Worldbuilding 203: Gender
Greetings and saltation! You know, something kind of happened between Anne’s last post and this one–it was my birthday! 😀 Hi and welcome! Last year, for my birthday post, I did a queer post as a secret “coming out” one, where I made alien queerness more interesting. Now I am officially out as trans, so why not do something similar? Except… gender! How do gender?
Definition of Gender & Sex
Everyone who knows me knows I love me some good definitions. As always with any of these definitions, I want to make it abundantly clear that they are not meant to capture how it is for humans on earth in contemporary times, but rather have a broader definition that can capture more possibilities–but it should capture somewhat what it is in humans today.
Gender refers to socially constructed roles and the interactions between them, related to but independent of the sexes of the sophont species.
I know Anne wants a second definition, so I will give it before explaining:
Sex refers to a collection of physiological traits commonly found to exist together, where the collection includes traits necessary for species reproduction.
So it is important to understand that a sex is not a singular thing; it is a huge collection of traits that are commonly, but not always, found together. Intersex people are examples where this “commonly” can and is completely broken. That does not make anyone any less of anything; it is just that biology is incredibly messy and does not care about our need for clean categories.
Another thing to remember is that while the collection must include the traits that allow for reproduction, an individual may lack any of those traits, and thus be unable to reproduce, and still belong to that particular sex.
Gender and Sex mixture
A common occurring problem in the general population is the belief that sex = gender and vice versa. Let’s make a quick detour on why that exists, and why it might exist in your society. My definition of gender includes that gender is related to sex, and that is where it starts. People divide themselves into groups of all kinds, and when a species has sexes… the division based on sex is extremely obvious because that difference in biology (however so slight) will result in common experiences that the other sexes will not experience, and you can bond and differentiate over.
Which does lead to the emergence of genders as it becomes a form of signaling “I belong to this group”. How this is done, I will go into in a little bit. Because remember what I said about sexes: they are collections of traits, but individuals can lack some, have others, and so on. So it is not always obvious just by looking at someone's body which sex they belong to. So the gender construct used initially to differentiate sexes becomes very closely tied together.
This is amplified in many cultures where gender roles are not only rigid but are also strongly enforced. So, with gender emerging from sexes in the distant past, being in many cases rigid (but not all, many cultures have been very fluid on earth), and then strongly enforced, it is not surprising that gender and sex get so strongly tied together that they are mentally inseparable. We can add on top of this also the need for simplicity in people’s minds, and that connection gets even stronger because loosening them means complexity, and people don’t like complexity often.
Though to this day, it infuriates me how people just refuse to listen…
The Construct
I stated that gender is a socially constructed role, but what does it mean? A role here doesn’t mean like in acting, where it is entirely artificial. An actor doesn’t feel like what they play; they put on a show to appear as if they do. A social role, however, is usually a role that you absorb as part of yourself that you are comfortable doing. In light of this, a lot of gender dysphoria, for example, is the discomfort of the role not matching one’s internal self.
But we’re not here to discuss trans stuff (or are we?), we’re here to discuss the construct itself. So what is included in the role of a gender? Quite a lot, actually. It includes, but is not limited to:
Clothes styles
Speech mannerism
Word choices
Body Language
Social interaction
Physical characteristics
And this is not static, as in a gender behaves the same way constantly or does all the same things all the time. These elements are in relation to each other, so a lot of these parts can change and shift the moment any other gender is present, because, by the rules of the role, they have to behave in a specific manner around that other gender.
So gender X can behave in one way when only other X are present, but the moment gender Y is present, the behaviour changes, and it can change yet again when gender Y and Z are both present.
A thing to note is that the construct, as I stated, is related to but not determined by sex. Enbies are a huge category of options that show this. A lot of enbies are alternative options to the sex-correlated genders, but it still falls under “related to sex” because by the logic we’ve done here, the largest gender categories will align with sexes often, so enbies (or entries, non-trinaries 😉, or any number) are in relation to the larger, often sex-correlated genders, and through that becomes related to sex in an indirect manner. Agender people are a different category and still fit into this model by virtue of saying, “That does not apply to me”. Is it a bit of a stretch? Yeah, but “I don’t play that game” is still a relation to the game. And in the game of gender, everything is relational.
Another thing to pay attention to with these constructs is that they are not “stereotypes” necessarily. A gender stereotype is a highly restricted set of options across all aspects of gender. Like if each factor contains a thousand options, the stereotype is you pick no more than 5 in each one and say “this is gender X” and keep it there and nothing else. Gender, however, can be, and often is, incredibly broad in all aspects stated, which is why one can say that there are many types of women that look widely different, and equally so with men.
Alternative constructs
As a construct, there is no definite way to do a gender, and while humans have, in large part, constructed two large genders centered around the sexes, this is by no means the only possible configuration that a species might use to organise themselves in relation to their sexes. I will lay out a couple of possibilities and arrangements in this section to help give inspiration for how other genders can relate outside of the big two.
