So rai and I were tossing around ideas for gender fuckery in our new fictional world.

Our thought process went something like this:

*The spirits of rivers are dragons and the spirits of mountains are giants. When a river dries up (or the mountain wears away) the dragon is trapped in human form and loses much of their magic.

*All humans are descended from these spirits one way or another

*Most humans retain some of their ancestors magic, among other things, the ability to shapeshift to different human forms.

*Sex is a meaningless category when you can shapeshift to any form

*What if social gender was based on whether you descended from/had magic of mountain or river spirit

*This could be hugely fun.

*If one parent is river and the other is mountain, what is the kid?

*Come back to that

*This would mean there would be significant real-world gender segregation simply because river valleys would mostly have folks descended from rivers and mountains mostly have folks descended from mountains

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Rai went to run errands and my brain kept running:

*Wait, at this point are we talking about fictional gender or fictional race?

* I think gender because gender identity appears to be something inherent where race is a social construct

* Right?

* Helloooooo bioessentialism

*Ah fuck

*Wait, no, spirit/mountain folks wouldn't necessarily be separated like that because the descendents of a dried up river are not necessarily going to be born or live where that river used to be, and certainly not where a river currently is. Etc. Most societies are probably pretty heterogenous in terms of river/mountain folks.

*Especially after umptee thousand years or so

*I should get some other viewpoints on this.

*I don't think we have anything coherent enough for an actual sensitivity consultant to work with. Do we?

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Which is where I am right now.