#nonhuman nonbinary

Hollywood Healing

Hero never becomes visibly injured and can recover completely from anything.

Propaganda:

Just... let serious injuries have long lasting consequences, okay? Okay.

Non-Human Non-Binary

Sapient nonhuman races that don't generally consider themselves male or female.

Propaganda:

I honestly don’t feel like there are any major concerns here. There are no humans, so I don’t see an issue with dehumanizing nonbinary identities. (If there were humans, maybe we would talk about how to make sure nonbinary characters are not alien-only.)

I guess I could suggest trying not to project a human idea of gender roles onto all of the aliens either. There’s a tendency for sci-fi and fantasy writers to project our preconceived notions of what are fundamentally *our own* culture’s perceptions of gender onto other cultures. Including and especially ones where it just doesn’t make sense to at all. We have a nonhuman nonbinary tag which should be able to help you out a bit.

Hey anon!

So I have thought a lot about this ask. But not in the way you think.

The character you’ve introduced to us is a cyborg. That means a person, a human, who had a part of their body amputated and replaced by a mechanical system, or just enhanced an organ with a mechanical system. A person with an mechatronic leg therefore is, by definition, a cyborg. A person with a cochlear implant is, by definition, a cyborg. They are still human. They still have their brain. They still have emotions, feelings and thoughts like any other human being.

Your character lost three of four extremities and got them replaced with a mechanical system. So even being more than 50% made out of robotics, your character is not a robot. They are human.

In conclusion, from a standpoint of nonbinary gender representation this is no issue. But your view on amputees might be. We are not the right reference for this. I would like to ask you to speak to people experienced with disability. (Maybe a local veterans centre?)

Best of luck.

I’m going to separate this into sections because it’s easier to answer.

1. Human concepts of gender/sex vs alien

2. A trans character being used to add perspective

3. Nonhuman not cis characters and the appropriateness of that

And here’s what I will talk about on this.

1. Gender/sex is not necessarily a human-only thing. Gender isn’t the same anywhere either. Gender in humans isn’t some kind of universal truth, even within one culture, even within one neighbourhood or family. And there are lots of humans that already are talking on these things and taking leadership in activism surrounding. My concern is dehumanizing that activism. Or assuming that perspective on the matter requires someone to be wholly removed from it, and engaging with it for the first time to get that.

In general also, when it comes to characters interacting with unfamiliar cultures, you should do some research on things like cultural relativity, diaspora, migration and the psychology of moving and culture shock. There’s also the danger of making aliens seem too much like human cultural groups that have been traditionally dehumanized. ... Like in Captain Marvel, when the hongi was used by one of the alien groups. Mind you, I haven’t seen any Māori addressing this. I don’t know if it was okay. But I do imagine that someone seeing the hongi for the first time in that context, maybe might mean they misinterpret what its origins are, especially seeing as it was not at all acknowledged within the movie as what it was. (It strikes me as appropriation. But I am not Māori, so please do not take my word for this like it’s gospel.)

2. It strikes me that you are using a trans character to add layers to the plot. This can be okay, but I wouldn’t do it unless you can get a sensitivity reader/editor who is trans to go through it with you. Your character needs to be a character first and foremost, and it needs to be acknowledged that this character’s transness in no way takes away from that, but is part of that whole-person-ness. This will be more difficult for you to understand and balance properly if you’re not trans. And it is important to do this properly.

3. I think we’ve covered this part pretty well before via our aliens tag and our nonhuman characters tag. The gist for you is that you need to ensure there is human representation of these identities, just as prominent or more prominent, ideally.

Something else that’s kind of a red flag here for me is that you’re painting it as though trans/nonbinary identity is something people “decide” (your word) to be, like it’s something informed and enlightened and something we choose. That has a lot of problems, and I think most of them can be figured out just by my framing it that way. 

A lot of non-nonbinary people seem to think that our identities are some kind of preaching. Like it’s an enlightened thing and that we are trying to seem special. This is extremely harmful and just not the truth. It’s only as ‘enlightened’ as anybody’s self-recognition is.