Worldbuilding 205: Alien Queerness
First off, let’s get one thing straight. I am not queer. Like every limax, I am a hermaphrodite, and like any sane person would do, I enjoy all parts the few times I am in the mood. But no, you humans always have to complicate things! First by having two sexes, then live births, then sexualities, and more! Urgh, so needlessly complicated! So here we are, with this post where I will talk about queerness for aliens and worldbuilding enrichment. But first, the obligatory disclaimer.
Disclaimer: In this post I am in no way saying what queer means for humans or for individuals. Any usage in relation to humans will be through my incomplete understanding of the variety of all human existence as it pertains to this topic. Any potential jabs are for entertainment purposes only and are intended in a good nature manner. Every person has an innate right to live their life as they see fit with other consenting adults, and I do not condone any violations of such a fundamental principle. Any corrections on my limited understanding are welcome in the comments, any form of bigotry is not.
I want to make it clear, once again, I am not going to say what is and isn’t how the queer community on Earth says, feels, and does things. You queer humans do your human queer things the way you see fit. Maybe one day you’ll treat it like the normality that it is, but oh well. We are doing aliens, huzzah! Hey, we aliens can be queer too!
What the queer is queer?
As I stated above, I will under no circumstances tell you humans, and especially not people who are in the queer community, what queer really is. For me personally, it is a word I use to describe all of LGBTQ+ humans, as it feels better to me for it to be a word than an acronym that keeps expanding. What I will do is to try to come up with a definition that for worldbuilding purposes transcends the narrow view of humans. I will re-iterate, this is for worldbuilding purposes only.
A character is queer if they deviate in the involuntary, innate psychological components required for the activities involved in reproduction that are biologically required for their species, with consenting adults.
Yes, I know reproduction is not everything in life, I am not placing any value judgements nor saying that reproduction is the highest requirement of any individual. All I am saying is that after thinking long and hard, I have found this to be the best definition for the word queer that transcends a human-focused perspective and can be applied to any kind of reproductive biology regardless of how strange and alien we as worldbuilders make it. Please pay attention that the focus is on the reproductive norm, not the societal norm. A society may view what is normal entirely different from what is required for maintaining the population of a species over generations, and that is a great thing to do!
This relates to a concept I like to call the “Societal queerness spectrum” which relates to where a society draws the line of where they think “Queer” starts and ends. I’ll talk more about this later or in another post.
Queer and evolution
Now one can ask, and I know many asshats do ask this, how can evolution let genes that make reproduction harder or impossible continue? Well, there are many reasons. One is that it is not common enough to really matter, so it slips through the cracks. Another is that genes related to a specific subtype of queerness are connected to a positive trait under certain circumstances. For example, there is a gene that correlates with male human homosexuality when in men, but in a woman, that gene makes the women have a much higher sex drive which makes them reproduce a lot more than normal, and thus it carries on. The pros outweigh the cons.
Another factor is that queerness can contribute greatly on its own when you look at it on a group level rather than an individual level. Sure, on an individual level being homosexual might, without technology, be a genetic dead end, assuming you don’t go along with an opposite sex partner due to societal pressures. But assuming you are free, and no one cares, especially in pre-civilisation times, it is actually a huge asset! There are lots of children still and parents struggle to make them survive. Homosexuality gives you another individual to help care for the children of the family without them getting their own children to increase the strain on the group. So it is really helpful!
So as we can see here in these few examples, queerness is not only natural to exist but might be even strongly selected for in a small but sufficient quantity to help the group and species as a whole.
Base line: Reproduction
I recommend you read my post on alien reproduction before this. We are going to do this as the title suggests: we need a baseline to consider. First, we have the incredibly BORING way of having only two sexes. It is tried and tested, and all of you are familiar with it. It works well for genetic diversity, and as you humans know, it is ripe for queerness. It is simply that you have males and females in general, and both are required for reproduction.
An alternative is, of course, that you can have it so that each sex can reproduce with either of the two sexes. Which becomes very close having one sex then, but hey, maybe you can make it still be two? It is thought that as sexual reproduction developed, it was first one sex which then slowly split into two. At first, both sexes could reproduce with any, but those that reproduced only with the opposite had some evolutionary advantage, and thus that became the norm. This was of course way before large multicellular lifeforms.
