Alicornutopia

Human societies have lots of different ways of assigning different characteristics to different genders. But they mostly use only two or three genders - loosely approximable as "male", "female", and occasionally "both". In fiction, we sometimes reach beyond those numbers.

MaggieOfTheOwls showed us a culture with six genders. Some fandoms have "omegaverse" fic, with a usually homomorphic biology of six types and any of a variety of cultures around it.

I've been toying with designing a system to avoid the pitfalls I see in omegaverse designs, but that's a big project. Today I want to share a simpler design.

In a modern city of this unnamed world, you'd see four genders of people around. I'll call them Men, Women, Dwarves, and Elves.

The women and men would be largely familiar to an earth-dweller, but with slightly more constrained gender presentation - most obviously, long hair is unusual on them.

The dwarves tend to be shorter, stockier, with bigger hips and breasts, better-muscled and of course bearded. A typical dwarf is biologically as prepared to bear or sire children. In English, dwarves can take dey/dem/deir pronouns.

The elves tend to be taller, slimmer, and entirely without beards or protruding breasts. A typical elf has neither of the more common sets of reproductive parts, but when they need to reproduce, they can do so by kissing other elves, or by oral sex with other genders. In English, elves can take ey/em/eir pronouns.

Children of any parents are approximately evenly distributed among the four genders.

Edited 2016-06-25:
- Edited the elves to a more on-tone version. (All credit to Kappa.)
- Changed the rule about which genders happen from which parents. (Was: children always match one parent.)

Since this is taking a while can you please make a third post in the thread when you’re done so it gets marked unread again? (If you were already planning on having the top three posts I can delete this one then)

Sure and done.

Edit: More info exists on other cultures, elf reproduction, and what inspired this setting fragment; I'm out of time for now, but I can type up any or all of those later.

Edit 2016-06-25:
Changed the elves in the above system. The thread from here spends a while discussing the old version, which started like this:

The elves tend to be taller, slimmer, and entirely without beards or protruding breasts. They do not cut their hair and you do not touch it. In English, elves can take ey/em/eir pronouns. Typical Elves can reproduce with any of the three other genders, but the mechanism is complicated.

That’s an interesting idea, borrowing from already-known archtypes to get a system which works but is easier for readers to learn. I think I like it.

Is there an in-universe reason to have the thing about not touching the hair of one gender but not any of the others? That seems a bit weird.

Yeah, now that you mention it, you probably shouldn't touch anyone else's hair either.

But, like, on earth: you don't touch men's chests, and you really don't touch women's chests. Like that for elf hair.

A typical Elf of this type can take a cutting of eir own hair together with a cutting of eir non-elf partner's hair, and tie them in a certain sort of knot, to make a seed. Planted and properly cared for, the seed will grow a plant, and the plant will grow a baby.

An elf can also make a seed with another elf, but they don't get a baby-plant. Instead, they get an elf-tree, a
long-lived sort of plant that also grows a silky hair like corn, usable for baby-seeds for elves.

(This reproduction mechanism is inspired by the hobbits of the charming little story Gardening, by The Feels Whale, adjusted to incorporate elements from certain other kinds of elves.)

Explain the silky hair plant in more detail?

My mental image of this plant is still unclear, but wobbles through like "corn stalk" at one end through "birch tree" to "willow tree" at the other. Whatever its exact appearance, if well-kept it can grow big and strong, living for hundreds of years.

Rather than flowers, it has a soft droopy silk, which is in fact hair. It works as well as the hair of men and women and dwarves for growing babies. Babies from an elf+tree seed are always elves.

It looks plantish, but its genes are as human as those of elves and women and men and dwarves, just expressed differently. So a tree can be a way to save genes you like for the future. We're pretty sure by now that they have no internal experience even on the level that animals do, but people often treasure them as members of the extended family anyway.

In majority-elf areas, the usual form of reproduction goes via these plants, and they may be considered sort of an additional gender. That's less common in cultures where the main gender split is, say, men/elves or women/elves; in some cultures, growing these plants is even considered weird anti-social gayness. Cosmopolitan places just want to make sure you only plant them on your family-owned land, not in rented gardens as might be suitable for just growing babies.

The desire to keep trees in the family means that in elf/somegender cultures that do land ownership, land is almost universally inherited on the elf side of the family.

So all pairs only get children in the genders they themselves are?