milo 🦴

Sand up to her shoulders waiting for the tide

Level 2: Sci-fi aliens exhibit the target audience's gender binary with some specific feature conspicuously inverted, like women are the stereotypically violent and lustful ones or whatever.

Level 3: Sci-fi aliens exhibit the target audience's gender binary, plus 1–3 "extra" genders just sort of dangling off the side of the system that literally never come up except to make jokes about them.

Level 4: The text insists that the sci-fi aliens have no genders, which are a human conceit; that every individual alien we meet happens to neatly conform with the target audience's gender binary is coincidence.

Level 5: The text attempts to un-gender its sci-fi aliens simply by taking the target audience's gender binary and subtracting one of the genders, like all of the aliens are lesbians, but you can still clearly tell which aliens are meant to be the "man" lesbians and which aliens are meant to be the "woman" lesbians.

Level 6: The text genuinely departs from the target audience's gender binary, but only because the author is using the sci-fi aliens' genders as an allegory for something else – e.g., physical disabilities, political affiliations, etc. – in a way that doesn't really make sense if you think about it too hard; "capitalist" is now a gender.

Philas the demon goat

assorted patel drawings