Writing Gender-Flexibly

This App was designed to help you write games that don't set a Character's gender in stone, but instead allow the gender to be defined at casting time based on player preference, so that gender is not a constraint on casting. This was tried out experimentally with the game A Respectful Calm ("ARC" below), and worked well -- it turned out to be a great exercise in breaking my own assumptions about how gender and plot worked together, and taught me a lot. What you have here is a slightly more refined version of the ideas from that original game.
Important: none of this is required, and frankly it works better in a modern context than for historical games, where gender roles often more strongly define the Characters. It does take a good deal of extra effort to write gender-flexibly -- be prepared to spend a while getting into the habit. To write a game more conventionally, where the genders are fixed at writing time, use the "Default First Name" property to specify the Character's name, ignore the "Gendered First Name" and "Character Gender" properties, and don't worry about any of the stuff below.
Also, note that this is not the same thing as writing truly non-binary gender-neutral characters, where traditional gender simply doesn't exist in the game. I haven't seen that done yet, but that is effectively "gender-fixed" for purposes of this page -- these tools are overkill if you want to write that way.

Gender and Pronouns

For purposes of this App, "gender" is mainly a grammatical construct, and is mainly about Pronouns. The system is designed to allow you to use the traditional male/female pronouns, as well as a variety of non-binary forms, depending on player preference.
There are five pronoun cases recognized by the system:
  • Nominative -- he / she / they / ze
  • Oblique -- him / her / them / zim
  • Possessive Determiner -- his / her / their / zir
  • Possessive Pronoun -- his / hers / theirs / zirs
  • Reflexive -- himself / herself / themself / zimself
The following genders are built into this App:
  • Female -- she / her / her / hers / herself
  • Male -- he / him / his / his / himself
  • They -- they / them / their / theirs / themself
  • Ze Gender -- ze / zim / zir / zirs / zirself
  • Spivak -- e / em / eir / eirs / emself
  • Elverson -- ey / em / eir / eirs / eirself
This list was chosen mainly through a quick survey of the literature, and what seemed to be popular. It is not hard and fast -- if you are an Editor of this LARP, you can add another set by clicking this button: Add another Gender

First Names

A Character's gender can also determine their first name. You don't have to do this -- some names are nicely gender-neutral (for example, one of the Characters in ARC was "Jamie"), but most names in most languages are gendered.
To handle this, use the "Gendered First Name" property on Character. This lets you add first names for any genders that you need.
This first-name-centric approach works for most Western languages, but fails to properly account for the relationship of gender and name in a variety of languages ranging from Norse to Russian, where gender can also affect the surname. This is a known issue; we'll have to think about how best to address it, but it's probably not a problem for most games.

Using the Right Pronouns and Names

Using gender-flexible pronouns requires that you follow a couple of standard recipes. It's some effort, but becomes second nature after a while.
Basically, whenever you need a pronoun, you need to specify who you're talking about, and which pronoun you need. (In theory we could parse and rewrite everything automatically, but it's Very Hard to do correctly. So instead, we let you control it.) It works like this.
Let's use a Character from ARC as an example, Ivah / Isaiah Zubin. The Name of this Character is "I Zubin" -- that's how you refer to the Character for this stuff. This is mainly used in other Characters' sheets. For example, Millie Cameron talks a lot about Ivah / Isaiah, who is an old friend. A typical bit goes,
Poor [[I Zubin -> First Name]] was heartbroken, and drew back into [[I Zubin -> zim]]self; you haven't been as close since.
If I Zubin is set to Male, that comes out as:
Poor Isaiah was heartbroken, and drew back into himself; you haven't been as close since.
And if I Zubin is set to Female, it shows as:
Poor Ivah was heartbroken, and drew back into herself; you haven't been as close since.
If you do this at the beginning of a sentence, you should capitalize the pseudo-pronoun appropriately. For example,
[[I Zubin -> Ze]] drew back into [[I Zubin -> zim]]self; you haven't been as close since.
would come out as:
He drew back into himself; you haven't been as close since.
Putting it together, there are a few key rules to follow:
  • All gender-flexible references go inside double-square-brackets.
  • They start with the Name of the Character, followed by a -> (dash + greater-than) arrow, followed by the part of speech you're looking for.
  • Use First Name to get that Character's first name, based on their current gender, or Full Name to get their full name.
  • Use the appropriate Ze-Gender pronoun (ze / zim / zir / zirs / zirself) to say which pronoun you're looking for.
  • Capitalize the pronoun if you want the results to be capitalized.

