72: Gender Theory

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Later on, I joined the historians in one of the relaxation rooms. Tima had chosen the illusion (we took turns), and today we were in a cave of ice with light faintly shining through the walls. We were supposed to be, well, relaxing, but Plia had a small portable computer with her (I’d never seen them on the Courageous, but on the Stalwart she hadn’t had any trouble borrowing it from someone) and was seated against the wall, looking through something.

“Uh, everything okay?” I asked as I came in.

“Fine,” she groaned. “Do you know what a ‘false positive’ is, Taya?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s – ”

“And I don’t want to know.”

“Oh. Alright then.”

“Just tighten up the search,” Tima said. “You’ve got it so loose right now that it’s going to throw you everything that looks like any kind of blueprint in the whole database. If you were going to do that, what was even the point of finding Denish’s notes?”

“I don’t want to miss anything,” Plia said. “False positives are better than false negatives.”

“Then run a tighter search on the looser search! Archive the whole thing and just look at the tighter matches for now, and you can dig through the slush if nothing comes up once the whole database is checked! Even I know that and I don’t know shit about computers. It’s just logical.”

“Checking the whole database will take years!”

“And will it happen any faster if you try to manually flip through this many false positives?” Tima gently took the computer away. “I thought you said we were on vacation for the rest of this trip, anyway.”

Plia made a grab for the computer, but it wasn’t a very enthusiastic one, and she gave up right away, slumping back against the wall. “Meanie. Wouldn’t it be cool if I found it before we even got home?”

“You won’t. We’ve had more luck on this mission that we rightly deserve, but you’re asking for a miracle.”

“I know.” She glanced at me. “Oh, yeah. Taya, we have to talk about the Ironstock.”

As our transport home, the Ironstock would be the last new ship we saw before being back home on the Courageous. “Is this about Grandma? Did she have some kind of horrible reputation that’s going to make trouble for us?”

“No, actually,” Tima said. “It’s not really all that important, but we’ve been looking into the ship and just thought it would be best to forewarn you to avoid any social awkwardness. They don’t do genders there.”

“They – what?”

“You know.” Plia waved a hand. “Women and men and brennans. They don’t have them. So don’t try to figure out who’s what and definitely don’t ask them, you’ll just confuse or insult people. We just thought you should know before we go there.”

“What do you mean, they don’t have genders?” I asked. “Everyone has genders. Even the capuchins have them.”

“Yes and no,” Tima said. “Every ship in the fleet, so far as I’m aware, has some kind of social caste system, and may or may not confer different privileges or social roles on their castes. Sometimes the system matters a lot and sometimes it doesn’t, but there does seem to be an inherent psychological need in all humans to self-sort into categories.”

“An inherent psychological need in enough humans that it permeates the culture,” Plia corrected. “It’s impossible to know how many people have such an ‘inherent need’ and in how many it’s simply learned, because you’d never be able to define precise enough interview questions to be sure that every respondent is understanding the questions the same way, but it’s definitely there in at least some, not all, people.”

“Uh, yeah. Anyway, the results don’t lie; social castes are endemic in every known human culture that exists for more than two generations, and in most of them from the getgo. But they don’t necessarily have to be the same system. Eighty per cent of the fleet uses the woman-man-brennan system that we brought with us from Earth, or something close enough to it that the castes can translate almost directly, though the fashions and stereotypes and legal standings might change between ships. But the other twenty per cent don’t have a system that can map onto ours. If you go onto the Stalwart expecting to be able to sort people into those categories, you’re just going to confuse yourself and make things very awkward.

“So it’s just a ship full of genderless people,” I said.

“Well, uh, yes,” Tima said, “but not in the way you mean.”

I crossed my arms. “How do you know what I mean?”

“Because your tone when you said that suggests that you think of genderless people as being a fourth, very small gender. Which they aren’t, even on the Courageous, and while it’s technically true that everyone on the Ironstock has no gender, just like a small number of people on the Courageous, there’s also a difference between being raised in a society with a critical concept that you’ve decided doesn’t apply to you, and being raised in a society that doesn’t have the concept at all. The majority of people on the Ironstock do fit themselves into their system, the same as the majority of people on our ship do fit ourselves into ours. They’re genderless much like we are mantleless.”

“Mantleless?”

