How To Write Non-Binary Gender Characters

It became patently obvious to me that I was taking this business of non-binary gender characters in Science Fiction completely wrong. And I thank the delightful Sarah Hoyt for this insight.

In simple easy to understand terms the answer is: Don't write Cardboard Characters.

Now, if you are unable to understand what it is to be a human being, and what it is to reflect the multiple internal tensions at play in the typical human heart, then you cannot depict the manly man who has a soft spot in his heart for his mother's knitted hat.

If you can't depict a character as humans are in real life, then you have to create some mash-up of all the stereotypes associated with the victim group you're trying to bean count. Oh, i need more gays in my story, so I'll make one of the women a softball player, and make one of the guys a hairdresser. I've railed against this sort of insulting stereotyping earlier.

While writers I follow were having too-much fun writing about non-binary gender characters in Science Fiction, I was writing a story wherein the POV character has to deal with an astrophysicist named A. Dankhopf. As you can probably guess, this sets up the POV character who expects to meet a German man, when the character later proves to be an Indian woman.

The mistaken identity trick has been done by writers since well before Shakespeare, probably the Ancient Greeks.

Then it occurred to me how Schrodinger's cat can help the Science Fiction writer in search of a non-binary gender character.

If you nodded off during Quantum Mechanics class, you may have missed a gedanken experiment wherein a sealed box is populated with a cat, a vial of poison gas, a hammer, and a radioactive source. Then some fiddly bits are added to cause the hammer to break the vial when the radioactive source emits a particle. The magic of Quantum Mechanics is something called "superposition" wherein the cat is both alive and dead until you open the box and look in.

Now, you'd think that, nine-lives notwithstanding, a cat is in a binary state of being either all alive or all dead. But in this experiment the cat is half-living and half-dead until you observe the system. I used this gimmick in my anthology Finding Time.

In this same Quantum Mechanical sense I was writing a non-binary gender character because until the hero observes A. Dankhopf, s/he is half-boy and half-girl. I feel so Politically Correct.

You can, too, just put your manly man in a girly hat, maybe name him Jayne, and until that character is actually observed, you can rely upon quantum superposition to maintain that you have a non-binary gender character.

Yesterday's Feminist

I found a paperback book that I bought when I was in grade school. I couldn't have been older than 5th grade. It was a collection of short stories by Robert Heinlein, The Green Hills of Earth.

The first story is "Delilah and the Space-Rigger." It recounts a conflict between a typical, paternalistic male-chauvinist construction supervisor and a young lady who goes to work on his space station. The story was published in 1949 when societal attitudes toward women in non-traditional vocations were more congruent with a non-ironic interpretation of Women Know Your Limits.

There has been a significant change in social attitudes in the last 65 years. So much so that even Rush Limbaugh would not defend the sexist attitude of the construction supervisor. Nor would any other Conservative I know. But in 1949, Robert Heinlein was "out there" on the cutting edge of societal evolution.

If you know anything about Robert Heinlein, you'll know he was neither a Republican nor a Conservative. He worked for Upton Sinclair and he ran for the California State Assembly as a Democrat. Most people nowadays don't know anything about Robert Heinlein. He was a Liberal in good standing with the Democrat party--in the 1940s.

But to hear some people talk nowadays, he was a Fascist. A lot of reasonable ideas that Liberals used to believe have become reasonable ideas that Conservatives believe. And other Liberals who were once in good standing have grown old and now they face attack and mau mauing by the Liberal tribe who think them not doctrinaly pure enough.

If you talk to a contemporary Liberal science fiction writer, s/he'll quickly point you to Heinlein's later works in which a character takes enjoyment from being raped. This might mean that Heinlein was endorsing rape, or that Heinlein's character who didn't regard herself as fully human, was so because she was female, OR it might mean that she erroneously thought she was not fully human because she was a clone.

Never misunderestimate the ability of people to miss the point. Or obtusely replace the point with something they can turn into a straw man. When Huckleberry Finn uses the n-word and begins his novel as a racist, does this mean that Mark Twain was a racist? If Mark Twain was a racist, then why does he depict Huck Finn growing out of his racism? And then there's A Clockwork Orange wherein the novel's protagonist brutally rapes and murders multiple women. Does this mean that Anthony Burgess endorsed rape and murder?

When I was at MSU there was a Liberal
professor who made some sarcastic remarks attacking racism. But the black community had an irony deficiency and thought he'd made a sincerely racist remark. It was patently obvious that the man had no intent toward racism. For years I thought this was due to stupidity on the part of those complaining.

