"This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here."
GNU Terry Pratchett
The full quote is fascinating though, and adds an interesting context as it's Angua (a werewolf) and Carrot (human, but raised by dwarves) discussing a dwarf colleague, Cheery.
"Female? He told you he was female?" "She," Angua corrected. "This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here." She could smell his bewilderment... "Well, I would have though she'd have the decency to keep it to herself," Carrot said finally. "I don't think it's very clever, you know, to go around drawing attention to the fact." "Carrot, I think you might have something wrong with your head," said Angua. "What?" "I think you might have it stuck up your bum."
Sir Terry Pratchett - "Feet of Clay"
This is CARROT being the asshole. Carrot who has, throughout all the prior books, been depicted as basically the best of all possible people. He is noble, brave, considerate, kind. He is the good guy in the entire City...
... and yet, he grew up dwarf, and has picked up their more conservative views on gender identity.
Discworld dwarves start out in the books as basically a people without visible gender differences (thanks to the woman growing beards just like the men) and using "he/him" pronouns as their default. Anything else is seen as breaking the most basic of social conventions. (Dwarf dating is described early on as being two dwarves who like each other spending an inordinately long time trying to find out, as tactfully as possible, what gender the other dwarf is)
Carrot does immediately adopt the "she" pronoun for Cheery, which is but wishes she didn't make such a fuss about it. He's prepared to tolerate her choices, but he doesn't APPROVE of them, and thinks that that is enough.
Carrot, because he IS Carrot, does learn to open his mind on this subject, perhaps his final frontier of bias, but I do love that it's addressed as something he has to work on, and succeed.
And to Terry Pratchett's credit what started out as a throwaway joke about dwarf sex, gradually becomes a multi-volume subplot which is a fascinating exploration of gender and social identity as more dwarves start to "come out" as being female, and not just identifying as female, but changing their form of dress to something which matches who they are (they keep their beards though, because to a dwarf, that has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with being a dwarf) and how their society has to adjust, with differing levels of comfort, to this new reality.
Carrot was also prejudiced against the undead early on as well. And the fact that he unlearns these views is a good example of a common theme in Pratchett's work
The overwhelming theme of Pratchett's work is change. Not good vs evil but progress vs stasis/going backwards. The protagonists of Pratchett's stories are people who can take on board new ideas and change and grow and adapt. Some of them start out as very stupid people with very stupid views in fact until they learn and grow and improve. The villains on the other hand are people who desperately want things to either stay the same or regress back to some imagined "Good old days" that they prefer.
While we're talking about Terry Pratchett gender, there's also golems, who are basically lumps of clay that have been brought to life but don't actually have any gender or secondary sexual characteristics so everyone defaults to male and he/him. As the books story goes on some of them decide to try being women just because.
Feet of Clay came out in 1996. I cannot overstate how pronoun discourse wasn't anywhere on the radar then. I'm fairly terminally online, active in fandom, and the first I can remember is some timid discussion of neopronouns in the mid-2000s, where "how could you tell other people to use them for you" was a major puzzle. (I still love neopronouns - zie/hir appeals to me in a way they distinctly doesn't, genderfluid though I am.)
ALSO also also
1) I don't have the book to hand, but when Cheery comes out she changes her name to Cheri, because "sometimes, when you shout who you are to the whole world, you need to do it quietly." It's such a beautiful expression of coming out being a process, and one that needn't be undertaken all at once.
2) Pterry had the best goyische take I've ever seen on golems, and I will die on that hill. It's not perfect, but it is really well-done, and it was done with respect, and to me that might be even more important than perfection.
I had the book to hand because I reread it recently. The quote goes:
When you've made up your mind to shout out who you are to the world, it's a relief to know that you can do it in a whisper.
THERE we go.
The thing to remember about Carrot is that he's a good person who cares a lot and very much wants to do the right thing, but he's still meant to be A Person. The text shows him fucking up and defaulting to Society Says or Everybody Knows when he gets caught sideways by a new situation or idea at least once per book in which he's featured prominently. The younger he is, the more he does it.
The reason that he's A Good Person⢠is that he stops and listens and actually thinks very hard about the issue when someone is like "Well, that's bullshit and here's why." He looks at the evidence instead of what he's been told, and he values people and outcomes more than tradition and feelings of comfort or vague ideals. When it turns out the thing he thinks is actually bullshit, he usually changes his worldview to be fairer and he definitely changes his behavior to be better.
The older and more mature he gets, the more we see him actively seeking out opportunities to learn and grow and understand more about what people need and where they're coming from and why they do what they do. Instead of learning during moments of crisis and fucking it up, he's exploring on his own and learning how to handle unfamiliar situations better.
Much like with Vimes, he's meant to model the fact that good people don't spring from the ground fully formed with no bad thoughts or impulses or prejudices. People will fuck up and trip dick-first into blind spots they didn't even know they had and find things they never even thought they had to think about. You act like a good person by reevaluating received wisdom and valuing people over dogma and learning the difference between facts and bigotry.
It's never "Oh, Good People⢠never do anything bad," it's "What makes someone a good person is how they handle it when they fuck up."
