sqbr | Characters that are or "feel" non binary to me

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Characters that are or "feel" non binary to me

Reading this post by a non-binary person about allegorical vs literal representation got me thinking about my own complex feelings about various characters that either are or feel non-binary, and I was curious to poke at my preferences and compare notes with other non binary folk.

So! This is based very much on my own personal feelings. These are not necessarily recommendations (some of these canons are Not Good), and other non-binary people's feelings may differ, especially those who aren't afab and multi-gender. Also the distinctions here are often pretty fuzzy.

First, characters that I have personally connected with in a non-binary way, where I get like...gender euphoria and a sense of YES, THAT.

Canonically non-binary:
I'm including characters where the terminology doesn't come up because it's in a period setting etc, but it feels to me like the writer intends the character to be read as non-binary.

Stevonnie and the other Steven fusions from Steven Universe
Double Trouble from She-ra
Kaede from Samurai Love Ballad: Party
Taichi from Yuureitou
Shi Qing Xuan in some Heaven Official's Blessing fanfic
Yuta from Stars Align
Davepetasprite^2 from Homestuck

Act in a very non-binary way, but canon isn't explicit:
These are characters who, say, switch between gender identities, but it doesn't feel to me like the writer is aware of/engaging with a non-binary identity. Which gets iffy when we're mostly talking about works from other cultures with different approaches to gender, but this is just how it feels to me.

Najimi from Komi Can't Communicate
Shi Qing Xuan from Heaven Official's Blessing (who can also be easily read as a cis man or trans woman)
Rimuru from That Time I Reincarnated as a Slime, though I didn't like the canon enough to watch much

Ungendered aliens/robots etc:

Shale from Dragon Age: Origins until she decides to be a woman again for very binarist reasons :/

Canonically binary gendered characters who give me some non-binary feels:
Not necessarily a LOT of feels, but some.

Lance, Tei and Nameless from Nameless. They feel like dolls acting like men because they think it will make their owner like them. Also, Lance cross-dresses.
Benito from Backstage Pass. It's just a vibe, and the voice actor is non-binary.
Viola from Twelfth Night, who has a whole separate male identity.
Plenty more I'm forgetting, I'm sure.

Canonically non-binary/genderless characters I am ambivalent about:
I may love the character in and of themselves, but my reaction to their gender is generally a vague "that's nice" rather than an intense ping of recognition.

Blanche from Pokémon Go
Frisk and Chara etc from Undertale
Zaheen from Verdant Skies
Asra from the Arcana
Desire from the Sandman
Roswell from The Adventure Zone
Janet from the Good Place
Various from Good Omens
Alex Cyprin from Astoria: Fate's Kiss
Vaarsuvius from Order of the Stick
Tilly Birch from Questionable Content
Various from The Imperial Radch series
Min from Butterfly Soup
AuDy from Friends at the Table
All the she/her using gems from Steven Universe

Canonically non-binary/genderless characters that left me feeling alienated:

The asari from Mass Effect. Feels like the writers see them as women.
Most fic I've read where characters are non binary.
Elliot from On a Sunbeam (more because of the general approach to gender in the story)
Charity from Unmasked by the Marquess (though I still enjoyed the story)
Grace from That Potent Alchemy
Tom from a Boy called Cin

Conclusions:

WOW so I was kinda expecting this but there's some VERY obvious trends.

I generally engage with characters who are some combo of (a) a literal fusion of male and female characters (b) Act out multiple genders as distinct roles (c) physically transform from a binary gendered form into an androgynous one, or between male and female forms, and like it (d) Have INTENSE GENDER FEELINGS
These are the closest to capturing my experience as someone who has a lot of gender Feels, and wants to identify and present as multiple genders, but also sometimes likes the idea of an androgynous body.

I also seem more inclined to connect to amab non-binary characters and I'm really not sure what's up with that. Maybe because they can be feminine and have it be read as a trans thing?

I am generally ambivalent about non-binary characters who use (one of) he/him or she/her pronouns, don't really care about gender, or who the story avoids gendering. I'm really glad these sorts of characters exist, and enjoy them, but more because it feels like the story is making space for non-binary people in general, including those like me, and not because I connect with that particular character's experience of gender.

