So, this is largely inspired by a) a review I saw on Goodreads for Ancillary Justice. b) My tendency to use “she” as a default pronoun because the *majority of fan fiction writers are women/identify as women. (I also tend to use “she” as the default pronoun due to a vaguely remembered essay years ago that concerned “he” as a default pronoun, but that’s another thing, that is absolutely relevant to this post!)
Anyway! The usual default pronoun in English as of a few decades ago was “he.” That is if you didn’t know the gender or the gender was unknown you went with “he.” You could use “they” but you would be consistently dinged by people insisting on using them/they as a plural instead of also as a singular. (Pause to give a certain English Teacher a Look. You can totally do this. Using “they” as a singular gender-neutral pronoun was always an option Mrs. B.) But it was generally universal to use “he” as the default. So you have “he” as the assumed default to the point where early SF stories are pretty much a sausage party, even if the writer was a woman.
Of course, then later we have feminists pointing out that “he” as a default excludes women. (This a correct observation, by the way for reasons I will get into, involving issue a.) So you have people starting to use either “she and/or he” and she or he interchangeably as the default pronoun, both in fiction writing and in nonfiction writing. (I started mostly using “she” as default, then switched to “they” when I wasn’t sure about gender.)
Okay so, now we get to the situation with the review, which was mostly positive except…the man who wrote the review claimed to have been deeply confused by the use of pronouns. There is, of course, only one pronoun being used. “She/her.” The Radch only have one gender and only use terminology related to that one gender. Mother, daughter, sister. She. Her.
Other cultures in the series have at least two and probably more genders, but the Radch only has one, and therefore are eternally confused by other cultures because those other cultures’ gender expectations for “women,” “men,” or “other,” varies wildly. (Breq Our Heroine spends a great deal of time being confused and/or exasperated about gender expectations while she’s outside the Radch. A trait assumed to be “womanly” in one culture could be “manly” in another, and the reverse. This means Breq can be misgendered several times for the same trait! Very confusing!)
Anne Leckie could have gone for having the default gender be “men.” She could have gone with “he/him.” Brother, father, sons. However given the sausage fest that is much of early and even recent SF, there wouldn’t have been much of a difference or impact. (Also, stories featuring all-male/default male cultures are a different kind of story, with a different kind of theme/message than the one Anne Leckie is telling. Ethan of Athos for example. Or Suzy McKee Charnas’ Holdfast novels.) Using “she/her” and “mother/sister/daughter” however is jarring enough (given the aforementioned default usually being “he” even with the more recent tendency to alternate pronouns) to let us know that the Imperial Radch Does Not Do Things The Way We Do And Think In Radically Different Ways. Their culture is different! They only have one gender, even though they very clearly have the usual number of sexes.
Stories with default-male (as in no women at all) cultures or separatist male and female cultures, or with one gender extremely dominant over another are generally saying something about men’s attitude toward women, or women and men in general. With the Imperial Radch Trilogy, the issue is not women vs men or default gender cultures. It’s about the interaction between AI and humans, personified by Breq, who is the last remaining ancillary (cyborg puppet) of the Justice of Toren. It’s about a ruler with hundreds of clones, each with a downloaded copy of her personality, which makes it really, really hard to assassinate her. (Breq however has Determination. **Determination is the name of her gun. That she’s going to shoot Anaander Miannaai with.) It is about revenge, radical forms of resistance to prejudice/oppression, and imperialism as well.
It’s about how memory and experience shape personality, and it’s a very little bit about a miserable sad sack of a former noble who gets knocked down a peg or two. (We love Seivarden. We love her best when she’s having her privilege pointed out to her in agonizing detail. We have hopes she will become less of an idiot over time and she does show signs of improvement by the end of the trilogy.)
The Radchaai have exactly one (1) gender pronoun (in so far as they have a concept of gender: and it appears that no, they don’t have much of one!), and in the story, it’s “translated” as “she/her.” This is opposed to using either a made-up neopronoun that might not have been as effective to use or the assumed default of “he/him.” (And he/him would imply a different kind of story I think.) And using “they” would also not have worked because of the entire “people nitpicking the use of “they” for anything other than plural.”
Of course, the use of “she” might be confusing for someone possibly expecting that the actual Radchaai have some kind of Amazonian thing going on. But it’s clear that’s not the case as with an “Amazonian thing” you would still have “men” except in a reversed gender role situation. (Which again, is not the type of story that Leckie is telling here.) Here, we just have a bunch of characters with “she” pronouns being mildly confused when confronted with the concept of gender.
Anyway, the reviewer claimed to be confused due to the entire “Radch only have one gender,” situation. This to me was mildly funny. (See: SF sausage party.) It is a little bit jarring, given that the assumed default is “he.” But it’s not exactly brain-breaking. I can think of a lot of things that are more brain-breaking than “the default pronoun being used across the board is ‘she/her’.” I mean, there’s this one comic on tumblr about whale fall except that the “whales” are giant aliens falling to Earth and humans are the hagfish. That’s pretty weird! And there’s that one Dick Van Dyke episode where Rob Petrie has a nightmare because of a sci-fi horror movie. That was really surreal and I think kid-me was more than a little freaked out at the time. Then there’s that one story that has an extremely unreliable narrator about a guy on an alien planet and his various delusions related to the predators of that planet. (I don’t remember the author or the title of the story. Just that it was super creepy and unreliable narrator.) These are all much more brain-breaking than the “wrong” default gender pronoun. So to me, it is mildly funny that he couldn’t wrap his mind around a really simple switch from default he (neutral/unknown gender) to default she (neutral/unknown gender).
TL;DR: People need to think about why “she” as a default pronoun is somehow more confusing than “he” as a default pronoun. Seriously. Also, using “she” as a default was actually pretty brilliant, for exactly the reason why it was confusing.
*Note: Some men do write fan fiction but tend to be in the minority. So I tend to assume “she” until I find out otherwise. This has only gotten me into a moderate amount of trouble. Because there are also nonbinary and agender writers.
**Note: It is not actually the name of her gun. I am being silly.
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