: Re: How do I keep the gender of my main character purposely ambiguous? I'm a newcomer to this community, and have recently started giving serious thought to my first novel. I'm basically working

@Debbie451

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1) Where's the best place to hide a red fish? In a pond full of other red fish.

Since you're writing in a fantasy genre, you have liberty to create an entire society. You're doing all your own worldbuilding. So create a society/race/culture where nobody's gender is ever established. A gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun will be required, but there are many (or you can coin your own).

Your characters who aren't of Red Fish's people can be binarily gendered and use standard pronouns. It's up to you if you want them to express confusion or struggle with how to address Red Fish.

2) Whether your reader will be distracted by Red Fish's gender ambiguity depends on what else you define about the character.

We establish a concept of the characters, settings, and actions in our heads as we read (some people visualize, some only get the radio drama, but there's some mental thing going on). If you say elf or dwarf, we have a vague outline of what the species is, and certain expectations. Elves and dwarves are sexually dimorphous, so an ambiguously gendered elf or dwarf is going to irritate the reader after a while.

But if you say breezleklorp, we don't know what one of those looks like, or what characteristics it has. Humanoid? Bipedial? Symmetrical? How many heads, eyes, arms, genders? You could get away with an ambiguously gendered breezleklorp for quite some time if you're only slowly revealing the characteristics of breezleklorpim as the story proceeds.

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