Also Janet and most of the Good Omens angels and demons don't feel very non-binary to me, even while they're not entirely binary gendered, like they're just...off in their own quasi-gendered non-human category. But I can see why other people feel differently.

After a bunch of thought, asides from the asari (who are written in an actively binarist way) I think the defining feature of the characters who alienate me is that they're written by people very obviously trying to Represent Diverse Genders, but something feels off. At first I thought it was afab non-binary women who use she/her pronouns, but I'm fine with Min from Butterfly Soup. Meanwhile Elliot from On a Sunbeam uses they/them but within a story which actively erases amab people and men, making me feel like the author sees non-binary people as women-lite. And Tom from a Boy Called Cin gets these long Educational Rants About Gender And Sex, which aren't bad but just...made the characters feel more like Symbols Of The Trans Experience, and since it wasn't my trans experience it felt weird. Maybe it would have felt weird even if it was my trans experience!

Going back to the post that inspired me: I'm honestly not sure If I would like the not-canonically-nb characters as much if they were written as canonically non-binary but otherwise stayed the same, or if things I overlook because it's not meant to be representation would start bugging me.

So, fellow non binary peeps: Are your feelings similar? Different? I imagine agender people, non-binary men, and non-binary women might have very flipped about preferences compared to me. And I know not everyone even likes connecting with characters like themselves in this way.

Binary gendered people are also welcome to comment, which includes suggesting things you think handle non-binary gender well, but please step carefully and don't mention something as having clicked for you personally without also mentioning that you're binary gendered.

If you have complicated What Even Is Gender feels then...use your best judgement I guess? Your opinion is still definitely interesting to me.

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I think I often have a problem with non-binary characters in live action who are written/played with very gendered characteristics that are the same gender as the actor. So, for the Good Omens example, Crowley, Aziraphale and Gabriel all read as male (though Aziraphale in Madame Tracey's body didn't so strongly). Beelzebub read as non-gendered to me, though. Janet read strongly female, though a lot of that was her costuming and "helpmeet" type role, which is not a good thing, but still strongly societally coded I guess.

The characters in the Radch-verse adjacent "Provenance" who identified as "they" definitely did work for me, so I think what I'm recognising and enjoying there is the feeling of "NO not that gender and NO not that one either" rather than a positive identification as non-binary.

(My version of non-binary is "don't want to have a gender at all while existing in a strongly cis female appearing body", so that is probably part of it.)

Yeah, I was talking about, like, Crowley and Gabriel, not Beezlebub. Those kinds of characters sometimes feel a bit like...Dumbledore as gay rep? Like, an actual real life headmaster whose sexuality never came up while I was at school would be a real gay man, and there's nothing inherently wrong with having characters like that, but it's not something I'd hold up as Representation. This metaphor isn't quite working for me, since the Dumbledore situation could happen in real life while angels etc don't but...*flails vaguely*

I forgot about Provenance! I had complicated feelings: the individual "they" characters definitely felt non-binary, although in ambivalent category, and I could 100% believe a society having gender work that way. But it grated a bit that there was no acknowledgement in the text that this gender system is still restrictive, and there would be trans people who didn't fit that society's boxes, just like there are in ours.

I'm AFAB nonbinary and I use they pronouns. I don't recognize most of your examples, except for Desire and Janet. And I've read Imperial Radch but I don't remember how I reacted to individual characters.

I'm more attuned to "nonbinary means being somewhere in the middle" characters (no one is popping to mind right now) and agender characters (Emma Bull's Finder) and robots (MurderBot) than to characters that switch back and forth between very masculine and very feminine. (I bounced off Ranma 1/2.)

Curious how you would categorize the Gethenians from The Left Hand of Darkness. (Written before "nonbinary" was a popular concept, of course.)

I love Desire from Sandman. Probably because I'm really attracted to that kind of androgynous look in real life. (Which frustrates me because it's pretty much a polar opposite of my own body type, but I don't seem to be able to undo what my hormones imprint on, although I've been able to add to my collection of imprints over the years.)

Janet reads feminine to me. (I haven't seen the final season though.)

