PRIDE: MurderBot Isn’t Non-Binary

Like any good little queer, probably autistic, sci-fi reader, I dearly love the Murderbot books even if I’m not fully caught up with them (shh, leave me alone). So when the show was announced, I was obviously excited. When I saw that Alexander Skarsgard was the lead I was like “hm.” Not because I don’t like Skarsgard. Hate to bandy around the phrase “unproblematic fave,” but he consistently delivers. I just saw MurderBot as being much more androgynous in my head. Skarsgard is very masculine looking to me. So it just wasn’t a first blush fit for me.
Then as I pondered on it, I could see the in-universe reason to make the sec-bots look like that. And if Martha Wells was involved in the development, then there must have been some kind of creative sign-off there. Maybe not. Can’t change it, so no reason to complain.
What did chap my hide, however, were they way I saw BlueSky users saying “non-binary actor” in reference to how MurderBot looks. As a non-binary person, I personaly could not give a shit if a character like MurderBot was played by a non-binary actor. Because androgynous doesn’t mean non-binary, the former of which is what I sort of wanted. And I would argue that a character like MurderBot isn’t actually non-binary.
Obviously, I’m not the arbiter of the feelings of everyone under the non-binary umbrella, but it’s sort of there in the name. We live in this society the defaults to a binary system, and some of us are like, “ummmm, no thank you.” There’s a tendency to see non-binary as a “third gender,” and I know a lot of us don’t really like that. I personally hate the word “enby” for that specific reason, but that’s a whole other thing. But labels like non-binary, genderfluid, gender non-forming, and even agender, to an extent, pre-suppose that the person carrying that label is living within a system that has discreet categories. And they live outside those categories.
So what if a character is not living in that kind of system?
I do not hide the fact that I’m a Venom fan, so let’s look at the symbiotic Klyntar. They reproduce asexually and don’t live in a social system that even really has a concept of gender. Whatever concepts they have of gender come from their hosts, and there has definitely been some transfer of ideas in more recent runs. Sleeper specifically uses “it” as its pronoun. Ewing writes a very interesting exchange in All New Venom where it’s specifically called out that the Venom symbiote uses “he.”
But in their native state, Klyntar don’t have gender. Instead of applying a human-centric identity label, it makes more sense to call them “genderless.”
A character like MurderBot, while created by humans, wasn’t designed to have the level of consciousness to comprehend something like gender. They weren’t programmed to perform gender or constructed with a simulacrum of anatomical sex in mind. So MurderBot is genderless. Without gender, but not in a way that references a binary system.
So when engaging with a speculative text, this is a really good way of forcing yourself to reframe an alien species in terms of gender if they present with either no or a different kind of dichotomy. As a writer, we could be pushing it farther, myself included.
In my own setting, along time ago I devised a handful of species with a trinary reproductive sex system. Internally, I found myself thinking “male,” “female,” and “third gender.” I had to pause and go “why am I thinking that way?” So I had to set myself the task of “what do I call each of these groups?”
Within the internal language structure of any given species, that’s easy. They would just have their own words that could be anything I wanted to ConLang into existence. But what about when they’re interacting with a binary species? Or a single-sex species? At a universal scale, what would the textbooks say? How do I write about them in English?
Here, there ended up being a very interesting world-building opportunity in and of itself. From a top down, science textbook perspective I use terms related to the chromosomal structure that gives them the three sexes (Alpha Hom, Beta Hom, AB Het). Not perfect but it’s internally consistent. If I have a character that tries to apply binary language to a member of one of these species, it reveals their own ignorance with the species preferred structure. I was able to break out an interaction like this for episode 2 of The Artifice of Us.
So by coming at it from both sides, there’s a lot of really great stuff to plumb here.
At the same time, real world language around gender is a consequence of real-life structures. Without those structures, the language doesn’t have the same weight.