androgynous/agender and/or asexual characters? themes?

just curious.

i haven't written a blatantly agender character yet but i have toyed with the idea. (i probably won't write any blatant asexuals simply because sexual themes rarely come up in my stories to begin with)
seems this is even less well represented than LGTBQ.....

(speaking of agender topics - WHY does English not have a good gender neutral pronoun? WHY?!)

Agender, not so much, but asexual yes. I attempt to put one in every single thing I write, because we need more love (No-one point out the irony in that statement.)

And yeah you;re right, they really are badly represented. Most people (at least other here) don;t even know what 'Asexual is', and thats porbably the same for agender. Hence why I always try to write at least one, and if possible slip the word in, so more people know and are aware of it.

But yeah even without 'sexual themes' you could have an asexual charater, even if you;re the only one who other knows, or the hints are very light, like them merely ignoring things taht would normally 'excite' other mebers of their gnder. Of course that might just lead to people thinking they're gay...again due to not many people being aware asexuality exsists.

My FMC might be asexual or demisexual, or she might be straight and have a low sex drive (and be religiously Catholic). She does have some kind of romantic feelings for the MMC, but I don't know if there's a sexual component or not...

I'm asexual and pan-romantic, and very happy this is getting more visibility.

One of the plots I'm considering writing this year includes three main characters, one who is definitely asexual and one who may or may not be asexual. The plot may need to marinate in my brain for another year though before its ready to be written.

As both agender and asexual, I'm kind of amused to see both of those aspects in a thread of their own, but okay, I guess? I see them all along the continuum of LGBTQQIAPP+ queerness.

One of my characters this year is fairly androgynous, although the concept is kind of hard to translate into a different culture, y'know? I say that if he lived in modern times, he'd probably be cool with "genderqueer". The other is entirely cis and sex-repulsed aromantic asexual. And these are all kind of major plot points.

sweet!
and good point about making subtle hints that a character is asexual... that could be fun. i might actually do that... yeah, i think that could work. thanks!

agender could definitely fall along the continuum but i feel like asexuality is pretty different since it means (basically) not being sexually attracted to anyone. and then i thought while i was making a new thread, might as well include both topics that particularly interest me. :-)

One of my main characters is a bit of a conundrum when it comes to hyr gender (hyr? hys?). It's especially complicated because the character is based on a historical figure widely thought of as transgender, genderfluid, or just a plain old opportunist, but never really agender or asexual. Because I am writing a play, I've specified that the character can be played by a girl or a boy, however for simplicity's sake I'm referring to hyr as 'he' in stage directions, though the characters on-stage call hyr 'he' as well as 'Madame'.

It's a period piece; they simply have no indicator of non-gender at the time, and in French, the masculine pronoun can also be taken as a gender-neutral one.

I too am glad that this is getting visibility.

I do have agender/asexual characters in my novel this nano, though it's not by choice. (Their souls were forced into a body that is mechanical after they died.) I'm finding it really challenging to write about, but its a lot of fun. It's actually really refreshing to write about how a person can love another person with feeling absolutely 0 physical attraction at all.

Don't know if this counts because it isn't a choice for my characters, but the themes are there.

I have a genderqueer character. I may add others as time goes on. It is a struggle to write a novel with genderqueer characters, though, for sure, because you have (ok, you don't HAVE to, but it's usually wise, if you're writing for a wide audience, at least) to explain the use of whatever pronoun you choose.

Oh man, I'm so glad I came here! I was hanging out in Fantasy. Anyway, I have a set of characters who are asexed. However, due to socialization they may not always be agendered. One of them, however, is genderqueer, I suppose, and for em I use Spivak pronouns, obviously. :)

Hey, cool topic! Glad I found it.