“They call them mantles. I don’t know why. But don’t try to map the mantles onto genders, because you’ll just confuse yourself.”

“Grandma was from the Ironstock,” I pointed out. “And she was a woman.”

“When she immigrated to the Courageous, she certainly was,” Plia said. “She wanted to marry a man and a brennan, after all.”

“Are you saying she lied to get married?”

Plia and Tima exchanged an impatient glance.

“No,” Plia said, “I’m saying that no answer is a lie when all of them are equally correct. They asked her what sort of role she wanted to fill and she chose womanhood. If I immigrated to the Ironstock and they asked me what my mantle was, I’d probably just pick whichever one can most easily become an historian.”

“That’s be the hamar,” Tima said. “I think? Their system is really confusing. Anyway, in that scenario, I’d just tell them I didn’t have a mantle. Because I don’t.”

“That’s fine for visitors,” Plia said, “but I think if you were a citizen then they’d just assume you were a hamar. I mean, if you were doing hamar stuff, and you’d probably be hanging out with other hamar and adopting their mannerisms…”

“Then they’d be assuming wrong,” Tima said.

“Okay,” Plia said, in the tone of someone who disagrees but not enough to make a big thing out of it. “I guess unless any of us decide to stay on the Ironstock, none of it matters. The important thing is that their system is different to what we’re used to, and we risk making awkward assumptions if we blindly impose our expectations on them. And they’re almost definitely going to blindly impose their expectations on us and we’re just going to have to be polite about it.”

“Why are we the ones who have to be polite about it?” I asked.

“Because we’re guests and they’re going out of their way to take us home,” Tima said. “It won’t be for long. You can think whatever you like about the Ironstock when we’re safely back on the Courageous.”

“I’m pretty curious about it,” I admitted. “Gamma-ma never really talked about it.”

“That’s generally a very bad sign,” Plia said. “We’ll be fine, we’re passengers, and from a pretty prestigious ship at that, but I’m not expecting it to be nice. How’s the Stalwart going for you? Catching up with your old friends again?”

Maybe I should explain about the capuchins being in charge, right here in the relaxation room where we weren’t being watched, just so that the Stalwart couldn’t get that data from the historians. Nah; it’d be even better to explain it off-ship, so they got nothing. (Petty? I’m not petty.) “It’s alright,” I said. “Except that Tikka got me this lovely heartfelt gift, and I’ve been trying to think of what to get her before we leave, and I can’t think of anything.”

“Well, what does she like?” Tima asked.

I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Opened it a second time. “Uh. Climbing in vents? Computer games?”

The historians exchanged a glance.

“Well, I don’t have any suggestions based on those hobbies,” Tima said drily.

“Everyone keeps telling me I should get her something from our culture, something to remind her of the Courageous,” I said. “she got me something from hers, so that makes sense. But we don’t really have any traditions like that, do we?”

“Diplomats will get each other gifts, and I’ve given gifts to hosts on our journey,” Tima said, “but we don’t have anything specific for friends, no. Was she sharing her culture with you on purpose?”

“I, uh. I don’t think so, actually? I mean, I think she just gave me the sort of thing that she’s used to giving friends, which is a part of her culture, but I don’t think it was in a ‘here is part of my culture that I’m sharing’ kind of way.”

“So do the same,” Tima shrugged. “She gave you something she thought you’d like, so give her something you think she’d like. The types of gifts you think about giving are part of your culture, by definition. You don’t need to make it into a whole deliberate thing. Think about what Tikka wants and give her that.”

Okay, well, it was obvious when she put it like that.

I got caught up brainstorming possible presents, and when I tuned back in, the historians were arguing about gender, for some reason.

“Our system isn’t more biologically inherent than other systems,” Plia insisted. “Yes, I agree that a tendency to self-sort and sort others into social castes is inherent, but the idea that sorting us into our genders specifically is the natural order and ships like the Ironstock have some sort of less natural knockoff system is ridiculous. Eighty per cent of the fleet uses our system because the most influential ships use it, and that’s because it’s the system we brought from Earth. That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It’s the system we brought from Earth because the entire Earth used it!” Tima countered. “You’re going to tell me that something that the whole species used isn’t – ”

“We have absolutely no reason to believe that the whole Earth used our system. We know that the Texans used it, and whoever created the Interlingua used it. We can assume it was imposed on the foreign colonists in the same way that last names were, regardless of their systems. But almost everything we have from other cultures was translated into the Interlingua, which – ”

“Which isn’t a compulsorily gendered language, so why would they have added gendered terms?”

