The Problem with Writing Non-Binary Characters

I tend to stay away from depicting gender in my stories; nothing sinister about it; I just can’t afford the backlash of doing something wrong right now. The current political and cultural climate is too intense to where I cannot risk getting screamed at by self-righteous dipshits on either side. I am sympathetic with those with gender dysmorphia and those who feel out of place in their gender roles; it's a struggle most people can understand to an extent. I love writing about people who are not me, and I want to provide humanity to those who denied that decency, inside or outside of fiction. Maybe when my footing is more secure, and I can risk more, I will gladly write about this sensitive topic.

Now onto why there is a problem with writing nonbinary characters.

I was beta-reading a manuscript for a Reddit user, who was beta-reading one of my stories. In this particular tale, was a character who didn’t care what their pronouns were and let people refer to them as whatever they wanted. The problem is that just about everyone constantly referred to this person as female (she/her). The story was pretty cool, a post-apocalypse story about a person who joins a circus and finds family while solving a murder mystery.

But the pronouns, repeated repeatedly by the various characters towards the Mc, were consistently She/Her. It was almost as if the nonbinary desire was little more than just window dressing. Something that if edited out of the story, nothing would change. I brought this up with the writer, who asked for clarification about how to fix this issue. The only solution I could personally come up with is randomly assigning pronouns to the MC. The writer said that would need clarification, and we could not develop another solution.

I couldn’t get this quandary out of my mind; I thought back to Mollymawk Tealeaf from Season 2 of Critical Role, who is supposed to be gender fluid but is exclusively referred to within the show and the wiki as he. I love Mollymauk as a character, he is an utter badass and played brilliantly by Taliesin Jaffe, but I had no idea that Mollymauk was gender-fluid until I read the Wiki. I always assumed that Mollymawk was a flamboyant male Tiefling with androgynous properties.

Art for Critical Role by Ari Orner

It is a shame cause fiction, especially fantasy and science fiction, is fertile ground for letting go of biological realities and constraints and exploring and pushing the boundaries of what we can do in reality. It's what I want to do with my gods in my fantasy universe; we can truly bring strange and beautiful creations that defy biology and stretch the prospects of gender and expression, all to create something extraordinary.

However, we must solve the pronoun problem and figure out how to properly convey something unbound by biological constraints, where an appearance can lead to a nighter or both sexes. Be it through the It or They, or just He and She interchangeably.

The best example of this problem being solved is in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, as the Eternal Desire is either referred to by Dream as Sisterbrother or just They. So far, Neil Gaiman is the only writer who seems to have avoided the problem with non-binary people characters.

Apart from that, non-binary identity is just a piece of nothing that doesn’t impact the character or the reader significantly. Completely invisible or impossible to convey without confusing the reader or turning the character into an entitled baby, screaming people call them something while unable to show that naturally.

If anyone can recommend stories with good nonbinary characters, I would happily read them.

Until that, however, I urge people to help think of creative ways to explore characters that ascend biological sex.

Cheers for reading!

Please consider reading Black Masquerade: and Where Dreams are Lost both of which are 0.99$ each for Pride month at selected retailers.

Acknowledgments

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