I'm really making this comment because I'm writing a smut fic with a character who is nonbinary, uses they pronouns, and has the innie bits on the bottom and the outie bits on the top that they were born with. (OK they're kind of a writer insert. Sue me.) This works for me but I'm worried/curious how it will come across to people different from me. I'm assuming based on your comment about afab nonbinary chars who use she/her that this character would feel like a woman to you? (No judgement one way or another.)

I read the Left Hand of Darkness many years ago, back when I still saw myself as cis. I remember liking it but feeling a bit uncomfortable with the way that everyone's sexuality and gender within the society matched that society's expectations. Le Guin herself later recognised this as a flaw and explored...I forget now but maybe a lesbian or asexual character in a later short story. Also I don't remember feeling much sense of recognition, I think because (at least as I remember it) noone got to really choose or control their gender. In effect, everyone was cisgendered, it was just that their assigned gender changed over time for biological reasons.

Your described character sounds like they'd read as entirely non-binary to me, and after thinking about it some more I rewrote the paragraph about what alienates me. On further thought, the she/her pronouns thing is correlation not causation, and the real issue is works which feel like they're making a big deal about having Diverse Genders while not actually being very varied. Non-binary characters written as characters, rather than symbols, tend to be fine regardless of their specific gender.

Also, the two she/her characters who pinged me as women were in m/nb romance novels using a lot of m/f romance tropes. I think it's the narrative around the characters rather than the characters themselves which is the issue.

Also, the two she/her characters who pinged me as women were in m/nb romance novels using a lot of m/f romance tropes. I think it's the narrative around the characters rather than the characters themselves which is the issue.

Was one of those by any chance Cat Sebastian's Unmasked by the Marquess? I found it really disappointing/frustrating.

Yes, yes it was.

(I am binary-gendered, I think.)

I thought Imperial Radch handled gender interestingly in that one of the points it was making was that the Radchaai approach to gender was (a) as stifling and restrictive in its own way as a binary approach (most apparent with Radchaai insistence on not recognizing the genders of members of colonized cultures who the narrative suggested very much did have genders they cared about the recognition of), (b) to point out that gender is a cultural construct that isn't mapped neatly to physical characteristics (via different cultures assigning Radchaai characters based on different assumptions), and (c) that even if you apparently don't have gender as a concept and don't place a lot of weight on physical anatomy either, there are plenty of other ways people will find to differentiate themselves and create hierarchies and abolishing gender isn't going to fix anything (even aside from the colonial implications). So I don't think Leckie's goal in how she wrote gender in those books was to present nonbinary characters, for the most part, but it is perhaps an argument against to some strands of anti-trans discourse. I don't know if she really succeeded at doing all those things, but that was what I took out of it.

(Super interesting post you linked - really articulates a lot of why I turn so much to SFF to explore things that matter to me and why it so often resonates more with me than realistic fiction.)

Oh yeah, I am inclined to agree. I would have liked to have seen some trans-for-their-society characters, but such characters are missing from the vast majority of scifi that explores gender, and I think what she was doing was still interesting and worthwhile. But a lot of the characters I've listed weren't intended to be representations of non-binariness, including several of the ones I connected with. They're still interesting to think about through a non-binary lens.

Yeah, definitely! I was just thinking that given the very many things she was trying to do with gender in those books, it doesn't surprise me that it didn't connect with you on the nonbinary level.

What do you think being trans in Radch society might look like? I have kind of the same struggle with Radch as with Pratchett's dwarves in that I am not sure what gender means in a society with 0 to 1 genders, and therefore what does transness mean (Pratchett's dwarfs who adopt non-dwarf gender presentations either go for something adjacent to "human female" or to "human male" in the case of Casanunda, and as a metaphor that gets super confusing and I don't think Pratchett had any idea what he was doing)? I guess what I puzzle about is - if a society doesn't have the concept of gender at all (which I'd argue is true of the original Radchaai and would be true of Pratchett's dwarfs if he wrote them consistently), how does an individual in that society develop that concept (except through contact with other societies that do have gender)?

Apologies if this is too off-topic or out of line! I puzzle about gender a lot...