And of course, as I said there, you can have more sexes, such as my beloved Raixher. Three sexes, all involved in reproduction in a step by step process. You can go the slime mould process I described in the post where each sex has a specific subset of sexes they can reproduce, or you can go the route of all involved at once in some kind of orgy depending on the amount of sexes. Another alternative is that sexes can have different states and bodies to serve different purposes, just to make things more complicated.
Honestly, the options are endless, but you have to decide on how they reproduce, how many sexes there are, how many are involved in the act, and such things, and then, you have a baseline to start considering how to deviate from it. For extra creativity, I would recommend not doing basic two like you humans have. And a thing to remember: try to separate concepts you often think belong to each other. For example, for Raixher, romantic attraction and sexual attraction do not always coincide and quite frequently don't coincide for the need of their reproduction.
Deviate from the baseline
With the baseline decided, now let’s have some fun and deviate from it!
Sex & Mind
While being intersex will not be discussed in this post and is considered a type of queerness in the human sense, I focus on other things here and will cover it in some other blog post. Intersex people, where the physical body develops more intermediary between the binary sex-related bodies, do exist and are just as important as anyone. But again, this is not where I will address it, but trust me, I will!
Now, just like you have physical dimorphism between sexes in a lot of species, the degree of it is very varied. Some you can barely tell apart beyond finding their genitals, others are vastly different that you cannot believe they are the same. Three species, Whalefish, Bignose, and Tapefish were thought to be three different species, but each one was only found with females, males, or juveniles respectively. Turns out they are all the same! Whalefish are females, Bignose are males, and Tapefish are the juveniles!
So of course, this means that the brain can and will have differences between the sexes. Notice however I am in no way saying that men and women fundamentally think differently; they do not. People are people, and the vast majority of what makes people people is learned with a base that it is built upon. The base, however, can be consistently different between the sexes in the baseline in some slight ways. But of course we are here to disrupt that! You can do the traditional flipping (if two sexes) or assign a different baseline mind in terms of sex; this is of course relevant to trans-related topics, ideas, and characters. I am not saying this is 100% accurate, but again, we are trying to expand beyond human concepts and imagine weirder.
A thing to remember, which is true for humans too, is that when it comes to the mind, sex, and gender, it is not a discrete system with clearly defined boxes but a huge spectrum. Most might appear near the edges, making it seem like there are boxes, but that is not accurate in life and will not be in this post!
Take this for example as a rough start, if we assume three sexes. Instead of just being Blue, Green, or Red, you can be many others in between, and even in the middle you would have… I guess you would call it non-ternary? Heck, using this model, you might use colour metaphors to describe sexes and genders in your society. In my Tsxobjez species, which physically alters between male and female constantly, they use metaphors involving clocks–the circular ones–when it comes to a lot of their sex, attractions, and gender stuff.
Attraction & Subsets
Subsets? Math? Sets!? THE HORROR! Don’t worry, we’ll get there, and I will explain it hopefully well! First thing to remember here is that while most people think that romantic attraction and sexual attraction are fundamentally connected, anyone that has had a hookup knows this is not the case. So one can be sexually attracted without romance, can one be romantically attracted but not sexually? I feel a ghostly Anne presence… (Anne: I definitely know this distinction, being asexual and not sexually attracted to anyone but having been deeply romantically in love before!)
Then remember romantic and sexual attraction are conceptually separated, even if the majority will have them overlap. But as in my Raixhen species, boy am I mentioning them too much? Anyway, to the Raixher it is normal for a subset to have romantic attraction and sexual attraction be fundamentally different. So, we can use this to create new norms even!
So let’s get to the mathematical part! I will use human males (M) and females (F), as an example because it makes the numbers and examples easy to see. Notice a thing, this method is not a means to find everything, but a good start to figure out all possibilities, or a lower limit for it. We will focus on just attraction as you can do this for both sexual and romantic and decide how much they overlap. Now we have the set of sexes for humans, {M,F}. Keep in mind a set is, roughly speaking, a “collection of things”. There is more to it, but who cares here? It is customary to write a set with {} and then the items within, so we will here!
Now you wonder surely
Where is this beautifully handsome Limax going with this magical notation speech?