Now, I think something different: I think it's obtuseness. "Sure, there are multiple interpretations of the other person's words, but I will reject the fair reading and substitute one that I can spin into an attack." Such it is with Robert Heinlein's so-called misogyny.

That's Raaaacist!

I ran an early draft of a story past my friend who told me all my characters were white guys. Since a person's race, or sex is doesn't disqualify one from our shared humanity, I thought, "That's not right."

And then I had a second thought, "How do you know Skip Collins is a white guy? Or Art Donway?"

In a fit of pique I asked, "Should I have one of them start speaking in ebonics?"

If you are a racist and a sexist, it matters whether these characters are white or black, boy or girl. If you're a human, maybe you can relate to the characters' humanity without heavy-handed labels branded on them.

One of the reasons why I like Bollywood movies so much is that all the characters are light enough to be not-black and tan enough to be not-white.

Racism and sexism now mean something different from what I have always thought they meant. What I always thought these terms meant was treating someone badly because they identify with the out group. But once all the laws get passed prohibiting favorable treatment, the people in the racism and sexism industry need to raise the bar. It's not enough to treat everyone equally and relate to them on the basis of their common humanity and respect them on the basis of bearing the image of God.

We somehow have to please self-appointed bean counters: Who complain that there aren't enough blacks in Science Fiction, or enough women, or that there are too many cismale gendernormative fascists.

So, what's a writer to do? Write a scene where the character goes into the girls' bathroom, and laments her boy-parts? Or vice-versa?

Sure, that'll sell a lot of books.

This tendency toward bean counting has engendered push-back. And if a "cismale gendernormative fascist" isn't polite enough when he pushes back, there's someone out there to concern-troll him.

Writing should be able to effectively and richly convey who a character is with just words and no gimmicks. Giving a character an Afro hair-cut or a name like LaFonda is a gimmick.

No, wait, Napoleon Dynamite was a white guy with an Afro. But he could dance, and don't they say that black people have rhythm--Raaaaacist!

So, the bean counters want us to convey the racial and sexual identity of our characters when the easiest ways to do that with the written word include racial and sexual stereotypes. But they have to be the right racial stereotypes or you'll be crucified for being a racist/sexist.

This game is not worth the candle. It doesn't matter whether my characters are black or white, male or female, because their humanity is more important.

(No, I don't think black people have rhythm, Motown records notwithstanding.)

I'm tempted to write a story with characters named Alex and Sidney who are the opposite sex, race, etc. than what everyone expects.

I Am Outraged

I'd like to propose a little thought-experiment. Einstein and the boys a century ago would imaging things like passenger trains hurtling at one another at thousands of miles per second to work out the details of Relativity.

So, I want you to suppose you are one of the folks on Storage Wars bidding on abandoned storage lockers. In the first locker you and your frienemy bid each other up because you both see a box for a rare collectible Star Wars toy. One of you wins, but pays through the nose for it. The next locker you see a similar box for a similar item of value and that locker sells at a premium, too. At the end of the day, a locker goes up for auction, and inside is a priceless 1935 Duesenberg convertible. You and your frienemy each check your pockets and find you've spent all your money. The locker then goes for a song as you look on helplessly. When you inspect your locker, you find the box is empty.

Your actions are reasonable because storage lockers containing priceless objects d'art are as rare these days as KKK lynchings.

Great crimes should be suffered with great outrage and small crimes should only warrant small outrage.

Yet, we've seen a reversal of this in our society. Decades-old thought-crimes are spun into "the worst form of racism." Morning-after regrets can occasion accusations of rape. And so on.

This lack of perspective comes about because a lynching is so rare these days. Society has advanced morally. No civilized person thinks it's OK to demean a person for the color of his skin. No civilized person thinks the victim of rape "was asking for it." No civilized person thinks that being a girl is inferior to being a boy.

Why is even the barest hint of transgression in these areas met with such fury? There is only a finite amount of outrage that a person or a society can muster. Why do we spend it so foolishly?

It could be that the activists don't really believe their own rhetoric about having won and they overcompensate to deny their insecurities.

More likely it's the rice bowl.

Suppose I held Aladdin's Lamp with infinite wishes and used the first one to end racism. What would this do to the people crying the loudest about racism? If I used the second wish to end poverty, think of the social workers who'd be tossed out of work.

The righteous work of the activist is to find the largest social problem in his/her area of interest and solve it. Then move on to the second-largest, and so on. But nobody is enslaving blacks, or lynching them, or segregating schools, or red-lining mortgages, or using the n-word. Now we have claims of subliminal racism.

At some point, the activist should admit victory. But admitting victory hurts fundraising.

