Pardon me if it's been asked before, but what are carriers and donors in terms of your experiment ocs?
(wall of text incoming)
According to C:U lore told via EPDA notes, Expies (and I think all Sawians by extension) are gonosimulistic, meaning they have two fully functional reproductive systems and any two individuals can breed with each other. Apparently they're also capable of asexual reproduction. That last part confused me a bit because I only vaguely remembered like… slugs and one species of lizard doing something like that. I assumed Expies have uteruses and placentas by the virtue of having human/mammalian DNA…
Anyway, I went ahead and read up on agamogenesis. What personally struck me as interesting was the fact that in this and other related articles, the organism capable of producing eggs or copies of itself was often referred to as the mother/female, especially when talked in the context of vertebrate animals (not amoebas or insects). I suppose this is fine if we're talking about biology without societal implications, and funnily this is what the EPDA note mentions, too.
When I first made my Expie OCs I didn't know they should be (?) gonosimulistic… so I decided to just slap the AU sticker on it. Now my AU story assumes that Sawians with single functioning reproductive systems can exist, but they're not as common. Still, I was a little hesitant to use male/female/cosexual (???) to describe their phenotypes, but then I remembered @flickering-nightfall's post on speculative biology of Rain World creatures - this is where the donor and carrier words come from. In the context of my AU, most Sawians are carrier-donors (gonosimulistic, about 50%), while the rest can be sole donors (male, 26%) or sole carriers (female, 24%). The greater genetic shuffling helped expand their natural lifespan from 30 to about 60 human years with much lesser risk of cancer, which was beneficial for the future plans of colonising the Grey Planet. I like to think the Company staff would sooner use those terms over male/female/other in order to not project human gender/sex frameworks onto the freaky test tube creatures, but also to kind of… further dehumanize them by only describing what their bodies can do, rather than acknowledge them as sapient species with identities.
Of course, such a policy absolutely would not stop the company staff from projecting human gender onto Expies. I believe Sawians have no innate concept of societal roles so if gendered pronouns are used it's very likely that the experiments accepted whatever their human caretakers called them, like a child would define their place in society by listening to parents.
