Gender Pronoun Difficulties

[TheCrystallineEntity]

The main character of my current story is genderless, and so far I've been using they/their as a sort of place-holder for now until I decide whether to use they/their and explain it in a author's note, or to create a new pronoun entirely and explain it in an author's note.
Any thoughts?

 

[Ireth]

It might be easier to write this story in first person, so you don't have to use neutral pronouns at all. You can make their gender (or lack thereof) clear in dialogue or otherwise.

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

I'm not very experienced in writing in first-person; most of my stories are in third-person-limited [I call it 'Harry Potter perspective']. Then again...the actual writing is a bit...clunky right now, so I might switch to first person for a bit and see how I like it.

 

[TheKillerBs]

I'd go with "they" as that is the proper gender neutral pronoun for a person.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

"They" works just fine. Whether to tell the story in first-person or not is a decision only you can make. You'll have to think about which POV is the best for your story.

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

I feel like the bit of the story that I'm writing right now is only a small part of a much larger story. Point of view decisions are sometimes tricky. Somehow, through first-person in one of the drafts for my first book several years ago, I successfully kept the fact that the main character was trans-gender until the very end, while dropping hints here and there. I kind of scrapped that draft, but I'm considering ideas to merge it into a later draft about a kitsune [fox spirit]. I'm full of ideas tonight!

 

[skip.knox]

If there are three people on the other side of the room, how do you use "they" to indicate the one on the left as distinguished from the whole group?

 

[Queshire]

Personally I second the suggestion to try first person and see how that works. Other than that I vote for They, but mostly since I think it looks better than author created pronouns.

 

[Michael K. Eidson]

I wrote a character who identified as neither male or female into my WIP. I looked on the web for genderless pronouns, found a bunch of options, and decided to go with xe (vs he, she, they), xem (vs him, her, them), and xyr (vs his, her, their). I used xe/xem/xyr consistently throughout the story for that one character. Xe looked at xyr dog and it looked back at xem.

I've since received feedback from beta readers. They all hated the genderless pronouns I'd chosen. They all suggested I use they/them/their. They found xe/xem/xyr to be distracting, drawing the reader out of the story.

So I will likely be making a change to my story. I might just make the character male and be done with it. Using they/them/their for a singular character is off-putting to me.

 

[buyjupiter]

If there are three people on the other side of the room, how do you use "they" to indicate the one on the left as distinguished from the whole group?

I'm a person who uses "they" as a pronoun. It forces people to use my name more often [which is also ambiguous when it comes to gender. In Italy/Israel it's a masc nickname. In the US/Western Europe it's femme.]

Think about how conversations usually go. You initially name the noun, 'table' for example. The rest of the convo everyone refers to that noun as "it". We frequently increase the number of nouns referred to as "it" and "they" as conversations go on, but no one gets confused.

That said, "they" as personal pronoun in writing tends to get lumped in 3rd person pronoun, without specifically being designed for gender variant/divergent/nonconforming folks. "Ze/Zir" constructions get clunky fast if you're not very very familiar with them. I wouldn't make a "big" deal out of the gender of the character [I also wouldn't hide it], but I would mention something along the lines of "I don't id with trad masc traits" [or flip it the other way if that applies] so that there is a clarity about why you're using the "they" pronoun for that character.

Using first person really obscures the nature of the character's id unless that 1st person narrating voice makes a production out of their id. And unless I'm reading a queer lit fic kind of thing that goes into the identity politics as part of the story, I'm not really keen on reading that sort of thing. [I will fully admit I'm part of the problem when it comes to ghettoizing queer fic, but I'd rather see queer voices doing queer voices well in queer spaces than the alternatives I have seen. Trudi Canavan gets a pass, she does queer relationships well in fantasy and she's very straight.]

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

The way the story is now, first-person or third-person could work either way, since it switches to two other characters' perspectives halfway through the story.