Magic Incarnate

Y'know that part in the 5e PHB that talks about how some elves are hermaphromorphs? And how they get that in reflection of Corellon? Yeah, that's been part of Corellon Larethian's bit since his/their original printing in 1st ed. AD&D's Deities & Demigods. Corellon is usually androgynous in appearance and can shapeshift between sexes to suit their mood or as needs merit. Do note that as a shapeshifting god, Corellon's apparent sex is necessarily a reflection of their gender (with only certain contexts changing that), so it is safe to say that Corellon is canonically nonbinary (an androgyne) and genderfluid.

Mind you, Deities & Demigods came out in 1980. The USese context for the game is important: that's the year Ronald Reagan took office in the wake of reactionary backlash against the various civil rights movements (the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Liberation Movement, and the start of the Gay/LGBT Rights Movement) and stagflation under Jimmy Carter, but a year before the AIDS epidemic started making headlines. Gay people were not widely accepted and frequently vilified. Trans people had it worse: the idea of being transsexual specifically was foreign to most and treated with contempt by most who knew about it -- if not ridiculed, then reviled and met with violence.

Yet of the "demihuman"/humanoid/monster gods in that book, Corellon is more powerful than any other greater god except possibly Moradin -- and that's being somewhat generous: Moradin has more HP and higher damage, but Corellon's casting is so much more expansive that it puts every other god to deep shame. Corellon is not treated at all as an object of ridicule; like the other demihuman deities, Corellon is a paragon of their race (in almost all ways: they lack Thief ability, which was a thing Elves could have), but even among other paragons, Corellon stands out.

At face value without the historical context, this makes sense: Elves are pretty much the Letoides (Apollo and Artemis) as a race and Corellon is pretty much Apollo, though without quite as expansive a list of associated concepts ("portfolio" in D&D terms). (For the record, Ehlonna, Eilistraee, and Mielikki have all served as Artemises. Artemes. Dianas.) Elves are also, in practical terms, the second race to be considered for inclusion in fantasy -- and now nearly any genre fiction -- setting after humans, with dwarves getting consideration mainly if more Tolkienian, less fey elves are already present (to act as foils). And I could go into the laundry list of reasons why that's the case, but suffice it to say that fairy folk have the cultural clout and psychological complexity that many other races lack while also serving as more than just foils with humans.

Corellon's gender is an expression of attitudes towards elves regarding gender and sexuality norms that have been present in pop fantasy for at least the last fifty years, with echoes going back to the thiasos of Dionysos. When elves aren't beautiful maidens in one stock trope or another, they're androgynous.

Or were. It's not that neither elves nor Corellon didn't receive ridicule for not being masculine enough -- because it is always about masculinity. All forms of queerphobia are inseparable (at least in Western culture) from misogyny because they all have to do with breaking norms that undermine expectations of male performance -- both as in performing masculinity and as in performance in bed. There has been a norm about how a man is defined by his dominance, specifically as expressed by being the active/topping/penetrating partner, in various forms through history and various levels of tolerance for different expressions and genders going all the way back to Ancient Fucking Egypt. So it should come as no surprise that the most common criticisms of elves amongst gamers were first that Tolkienian elves are too perfect (that's kinda Tolkien's point) and/or arrogantly racist (everyone in Middle Earth is racist) and second that they're effeminate/gay.

So almost immediately, we get a backlash. Some of this is due to the times: Corellon uses masculine pronouns almost without exception, but it wasn't until the mid-2000s or later that use of the singular "they" had become a major movement; "he" was treated as the default pronoun and neopronouns in fiction were largely reserved for sci fi/other speculative fiction involving aliens. Use of "he or she" or just "she" took a couple of decades from 1980 to replace "he" more prominently. But plenty was not. Corellon was immediately opposed to Lolth due to racial representations -- and, surprisingly, the elves were formed from the blood he shed banishing her from the surface in this telling; Gruumsh (also present) isn't yet Corellon's archfoe nor is Corellon responsible for Gruumsh having only one eye. But the form of the myth would become the telling we're more familiar with fairly quickly. And then the Forgotten Realms came out (1987), which would push Corellon from a nonbinary deity to patriarch of all elves, with at least two and possibly four or five consorts (depending on how you count Aerdrie Faenya, Angharradh, and Hanali Celanil). Indeed, because it mattered because of patriarchy and homophobia, Corellon was exclusively given female romantic partners.