“Because that’s what shitty translators do! Remember Hali’s nightmare month a couple of years ago when he was trying to untangle Keeman’s translations?”

“Ugh, yes, Keeman was an idiot. But I don’t think every translator involved in preparing materials for the Courageous was that much of an idiot. Anyway, if our system isn’t inherent, what do you make about the Lipi Hypothesis?”

“That it’s garbage, obviously. Lipi knew what results ke wanted to see and accidentally weighted kes calculations accordingly. We simply do not have enough information on early humanity to make those calculations accurately.”

“What’s the Lipi Hypothesis?” I asked, forgetting for a moment the consequences of asking these two questions about history.

“Oh, it’s fascinating!” Tima enthused.

“It’s nonsense,” Plia muttered.

“It’s like, a very, very long time ago, back before humans had electricity or even metalsmithing or anything, life took a lot of work, right? Just so much work. Because everything had to be done by hand; cloth had to be woven by hand, food had to be cooked over fires like how Arboreans do it, you had to go out and kill animals with sticks so you could eat them. So deciding who had to do all the work and when was incredibly important. Anyway, about seventy years ago, an historian called Lipi looked at all the work that early humans would have had to do, figured how much time each job would take, and sorted it into three categories.

“Ke found that about two-twelfths of the work was people and service work; stuff like childcare and medicine and record-keeping. About five-twelfths of the work was dangerous and variable stuff, like hunting, or collecting berries and roots or whatever without getting poisoned. And five-twelfths was repetitive tasks that take patience and focus to improve, like manufacturing cloth and wooden weapons. Which lines up with…”

She looked at me expectantly. I didn’t know what it lined up with, so I looked to Plia.

“It lines up suspiciously well with the proportions of brennans, men and women in the average society without extreme external factors,” she said, “if you discount the people who don’t fit into those categories from the calculation.”

“Well how do those people fit into Lipi’s hypothesis?” I asked.

“Wild cards!” Tima grinned. “Things change and life in those times was unreliable. You’re not going to have exactly the same proportion of brennan’s, men’s and women’s work from season to season. So people who aren’t bound by those categories can move jobs and fill in any needed gaps, according to Lipi. The idea is that our inherent need to sort ourselves into these groups and identify ourselves with different clothing and body language and soforth and to prefer different types of work developed way back then as a way to easily divide work without confusion and conflict, and keep the whole society alive.”

“It evolved into us,” I said.

“Yes!”

“No, it didn’t,” Plia said impatiently. “I mean, yes, self-sorting for social organisation and task specialisation obviously did, but the idea that our system, with the specific proportions present today, has endured across all this time and everyone else is simply doing it wrong is – ”

“Men and women are distinguishable at birth more than three quarters of the time,” Plia said. “If you discount brennans, then it’s over ninety per cent of the time!”

“Oh, if we discount a full sixth of the population, then things match up great! Most of these caste systems have a high correlation with traits distinguishable from birth, because people make assumptions about which one the child will fit into as early as possible, and the majority of people put themselves into whatever group they were raised as. On the Scout, their gender system is determined by birth order, and since most children are born in artificial wombs, there’s definitely no biological factors there. Yet they stay in their designated groups ninety per cent of the time, as well. There’s no – ”

“What’s the deal with the hair here?” I cut in.

The historians both stared at me, startled out of their argument.

“What?” Tima asked.

“The hair. They incinerate it, you know? The humans here. They shave their heads, and it goes into the incinerator. It seems weird, given how efficiency-focused they are.”

“Well, they seem to keep themselves pretty clean-shaven. I guess they don’t let it get long enough for it to be useful for anything.”

“Then why not get depilated?”

“Hmm. Good question,” Plia said. She looked at Tima. “What do you think?”

“My immediate thought is that it’s a status display, obviously,” Tima said. “Like people wearing jumpsuits on the Courageous when they don’t need to. Something to demonstrate how dedicated to keeping themselves groomed and in perfect shape they are, perhaps?”

Good. They weren’t arguing any more. Mission accomplished.

I left them to their discussion. I had work to do.

I knew what I wanted to get Tikka.

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