Now that the Qunari have been thoroughly butchered, I wanted to compile my thoughts on gender under the Qun into a more comprehensive 'essay.' This is not primarily an essay about politics, identity, or even gender in the contemporary Western sense. It is an essay about language.
More specifically, it is about what happens when we attempt to understand a foreign culture through English.
Whenever discussions surrounding the Qun arise in online spaces, one phrase inevitably dominates the conversation:
"Under the Qun, your gender is your role."
Most players interpret this quite literally. If someone is a warrior, then they are a man. If someone fulfills another social function that's conventionally feminine, then they are considered a woman. The conclusion appears straightforward, and I suspect it is also the interpretation the writers themselves ultimately settled on.
I intend to dismantle it for my own amusement.
Not because I believe the games secretly intended something else, nor because I think this interpretation is objectively incorrect, but because I approached the Qunlat from a linguistic background fundamentally different from that of English. My first instinct was not to ask, "What does the Qun believe about men and women?" My first instinct was to ask, "What does the Qun mean by gender?"
This analysis is my attempt to explain why.
My native language lacks gendered pronouns. There is no equivalent distinction between "he" and "she." At first glance, this seems like a language where gender is largely irrelevant.
Counterintuitively, that is very much untrue.
The absence of gendered pronouns does not eliminate gender from a language. Instead, it changes where gender lives.
II. Where Language Stores Gender
English speakers constantly encode gender in ordinary conversation without consciously thinking about it.
"I saw her yesterday."
"He said he would arrive tomorrow."
Before these sentences can even be spoken, the speaker must already know which pronoun to choose. Gender becomes one of the first pieces of information retrieved when referring to another person.
This process is so automatic that most native English speakers never notice it.
Turkish works differently.
The sentence Çöpü attığını gördüm simply means:
"I saw them take out the trash."
The sentence contains no information whatsoever regarding whether the person observed was male or female. In fact, depending on context, the subject can even remain ambiguous between 2. and 3. person singular. The information simply is not grammatically required. It is not exposed unless it's required.
It does not mean Turkish speakers are incapable of perceiving gender. It means the language does not force speakers to encode that information every time another person is mentioned whereas English requires it.
Now consider Czech.
Viděl jsem ji vynášet odpadky.
Before we even reach the object of the sentence, the grammar has already revealed something about the speaker themselves. The viděl tells us that the person speaking is male.
Spanish encodes something else.
La vi sacar la basura.
The pronoun identifies the observed person as feminine while la basura independently marks the noun "trash" as grammatically feminine.
None of these languages have more or less genders than the other for both the object and the subject. They simply distribute gender differently.
Some require information about the subject.
Some require information about the speaker.
Some require information about inanimate objects.
Some require almost none at all.
Every language obliges its speakers to express certain kinds of information. English demands tense where Mandarin often relies on context. Japanese frequently encodes social hierarchy where English does not. Czech marks grammatical case in places where English instead relies on word order.
These are not merely quirks of vocabulary, they shape what information speakers must continually keep available while communicating.
Linguists sometimes refer to this as obligatory grammatical information. A language does not necessarily determine what its speakers are capable of thinking, but it certainly determines what they must routinely express. That creates a substantial distinction.
Popular discussions often invoke the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the idea that language determines thought, as though speakers of different languages possess fundamentally different thought patterns. Most modern linguists reject that for various reasons.
Language does not provably constrict thought. It can, however, influence it by making some distinctions obligatory while allowing others to remain optional.
An English speaker cannot naturally produce the sentence "I saw..." without deciding whether to continue with him, her or them. A Turkish speaker can. That information is stored in the previous context so they fundamentally ask different questions.
III. Gender as Grammar
This brings us to grammatical gender.
One of the most common misconceptions among speakers of languages that lack variety of grammatical genders is the assumption that grammatical gender must somehow reflect biological sex.
It rarely does.
A French speaker does not believe a baguette is female. A German speaker does not think a girl is literally neuter because das mädchen happens to use neuter grammar.
The grammatical category exists independently of biology. Its purpose is structural. Gender in language determines how words behave, which articles accompany them, which adjectives agree with them, which suffixes they receive, how they are declined (or not)...
Gender, in other words, is less about describing reality than organizing it.
A noun belongs to a category because the language requires it to belong somewhere to function.
Native speakers rarely question why a chair is feminine or why a bridge is masculine. The categories simply serve as a part of the language's internal logic. Trying to explain grammatical gender to someone whose native language lacks it often produces the infamous question;
"But why is the chair female?"