Doing a Section About One Character

(This is totally optional, but saves some typing.)
The above formula works fine, but it does result in a fair amount of boilerplate -- in particular, if you're writing an entire paragraph or more about one Character, you wind up repeating their Name over and over again. To reduce that, you can put that whole section inside the square brackets. Continuing from the previous examples, here's an entire (edited) paragraph from Millie Cameron's sheet, talking about I Zubin:
[[I Zubin -> ""You -- well, when you look at it now, you've always kind of defined yourself by your relationships. Back in school, you fell for [[Full Name]], and the two of you got quite serious for a while, even moving in together junior year. But you always told [[zim]] that [[ze]] was too dour, always seeing the dark side of things, and telling [[zim]] to accentuate the positive was usually met with a list of objective reasons why things were bad. Whether it was politics, schoolwork or money, you were always arguing -- lovingly, but arguing. Eventually, you broke it off, partly at [[H Derren -> First Name]]'s urging but mostly because it was just too depressing to be with [[zim]] any more. You've never forgotten that first real romance, though, and still cherish [[zim]] as a dear friend.""]]
If I Zubin is set to Male, that comes out as:
You -- well, when you look at it now, you've always kind of defined yourself by your relationships. Back in school, you fell for Isaiah Zubin, and the two of you got quite serious for a while, even moving in together junior year. But you always told him that he was too dour, always seeing the dark side of things, and telling him to accentuate the positive was usually met with a list of objective reasons why things were bad. Whether it was politics, schoolwork or money, you were always arguing -- lovingly, but arguing. Eventually, you broke it off, partly at Helen's urging but mostly because it was just too depressing to be with him any more. You've never forgotten that first real romance, though, and still cherish him as a dear friend.
So here are the rules for doing a chunk of text about a specific other Character:
  • As with the simpler cases above, the whole thing is in double-square-brackets, starting with the Name of the target Character and an arrow.
  • Following the arrow, you put the entire section in double-double-quotes.
  • The section can be as long or short as you like -- anywhere from a sentence to several paragraphs.
  • Within the section, you can just use the pronouns and [[First Name]], without giving the Character's Name over and over -- Querki knows that the whole section is talking about that Character.
  • Within the section, you can still use the normal mechanism to talk about other Characters, as shown in the reference to H Derren in the paragraph shown.
For those who care about what the heck is going on here: basically, everything inside double-square-brackets is actually a program, written in Querki's simple language QL. Inside one of those programs, everything inside double-double-quotes is back to normal text again. And the arrow says, "take the thing on the left of the arrow, and pass it to the thing on the right of the arrow". So in the simple cases, you're telling it "pass I Zubin to the Ze pronoun", and the in more complicated one you're saying "pass I Zubin to this whole section". That's basically all that programming in Querki is.

Caveat: Using the They Gender

NB: I have not yet tried casting someone as They in practice. The pronouns should work correctly (note that we are using "themself" as the reflexive, which is a new but increasingly accepted form), but my suspicion is that the plural-ness of "they" is going to make some of the grammar a bit weird. The concept of Grammatical Number exists in the system so that we can work with this, but I suspect that it will take additional effort to write character sheets that work well grammatically with They. If you want to play with this, I encourage you to write to me and we can work through the challenges.

Limits of Gender Flexibility

I recommend using these tools with some care -- even in a game that is designed to be gender-flexible, you may find that you want some gender-fixed Characters for one reason or another. ARC had several of these, each for their own specific reasons:
  • One was a Catholic priest, and thus necessarily male.
  • One was specifically male because it was exploring a father/son relationship.
  • One was specifically female because it was about the challenges of a conservative woman in the modern business world.
  • One was specifically female because it was exploring a mother/daughter relationship.
These Characters were gendered by the nature of what we were exploring with that Character, and you may find that you have some examples of that yourself. But if you're up for the work, I recommend making as many Characters as possible gender-flexible: I learned a lot from the process, and I think it made for a better game. Especially in a modern-day game, I think you'll find that most Characters do not need to be gender-fixed.

Writing With a Different Set of Pronouns

As shown above, the LARP App has standardized on Ze Gender as the pronoun set that is built in for writing gender-flexible characters -- I find it reasonably intuitive and very neutral, so it doesn't bias my writing with gender assumptions. (ARC was actually written using a homebrew set of pronouns that, in practice, didn't work so well.)
However, this is a matter of taste, and it is possible to use a different gender set for your writing if you prefer, although it takes some setup. It goes like this:
  • Make sure you know the pronouns for your preferred gender in advance -- you'll want all five of the cases described above.
  • Edit the base Character Model, by clicking here: Edit the Character Model.
  • Down at the bottom of the page, look at the definitions of Ze / Zim / Zir / Zirs / Zirself. Those are Properties, and you're going to be copying them to make your new set.
  • For each of the five pronouns you want, press the "Add a Property" button, then "Create a New Property instead". The Name of the new Property should be the pronoun you're adding. Set the Type to "Function", and then press the "Required" button. Press the "Create" button, and it will add this new Property. Copy the text of the corresponding pronoun from the Ze set -- it will be some version of "pronoun case.Pronoun".
That's it -- after that, you should be able to use your new pronoun set in your writing.
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