: Re: How to describe my character using they/them so the reader doesn't know their gender until their pronouns show up later? I'm experimenting with writing nonbinary or generally gender-ambiguous characters

@Annie587

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It works up until:

they shrugged and stepped into the bathroom, closing the door behind them before starting to brush their hair.

I honestly think it is just too many "they-them-their" in one sentence. It's starting to sound labored.

A few weeks ago I attempted the same idea, a character who has a name but I didn't want to reveal as male or a tomboy. I wanted to see how far I could get:

Murphy didn't wait to be caught staring, and moved away from the door in the same direction up the sidewalk, and lit a cigarette.

My solution was to create run-on sentences that felt a bit stream-of-conscience and never used a pronoun. It started to sound labored when I really had to mangle the sentence to avoid a third-person person (TVtropes), like the Batman villain Solomon Grundy.

I didn't "fool" anyone, but beta-readers didn't mention it until one of them needed to use the character's pronoun to talk about the character, and then they just acted a little annoyed like I was being artsy and not all that clever by refusing to label them – it was only annoying to the reader when they had to do it themselves, and they refused not out of malice, but out of English.

It's not possible to read it without invoking a modern perception of a-gender-identity.

It reads as if the MC does not identify with any gender, or identifies as gender-neutral.

The sister comes along and genders "him", which implies that he hasn't made it an issue within the family. He doesn't react negatively to being gendered, instead the narrative picks up the gender he's been given from the conversation.

If the story continues, I might hope that the MC lapses back into not having a gender, until someone else comes along and assigns a gender again (maybe male, maybe female) it's interesting to see a malleable character, who will accept being called male, but doesn't really relate so as time goes on the "maleness" wears off.

That the narrative voice shifts to include new information feels fine, but I'm left wondering if this is a quirk of the character or just a "meet the everyperson" way to begin the story.

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