#which suck

Yes it’s nice that Murderbot is agender and uses it/its and doesn’t want to be human.

But there need to be more blatantly trans characters. Humans who are nonbinary and constructs and bots that are binary.

Rather than having characters list out their gender on the interfaces, have them list their pronouns. “female” doesn’t = “she/her” and honestly like. Are they listing their genders, or are they listing their sex because Martha Wells thinks they’re the same thing except for when it comes to nonbinary people? We don’t know, because the books don’t give us any more details.

The characters need to list their pronouns, not their gender. Your gender doesn’t tell us anything about the pronouns you use. Especially when Murderbot lists its gender as “indeterminate” or “not applicable”.

The Murderbot Diaries is better with this stuff than The Books of the Raksura, but the Books of the Raksura were quite frankly atrocious when it comes to gender, so that’s not saying much. It’s not enough to be better than the older works, you have to be good.

Murderbot uses it/its, which is great. It’s less great that there aren’t any human characters who use it/its and there aren’t any bots or constructs that use anything besides it/its.

This is still very much “sex = gender = pronouns” including the bots and constructs, with the sole exception so far being Rami, who uses te/ter pronouns and describes ter gender as “tercera”.

If Martha Wells writes more for this series, I hope she learns more about trans people before she does so and not only fixes the “listing your gender means people know your pronouns” issue, but also creates and introduces more characters who are trans, non-human, human, and augmented human alike.