And I agree, I am pretty! Anyway, there is a function called “the power set”: you put in a set, and you get all kinds of subsets. I won’t go into the exact definition, but think of a subset as a set you can make from the given set by only picking objects from it. We write it as P({M,F}). So what subsets can we make? Well, we can pick only M, {M}, we can pick only F, {F}, and we can pick both! {M,F}. This one might seem odd but it works too, we can pick…NONE OF THOSE INSIDE! {}, this is the empty set (which is a subset to all sets).
So the final powerset we get is {{}, {M}, {F}, {M,F}}, yeah it is customary to write this, but I gotta agree, it is annoying. So what subsets did we get? {}, {M}, {F}, {M,F}, looks better doesn’t it? Now what does ANY of this even mean? Well, this can be used to find a baseline for all possible ways people can be attracted to each other! {} is attracted to none, sexually we get asexuals. {M} is attracted to males, which for women is heterosexual and for men is homosexual. {F} is attracted to females, similar to the one previous but opposite sexes. And finally we have {M,F} which is bisexual as they are attracted to both sexes!
This works regardless of the number of sexes (or states of sexes, including mental configurations as I discussed in the previous section) and helps you find the least number of possible attractions. Of course there are countless more possibilities, but I am trying to give some quick ways to imagine new ones. For my Raixher, I had to use the set of {P, MF, MM, U}, that is because while they have three sexes, Primale, Midmale, Ultimale, the midmale changes form and structure as part of their reproductive cycle so for this calculation, I had to treat each one separately as different sexes despite only being biologically one sex. If you get nervous if you have found all possibilities, remember this: 2^(number of sexes/forms of sexes) is how many there should be using this trick. If you got less, you missed some. In the case of my Raixher, I have 16! That’s a lot! Take that times two now, one for romantic and one for sexual attraction, and then times four for each of the sexes and their states… bigly number.
And again, this is not the entire spectrum of attractions, but a bare minimum categorisation of it that is useful to start at.
Terminology
Phew! Done with math… 😈 Not quite! But most is done. Let’s step away from humans and go to my Raixher as I have developed them in this, but I won’t tell all my secrets here! So we had 4 “states of sexes”, giving us a baseline of 16 combinations there. With romantic vs sexual attraction, that gives us 32 combinations. Add on top of that this applies to each of the states of sexes, that gives us a whooping 128 possibilities. Yikes! Do you, the author, need to name them all?
Of course not! Sure, it will exclude people that will inevitably exist. But a thing to remember when it comes to language is that words need to have a sufficiently strong meaning to be used. That is, it occurs enough in the context of life to be worthwhile to remember and be passed on regularly from person to person. How many know, for example, what defenestrate, irrumate, absquatulate, or similar mean? Okay, some will know cause they are fun in how obscure they are! (Anne: as a writer who tends to focus on what the story needs first and foremost and only adds to the world later, and only if necessary in many cases, this is something I do all the time. If it doesn’t come up in the story, you really don’t need a term for it!) Thanks Anne! That is many writer’s default in my experience, and there is validity to it, especially when one goes from one story in one world to another unrelated story in a different world.
So no, you do not need to make the most obscure combinations here, obscure being determined by the society in question. They are most easily described in terms of “X, but with Y” or similar constructions, where you grab the closest existing term and add qualifiers in how the person differs. This is not to say that those people are lesser or anything, it is about how languages work. Humans and even people in your world do not memorise words that are not encountered in sufficiently many contexts. Everyone matters. But those that are common enough can be very fun to name! And even here, you don’t need to make each one unique. For example in English, “homosexual” covers both F-F and M-M, and the context of the person's sex determines the exact meaning. Similarly with “bisexual”, it doesn’t matter which sex the person is in most contexts. But in certain contexts, it does matter, yet you lack words for the distinction. Which is fine, too; some words never develop because of happenstance. Of course, English has “lesbian” for F-F and “gay” for M-M, however “gay” is also used as an umbrella term for both, so there’s a hole in semantics for a word with a single, exclusive meaning for M-M. What does that say about the cultures of English speakers? Albeit I have heard that “gay” might be moving toward M-M exclusively to fill the gap, but don’t quote me on this.
