want to skew them in a masculine or feminine direction. But I'm at the point where I want to start writing them so I need pronouns and full personalities!

Will it weaken my work just to randomly choose genders for each of them? What is a way to make the character's genders realistically present without influencing who they are as people, how they are treated by other characters, and how readers will perceive them?

Thanks, any advice would be greatly appreciated!

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Don't write anything, because that's inevitable if you do? Especially the last bit is pretty well out of your hands.

I mean if your novel is set in a society that has no gender norms, assumptions, roles, stereotypes, anything at all, from anyplace, that'd help, character-wise, but it still won't help with the reader thing, unless you just have literally genderless characters in a genderless world, in which case, readers will probably assign gender in their heads regardless.

I write speculative fiction, so my first impulse would be, "Hey, make them agender! Or both genders! It'd be cool!" Of course, that wouldn't work so well for, e.g. a romance novel or cozy mystery.

So I'd suggest making them male and female, and then keep them exactly as you envision them, because personally, I'd like to see more books that portray men and women as just...people. i.e. I'd like to see books that don't reinforce the gender binary, either in terms of how the characters behave or how the world treats them.

Alternately, you could also make them both people who don't fit into the gender binary in a more concrete way, either by how they identify internally or by making one of them intersex. If that fact is normalized in your book, i.e. just a thing that happens to be true as your characters get on with their lives, I think that could be really cool too. And you wouldn't have readers complaining that one or both of them isn't "believable" as a man or woman, because the characters themselves would have already asserted they don't fit those labels.

I have seen it done but with one character. In Sara Taylor's The Lauras, the MC is a teenager named Alex and as it is narrated in the 1st POV you never know if they are a boy or a girl. There is actually a part in the book where Alex gets bullied and attacked at school as the other kids want a definite answer.

I am a plot-oriented writer, and for me the idea comes first as an action. Then I decide who are the best characters to make the story happen, and usually there are gender roles which give the gender of each of the characters. In historical novels, usually Army were men. An occasional woman dressed as a boy (who gets caught ultimately, after a while, in a way or another) might be the odd one out. A nurse is usually a woman. A singer or a teacher could be of any gender - then pick one thinking about all the relationships the character might help the story develop by having.

If the character doesn't tell me right off the bat, I take some time to get to know them better. I had one who continued to prefer not to specify, and it became clear they were non-binary.

With some characters, if they're not adamant about it, I'll choose the opposite of my first instinct, just to shake myself out of the habit of writing stereotypes. (I had a POV character become bisexual when I did this, but it worked fine. ) But I like to rummage around in presumptions of gender anyway, and I want to continue to expand my own thinking on the subject.

I have found that my reasons for wanting particular characters to be one gender or another don't necessarily influence the story. Yes, we live in a society where specific choices may make specific readers feel those choices are political or have an agenda. That doesn't mean the story is something other than it should be just because a lead was female instead of male. So, the choices you make should reflect the story you want to tell and which characters will best tell that story.

(I've been working on a YA novel that I deliberately swapped out the mostly male cast with an all-female cast of characters for the main plot. It doesn't effect the plot itself. It did help me write the details and subplots more effectively. In other stories there are more male characters. For me, though, realism is reflected in seeing a piece of the world I know in the books I read and that generally means seeing representation that is similar to what I see in my life. Unless, the story particularly demands something different.)

You don't have to gender them. See Emma Bull's Bone Dance or Anne Leckie's trilogy.

shadow2 said:

I have 2 very strong and well-developed characters I am excited to make my protagonists for my next novel.

However, weirdly, they are neither male of female yet. Whenever I try to imagine them as such, they lose a lot of their complexity. None of their character traits are defined by their gender, and I don't want to skew them in a masculine or feminine direction.

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This is where unconscious gender bias is taking over. Everyone has some degree of unconscious bias, it's the inevitable result of living in a male dominated society. By not letting the unconscious bias change your characters, you will have better characters. Easier said than done, I know!

You could try writing the characters with a placeholder pronoun, one that you can easily fix with a search and replace, for example, hx for he/she, hxx for him/her etc. Then, after you've finished, choose their gender and do a search and replace. If you have more than one character whose gender isn't determined yet, you may need to make them personal to each character, in case you go for one gender for one, and another for the other (which would screw up the search and replace plan). Example: your characters are Sam and Alex. Sam's pronouns could be sx and sxx and Alex's pronouns could be ax and axx.