The answer, of course, is that it isn't.
The chair is not female.
The word belongs to a grammatical category that English simply lacks (i.e. Masculine inanimate as a grammatical gender carries more information about the state of the object than its 'sex'). The confusion arises because learners instinctively attempt to translate one conceptual framework into another. What if, I began to wonder while playing DAO, the same thing was happening with Qunlat?
What if "man" and "woman" were not 1=1 translations?
What if they were approximations?
What if the game's medium of English language was doing the only thing it could do; mapping an alien system of classification onto the nearest concepts available?
Whether that was the writers' intention is beside the point. I think the possibility itself warrants exploration. Because if the Qun's concept of gender functions less like biological identity and more like grammatical classification, then many conversations throughout the series become open to entirely different interpretations.
This is going to be a long read.
IV. The Qun as a System of Classification
The crucial question is not whether Qunari have gender. They clearly do. The more interesting question is what kind of category gender is within Qunlat.
Most discussions assume that Qunari gender categories are equivalent to human concepts of male and female. The games often encourage this reading, especially in the last installment, but the broader structure of the Qun suggests something else.
The most important thing to understand about the Qun is that it is not primarily a moral philosophy. It is a taxonomy.
Everything under the Qun has a place.
Every person has a function.
Soldiers belong to the Antaam. Spies belong to the Ben-Hassrath. Priests belong to the priesthood. Artisans belong to their craft. The Qun is obsessed not with individual self-expression but with correct classification. A person's value comes from occupying the role for which they are best suited.
Once viewed through this lens, the statement "your gender is your role" begins to sound less like a claim about masculinity and femininity and more like a claim about grammar.
The moral legitimacy of the Qun rests on the belief that disorder arises when things occupy the wrong category. A baker pretending to be a soldier is not merely inefficient; they are violating the proper order of society.
This resembles grammar more than it resembles bioessentialism.
Grammar does not ask what a noun “really is.”
It asks how that noun behaves within the system.
Likewise, the Qun appears less concerned with what a person “is” in some metaphysical sense than with how that person functions within the social order.
Under this framework, gender ceases to be primarily anatomical, it turns into a designation of social behavior and purpose.
That is a subtle but enormous shift.
An English speaker hears “warriors are men” and naturally interprets it to mean “people with dicks are warriors.”
But a Qunari speaker might mean something closer to “the social category associated with warfare is translated into Common as ‘man’ because the people who express warrior-like qualities (aka masculinity) in South are referred to as man.”
The distinction sounds small until one realizes that the second statement does not actually define the category by anatomy at all.
Imagine a language with six grammatical genders:
warrior
priest
artisan
teacher
merchant
caretaker
These categories would not describe anatomy. They would describe function.
A person assigned to the "warrior" category would receive the grammatical markers associated with warriors. A person assigned to the "teacher" category would receive its respective markers. Native speakers would not experience this as strange any more than an Italian speaker experiences the gender of a noun as strange. The category would simply be part of the language.
This is the conceptual leap that I believe many players never make, because English encourages us to treat gender as an identity rooted in gender expression. The Qun may instead be treating gender as a functional classification.
V. Rereading Sten
This is why Sten’s infamous line in Origins has always fascinated me.
"You look like a woman. But you are a soldier. One of those things can't be true."
For many players, the line immediately establishes Sten as sexist. The implication seems obvious: women should not fight. That is certainly a possible reading.
But it is not the only one.
Imagine a speaker whose native language organises people according to functional categories rather than biological sex. Now imagine that speaker trying to communicate through a language that lacks those categories and instead forces every distinction into “man” and “woman.”
Suddenly the sentence becomes less straightforward.
To illustrate the difference, imagine someone saying:
"I am a tailor."
"Then why are you commanding an army?"
Under a linguistic (and cultural) reading of the Qun, Sten’s question can be understood similarly.
Notice he starts with "I don't understand. You look like a woman."
This can be a context-seeking question if we go with the assumption that he's not being condescending. He remarks that the Warden looks like someone that should not swing a sword. They are not conforming to the self expression of a sword-swinging role.
"You are a Grey Warden, so it follows that you can't be a woman."
He has not denied the player their role due to their sex, he has denied them their sex due to their role. The role takes precedence. The role is not in dispute. The wording is precise and it is fundamentally very revealing. It doesn't mean a person's sex is an assignment like a profession, it means a person's profession is as predetermined as their sex.
“You identify with category A. Why are you performing the function and expressing the characteristics associated with category B?”