Let us start with the “normal” configuration of two sexes. You can have genders that function as an amalgamation of the two sex-correlated genders, either by being a complete mixture of all of it, or specific subsets of each gender. Another possibility is that there exists an option that is entirely independent and doesn't share properties with those larger and more dominant genders. This won’t work in the human world, but let’s do this as an example. Pants are for gender X, skirts are for gender Y, and dresses are for gender Z. Of course, in an actual society, there probably would be more divisions, but a quick and dirty example is not necessarily a good example–it just gets the point across.
Another alternative is that instead of having sex-correlated genders be a singular thing, you can split them. For example, instead of having 1 singular woman gender, there might be 2 different woman genders that women divide themselves into based on properties and feelings. Same can be done for men, of course. Though, can we say they already do that, in the form of toxic ones and normal ones?
Yet more ways to do gender are to mix additional aspects. Many cultures have included spiritual or religious aspects in gender as well. One could also make it so that gender is inherited from parent to child and entirely independent of sex. Albeit it makes my skin crawl to imagine that level of enforcement, that is my own trans history coming into effect. We’re doing what is realistic and can be done in societies, and in a given society, it might be enforced culturally.
I’ll expand this slightly by going to a trinary sex species, like my Raixher species. We would have sex-related genders, let’s call them A, B, and C. We can also do a mix of all three, ABC, and we also have the possibility of specific gender mixes, such as AB, AC, BC. Which creates quite the rich possibility space for that. And then we can add the other possibilities I mentioned before on top of that, and the number of genders explodes. The diversity of existence is truly mindboggling, even when you try to set a lower limit to it when you start thinking about the actual possibilities.
Width of Gender
We’ve talked about gender and its components and some alternative ways to put one together, but I feel this needs its own part, even if it is small. With width of a gender, I refer to the amount of variety a gender construct allows in a culture at a given time. A wide gender has a huge amount of variety and will still be considered part of the same gender. And, conversely, a narrow gender is one that allows little variety before you leave what is considered for that gender.
A thing to note here is that the width of a gender can change drastically. For example, in the Western world, what was considered acceptable for women was incredibly narrow once upon a time. In modern times, however, what is considered a woman is much more diverse, and thus the gender of woman is incredibly wide. So, when you make your own gender, you can have it either be incredibly narrow, incredibly broad, or anything in between, and it is all valid.
Designing a gender
So, how does one go about designing a gender? Good question, my dear reader! The first and most important decision is if that gender is a sex-correlated one. It can either be because a specific sex usually has one gender, or a gender is defined negatively the same, as in, a specific sex usually doesn’t have that gender. For example, my species Raixher has three sexes–primale, ultimale, midmale–and a gender isn’t defined by “usually primale sex”, it is “usually NOT primale sex”, meaning that particular gender would be a gender usually associated with midmales or ultimales. This is important because it will determine if specific physical traits are commonly associated with a specific gender. Like for humans, a beard is usually an indicator of man while breasts are usually an indicator of woman.
But if you have a three-sexed species, you can have a gender that is defined by characteristics that a specific sex lacks. Again in my Raixher, the ultimale sex is defined by having flowers on their vines (instead of hair), so a gender there can be defined by simply not having flowers there often. So thorns or nothing at all would be indicators of the gender physiologically. Though if your gender is such that it is entirely independent of sex, this does not apply, but it is still an important decision to make.
After that, it is good to start deciding how this gender relates to itself and how it relates to others. By which I mean, how will all the other genders interact with this new gender? What do they expect from this gender? What does this gender expect from them? This is in terms of behaviour, which includes how the gender speaks, how the gender moves, positions itself, etc during any and all interactions. I can take as an example that some Earth languages have very specific mannerisms in terms of speech that are entirely dependent on the gender of the person. Like they can have 3 words for the same thing. One word is used only in contexts where only women are present, another in contexts where only men are present, and then a third one where those 2 genders mix together.
Then we have the presentation; this is how the gender will dress, style itself, and look toward the outside world. This, like many other parts, can be heavily context-dependent. Like some parts can be the same whether in private and public (Like underwear, men don’t wear panties usually for example), some can be heavily dependent on whether it is public, private, known people you meet, etc. Does one use makeup, what style of clothes are to be worn, etc etc. Fun fact, makeup was originally made for men and not women. Another one of those delightful shifts in gender norms.
I will do a practicum for a gender I’ve designed in the future.
Summa Summarum
So what have we learned? Gender is deeply complicated and a very personal experience of the interactions between people, so why should our worldbuilding be any different? It is complicated, and it is easy to fall into the trap of just using our own universes' genders instead of designing our own. I am not going to lie, I have easily fallen into this trap without thinking.
So I recommend you take this post into consideration and design your own genders. You don’t need to start from scratch if you don’t want to–taking what we have and modifying it is a perfectly valid method–but I am sure a lot of you, my dear readers, would love being a bit different.
So if you read this and design your own gender, please tell me about it in the comments!
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Copyright ©️ 2026 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as Gender are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as Raixher and all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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