Apropos of nothing other than vague procrastination, a quick thread on something that’s occurred to me a few times lately, using one of my novels as an example:

In DARK DEEDS, there is a minor antagonist named Serenity Chen who uses ze/zir pronouns.

At one point, another member of the same organised crime syndicate discusses, in Chen’s absence, the fact that ze might have outlived zir usefulness. This character is a violent thug called Gao Dongfeng (he/him), and is generally very unpleasant.

A comment I got on the manuscript from, I believe, the copy editor, was “would he really respect these pronouns?”

And

Yes.

Because although the Keiko series is far from a utopian future, I did want to leave general bigotry behind. Societal problems are greed and capitalism

And I know I won’t have succeeded completely; I know that I have, in the choices I made in my writing, unintentionally leaned into biases or made errors. I’ll undoubtedly do it in the future, no matter how hard I try. I am a LONG way from perfect.

BUT

If you look at a character and go “would he respect these pronouns?” then either you have to ask if this character would respect any/all pronouns, or you have to acknowledge that you think some pronouns are more valid than others. That some are unquestionable, and others aren’t.

If Gao Dongfeng decided to ignore “ze/zir”, why would he not decide to ignore “he/him” for a cis man, or “she/her” for a cis woman, or what have you?

For that matter, what pronouns would he have used for Serenity Chen? I never stated what gender, if any, ze was assigned at birth

Making horrible characters do horrible things to show that they’re horrible is fine, but we need to be careful what we’re making them do, to who, and why. I wanted Gao Dongfeng to be unpleasant, but not to suggest that society was still focused around binary genders, partly

because that wasn’t what I was interested in interrogating in those novels. They were pulpy space adventures, which I decided to put in a society that had moved on from those sort of hang ups. The point was action and crime, not fighting for social justice. That had happened.

Gods know that we can use SFF to investigate real-world social issues, and interrogate and challenge them. But I don’t think that anything should be put in just as a default. If it’s there, are you addressing it in the text? If not, why include it?

And the gods also know that I’m far from perfect at this. Subtlety is not one of my most famous attributes, for one thing. So this is as much a public reminder to myself as much as anything else, but I think it’s an important point.

We create the worlds. We will make them imperfect in some manner, so that the conflict that is the essential nature of any story can take place. But when creating imperfection, we should ask why we are making it imperfect in *this particular* way.