“This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We’ve got extra pronouns here.”
GNU Terry Pratchett
The full quote is fascinating though, and adds an interesting context as it’s Angua (a werewolf) and Carrot (human, but raised by dwarves) discussing a dwarf colleague, Cheery.
“Female? He told you he was female?”
“She,” Angua corrected. “This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We’ve got extra pronouns here.”
She could smell his bewilderment…
“Well, I would have though she’d have the decency to keep it to herself,” Carrot said finally. “I don’t think it’s very clever, you know, to go around drawing attention to the fact.”
“Carrot, I think you might have something wrong with your head,” said Angua.
“What?” “I think you might have it stuck up your bum.”
Sir Terry Pratchett - “Feet of Clay”
This is CARROT being the asshole. Carrot who has, throughout all the prior books, been depicted as basically the best of all possible people. He is noble, brave, considerate, kind. He is the good guy in the entire City…
… and yet, he grew up dwarf, and has picked up their more conservative views on gender identity.
Discworld dwarves start out in the books as basically a people without visible gender differences (thanks to the woman growing beards just like the men) and using “he/him” pronouns as their default. Anything else is seen as breaking the most basic of social conventions. (Dwarf dating is described early on as being two dwarves who like each other spending an inordinately long time trying to find out, as tactfully as possible, what gender the other dwarf is)
Carrot does immediately adopt the “she” pronoun for Cheery, which is but wishes she didn’t make such a fuss about it. He’s prepared to tolerate her choices, but he doesn’t APPROVE of them, and thinks that that is enough.
Carrot, because he IS Carrot, does learn to open his mind on this subject, perhaps his final frontier of bias, but I do love that it’s addressed as something he has to work on, and succeed.
And to Terry Pratchett’s credit what started out as a throwaway joke about dwarf sex, gradually becomes a multi-volume subplot which is a fascinating exploration of gender and social identity as more dwarves start to “come out” as being female, and not just identifying as female, but changing their form of dress to something which matches who they are (they keep their beards though, because to a dwarf, that has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with being a dwarf) and how their society has to adjust, with differing levels of comfort, to this new reality.
Carrot was also prejudiced against the undead early on as well. And the fact that he unlearns these views is a good example of a common theme in Pratchett’s work
The overwhelming theme of Pratchett’s work is change. Not good vs evil but progress vs stasis/going backwards. The protagonists of Pratchett’s stories are people who can take on board new ideas and change and grow and adapt. Some of them start out as very stupid people with very stupid views in fact until they learn and grow and improve. The villains on the other hand are people who desperately want things to either stay the same or regress back to some imagined “Good old days” that they prefer.
While we’re talking about Terry Pratchett gender, there’s also golems, who are basically lumps of clay that have been brought to life but don’t actually have any gender or secondary sexual characteristics so everyone defaults to male and he/him. As the books story goes on some of them decide to try being women just because.
I personally strongly believe that as the population of free golems gets larger and more accustomed to being and thinking of themselves as people, their rejection of Ankh-Morpork’s “default male” is going to decrease significantly and an insistence that only golems who are clearly performing binary gender should be gendered.
This insistence, they being golems, will largely manifest itself as persistently refusing to understand any gendered pronoun, title or other indicator as referent to a non-gender-performing golem in any way, even if this requires a contorted redefinition of what anyone is saying to misunderstand what the person meant.
Legal challenges may be involved, as they determine that no laws written with assumed male gender apply to any ungendered or feminine-performing golems.
If this happens before Vetinari passes things on to Moist, Vetinari will be profoundly amused and let the entire drama run its course on the basis that It’s Very Funny.
If it happens after, Moist cuts this off at the ankles by having Slant redraft everything with gender neutral language and then passes all the newly rewritten laws in one afternoon because he does NOT have time for this and it’s making his head hurt, this is NOT the fun kind of fucking with people this is the kind that just gives him more work, and he would like to move on to his next diplomatic triumph, he’s thinking Klatch this week.
ALT