The confusion is categorical. In this sense, it emphasises Qun's strict adherence to roles. Why appear as something you're not? Why express yourself like a priest and fight like a sten? What are you?
The face value interpretation is of course that his assumption that someone can't simultaneously express femininity and also adopt a masculine role is an indicator of how conservative Qun is.
Now contrast this with areal-life experience I've had learning Czech.
In Czech, grammatical gender is not optional, and it cannot easily be avoided without making language itself unnatural or incomplete. Over time, I found myself running into a recurring issue: speakers struggled to consistently apply feminine forms to my name as its phonetic structure was perceived as categorically "masculine-sounding" within their system.
Rather than assigning a gendered grammatical form, people would restructure sentences in ways that bypassed agreement entirely. The result is something comparable to constantly replacing a possessive structure like "Clair’s computer" with the clumsy "computer belonging to Clair" or even "Clair computer" in certain odd cases. It is noticeably strained in everyday use.
At various points, I explicitly stated that I didn't mind being referred to with masculine forms. From my perspective, this was a simple matter of grammatical convenience rather than identity. Yet many speakers still refused to make the shift. This was not a rejection of my gender identity, had I came out as a man I know that these people would have obliged. They thought of it as insulting to me, that I simply lack the lingual framework to understand the distinction. And to a certain degree they are right. As a non-native speaker, I will never experience grammatical gender in the same intuitive, automatic way that native speakers do. I won't feel like I'm being denied femininity simply because of a suffix even knowing it's meaning.
One particularly revealing example was the naming of my cat. Despite her name ending in -o, which in Czech often aligns with neuter grammatical patterns, speakers around me consistently opted to modify the name with the feminine -a ending in order to maintain alignment with the animal’s biological sex. In doing so, they effectively modified the linguistic category of the name itself, prioritizing grammatical and social coherence over morphological expectation.
What this illustrates is not simply a preference for consistency, but the degree to which grammatical gender is treated as a system that must remain internally stable. Even when exceptions are technically permissible, speakers often adjust surrounding language to preserve categorical alignment. This is not because they are consciously thinking about gender at every moment of speech. It is because the language demands that such distinctions remain continuously operational.
Sten, effectively, struggles with the same concept. He wants to hear that -a. He needs it to process the information he receives from what he sees in opposition to what he hears. He prompts the Warden with the same question; If you're a woman, if you wish to be referred to and seen and understood in the social sense as a woman why do you refer to yourself as a man?
This interpretation also explains why his dialogue sounds awkward in English. He speaks as though he is translating concepts that do not map neatly onto the language available to him. The result resembles the discomfort many language learners experience when dealing with grammatical gender.
“Why is a chair feminine?”
The native speaker shrugs because the question itself misunderstands the category.
Likewise, Sten may be encountering a person whose social designation and observable function do not align according to the framework he expects.
Whether the writers intended this nuance is very unlikely. What matters to me personally is that the early lore allows it.
VI. Translation and Approximation
This brings us to one of the most debated terms in the series: notorious aqun-athlok.
We usually treat it as a direct analogy for “transgender.”
That translation is understandable, but I think it may be misleading.
If gender under the Qun is fundamentally a functional category, then aqun-athlok does not necessarily describe a person changing from one biological sex category to another. It describes a person whose social designation has been reassigned.
A useful comparison is professional rather than anatomical.
Imagine a cashier who demonstrates extraordinary aptitude for masonry. The state formally redesignates them as a mason. Their category changes because their function changes. Their pronouns change.
That does not mean they have become physically different. It means the system now recognizes them under a different classification.
Viewed this way, Iron Bull’s explanation to Krem becomes particularly interesting.
Bull understands Southern culture. He knows that the people around him think in terms of men and women as sex-based identities. So he translates the Qun into concepts they can understand, he does this quite frequently.
He tells Krem that his society assigned him one role and that he fought to attain another. That is the closest Common equivalent available.
This is not a lie. It is fundamentally what a translator does for colloquial speech. When a concept has no exact equivalent, translators choose the closest available approximation. English lacks a ready-made set of social-gender categories detached from sex and/or gender expression, so the dialogue maps them onto the familiar binary of "man" and "woman."
We already accept this process everywhere else in fantasy. When a character says "barbarian," we do not immediately assume there is a Greek language for the onomatopoeic term to be coined. When a character says "god," we don't assume their theology matches Christianity. We translate "Yes" as oui or si respectively from the context clues derived from previous information the question provides.