You can do that for names as well. I usually start writing long before I've figured out all the characters' names. I just put in a placeholder name like (friend) - I put in the brackets so I can do a search and replace when I finally figure out what they're going to be called.

I have very few men in current WIP. The one who are there exist as bit-characters.

If if doubt, I make them women. It doesn't change their characteristics, they act exactly the same.


Good luck.

shadow2 said:

None of their character traits are defined by their gender, and I don't want to skew them in a masculine or feminine direction.

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I like death metal and shred metal. A lot. And I'm a woman. If I was a man and liked death metal, that wouldn't make me any less complex. I also like to bake cookies. If was a man and liked to bake cookies, that still wouldn't mean anything. These traits exist by themselves, separate from gender.

Gender doesn't make a trait. Gender determines bodyparts and a slightly different mixture of hormones. If a character is good at baseball, they're good at baseball. Gender doesn't make that trait any different.

However, interacting in certain social circles will be different. A woman at a death metal concert might be treated differently. The trait isn't any different, but interactions within that community will be biased (hell, sometimes it's not biased at all!). I feel like choosing a character's gender based on how other characters treat them is valid. Choosing a character's gender based on their traits is actually not really related. All genders are allowed to like, enjoy, or have any trait. It's the community that has the stigma.

People are different, I agree completely with Blinkk, and often we are forced by peers into a mold that isn't comfortable. I rode with outlaw bikers for many years, and there was an expectation that I would really like death metal... which I don't mind in small doses, but my preference is classical music - particularly classical guitar. My friends have gotten used to me though.

Physically there is the Matthew Effect to consider. Even tiny differences in natural physical abilities change the directions lives take.

indianroads said:

Physically there is the Matthew Effect to consider. Even tiny differences in natural physical abilities change the directions lives take.

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I see what you're saying. I'm not so sure I agree with 'changing the direction' of a life. That seems a little extreme. The body you're born with can make something more challenging for you. A woman who plays baseball might have to train her upper body extra hard to be on par with the men. It definitely can create extra challenges. I think a lot of times motivation outweighs this disadvantage. Not always, but a lot of times.

shadow2 said:

True. If I were to write them as female characters, I think the male characters wouldn't take them quite as seriously in the kinds of situations I will be writing about unless I create an extraordinarily gender neutral society for the purpose of the novel. This is what would bother me about it.

Also, I love your location, Blinkk. Steve Miller Band = .

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Why are you restricting yourself? You are the God of your novel's universe.

But is that addressed by not showing those situations at all?

It's your call ofc. I do think there is value, though, in fiction being a template for life. Normalising how interactions should go.

In real life, bad people don't get caught, don't go to prison, don't lose. They tend to in books, and readers generally don't object. Should a novel deal with the fact that most murders/rapes/war crimes are totally passed by? Maybe, if that's the point of the novel. But they don't *have* to. There's value in a story where the villain gets comeuppance. There's value in a story where women and men interact without dumping on each other (metaphorically).

Harlequin said:

But is that addressed by not showing those situations at all?

It's your call ofc. I do think there is value, though, in fiction being a template for life. Normalising how interactions should go.

In real life, bad people don't get caught, don't go to prison, don't lose. They tend to in books, and readers generally don't object. Should a novel deal with the fact that most murders/rapes/war crimes are totally passed by? Maybe, if that's the point of the novel. But they don't *have* to. There's value in a story where the villain gets comeuppance. There's value in a story where women and men interact without dumping on each other (metaphorically).

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I guess that’s the fiction aspect of the book, when the antagonist is caught and is punished.

ETA if the bad guy got away, it could be a pretty unsatisfactory ending.

I finally settled on the gender for some characters not based on the characters themselves (because their traits didn't change either way), but rather on how the characters would relate to the other characters. This is generalizing of course, but often there is a special type of relationship bond between, say, a father and daughter, or two sisters, etc. Also think about if you want there to be potential love interest - or not - inferred by readers between certain characters (their orientation comes into play here too obviously). At least for me, these were the things that drove the choice of gender, rather than the characters themselves.

Have you read Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness?