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Will you make transsexual Elves canon in your games ?
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<blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 7437930" data-attributes="member: 6683613"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p></p><p>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.)</p><p></p><p>Well, the greater implication of the question is "Will trans-ness still exist in <em>our</em> culture as trans rights continue to make strides?"</p><p></p><p></p><p>Hmm. It seems to me like you're still implicitly attributing them a gender identity, despite the stipulation that they don't have one. 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 <em>strong</em> preference. </p><p></p><p>Say a human enters, oh, dwarven society, and finds out that they have defined social roles for <em>unak</em> and <em>khivud</em> 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 <em>khivud</em> dwarves. It strikes me as more likely for the human to accept the translations and write off the social expectations associated with <em>unak</em> 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. A dwarf, acculturated to feel that <em>unak</em> and <em>khivud</em> are important, might well be motivated to carve out a place for himself as "right-handed, but <em>khivud</em> 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 <em>unak</em> or <em>khivud</em> would be projecting their own attachment to those concepts onto somebody who honestly doesn't have it.</p><p></p><p>(Corollary question: Are <em>unak</em> and <em>khivud</em> genders?)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="TheCosmicKid, post: 7437930, member: 6683613"] 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. 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.) Well, the greater implication of the question is "Will trans-ness still exist in [I]our[/I] culture as trans rights continue to make strides?" Hmm. It seems to me like you're still implicitly attributing them a gender identity, despite the stipulation that they don't have one. 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 [I]strong[/I] preference. Say a human enters, oh, dwarven society, and finds out that they have defined social roles for [I]unak[/I] and [I]khivud[/I] 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 [I]khivud[/I] dwarves. It strikes me as more likely for the human to accept the translations and write off the social expectations associated with [I]unak[/I] 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. A dwarf, acculturated to feel that [I]unak[/I] and [I]khivud[/I] are important, might well be motivated to carve out a place for himself as "right-handed, but [I]khivud[/I] 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 [I]unak[/I] or [I]khivud[/I] would be projecting their own attachment to those concepts onto somebody who honestly doesn't have it. (Corollary question: Are [I]unak[/I] and [I]khivud[/I] genders?) [/QUOTE]
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