#lisme

There is Shale, who is agender, and in in Last Flight there is a character, Lisme, who is genderfluid.

It’s generally regarded that Shale being agender isn’t handled very well. Shale is constantly having to tell characters that she has no gender (like literally saying the words “I have no gender,”) and in Asunder is called “it.” It’s insinuated that Shale’s lack of gender is just because of being a golem.

I’ve heard mixed feelings about how Lisme is written so I’ll just share some excerpts:

The tallest of the three mages, Lisme was an intentionally unsettling presence. She used wigs and paints and other cosmetic tricks to give herself exaggerated, inhuman looks. Some days she appeared male; others, female. Isseya had worked and fought alongside her for years and still wasn’t sure which, if either, was the truth. The mage seemed to change genders as easily as she changed her clothes, and with the same air of artificial performance. To her, being a man or woman seemed to be a matter of theatre, not identity. She had heard that Lisme had been subjected to considerable persecution before and during her time in the Circle of Magi, and that her bizarre guises since joining the Grey Wardens were coloured by those earlier attempts to control her identity. Having survived erasure, she made herself indelible.Today Lisme was dressed as a woman, and her hair was a tangled mass of old sea nets, the ropes stiff with salt and bleached white by the sun. Her eyes were a pale, washed-out bluish-green, the same shade as the cloudy glass beads she’d strung into the netting. Somehow she’d procured dozens of opalescent fish scales and had glued them to her cheeks and eyebrows, masking her pale skin under the guise of some fey, dreamlike creature.–Last Flight, pg 78

The androgynous mage still bore fresh pink scars from the battle to close off the Deep Roads, but he’d incorporated them into the carnival of his costuming. Today he had dressed to identify himself as a man, with black hair that fell past his shoulders and an equally long moustache. Both hair and moustache cut away around the shiny pink flesh of his newly healed wounds, leaving a wide bare swath striped across the left side of his head.–Last Flight, pg 91

“You’ve Joined the griffons,” the taller mage said. She had shed the male guise she’d worn when Isseya saw her last. Today she was dressed and made up as a woman, her eyes so thickly lined in kohl that she seemed to be wearing a bandit’s mask.–Last Flight, pg 122

The biggest critical responses I’ve personally heard is the way Lisme is described as using “disguises” and the idea that  having different genders is because of trauma. The biggest praise I’ve heard is the fluid use of different pronouns, and how everyone accepts Lisme; it’s nice to see that positivity, especially considering there is no actual in-lore reason for hatred.

Shale is agender and has expressed this on several occasions, including correcting other characters who refer to them as female. When Shale uses the words ‘woman’ ‘female’ etc to describe themselves, it’s in past tense. And I’m pretty sure any other rare occasion is a mistake on the writers’ parts.

It was even said that Shale’s voice was lowered post-recording, to be a bit more ambiguous re: gender, as the writers did not want players to associate with male or female based on the voice. But unfortunately, there is no longer the BioWare forums, so I can’t show you the receipts™. 

(Gifs courtesy of @princessrosellas-moved)