Under this reading, aqun-athlok becomes less “a transgender person in the Western sense” and more “a person recognised under a category different from the one originally assigned to them by the Qun.”
Before discussing disaster that was Veilguard, I want to make one final distinction.
Throughout this analysis I have deliberately avoided claiming that the Qun "has no gender." That statement would be obviously false.
The Qun has gender.
What I question is whether those genders are equivalent to the ones we instinctively imagine.
Translation being an act of approximation, there are words that simply do not survive intact when carried from one language into another. Each translation captures part of the meaning while leaving another part behind.
We accept this instinctively when discussing vocabulary. Oddly, we abandon that generosity when discussing cultures.
When a Qunari says "man," we assume they must mean exactly what an English speaker means by "man."
Why, though?
If the Qun genuinely organizes society according to principles foreign to Southern Thedas, why would we expect one of its central concepts to map perfectly onto Common?
Perhaps it does. It looks like it. The expression of hypermasculinity is certainly the same.
But perhaps "man" is simply the closest available word. This would hardly be unusual.
Sten's earlier confusion also indicates that a person with female features is not exempt from this category of "man", they are exempt from 'womanhood'.
Every translator eventually reaches a point where perfect accuracy becomes impossible. One must choose between preserving the literal words or preserving the underlying concept.
Bull translates the Qun not merely linguistically, but culturally. He knows when to omit details that would only confuse his audience. He knows when to substitute familiar concepts for alien ones. Above all, he understands that communication is not achieved by literal accuracy but by producing the same understanding in another person's mind.
When Bull explains aqun-athlok to Krem, he is not writing a philosophical treatise. He is explaining his culture to someone who lacks the conceptual vocabulary to understand it directly.
That conversation therefore deserves to be read as a translation rather than a dictionary definition.
VII. Why This Reading Matters
At this point, someone might reasonably ask whether any of this matters if the writers themselves probably intended a more conventional interpretation.
It does to me.
Because the value of a fictional culture is not limited to authorial intent. Sometimes worldbuilding accidentally creates implications richer than the story that contains it.
The Qun was designed to feel alien. Ironically, the most alien aspect of it may be one the games never fully explored: the possibility that its concept of gender is not a biological binary at all, but a system of social grammar.
And if that is true, then the later portrayal of Qunari gender becomes much more complicated.
Because a society that classifies people by function would not necessarily experience gender variance in the same way a society that classifies people by anatomy. A society without binary gender also lacks the conceptual absence of binary gender. This may be difficult to imagine because English constantly defines concepts by opposition. Terms such as "stay-at-home spouse" immediately evoke "wife" precisely because the expected word has been omitted, which makes true gender ambiguity an impossibility.
If this interpretation is accepted, then Taash's story in Veilguard raises a serious internal contradiction: a character who is unquestionably a warrior is nevertheless treated by their mother as though biological sex overrides the very system of role-based classification that earlier Qunari lore appeared to establish.
VIII. The Problem of Taash
Taash is not where my interpretation begins. It is where it begins to break.
Under the framework established throughout the earlier games, there is remarkably little ambiguity regarding Taash's social role.
Taash is a warrior. No one disputes this. Not Taash. Not the player. Not their mother. Not the Qun.
Had Taash been raised entirely under the Qun, they would have been a part of Antaam, the dialogue explicitly states this. Their unique talents would've landed them the role of the warrior.
Within the framework the games have outlined, this should already determine the relevant "gender."
If gender corresponds primarily to social designation, then Taash already belongs to the soldier category. By the internal logic established earlier in the series, Taash is already what Common translates as "a man."
This is precisely where Shathann becomes frustrating.
She is portrayed as someone deeply committed to preserving Qunari customs despite living outside the Qun. Much of her relationship with Taash revolves around those expectations.
Yet she consistently refers to Taash according to biological sex.
That strikes me as profoundly strange.
If anyone should instinctively categorize people according to the logic of the Qun, it should be Shathann.
Instead, she appears to do the opposite.
She acknowledges Taash as a warrior.
She never argues they lack the temperament for combat. She never insists they belong in another profession. She wants to encourage them to learn more about their own culture but it is not portrayed as pushing them to scholarly duty due to their physical characteristics. She is even suspicious of the notion of them adopting said Qunari customs.
Yet she continues to categorise them through anatomy.
Ironically, the character presented as enforcing the Qun becomes the one behaving least like the earlier games suggested a Qunari should.
The narrative frames this as a mother attempting to impose biological gender upon her child. If anyone should instinctively think in terms of Qunari categories, it is Shathann. And yet her language appears to prioritize anatomy over function.
