My weird: Agender

My society places massive emphasis and importance on gender, which makes life excessively complicated for those of us whose response to “what gender are you?” is “idk N/A?”.

People insist on knowing what gender a character is, and if you don’t mention it they’ll guess wildly rather than just… not knowing, like they do with a character’s favourite colour, chosen sport team, full name, or a million other factoids. The “gender” field being blank is Unacceptable.

Meanwhile I don’t give most side characters genders because frankly I can’t be bothered. Why would you need to know that? Why would you even care? Singular “they” has been used in English for hundreds of years. Just default to that and move on.

Gender having no importance to me also means I struggle with stories centred around gender, or driven by a character’s sense of gender. Because the whole thing is alien to me.

Speaking of alien, I’ve always found genderless or nonbinary characters fascinating and compelling, most of which are robots or aliens. For years before I found the language for my own gender expression (or rather lack thereof) I was exploring the idea of life forms which didn’t have gender through the lens of aliens and genetically engineered life forms. A trend which continues in my sci-fi works.