A tangential word of warning from an amateur philologist: this reasoning is treacherous. Our wonderful language is full of word pairs which, from their prefixes, would seem to be antonyms, but aren't: "access"/"abcess", "concern"/"discern", "compute"/"dispute", "incite"/"excite", "inspect"/"expect"... See if you can find some of your own! It's fun! ...if you're a very particular kind of geek.
EDIT: And even in the case of antonyms, well, an "ingress" may be an entrance, but an "egress" is not "anything that is not an entrance". Antonymy is not always exhaustivity.
More topically, it seems weird to apply this binary logic of "If not X, then Y" to, y'know, nonbinary people. Granted, logic is logic, and a binary is impossible to escape at some point -- "nonbinary" itself could not be more explicitly a binary term -- but still.
Sure, but none of this changes the fact that trans is an umbrella term and anyone who is not cis falls under the trans umbrella. That's just the way those words are used in LGBTQIA spaces. I speak from experience in this matter.
It also sounds like they may be sequential hermaphrodites (I know nothing of the game other than what you have described). If so, the "concept at least roughly analogous to gender" may simply be biological sex, or tied to biological sex or reproductive function. Or the pronouns could be assigned by the human translators on that basis -- would hardly be the first time. They might not make the gender/caste distinction in their own grammar at all. (Which is not to say that they can't make the distinction very heavily in other areas. Turkish is a genderless language, but Turkey is hardly a genderless culture.)
Oh, that is almost certainly the case. But (and?), there are also strict societal roles tied to those sexes. Presumably, Mothers are translated as female-analogues because they give birth to Larvae. They are also culturally expected to act primarily in a child-rearing capacity by Krill society, and in Hive society*, they are referred to as Witches and are the only caste that performs magic. In other words, the Hive have a cultural association between the ability to bear children and magical capability. We see through magic that Oryx (a King morph) performs that magic must not be exclusive to Mothers/Witches, so we can only assume that this is a cultural norm, and it is certainly linked to sex. If a Knight or King found they had a talent for magic and desired to serve in the Hive armies in a sorcerous capacity, how would Hive culture respond to that? We don't really see it happen, outside of Oryx, who transgresses Hive cultural norms in a lot of ways. But given that we don't see any Knights doing Witch magic, it seems reasonable to assume that such things are not generally looked upon favorably by the rest of the Hive. I would absolutely describe a Knight that wanted to do magic like a Wizard as transgender.
*quick aside: the Krill become the Hive by entering a symbiotic relationship with another species called Worms, which feed on entropy. The Worm provides the Krill with an extended lifespan and metaphysical power, and in exchange, the Krill engages in constant darwinistic struggle to live at the expense of other life, thereby feeding the Worm. In this way, both symbionts can theoretically live forever, their mystical power increasing exponentially all the while, unless their growth ever exceeds their capacity to kill, at which point the Worm consumes the Krill from the inside out, and seeks a new host.
Well, the greater implication of the question is "Will trans-ness still exist in our culture as trans rights continue to make strides?"
I certainly don’t expect it to reach that point in my lifetime. Most of our society is just not ready to discard our inbuilt assumptions about what things our bodies should determine about our identities. But, we could formulate a similar question on a different scale. If a family raises a child with the freedom to choose their own gender identity regardless of their sex characteristics, is that child still trans? The answer is yes, because the rest of society is still going to assign them a gender even if their parents do not. Like the eladrin who learns upon encountering humans that the way they dress and act is considered aberrant to humans because of their sex characteristics, that child is still going to face people telling them, "you're a boy and boys aren't supposed to wear dresses" and other such nonsense. If we could completely eliminate such constructs in society the world over? Then we can have the discussion of whether or not trans is still a useful term.
Hmm. It seems to me like you're still implicitly attributing them a gender identity, despite the stipulation that they don't have one.
No, they have an identity. Their culture has no concept of gender, but they still have an identity. Another culture that does have a concept of gender will assign certain aspects of identity to certain genders, and when a person's identity does not match what their society says it should be based on whatever criteria it uses to assign gender, there is going to be conflict.
The humans call them a "man", and if they don't line up with all the human norms for that label, so what? They don't line up with human norms in a lot of ways, and never expected to. But referring to themself as a "woman" in contradiction of the label assigned them implies they have a preference in the matter. Doing so to the likely confusion, consternation, and possibly even hostility of the humans implies they have a strong preference.
They may well have a strong preference for the aspects of their identity that human culture dictates are "for women."
Say a human enters, oh, dwarven society, and finds out that they have defined social roles for unak and khivud dwarves. When she asks what these words mean, she is told "right-handed" and "left-handed". Now, this human is right-handed, but her behavior more resembles that of khivud dwarves. It strikes me as more likely for the human to accept the translations and write off the social expectations associated with unak as a dwarf matter than it is for her to challenge the definitions of words in a language that is not her own and the norms of a society that is not her own for the sake of a concept that is not a part of her own identity and is unlikely to become one.
Depends on whether or not those dwarves try to assert their own cultural norms on the human. If
unak aren't allowed to be warriors, and this right-handed human is a warrior, how do the dwarves resolve this dissonance? Do they write it off as "not our way" but leave the human to his own people's way? Or do they shame him for behaving in a manner unbefitting an
unak, which he so clearly is? In the former case, sure, I'd assume the human would most likely live and let live just as the dwarves are doing. But if a dragon attacks and the dwarves don't want to let the human help because the other warriors refuse to stand beside an
unak on the field of battle... Might be a different story.
A dwarf, acculturated to feel that unak and khivud are important, might well be motivated to carve out a place for himself as "right-handed, but khivud anyway, they're not actually the same thing". An outsider, though? Anything is possible, but I think dwarves expecting a human to care about whether they call her unak or khivud would be projecting their own attachment to those concepts onto somebody who honestly doesn't have it.
But it's about more than just what they call him. It's about the expectations that label comes with within their society.
(Corollary question: Are unak and khivud genders?)
I don't know. I'm inclined to say no, as its usefulness as a metaphor for gender in real life is pretty limited; it's a simile at best. But I suppose, if the fiction handled it in a way that made it useful to consider them genders, they could be.
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