Aliens and Gender

If you saw last week's Doctor Who, there was mpreg. Which was highly amusing, but a little bit lazy.

If both of your genders can get pregnant, then you aren't really dealing with males or females in the typical sense.

Playing with alien gender is something relatively few science fiction writers do. My own Transpecial features aliens who have three sexes, one of which plays no direct role in reproduction (this was inspired by maned lionesses - look them up).

But aliens that have interesting gender and sex variations are relatively rare. Much playing with gender is done with humans - Leckie envisions a world in which sex is considered completely unimportant in her Ancillary series. Or with beings that might as well be human - JY Yang creates a world where gender is a free choice in The Black Tides of Heaven, with men, women and those who never actually choose.

And, of course, The Left Hand of Darkness - but the people in it are explicitly descended from humans.

Doctor Who's Gifftan may or may not be human variants. But they could have done a better job of playing with gender here (although the concept is not played as ridiculous as it might be - my first assumption was that the character was a pregnant human trans man not an alien, and it was handled in a way that I don't think would have offended anyone. In fact, it was a love letter to fatherhood, cross referenced with Ryan's poor relationship with his own dad).

It left a lot unexplained. Do Gifftan men get pregnant by women? By other men? And I still think it could have gone a step further without confusing the younger viewers.

If you're actually looking for good alien gender stuff:

C.J. Cherryh's Chanur series (old but good) has a species with three sexes and with individuals changing sex under stress.

Asimov's The Soft Ones from The Gods Themselves reproduce in trios. Interestingly, they breed in their larval form not their adult form.

And if you saw the Venom movie, although Venom is referred to with male pronouns, perhaps because he's taking a concept of gender from Eddie Brock, if you go through the comics - symbiotes are in fact asexual and reproduce by budding.

Meaning?

There's lots of ways to play with alien gender. You can take inspiration from Earth (snails have only one sex, bees have three...)

Think about it. Not even humans truly only have two sexes and many things on this planet don't.