Ironically, this places her in the opposite position one might expect. She is simultaneously using categories that the Qun itself would never have privileged in the first place, and is punished by the narrative for it. Portrayed as a close minded boomer that needs to listen to their child.
IX. A Quest for the Binary
This realisation led me to what I consider the greatest failure in Taash's story.
The game presents their travel to Minrathous as part of a search for language capable of expressing who they are. That is debilitating. Not because I disagree with the story being told, but because I believe it accidentally tells another story at the same time. A story about the writers and audience.
The story presents this as liberation from rigid expectations.
But under the linguistic framework I have proposed, something almost paradoxical happens.
Taash does not leave the Qun-based teachings to escape an anatomical gender binary.
They leave it to discover one.
Within the Qun, social designation would already provide the relevant category. "Man" and "woman," understood as identities rooted in biological sex, would not occupy the same conceptual space they do in Southern Thedas.
It is only through sustained contact with the South that Taash encounters a society where anatomy itself becomes the organizing principle.
Only then does the language become available to reject it.
Viewed this way, Taash's story ceases to be one of escaping the Qun's categories. It becomes the story of someone moving between two incompatible systems of classification.
The Qun is one of the most genuinely alien cultures in fantasy precisely because it organises society according to principles that often feel deeply unintuitive to modern readers.
Its understanding of personhood is collectivist rather than individual, its ethics are teleological rather than rights-based, its conception of freedom is almost the inverse of liberal philosophy.
Why should its understanding of gender resemble ours?
Why should it use the same conceptual categories at all?
Reducing Qunari gender to a direct analogue of contemporary Western discourse makes the culture easier to understand. And I'm afraid it is the philosophy the writers understand.
X. Conclusion
Ultimately, I am less interested in arguing that this interpretation is canon than I am in arguing that it is possible.
Language is never a neutral vehicle for ideas.
When I first encountered the Qun, this was simply how I understood it.
Coming from a language without gendered pronouns, I naturally interpreted the Qun's statements about gender through linguistics rather than through biology. Only through time, after discussing the series with English speaking fans, did I realize that most people had reached a very different conclusion.
Eventually, I did too.
I learned to read the Qun the way the games increasingly encouraged me to. I had to perform the very act of translation this long-ass post has been describing. I replaced my own conceptual framework with another.
That experience is precisely why I find this topic immensely gripping.
Language does not merely give us words. It gives us habits of interpretation. The assumptions we bring into fiction are often invisible until we encounter someone whose language encourages different assumptions. Whether my interpretation reflects the writers' intentions is ultimately irrelevant.
I am pretty sure it doesn't.
Still it's very compelling what their worldbuilding accidentally made possible.
In the end, one of the most interesting questions Dragon Age could have asked remains unanswered;
What does gender variance look like in a society that never organized gender around biological sex in the first place?
What does it mean to be genderqueer in a culture whose "genders" are functions rather than identities?
And what happens when such a culture encounters another whose language insists upon distinctions the first never needed to make?
Because if the Qun really was conceived as an alien civilization, then perhaps its greatest unrealised potential lays not in reversing familiar gender roles, but in imagining a society whose very concept of gender belongs to an entirely different universe.
That, to me, would have been far stranger. And far more worthy of the Qun.
andersmancing hawke and brosca or aeducan warden but because the former married him and the latter was very generous about who they added to their new house as paragon, they do literally nothing but bicker over what anders’ surname is
warden-commander: anders hawke? huh, i heard that guy’s name was—
hawke: and i heard his name would have changed from whatever it was before when he got married
warden-commander: if such a man were to get married, nothing could take away his house status
hawke: it’s a surface custom. assuming such a man got married on the surface. you wouldn’t be familiar
warden-commander: hmmph. well certainly. if he legally bound a marriage. but isn’t having one of your priests actually present something of a surface custom—
hawke: maker don’t start that again
warden-commander: you started it!
hawke: i did not!
extremely bored templar: i just want to know if either of you have seen the apostate
[ID: Digital art of Zevran Aranai smiling slightly and holding a tankard while wearing an unlaced grey tunic. His cheeks are flushed and he has a thought bubble reading "they changed the uniform while I was gone..." /END ID]
In the midst of my ongoing health issues, I've been replaying the dragon age games, and getting a new appreciation for these stories (and the ways things have aged for better or worse lol)
two forces pulling in opposite direction • I had the pleasure of painting Sten with the tarot card The Chariot as inspiration for 2026's @dragonageannual ARCANA!
