It's Not Just About Restrooms

You ever think about gender and aliens?

I do, especially when I've been watching Star Trek or playing Mass Effect. Quite often in science fiction, the female aliens have feminine traits that parallel humans. When you think about it, that's a little weird.

Human females--mammalian females in general--share certain traits that make them identifiable as females (more or less--individuals always vary, but I'm speaking to the curve here). Outside of our taxonomic class, though, things are different. Among reptiles, females are often larger than males. And there are spiders where the male is so small he'd make a nice lapdog for his mate. There's also at least one species of fish where the male lives inside the female like a parasite! Size isn't the only thing that can be different: seahorse males carry the babies, not the females (they have a pouch like a kangaroo).

So why is it most science fiction races have a simple male/female distinction where the females tend to be physically smaller than the males, have higher voice pitch, and often display the exact same sexual dimorphism as humans (a sophisticated way of saying their broads are broad where broads should be broad)?

There are exceptions, of course. The Empire of Man series reverses how the genders developed. The humans encounter an alien race where one gender has an, um, apparatus which injects ovum into the other gender, who in turn inseminate the ovum on their body and carry the fetus. Technically speaking, these "males" contribute the egg, so on Earth we would classify them as female. Because the ones who actually contribute the sperm are the ones who get "pregnant" though, they are the ones relegated to the status of second class citizen and homemaker (this particular alien society was not very entitled about gender roles). The humans in the story settle this question by referring to the aliens who possess egg-shooting apparatuses as male, since they go to war, rule cities and just generally swagger around like pricks. Which means the authors simply reversed gender assignment. There were still definable males and definable females--an unavoidable dichotomy with an inherently unfair power dynamic.

This raises an interesting question: if we encounter aliens, should we classify gender by social role or by biological reality?


The truth is that this question is kind of uncomfortable because it brings to light how arbitrary our own social roles are. If the aliens land here first (or are watching our television signals from afar), what must they think about our gender dynamics? Do they nod their head or do they laugh? Do they heap scorn on us or do they envy us?

One thing is for certain: it's going to be (or is) great material for some alien's dissertation.



If there's a sci fi franchise that you think approaches gender from an interesting standpoint, throw it out there in the Comments.