Tag: Genderqueer

Pronouns

I dusted off a manuscript that I had written a couple years ago which is in line for developmental edit. The name of the novel is Reclaiming the Balance, and one of the main characters is Amarel, who is balanced on the point between young and old, wise and foolish, human and Archetype — and male and female.

In other words, Amarel was born genderqueer, complete with ambiguous genitalia.

When looking through the story, I realized that I had used the word “him” to refer to Amarel, which was first and foremost offensive, because the pronoun boxed him into a binary Amarel didn’t belong to. I misgendered Amarel.

So I introduced gender-neutral pronouns for Amarel — ze for he/she, hir for him/her and his/hers, hirself for himself/herself. I wrote a lot of substitutions, given that Amarel is one of the main characters.

The revised novel is a bit harder to read, because I am not used to gender-neutral pronouns. This might be a good thing or a bad thing for the reader — good in that the reader feels the discomfort of the people around Amarel; bad in that this might make it more difficult to read.

The gender-neutral pronouns also tend to add a feeling of isolation to Amarel’ s situation, which is accurate. Amarel is the only person referred to as hir and ze. We still treat the gender queer as “other”, as people who purposefully isolate themselves from society through their rejection of the binary gender construction of society.

If the story had been written in first person, Amarel may have seen everyone as ze/hir/hirself, which would make a pretty inescapable point to the reader. Alas, Reclaiming the Balance is a third-person novel, so it will only convey so much of the point.

Quirky Characters I Have Known

I think what drives me to write is the characters. My characters have been known to show up in my imagination during coffee hour. For example:
I sit in my favorite coffeehouse at the moment, a Starbucks in an expansive space at the corner of our college library.  Grzegorz visits — he orders tea and brews it strong. He folds his lanky frame into the chair and cups his hands around his tea as if it was his chance of salvation. His copper hair spills down his shoulders and gets into his eyes.  He speaks with a low, sibilant voice, sometimes halting to find a word. “Did I ever tell you about the time I had to pass as a college professor?”
“No!” I exclaimed. “How did you do that?”
“It’s actually pretty easy. Wear a tweed jacket, put on nerd glasses, wear the hair in a man bun — the bun was so tight it gave me headaches — and explain nonsense in an authoritative manner.”
“Hey! I protested. “I resemble that remark!”
Grzegorz chuckles and makes a defiant face at me.
Kat pops in occasionally — I mean literally pops in, because she’s a hereditary time traveler. This is her “natural time”, but chances are she set a bounce point in her favorite place, Starved Rock 1958, to get here.
“Hey,” she says, standing by the table, gazing with ice blue eyes. “Do you know what the hell that blonde espresso is?”
“As far as I can tell, it’s a light roast put through the espresso machine.”
“There’s no there there, if you know what I mean.” She brushed back the lock of white in her otherwise black hair. “Ian says he wants a blonde espresso — “
Ian pops in, five inches shorter than Kat, his crinkly brown eyes merry in his freckled face. “We were playing hide-and-seek; it took me a while to figure out where she went,”he noted, putting his arm around Kat’s waist. 
“I thought you’d never show up,” Kat scoffed. “I was about to get you a blonde cappuccino. Which is so far removed from coffee I might as well give you chocolate milk.”
“Hey, I like chocolate milk!” Ian protested.
Amarel, their* white-blond hair braided neatly down their back, sits down across from me, smiling with dimples showing. “Lauren,” they say, head propped on knuckles, china blue eyes focused on me, “Tell me about your writing.”
I had forgotten that Amarel was in training to be a social worker. “I’ve been struggling for a while. I’m demoralized because I can’t seem to get anyone to read my stuff.”
“You could,” they said, flexing their long fingers as their hands steepled, “write as if they are reading. And then maybe they will find you. Your words deserve to be heard.”
Maybe Amarel is right — maybe I need to write for my potential audience rather than mourning the lack of hits on this blog or on Wattpad. Moreso, maybe I need to write for Amarel, Grzegorz, Kat, and Ian. And all my other quirky characters.

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* Amarel is genderqueer, having been born with male and female genitals. This is a preferred gender pronoun form for them.