So, many of the 128 combinations can be excluded and even collapsed to the same word as context can carry the rest. “Idemfrodital” is a word I made for anyone sexually attracted to their own sex/state of sex, So that is 4 combinations with one word. But deviations from this and certain combinations being emphasised can be used to showcase cultural values. For example, if they consider M-M perfectly acceptable but F-F is not one, then them lacking a word for lesbians is a subtle way to hint at it.
I have currently focused primarily on people whose mental sex is identical to their physical, but we can throw in that as well, at which it is times 3, as for Raixher the different states for midmales I do not imagine differ when it comes to the mind. So 384 combinations now. I am a bit of a masochist when it comes to worldbuilding, but even I faint at considering all of those. I am slowly exploring all and considering. It takes work but can be lots of fun! Again, this is not an exhaustive calculation, and as I have stated and should be known, all of these are spectrums; maybe I should do a fuzzy logic/set/math post for it later? Anyway, this means that these combinations should not be viewed as definitive or anything but to guide your mind into uncharted territories.
Society and being queer
I have discussed somewhat about society and such, but let’s collect it in one place here. Human societies have had a myriad of views when it comes to queerness. There have been societies that have been incredibly strict, and others only strict when in public. And that is just when it is forbidden. So of course some societies, depending on their technological and societal development, will definitely be similar and forbid anything that is not the standard one. When you add on the types where it’s not forbidden or illegal, it gets even more complicated! This is by no means all human societies, and many old ones that were forbidding it are now changing.
But that is somewhat boring, if you ask me. It is more fun if you figure out what kind of queerness can exist given your system and then ask yourself, “How will society split this up and consider the parts?” By which I mean that like some human cultures, some queerness can be viewed as neutral, others positive, and others very negatively. They might even view that in some aspects of society, certain queerness options are mandatory. I believe I have discussed it before but cannot remember which post that there was a tribe that I think was relatively small. Anyway, they had a special role that was not inherited but passed on, and studies seemed to show that something akin to non-binaryness was a prerequisite for the position. I might be wrong though; even if I am, that is an interesting thing to include! Where your society draws lines can differ by class, sex, position, and many more factors. As I always say, imagination is the only limiting factor!
Now to be a bit of a negative nancy. I have seen a phenomenon a few times with some human writers, often young and frustrated and most likely queer. What is it? The complete reversal of society where queers are now on top and oppressive to the non-queers. Which of course cannot work, as many of the combinations of queerness are not able to reproduce, meaning the population of the ruling elite of queers will decrease over time. I understand someone might do it out of frustration and want to show how the human queers are feeling through reversal, but this makes the world unbelievable, and the desired message falls on deaf ears. Anne and I will do a blog post on how to use the world and writing to get a message across without preaching or falling flat like this.
Now does that mean queers cannot be in the ruling elite? Of course not! You can either do the numbers game with a relatively tolerant society where they will be there, and depending on how oppressive your society is, it might be close to the ratio of the general population or very far from it. But you can also imagine, like the aforementioned special position in the tribe, a role that requires queerness; imagine like you have a king, high priest, and a third one, but the third one is always expected to be queer in some manner. That is a possible way, but there are more that you can imagine. Just remember that non-queers have numerical superiority, and when a huge swath of the population is angry at you, and they outnumber you even 5:1, you are as good as dead. But creative ways can give queer people a powerful voice!
Summa Summarum
I’ve discussed a lot of things here, using mathematics and basic sets to get an idea of the possibilities, discussing how we as worldbuilders can expand beyond to make it more diverse in ways that are non-human, and even somewhat how we can do analogies! Personally, I find this very enjoyable to deal with as it makes the world more believable. The human world is fascinating and amazing thanks to all the diversity it has to offer; why should our worlds be any less amazing? Sure, if you are like Anne and it will not be in the story, it won’t be developed, but I don’t blame her. This can be a way to have someone queer in the story that is more new to human consumers.
As a final note, I will say this: I have tried to be as respectful as possible while being factually neutral. If I have in some way failed in this mission, please leave a comment below, and I will do my best to address it! Include a quote on the segment and explain what you think is the issue in order to help me address it.
Happy worldbuilding for all who found this helpful, and happy queering!
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Copyright ©️ 2023 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as queerness, sexes, configurations, and similar are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as Raixher the species, Tsxobjez the species, concepts related to them, 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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