sith + gender & sex noodling
one piece of worldbuilding headcanon I developed a while ago, mostly in the process of trying to figure out "Meshurat wtf is your gender deal," was Sith culture conceptualizing an exo-m/f-binary gender/role to the effect of "(self- & personal agency-sacrificing) weapon in service to the community as a whole". something kind of straddling the line between playing a valued, honored role, but also being to an extent socially disposable, in the sense of part of this being not partnering, having a family, etc.
in Meshurat's context - a modern* human*-dominant class of Sith lineages - this is something ve comes to as a choice, with potential to identify towards as a child, but not "officially confirmed" in a sociocultural sense until adulthood (read: late teens-ish equivalent). it, and gender overall, is also less of a Strict Binding Social Role, and more like, select this collection of vibes to be read through (none of which are all unambiguously positive or negative, nor holding the majority share of structural power in the way that's seen re: Sith/non-Sith or human/nonhuman class distinctions).
at the same time, given how modern* Sith&imperial culture draws a lot from older/pre-Jen'ari Red Sith culture, with varying degrees of adaptation, syncretism, reanalysis, straight-up theft, etc, I think there's like -
if you take a few steps to the left, a lot of this + other gender categories derive from social roles in that traditional sith society, but a significant piece in weakening the biological/sex determinism aspect of those gender roles was the massive jumpstart in bioalchemical applications via Sorzus Syn &co.
so more to the point, while the khevess role was to an extent an open class that people could choose (analogous to maybe like, if becoming a monk/nun was a choice of a totally separate gender rather than a vocation inflect(ing/ed by) being a man/woman?) - it was more prototypically an assigned gender just like m/f, mapping onto sith-species intersex-analogous body configurations. because of the significant degree of subsequent species-hybridization & privileging more human-like ancestries & appearances for a long while*, sith-cultural sex/gender categories kind of drifted + experienced scope-creep beyond their original somatic associations.
swinging back around to Meshurat, like most people at this point ve's operating in this exobinary-gender-as-uncommon-optional-sith-prestige-class-a-la-RPGs framework. (there's also a not super subtle gender-and-sexual-orientation-as-fused-concept thing going on, which at least for Meshurat anyway is a feature rather than a bug, though that's not necessarily a universal feeling.)
on the other hand, if you're operating within a much more traditionalist red sith ("sith pureblood") cultural context (not that those two aspects are necessarily always in concert with one another), it is still more of an established thing for khevess to be an externally-assigned gender, including for babies/children. and that's actually Khisit's situation, prior to their parents' deaths; and why growing up under the Jedi/in the Republic, due to all of the previous discussion being a [lore unavailable] epistemic gap, they essentially get raised as like.... shrug?? unclear?? put in same conceptual bucket as applicable for usually much more non-humanoid (& culturally marginal Core-wise) individuals?
(tbqh gender-as-institution in the Republic is a much bigger can of worms that makes me want to bash my head against a wall whenever I think about it, but for relative simplicity's sake, I p much just handwave, yeah idk there's some relatively common/normal(ized) (collection of) nonbinary identity(ies) [implied: among """standard""" Core-cultural species][is the can of worms starting to become visible yet]; and the "nope 404 not found" corner of that is how Khisit actually identifies, once they start parsing & asserting it for themself. to which: while their circumstances would've been differently low-key-crappy in this regard had they been raised in the Sith Empire, that hypothetical AU still isn't something they'd be happy within or (as an adult) choose over the life they've actually lived. their whole deal is truly ambivalent feelings about how they do vs could/"should" identify, all the way down.)
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