Single-Sex Races?

Do you have any? If so, how do they reproduce? Are they mortal or immortal?

I only have one. My Fey (which I had detailed during the last forum cycle) are all female. They come in all sizes and colours, but they aren't nature spirits (they help the repentant dead on their journey to the Heavens and force the devilish souls back into Hel). Every once in a while, one of the Faeries will assume a mortal image and enter the world.

The next party I haven't quite figured out, exactly. They reproduce with the mortal races, but always give birth to Fey daughters and then they return to Titania off the western edge of the world. I don't quite know the courting process or what happens to the men yet -___-''

Either way, I'm still toying with the idea of Fey reincarnation. They fight monsters, so there is opportunities for them to die... but I can't fit them into my afterlife-system (they're kinda the ones who run it, how could they also function inside of it?) So the idea that they get reincarnated came about... except that if they reincarnate AND new ones are born, then that means their numbers keep increasing which causes problems... At the same time, though, I don't know if I like the idea that all the new Fey are just reincarnated Fey. Hm...

Anyway, do you have any Single-Sex Races?

I have the phoenix, but I'm not sure that counts as a race, since there's only one phoenix. He never reproduces; he's reborn from the ashes each time he dies. He was created by magic to act as a messenger between life and death, so the living and the dead could communicate. Then he turned out to be sentient.

This is the way I depict the phoenix. Other authors and folklore depict the phoenix in different ways.

I have the E. Coli. Which reproduces by binary fission. Except Coli has no sex.

The trouble with a single sex race is that "sex" implies to have more than one of them, being that there has to be more than one gene donor for the next generation. Otherwise you might as well declare them without sex, unless they're the kind that only reproduces by stealing mates from other species like Vespero's Fey.

Well, there's always parthenogenisis. We just hope the gene stock doesn't end up too homogenized.

i have dwarfs that are all male. they carve their sons out of the "living rock".

I have an immortal race that is all men. I keep changing the name of their race. They're somewhere between elves and archangels. They used to have women, too, but they all died. So they don't reproduce anymore. Kind of sad.

They're not really well developed, yet. I've introduced 3 of them. I do still toy with the idea of making them sexless. The 3 in the story are kind of androgynous looking, so I wouldn't have to change them drastically. One needs to reproduce with a female human, though.

Also in my setting there is the spined gryphon (keythong or alce). It's not actually a distinct species though, just an occasional mutation of the normal gryphon genome. The trait is gender-exclusive to males, which means that when a spined gryphon reproduces, daughters are normal gryphons, sons are spined gryphons.

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And then ... there's the manticore species. I don't know what dark corner my imagination dredged them up from, but these are definitely monsters with a capital M. They're not evil, but they're definitely not "misunderstood" creatures either. They have been extensively studied, but nobody likes the findings.

These manticores are warm-blooded quadropeds with a beaked face, wiry build, thin fur pelt, batlike wings, and a thin stinger-tipped tail (which can inject a paralyzing, but not-generally-lethal, toxin).

Manticores are always male. There are also wingless manticores (which are always female), but the two kinds are never seen together.

So how do manticores reproduce? It just so happens that the male manticore's stinger tail is also its reproductive organ. And the female manticores aren't actually manticores; they're mutated chimera originating from other species. You can probably guess where this is heading . . . to reproduce, the male manticore hunts down a female of another species and rapes it. Its stinger tail is left behind in the process, embedded in the female's body where it slowly mutates the female into a manticore (sans wings and stinger-tail, as it's not a "true" manticore) and gestating offspring more or less in perpetuity. Manticores bear small litters (usually only 2 at a time), but the young are vulnerable to predation, especially by male manticores. Female manticores aren't exactly model mother figures, either, very aggressive and will attack just about anything, even if it's a bad idea. On the other hand, male manticores aren't particularly dangerous after mating but may still persist in their sexual behavior, which should they cross paths with a female manticore usually results in them getting killed and (quite possibly) eaten.

On the flipside, if the manticore is neutered at an early age (read: tail stinger cut off) then it won't develop the sexual pressures that gives its species such a bad rap, and neutered manticores are actually less dangerous compared to other "exotic pet" species (but you'd still need an exotic handler's permit anyway).

I have a single-member-species who can be either gender/sex depending on 'his' current incarnation. Usually male, but sometimes, such as when she was the firebird, female. And depending on his incarnation, he may not even appear to be his true species. He's been human, he's been multiple mythology versions of the phoenix, and also a demigod. He does actually have a soul mate somewhere floating around the universe, the dove to his phoenix, but they've only been able to hook up twice so far. Though, the nice part is that his 'species' is more magical and spiritual in nature and not necessarily attached to his physical body, so they were actually able to have children at one point - who may have inherited a small bit of their father's spirit but are their mother's species, and did not have the same life cycle as he did.

He doesn't technically have any need to reproduce; he's immortal and while he can die in accidental ways like anyone else, the fire within will fuel a renewed life. To a certain extent, that is. If he's overly drained and can't tap into that source of energy, he could stay in a magical coma for the rest of his life span, which is around a thousand years. When his time is up, he's reincarnated and comes back completely wiped clean, memories erased, new body, new life. He can access former memories through dreams, but it's difficult.

