Hey so I have had another Dwarf Gender/Parentage Thought.
I am like 99% sure that we never get any named couples among the dwarves we know of who've had children. There's just one line on those family trees, and when Dwarves introduce themselves by their lineage, they only drop one name (the father's of course because patriarchy).
But. If we have a society of Dwarves who don't really do the "gender thing" (as is my favorite way to write them) then there's no reason to assume that father means the same thing to them as it does to us: maybe it just means parent.
Maybe all Dwarves are "he" above their Mountain, even if some of them have gender(s) down below.
So what if there really is only one line on those family trees? Maybe it's not that the Hobbits left people off: maybe for Dwarves, their family trees are just one line. Because maybe Dwarves don't go for in for marriage and nuclear families the way we do; maybe for them, it's more about clans and community, and each Dwarf only has one parent, because that parent is the one who bore them, and everyone else is just "general family."
So then the reason why Dís is the only-named-female-dwarf in the Red Book of Westmarch is because when Bilbo and/or Frodo and/or Sam (whoever wrote down that part of the appendixes) put together all the bits they knew about the Line of Durin, and Fili and Kili and Thorin and all, they figured out that Dís had been the one who carried and bore the brothers (perhaps Fili had told Bilbo a story about when his parent had been pregnant with his little brother) and that led them to the obvious (Hobbit-gender-role-centric) conclusion that Dís was female, because that's who has babies.
But really every Dwarf who's ever been called "father" is the one who's done the childbearing. Gimli is the son of Glóin because that's the parent who crafted and birthed him into the world. Same with Thráin and Thorin, same with Dáin and Other-Thorin.
Same with all of them.
Because maybe that's just how Dwarves work. No one cares who your sire is. You wouldn't give credit for the sword you forged to the guy who laid the coals, right? Sure, they helped, but you're the one who did the work. You're the one who forged and crafted that child, so you're his father, and that's the only lineage that matters.
And the Hobbits just didn't know quite how that worked, so they wrote Dís in there as she...when really, like the rest of Mahal's children, her whole gender begins and ends at "Dwarf."
