Anther story I'm not writing

[soc_puppet]

Inspired by the reviews and examinations of genderpocalypse/gender rapture books by writer and activist Ana Mardoll, I've been thinking to myself: How would I approach writing a genderpocalypse story? And I've gotta say, I've had a bit of fun teasing out the details to myself.


First of all, I wouldn't kill anyone of any gender. Suddenly, for reasons unknown, women are alone on the planet. But things don't really fall apart immediately; despite over half the population being suddenly gone, everything that keeps society going... generally keeps going. And while that's weird enough, it still takes a while for the women to figure out exactly what the missing people have in common, and what the people remaining have in common, because, well. They don't realize at first that all of the people who are still with them are women, and some of the people who are gone are people they assumed are women.

Turns out that the people that everyone assumed were throwing off the "only women are here" metric are all trans women, either closeted or eggs (that is, trans but they didn't realize it yet), while they eventually piece together that, in addition to cis men being gone, so are trans men and a whole lot of nonbinary people.

Chief to figuring this out is a genderfluid person who is there for the first few days, disappears without a trace, then reappears a few more days later with reports of having interacted with men.

Surprise! No one is dead—or, well, no one is dead who wouldn't be dead anyway; all of the missing men and nonbinary people have been dimensionally shifted away from the dimension the women are in. There's a whole separate dimension for men, and also a separate dimension for a lot of nonbinary people. There's some weird physics shenanigans going on where alternate dimension versions of all the missing people are echoed somehow into the various sub-dimensions, so their tasks are still being performed and the gears of society don't stop turning. People are mostly left to stop and think and examine... what now, with the gender stuff?

(Planet Genderqueer is probably the first of the three dimensions to really figure a lot of stuff out, if only because the vast majority of the people there have done some serious gender examination.)

In addition to genderfluid people, who can kinda shift between dimensions depending on what gender they are at any time, some nonbinary people (such as demigirls and demiboys) can kinda... pick up signals, as it were, from a dimensional plane that they share some gender commonalities with? Like they can hear or see what's happening in the same relative space in one or more alternate dimensions as if they're listening from the next room or looking through a window, depending on gender feels at any given time. Genderflux people can get the same signals, though the signals tend to be either stronger or weaker, depending on which way their gender is fluctuating at any given time. Bigender people and other people who are or can be multiple genders at once can co-exist in multiple gender dimensions at once, which can be a special kind of hell for more than one reason, though it can also be useful for communicating between the dimensions.

And then there's also a few other dimensions for specific genders that don't exist in the European-colonized understanding of gender, even with broader understanding of gender in general and queerness these days.

What with one thing and another, people of various genders from various dimensions end up working together to figure out WTF happened and how they can fix it and be together again (while also protecting any trans people who were suddenly and unceremoniously outed by the whole mess).

Anyway, long story short, pretty sure it was aliens who don't have a concept of gender (or boundaries, apparently!) who pulled the dimensional shuffle off, in order to study the weird "gender" phenomenon that humans have. Humans eventually figure out a way to contact them, ask WTF is going on, and can you please put things back to normal already?

Or something like that, anyway 😛


So, what would your approach to a genderpocalypse story be?

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

That's a very fun idea as a twist on the genderpocalypse trope!

[soc_puppet]

Thank you 😁 I don't like the idea of everyone of a specific sex or gender dying, or trying to figure out how the sorting would work, so it's more fun to me to just let everyone live in some weird, mixed-up circumstances somehow.

[mistressofmuses]

I like that no one categorically dies in your setup, and I like the explanation of it being aliens poking at this weird "gender" thing, haha.

[soc_puppet]

It just seemed more fun to me! I can totally explore the dynamics of "What if Gender A is suddenly separated from the other genders?" without killing more than half the population to do it, and this way I can also explore what things are like for Gender B and Genders C+.

I will freely admit that the aliens are an asspull, but they're an asspull that really works here 😂 It wasn't until I was actually writing down this summary that I stopped to think, "Okay, but I'm going to need a conclusion for this? And I want that conclusion to be 'everyone gets back into the same dimension and most people are more understanding', so how do I do that? Why were they even separated in the first place?" And my brain was like, "Lol just say aliens did it," and, well, it all came together from there!

[mistressofmuses]

It may be an asspull, but it's a GOOD asspull, hahaha. I like the explanation that it gives to the "why".

[silveradept]

That seems like a pretty good way of going about the "what would things be like if there was only a single apparent gender near you?" Especially if the aliens have never heard of an IRB or had to go through one to do their experiments.

[soc_puppet]

Possibly the funniest way to approach this would be the aliens being able to, IDK, sense gender somehow, which is how they managed to separate people into their various dimensions in the first place. And they're baffled by the fact that we somehow can't sense gender in this way, and have to figure it out ourselves and take each other's word for it, etc. And maybe if our genders were separated out, we'd be able to start sensing it for ourselves or something?

Now that I think about it, I have no idea how they'd approach a control group for this experiment, either.

[silveradept]

Yep. Once the humans figure out what's going on and they light into the aliens about ethics and proper scientific procedure, they realize that it's the equivalent of a baking soda volcano for the aliens and the humans have a collective facepalm and ask to talk to the grownups in the room.

(Presumably, they'd use a city like New York as the control group, where all the genders are still present and can see each other, but they can't leave the city because they would mess up the experiment.