Another example would be the cherry nymphs. There are some rare male nymphs, and even more rare hermaphrodites, but by and large, they're all a female species. They don't actually reproduce at all; they're merely the nature spirits of hamadryads, the shell of the tree, which actually do the reproduction the way that normal cherry trees do. That's why only a select few nymphs can survive outside of their Groves of Laurasia, or earlier in the timeline, the Orchards of Olympus. The ones that venture outside have to be converted and corrupted by another source of energy. For example, the nymph Jubilee was corrupted by the trickster god Loki and eventually becomes so devoted to him that it allows her to escape her physical connection to her tree, which burned in the Great Fire without affecting her at all, though the effect on others was such that all of her sisters believed that she was dead for generations afterwards.

Often, if the nymphs themselves reproduce, it's with their spear counterparts, satyrs, who are another minor one-gender race. But they're mostly extinct, and they can sire offspring on human women and other vaguely humanoid species. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

When I saw the heading I immediately started to think of hermaphrodites (i.e. the same individual can act both as a female and as a male). I've been thinking it more as a science fiction species, but the ideas fit fantasy as well.

In Le Guin's "Left hand of darkness" the hermaphrodites are most of the time asexual but "kemmer" as either men or women - one solution for this.

I was thinking of two others (BTW, these are actual found in some animals):

a) full hermaphrodites, i.e. all the time capable of both giving seed and becoming pregnant, and even two individuals making each other pregnant.

b) time based. An individual matures first e.g. as a female, gives birth to offspring, then converts to male at some point and sires offspring. Could be the other way, too, but this seems more natural (e.g. giving birth would be a prerequisite of turning into a male, so infertile one's would not be husbands...).

My gryphons and dragons are hermaphrodites. They are born male and, at some point in their life, they might become "open" - which makes them function as female. After a certain amount of time, they go back to functioning as male.

It makes for interesting plot points, such as when I had a character who uses the male pronouns - thinks of himself as male - get pregnant. He's a gryphon and an opened one (ie - biologically female at this point), but it made a few readers stop and say... "He's their mother?"

In my story, Nephilim (a subgroup of mixed-human/angels) are all males, at least for the first generation. Their fathers, being angels, had haploid chromosomes (half a set) compared to humans and each just passed on the same genes to all their offspring. Which meant all the half angels were male. The descendants of those Nephilim could be male or female, so there were some Nephilim in later generations that were female.

I don't know if that really counts...

many of the fae in my world are single sexed as well: dryads, nymphs etc females; satyrs and leprechauns male; and pixies sort of androgynous.

new fae come into the world through elaborate rituals such as sprouting from dew drops through which the full moon has shown that are placed in the center of a fairy ring for the midsummer's night dances.

I sort of have a single sex race, but it is more of a sub-species. The Daunean are the main race, known as the children of the earth, and the Thaunean are the sons of lightning, they are an all male race, but each of them is technically half Daunean-half Thaunean.
Because there are no Thaunean women, they mate with Daunean females instead. They only carry the Y chromosome in their sperm and therefore only produce male offspring. Most of their genes are also dominant, so the defining features of the race persist with each generation. They are still mistaken for regular Daunean most of the time.

Making an all Female race to me seems far more complicated in terms of breeding with other races to produce offspring. Because it is the male chromosome donor that decides whether a child is male or female, there would only be a 50% chance of producing the correct off spring. The genes would also become mixed over time and produce some weird results.

Unless of course magic does it. I always like trying to find scientific ways to describe how things work, even if it does bend the laws of reality a little. If I were to make an all female race, I would have their ova actively deny fertilization by a Y chromosome sperm, or have such fertilization result in a miscarriage, probably reducing the population and reproduction rate significantly.

All female races that breed with males of some other race that has both males and females would be difficult. I think most of the time they either reproduce some other way, like magic or parthenogenesis, or they breed with an all-male race where females are all race A and males are all race B.

But now I want to make a race of all females where their sons and non-race daughters are basically carriers.

Lamia, my little pet project, are an entirely female race of immortals who can shift between the forms of beautiful women of an enormous snake. They can only take a human form once in their lives, so they'll usually use that opportunity to go on land, seduce the first guy they find, and jump back into the ocean as soon as they're knocked up. The baby is born as a snake, and the cycle repeats itself when the child is old enough to reproduce.

Sirens, all female.
They're mermaids, and there used to be a huge race of merpeople, including mermen. But then a few mermaids disobeyed a strict law, were exiled, and the cursed. Well, officially, they're cursed, but according to them, they're blessed. They are the only known of their kind to still live.
They are not immortal, but they live a long time, maybe because of all the dead at the bottom of their homes. They occasionally may reproduce children because of the occasional sailor men that come by. But the men can't last long.

That, and I also have the Phoenix. The last of its kind, being reborn again and again. It doesn't really have a gender because it doesn't need one.

Binary sexuality is so done--I'm still waiting for someone to write a species based on yeasts: 15,000 mating types and counting. Hmm... maybe that "someone" will have to be me...

I was once thinking that from the point of evolution (OK, that's more SciFi than fantasy, but having some logic in what's going on isn't usually a bad thing...), that it gets difficult if you need more than two different types together at the same time for reproducing - BTW this disturbed me with Octavia Butler's ooloi-sex. But I got an idea where you have three types of sex markers (chromosomes, if you wish), say A, B and C. A is "femaleness", C is "maleness", B is intermediate. AA and AB can act only as females (i.e. give birth), CC and BC only as males (give seed), BB and AC can be either. One of the pair must be male (or bi) and one female (or bi), and you cannot pair with your own type (BB - BB or AC - AC pairings could also just be morally prohibited, not sterile). There are 6 sexes and 9 (if I did not get mixed up) possible reproductive pairings... But always just two individuals needed.

One thing you can do is basically have another race that coincides with them. For example, a male race would be Bards or musicians, while the female races are dancers or singers.