Eclipse Phase includes an excellent sidebar about the uselessness of using gender-specific descriptors in an era where physical bodies can be switched and only your ‘ego’ remains constant (even though your ego may be more comfortable in certain body types).
When writing Nights of the Crusades it was painful that my language doesn’t include a gender-neutral descriptor for a person, which left the D&D option of always referring to someone as ‘she’, or mixing ‘he’ and ‘she’ throughout the text so it was roughly 50/50 by the time you reached the end of the rulebook. It also seems it's a common problem.
Using the Swedish route of inventing a term (their gender neutral ‘hen’; though ‘hen’ in English is a female chicken) didn’t seem viable for a mythos set in the early-middle ages; but maybe it will work for one set in the far future. There are a number of possible terms to describe someone’s ‘identity’ without categorising him/her ( <— that’s actually another, uncreative, option to deal with the issue), but some, like ‘id’ or ‘idem’, use the male as a default gender (‘ead’ is the female). Though the Fraudian id’ is supposed to represent the reptilian, instinctual part of your mind, whereas your ego’ tries to reign in your darker, unthinking self. Just thinking on that – Eclipse Phase seems to have chosen an excellent english word that sums it up with their choice of using ‘ego’.
So the challenge is how to rephrase, “he strode onboard the craft”? …
• “The person strode onboard the craft”
• “The persona strode onboard the craft”
• “Hen strode onboard the craft”
• “The idem strode onboard the craft”
• “The ego strode onboard the craft”
• “The bold id strode onboard the craft”
• “The character strode onboard the craft”
• “The actor strode onboard the craft”
hmmm… needs some work – or maybe a workaround to not end up with phrases like that…
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