I'm not saying that you cannot be gynophilic and nonbinary. I'm saying that the choice to make one of your few queer characters conform to standard expectations of apparent gender without other characters operating differently is a narrative decision rooted in queerphobia. Corellon has been a major deity for all editions since debut, but has been treated as a male performing male roles and having expected cishet male relationships despite being nonbinary to mitigate that nonbinary identity. In 3rd edition, this came to a head: Corellon is exclusively referred to as male except in that edition's Deities & Demigods -- and he features prominently in the edition.

By that point, we had three different depictions of the god: the "official" portrait in said book, which tries to make Corellon look androgynous by adding lipstick, eye shadow, jeweled hair pieces, and ribbons; the one in the obligatory Forgotten Realms clone supplement Faiths and Pantheons, which so dramatically masculinizes the god that you could mistake him for Heironeous (were this a Greyhawk book); and Todd Lockwood's 1999 portrait of Corellon fighting Gruumsh (with fellow artist Randy "RK" Post modelling Corellon, giving it the title "Randy the Elf God"), which portrays Corellon with biceps and triceps a bodybuilder would envy -- ones which rival his opponent's.

This was not a theoretical critique of pop culture from a queer perspective, either. The early oughts saw the beginning of a movement retaliating against elves as non-masculine. 2000's Majesty: the Fantasy Kingdom Sim and Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition kept to an earlier idea of elves as slender, graceful, and somewhat androgynous. While there were rumblings beforehand, things shifted not long afterward: WarCraft III's Night Elf men were at least as buff as its humans (with dwarven beards!) and that tendency was being seen throughout fantasy. And there was discussion on this. Male Blood Elves in The Burning Crusade (released Jan 2007) had to be buffed up from their beta counterparts to meet growing outcries about them looking effeminate/gay; while their builds weren't atypical for an average human male in real life, within Azeroth they were skinny, so their models changed.

Despite being very muscular, Night and Blood Elf males still received regular ridicule for being "gay" -- and Cam Clarke's performance for the playable Blood Elf male only added fuel to that fire.

Now, of course, 5e decided to change gears and emphasize queer identities as a matter of play. 5e came out seven years after The Burning Crusade did, by which point the discourse had shifted. Even my (extremely red) hometown had had a SOGI ordinance put in place (and then repealed the next year). The shift had begun in 4e (released not long after TBC), but only just: "Elves" (Wood Elves) in 4e are no longer canonically glabrous, as Elves had been prior, and Corellon is now the god of beauty, but still exclusively uses masculine pronouns. The pendulum had begun swinging, in fact, in the wake of TBC: the vocal men on the WoW forums were not unopposed and the controversy that had ensued remained a topic of occasional conversation for years afterward.

Why this upsurge in queerphobia aimed against elves? It's not as though homophobia or transphobia were suddenly new. Two things did it: the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy put elves in the forefront of public imagination, but in the crosshairs of reactionary men in the wake of 9/11. This is not speculatory: the need to cater to male identities became a feature of the oughts (as tends to happen within cultures facing such crises -- a known phenomenon) and led to lots of decisions in culture and media towards that end. For example, Amy Lee of Evanescence is on record saying that the male vocalist in "Bring Me to Life," who was not a band member, was added on the insistence of the record label (as a compromise for not adding rap); the part is notably absent in the 2017 rerelease. While Legolas was the idol for teen girls above and beyond most others, his long hair and graceful movements were derided among men (bearing in mind that most men in LotR have long hair; the elves just have long, well-kept hair). The trend started before the release of Fellowship of the Ring, but picked up steam quickly thereafter. (I'm not going to get into positive/negative reactions regarding imported Japanese culture [anime and video games], but that was also a part of it.)

Like I said, by 2014, the culture had shifted, queer rights were becoming mainstream, and acceptance was rising. As a result, Corellon returned to being genderfluid once more and elves followed suit.