Terry, Sam and Alex

An experimental story idea that will probably fail, inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin.

Photo by Sabbaar Khan

So here's an idea I've been playing with. I’m working on a story about Terry, Sam, Alex, and their friends Leigh, Robin, Chris, Drew, Jamie, Leslie, and Nicky.

On your very first impression, when you read those names, did you imagine them as male or female?

The reason I chose these particular names is because I personally know both men and women with those names. In some cases, it's been a little confusing and embarrassing to find out that they are not the gender I originally thought they were. My belief is that most of us, when presented with a unisex name, won't stop and wonder whether the character is male or female. We'll just imagine that character in our head, based on our personal preconceptions, and keep going.

My aim is not to give the reader any clues to the gender of any of these characters: I’m trying to avoid using gendered pronouns, clothing, and so on. They're all just people. You can make assumptions based on their actions or attitudes, but that's all they will be, your assumptions. I'm not going to tell you, that's all on you.

I’m not sure I have the skill to pull this off without making it unreadable, but I rather like the idea that every one of us could have our own conception of who these characters are. And of course, I haven't said that they were all male or all female there's no reason why they can't be a mixture. With ten characters, that gives us 2^10 possibilities - that's over 2,000 different ways of interpreting who's who in this story.

When I first came up with this idea, my plan was for a big reveal at the end, prompting the reader to think, “Oh my God, I never realized Sam was a girl,” or whatever, but the more I thought about it, the more I like the idea of just leaving it ambiguous and pointing out the ambiguity, making the reader doubt their own interpretation. I want them to think, “Hang on, is Sam a girl? Did I miss something?”

That way, they can read it again and consciously reimagine the characters, and see how that changes the story. It's almost like a choose your own adventure where you get to replay it with a different character: although the story is exactly the same, the reader’s experience is completely different. And of course if you mentally change a character's gender, you may have to change their sexuality as well. Do you view the relationship between Sam and Alex differently if they’re the same gender?

Gender ambiguity is something I've wanted to play with ever since reading The Left Hand of Darkness many years ago. Many of the characters in that book are ambisexual aliens, neither male nor female. In most editions, they use male pronouns, even though Le Guin says explicitly that the Gethenians are not male. If you were to switch all their pronouns to female, that would create a completely different experience for the reader. Estraven, Argaven and the other Gethenians are exactly the same characters, and the story is exactly the same, but we’d view them differently once we think of them as female. That's fascinating in itself, but you'd still be telling the reader how to imagine the characters.

A third option is to use non-gender pronouns, such as s/he, but although this enables you to explicitly remind the reader that these are non-binary characters, that's just awkward to read.

So what I want to try instead is just to take gender out of it completely. Terry, Sam and the others aren’t ambisexual, transexual, or anything else. They may be male, or they may be female, and even I don’t know which is which. I'll tell you what they do and what they say. The rest is up to you.