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<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7602026" data-attributes="member: 6779196"><p>Mmm... This really depends on how you define gender. Modern gender theory, as it pertains to humans, would disagree. Most scholars on the subject nowadays agree that gender is performative, and there are plenty of animals that have more than two sex-related roles that different members of their species perform. Even if we go with the now largely scientifically outdated concept of sex and gender being interchangeable, it is far more complex than the traditional male/female binary, even for humans. Plenty of animals have more than two clear-cut sets of sex characteristics, including humans, and plenty of animals change sex characteristics under certain conditions (humans not included). Granted, there are no species on earth that require more than two parents to produce offspring, but saying that all species on earth that reproduce sexually have only two genders is an oversimplification on multiple levels. The data is clear, gender and sex are both spectra, in humans and other animals alike, so I see no reason the same wouldn’t be true of fantasy races and/or fictional life forms from other planets. Requiring more than two members of the species for reproduction would be an extraordinary biological oddity and would therefore demand extraordinary fictional justification, but the idea of a race with more than two genders is downright pedestrian to anyone with a working knowledge of either gender studies, zoology, or both.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 7602026, member: 6779196"] Mmm... This really depends on how you define gender. Modern gender theory, as it pertains to humans, would disagree. Most scholars on the subject nowadays agree that gender is performative, and there are plenty of animals that have more than two sex-related roles that different members of their species perform. Even if we go with the now largely scientifically outdated concept of sex and gender being interchangeable, it is far more complex than the traditional male/female binary, even for humans. Plenty of animals have more than two clear-cut sets of sex characteristics, including humans, and plenty of animals change sex characteristics under certain conditions (humans not included). Granted, there are no species on earth that require more than two parents to produce offspring, but saying that all species on earth that reproduce sexually have only two genders is an oversimplification on multiple levels. The data is clear, gender and sex are both spectra, in humans and other animals alike, so I see no reason the same wouldn’t be true of fantasy races and/or fictional life forms from other planets. Requiring more than two members of the species for reproduction would be an extraordinary biological oddity and would therefore demand extraordinary fictional justification, but the idea of a race with more than two genders is downright pedestrian to anyone with a working knowledge of either gender studies, zoology, or both. [/QUOTE]

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