Hi!
Right now I'm (attempting) to write a sci-fi story centered around a human and an alien, and basically it would be the alien trying to get the human back home, all the while the human teaches them about Earth culture (what they know of it) and the alien reacting to it/other biological things humans have (a la humans-are-weird).
My plan was to make this human nonbinary (I've been thinking specifically bigender) as a way to explore both masc and femme ways of moving through society. Taking on both masculine and feminine traits to showcase to the alien how either would work back on earth. My thoughts on their gender presentation would be as androgynous as possible, and that people would be unable to tell if they're a man/woman but would believe either if they were told so. They would also go by they/them, with a pretty gender neutral name.
What's the best way to go about this? Is it insensitive to construct a nonbinary person that's split so evenly down the middle? I know, of course, that actual nonbinary people can have an array of presentations, but story wise I thought this would be the best way to showcase more of the human experience in one character. They're experiences as being nonbinary would be shown too, but I wanted an avenue to bring up different trends if needed.
This wouldn't be the only human character, but they would be the main one, and the one the reader gets introduced to first/know the longest.
Any advice you can give would be amazing! (And thank you for reading/responding this kind of got away from me).
Others will definitely have different opinions on this (I especially encourage replies here) but I take issue with nonbinary characters specifically existing within the plot as a teaching tool. When I was in high school, I was outed specifically so my "friends" could teach others about queer topics as though they had a right to share that information without my consent. So this one hits particularly subhumanizing for me, since I was seen as a teaching tool and not a person.
I realize that in this ask, I am only getting the relevant parts of your story to ask about, so that's all I have to judge off of. There are details of your characters that I am not privy to, where they are possibly written as whole fully fleshed out characters.
I think you should also explore your own fluency in teaching about gender from a nonbinary perspective, like your character will be doing. There are nonbinary people who aren't the same as me and who have different relationships to their identities, but I think about gender every day of my life in some way. When I first came to terms with it 11 years ago, I had to deprogram my idea of what gender can be from the binary way I was trained to, in order to accept that I am a real person and part of mainstream society. At least, that I deserve to be part of it.
I think a lot of people who haven't spent time around [other] nonbinary people tend to have not really decoupled their thoughts from the prescribed gender binary. Gender is not two pillars of "man/masculine" and "woman/feminine" and everyone else in relation to that. In the cultures that exist on earth, we don't even have the same perspectives on what either of those mean, if they exist at all.
And that's another thing - it is inaccurate to say that manhood and womanhood are inherently human in the way your nonbinary character would understand it. There are many human cultures who have 5 or 6 genders as the socially accepted norm. When we ignore these cultures and their genders when teaching about "human gender" in these stories, we are implying that those outside the colonial binary are not human. Even when womanhood (for instance) is a thing that exists in a given culture, that doesn't mean it translates to the colonial enforcement of a given gender. There are many Indigenous people I know of who specifically have said, "I'm kwe, which is different than what English-speakers mean when they say 'woman.'" Or who have said they identify as an Inuk woman, or 'nonbinary' if they have to use that framework.
It is not enough to say, "femme and masc" as though these are a new, more inclusive binary. They aren't, and femme (when used in English) is a very specific queer identity. It is not synonymous with feminine, and feminine doesn't mean woman-like either. At least to me, and the majority of trans people I know personally. And I'm not sure what exactly you mean when you say masculine or feminine traits either. How these things are defined is really, really subjective. And tbh, a lot of us unfortunately think of stereotypes around what these things mean. Maybe not when we think about it and how we actually perceive these things, but it's the kind of thing many just happen to more readily have words for.
Re: "Split down the middle" bigender. There's nothing wrong with having a nonbinary person have a specific identity. This happens sometimes.
Actual advice:
I don't think you should write this character to be a teacher of gender. I think it's okay to explain some stuff when asked and to make general statements with disclaimers, and have those general statements not imply that most people are men or women (because that only accounts for a specific cultural setting, and one where anything otherwise is persecuted in order to uphold certain systems of power, like patriarchy, colonialism).
Another thing you could do is involve a nonbinary co-writer to write with you from the perspective of this character. Or write their dialogue at least, which your writing responds to.
mod nat