You Are Not Safe

I had a friend who got high in Democrat circles. He was the kind of guy who actually owned a copy of Speaker of the House Jim Wright's book. The one he fraudulently published in a money laundering scheme

. My friend knew I was Conservative in some issues and Libertarian in others. I think this is what gave him the feeling he could make remarks that were disrespectful of gay people. My response was a lifted eyebrow, because that was the sort of thing Democrats always accuse Republicans of. He'd be crucified if he made such remarks publicly today.

For the record, I am a libertarian who believes Government should be small enough so that what goes between your legs is of no interest to it. Government should also be color blind and indifferent to whether you have boy parts or girl parts.

In recent days I've watched on with detachment at the sound and fury directed at people with good Democrat credentials. They are being mau-maued for remarks that have been spun into thought-crime. I'm not a fan of Paula Deen and I have never heard her utter a racist remark, yet I have heard accusations that she has done so in the past and that she botched her apology. Did she campaign for the white half of Barack Obama?

There is no statute of limitations on thought-crime and I have heard her called the worst kind of racist.

This should be good news for those fellas in white hoods with a penchant for carrying torches and lynching.

Then there's the flap I just learned about at the SFWA. I don't haunt those precincts very much and so I'm not the best guy to assess guilt. It turns out two old guys, Barry Malzberg and Mike Resnick, said some things that could be spun into anti-feminism.

Apparently, they wrote in the SFWA newsletters referring to females as "ladies" and their fetching appearance was noted in complimentary terms. This was spun into thought-crime most foul.

This should be good news to those fellas who make girls wear burqas and practice female genital mutilation.

For the record, when I use a word it means exactly what I want it to mean, nothing more and nothing less. If you are a lady, you are a superior woman. Just as a gentleman is a superior man. I find humorless scolds abhorrent without regard to sex, creed or color.

The frightening thing about this story is that the perpetrators were Liberals in good standing who merely reflected the values of Democrats in the 1960s. A generation and a half of multicultural political correctness has turned large swaths of the academy into cultural Stalinists.

What I found most appealing about the liberalism of the 1960s was its tolerance and acceptance of diversity. But today it seems the only diversity that can be tolerated is the kind that uses rainbow logos to tell religious people to shut up.

Anything can be interpreted maliciously by someone intent upon using the politics of personal destruction. Moreover, when charges of racism or sexism are trivialized as we've seen recently, our society has no moral outrage left over for the fellas in white hoods, etc.

Will you tolerate mau-mauing?

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

We Don't Put Up With No Intolerance

This started a while back on Facebook. Someone posted picture of a sheet of notebook paper on which was scrawled, "Judging a person does not define who they are, it defines who you are."

My first thought was, the spirit is right, but its too simplistic.

My second thought was the grammar is wrong. The singular "person" is being referenced with a plural "they."

My third thought was, I have just outed myself as a Grammar Nazi.

I don't think you can go through life without judging others. You ought not get in the windowless van with the creepy stranger promising free candy. The same goes for decisions about where you'll invest your money or who you'll hire to remodel your house. You judge others when you accept a dinner date or consider a marriage proposal. This is simply exercising good judgment.

The black economist Walter Williams make a case for discrimination. He says he won't sleep with a woman if she's not Mrs. Williams. He's being a bit silly to make a not-silly point. Keeping one's wedding vows  is a legitimate basis for discriminating against potential sex partners. Since Dr. Williams is black it is obvious that he's making a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate bases for discrimination.

The basis of judgment may be legitimate or not. If I am selling you something, the only color I care about is the green of your money. If I'm lending you money, I'll extend my consideration to your credit history. It's illegitimate to consider your race, creed, sexual preference, or political affiliations. I think it's wrong to even record such criteria for the purposes of affirmative action.


The legitimacy of judgment is also contextual. If I'm renting a house or an apartment to you, your housekeeping becomes a consideration. I don't want to wash nicotine off my walls, so I feel  smoking habits are a legitimate basis of judging of potential tenants.

Suppose I'm considering a job candidate. It is wrong to consider sex, creed and sexual preference in employment decisions. How about when a female, Buddhist, lesbian applies for the job of Pastor of a Baptist church?

I've stated before one's conscience is not subject to political suasion. Freedom of religion is more than just disestablishmentarianism (prohibiting funding of an established church with tax dollars). It's giving people the space to be true to their conscience.

Religious intolerance cuts both ways. If someone's conscience demands something you don't like, you are the intolerant one when you damn that person on that basis. Which brings us back to where we started. This goes around and around.

And around. Sometimes being intolerant is OK. If your religion tells you to fly an airplane into a building or another murderous act, I won't tolerate your religion.

It's a judgment call.