Two Links to Posts on Gender

[julieandrews]

First up: io9 has Women Who Pretended to be Men to Publish SciFi Books. A few names I'd never heard of, but it's more than a list of names, there's reasons and quotes given. I found it interesting, but I still find it difficult to draw any conclusion. Is it conforming and reinforcing stereotypes to take a male or gender neutral name? Or is it proving the stereotypes wrong? And ultimately, is it aiding or hurting your present career, and/or your future notoriety? And should it depend on the type of science fiction you're writing?

Second up: In a Google blog search for 'gender science fiction', this came up. It's not a lengthy or in-depth post, but I wanted to argue against it. So it's Choosing Baby Gender is Not Science Fiction Anymore. (Can anyone give me examples of when it was science fiction, btw?)

There are many things wrong with this. And the most important is that it will lead to a dislocation of the natural balance between genders. 70% of families would like their first child to be a girl (see article above). What would all these girls do when they grow up and face with the shortage of boys to date, marry and have kids with?

70% of which families, we're not told. The article referenced is Choose a baby, not its sex. That article doesn't say either, but as it's an Australian newspaper, we can perhaps assume they mean Australian families. Which certainly isn't a large percentage of the world population. And it's still lacking too much vital information. Like, is this 70% of people trying IVF who want a girl? They might have legitimate, IVF specific reasons for wanting a girl. I believe (hey, if they didn't quote a source, I don't have to dig one up), that girl embryos, fetuses, and young babies have a better chance of survival than boy ones. So it'd be logical for people with infertility problems to go for the better odds of a girl.

The 70% aside, that's just for their first child. I'm betting nearly 100% of those 70% would want a boy for their second child. Granted you'd still end up skewed towards girls, but so what? We're already skewed towards girls in most societies. All the good men are taken or gay? Well, yea, because there aren't enough straight ones to go around.

And, again I say, so what? So those girls will grow up realizing that there aren't enough boys to go around, and they'll have internalized quite early on that finding a straight boy and marrying him and having kids with him isn't the only path to happiness. How horrible would that be? The ones with bi tendencies can find themselves a nice girl. The ones who want kids can have them on their own (and pick whichever gender they want) or even pair up with a friend to raise kids together, manless. And well, quite frankly the others can seek out men from a) the communities, religious and otherwise, who went mostly for boy babies, b) the communities, again religious and otherwise, who were against picking a gender in the first place, c) the communities, socioeconomic in this case, who couldn't afford to pick baby gender, and d) the next generation, where the gender choice rebounded and swung the other way.

Because society is not a homogenous entity. And humans grow and change and adapt. Would society be different if a large percentage of it chose the sex of their children? Undoubtably. But would it be horrible? Not likely.

For the sake of maintaining the balance between men and women, we should not allow selection of baby gender.

We don't have a balance now, not if you mean 50/50. Will it upset the status quo? Sure. But so would eliminating gun violence and a gender disparate military and all the other ways that young men get killed at rates faster than young women. Are people advocating against doing that?

Comments

[birdhousefrog.livejournal.com]

I found it interesting, but I still find it difficult to draw any conclusion. Is it conforming and reinforcing stereotypes to take a male or gender neutral name? Or is it proving the stereotypes wrong? And ultimately, is it aiding or hurting your present career, and/or your future notoriety? And should it depend on the type of science fiction you're writing?

It's personal choice. I don't want readers making any judgment about my work from my name alone. To be "gender neutral" in science fiction, I use a man's name. If I were writing romance, I would want it to be a woman's name. Most men writing romance use pseudonyms. And there are some good ones. I don't expect it will have any effect on my career at all, not today. And it's not like it's a secret. ANYONE who googles me will get to my blog and figure out I'm not a man.

Oz

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

That's another issue. Are you shooting yourself in the foot if you do your best to make it secret, and therefore cut yourself off from the writing/reading community?

[birdhousefrog.livejournal.com]

In this day and age for it to be a secret, there would have to be a very good reason, such as having a different profession or being well-known. And yes, it cuts you off from a community that I, personally, need.

I don't have a pen name for secrecy. I have it for assumptions.

I do have another career that in my opinion doesn't fit all that well with writing. That's one of my reasons for having a separate writing name.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, me too. Same reasons, plus offering plausible deniability to immediate relatives for when I publish something embarrassing.

Keyan

[tomomi.livejournal.com]

As far as the gender disparity goes, China is going to have to deal with that already due to the one child policy. Unfortunately weighted toward boys, who may not be as sanguine about the issue as your imaginary girls.

Maybe all those excess Aussie girls can go find some Chinese guys. :P

Anyway, yes, there are definitely legitimate reasons to want an XX baby rather than an XY if you're dealing with an inherited genetic disease. But you can also do PGD if you're going completely the IVF route. Gender selection is much more simple (ie, less expensive).

There are also legitimate reasons to want to select the gender of your child beyond disease. There are some exceptions but most people will say they want one of each. Personally, I have no real issues with gender selection of children in a society where there is little to gain for having one over the other. Most parts of the United States are at this point.

My grandparents had three boys before they got a girl. I don't know that that was what was going on for sure, but it seems likely to me that wanting a girl figured into the equation for having another baby. Would it really be wrong for someone who already has a boy to be able to get a girl without straining their financial/emotional resources by trying until they get lucky?

[(Anonymous)]

Don't forget India! The sex ratio is biased against girls, and dropping due to selective abortion. So the two countries constituting a third of the world's population will have excess boys. I don't think a few extra girls in Oz will really tip the balance.

Incidentally, my recent Expanded Horizons story, Spoiling Veena, is about gender selection.

I personally have rather mixed feelings about it, but I also think its a technology people want so badly that once it's easily (and cheaply) available, it will be unstoppable.

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

I still need to read that!

I wonder if it would lead to lawsuits.. or maybe I should just assume it would lead to lawsuits, when you chose a girl or a boy and the baby comes out intersex through no fault of the gender selection. 'You promised me a girl!'

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

Where it might start getting odd is.. like in China, it's very rare to have a sibling. If people are choosing the sex of their children and most of them are opting for one girl and one boy, you'll get fewer girls who can say they have sisters and boys who say they have brothers. That bond of 'sisterhood' and 'brotherhood' may become rather abstract in a society where it's rare.

If it only happens in the case of twins and those opting for more than two children.

Hey, I just thought of a science fiction example of gender selection. Ender's Game. That was just one component of trying to breed a military genius.