(I don't remember Provenance so well, but wasn't there a character who was refusing to choose an approved adult trinary gender? I remember thinking that could be read as either not ready to choose or as rejecting the socially available options. I may be completely misremembering, though.)

Man yeah I don't know how to conceptualise what being trans would look like in a single gender society. Thinking about it sometimes makes me a bit dysphoric: I'm multigender, and the idea of a society where my gender wouldn't make any sense (unless you add concepts from outside the society) feels uncomfortable.

I mean part of it I think is that it's not clear if a society of psychologically human people can be single gender, or if gender of some sort will naturally manifest in some people. Like, we know that trans people exist in a binary gendered society that assumes everyone is cis: some people, raised to believe that there are two genders which are rigidly defined by biological sex, will end up identifying as the other gender, or as both, etc. I know trans-for-their-society people pop up in societies with other setups, like three genders. I haven't heard of it happening before contact with the international trans community, but would expect that it probably happened? But we don't really know why or how that happens, how much is nature versus nurture, whether the same person would define themselves differently if raised differently etc.

From a political POV it's not super important where people's sense of gender comes from, we just need to respect it. But from a personal understanding POV I find it interesting and frustratingly hard to pin down!

I have spoken to agender people who think that a genderless society is attainable, sustainable, and would be good. But afaict no culture in all of human history has ever been entirely genderless, although what genders they believe in have varied. So I wonder if it's to some extent hard wired into enough people that it always shows up once enough humans gather. But maybe I just think that because it feels so hard wired into me! Then again I'm an atheist and still feel the same way about religion: how significant and common religious belief is varies between societies, and the same person might be atheist or various different religions depending on upbringing. But I feel like an entirely religion free society is incompatible with how humans tend to think as a group, even if plenty of individual people have no religious drive.

All of which means that I have trouble getting my head around a genderless/single gender society in the first place, unless it involves non-humans (which dwarves are in theory, but their psychology seems fairly human-ish in this respect). I can imagine one where gender manifests very differently, and has a lot less social significance. Exploring the relationship between that society and, say, ours, could be interesting, if people were like "Oh actually I like that gender they have more than the ones I've encountered in mine", and how you can be trans/gnc in one society and not in another. But I mean, that sort of thing already happens on Earth, you get complicated mixtures of cultural appropriation and inspiration and solidarity in a way I don't see reflected in fiction, even fiction comparing gender between societies, which tends to either assume everyone wants to stick to their own culture, or holds one culture up as The Good One.

I don't remember Provenance clearly, but I think the character who put off choosing a gender did pick one eventually? And noone seemed to even consider not choosing permanently as possible (even as a bad thing bad people do), so it felt like the equivalent of a girl holding onto a tomboy phase before realising she Had To Become A Woman. But I may be misremembering!

Will respond in more detail later, but I am inclined to agree that humans are sort of hardwired towards some sort of concept of gender (but I...uh, well, I figure I'm cis because...something, I guess, reasons?...but I also struggle with understanding what gender even is and what it means) - so it's this science-fictional thought experiment and it doesn't seem to quite ring true when people attempt single-gender/genderless societies. Plus I suspect the drive to define ones' self and others in highly specific ways varies a lot between individuals and societies/over time (the eternal struggle of trying to understand history of sexuality before LGBTQ+ and straightness were defined identities).

Religion seems almost as hard to define as gender, but that does seem basically universal, too (Daniel Everett is wrong about the Pirahã because his concept of what religion is is so narrow, probably because of his own upbringing, and his anthropology is full of inconsistencies). That's the only cultural group I've ever seen described as being "without religion," but they see spirits that outsiders don't see and have mythic creation stories, which both sound like religious concepts to me.

I don't remember Provenance clearly, but I think the character who put off choosing a gender did pick one eventually? And noone seemed to even consider not choosing permanently as possible (even as a bad thing bad people do), so it felt like the equivalent of a girl holding onto a tomboy phase before realising she Had To Become A Woman. But I may be misremembering!

I may be also! If I ever regain the attention span to read books again, I should reread Provenance, because I do not remember the details at all (although I also haven't read the rock-POV book yet, gotta do that).

nods

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