Anther story I'm not writing
Jun. 16th, 2022 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetInspired 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?
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?