I'm writing a story about three people who all live in the same body (young woman's body), one of whom is a girl (so technically asexual, but noone knows if that will change if/when she grows up. It's very likely she'll stay a 4-year-old all her life), another one an asexual young woman and the third one a gay boy with major angst about his body disphoria, although I'm probably only gonna hint at it, it's not plot-relevant. I love them :D
In the world of my story (sci-fi), there is far less discrimination against people for any reason except money/ wealth and ability/ willingness to work. So they can live a life that's usually discrimination-free as long as they don't hang out in weird places where the last few bigots gather. So because there's next to no discrimination about people's identity or sexuality (or lack thereof) it's probably not gonna come up. I'm looking forward to including little hints, though, so for example if someone sais "I just fell in love" you wouldn't answer with "What's her/his name?" (using the pronoun that would assume a heterosexual love), instead you would use a gender-neutral phrasing.

Unfortunately I'm writing in german (because that's my first language) and there don't seem to be good gender-neutral pronouns. Using plural pronouns wouldn't work since they're nearly always identical to singular female pronouns. So I use "he" and "she" alternately for my genderqueer sidecharacter. I explained it in a footnote but I'm not sure it will work for readers. I'll have to find out in December...

If you want to read what I've got so far, you can do so here:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/participants/meeresbande/novels/revolution-im-weltraum
but like I said, it's in german.

My MC is androgynous in the way that their gender is not mentioned, at all. It's obviously intentional and any careful reader should be able to pick out where a specific gender only makes sense. Making my MC asexual would help this cause but it leaves out many of the places I would like to take my story, so for now, they do not have a specific age, gender or sexual orientation.

As for pronouns, I am writing a fictionalized memoir so I just use 'I' but I may need Spivak's later on. Wish me luck!

I've never tackled agender (though now I will), but I made two of my most important character asexual. It just made more sense given their similar outlooks and appearances, but they still can be romantic in their unique ways.

My MC is an androgen and I'm just sticking with the biological gender as pronouns referring to "him". Of course this character is pretty free with his orientation. I cannot stand writing "him" constantly. I'm keeping it first person for the most part. though. I'm just having some issues with the whole aesthetics of pronouns. I feel like there needs to be more words describing those who are genderqueer, gender-neutral, androgen or the like.

when i started this thread i wasn't sure how many people would respond, so seeing your responses is really great!
:-)

my nano is getting ever more surreal so while i'm currently using gendered pronouns for my MC it's entirely possible that that could go out the window at some point. also, it's very visual so in the end i'm seeing it as more of a graphic novel or animated video or something. if that happens, i think the MC is going to be very ambiguously gendered. (yay for visual media!)

i do wonder though, if it would be hard for people that aren't agender to relate to a blatantly agendered character or if people that are sexual would have a hard time relating to a blatantly asexual character?
on the one hand, i would think it wouldn't be an issue since people seem to relate to characters not of their own gender all the time but on the other hand it seems like being agender/asexual is such a foreign concept to most people that i wonder sometimes.
even if the sexual orientation/gender identity is treated as a side note in the novel, is it going to distract some (most?) people from really following the plot/other themes?

and on that note - do any of you know of published books that feature asexual or androgynous/agendered characters?

My most magnetic main character is asexual, which is pretty much a running gag in my story. I based him a lot off of one my best friends, who is asexual and I'm actually getting a lot of my response ideas from him.

Not in the book I'm doing at the moment, but in the same series, later, one of the MMCs has a son who is asexual/ aromantic, and there will be a character who is technically neither male or female or anything else because she (who is presenting as female at that stage of the story) is a physical embodiment of an abstract concept. Later 'she' turns up with the same name, but is a 'he', and it's not questioned in-story (it would be kind-of a faux-pas to bring it up - 'excuse me, personification of an abstract idea, but you're doing humanoid presentation wrong - choose a gender/sex and stick to it' isn't really something you want to consider saying around this particular idea)
And there's a lot of ambiguous/ androgynous characters, though my Narrator is a cis male, undisclosed sexuality (well, the nature of his existance sort-of ... makes sexuality irrelevant to him, personally. Probably I'd need a whole lot more than one post to explain it all) and his flatmate, the MMC is a cis male, pansexual, who kind-of missed the whole 'thing' of there being anything to make a fuss about with how anyone identifies (it's his son who is ace and aro, and when he 'comes out', this MMC is pretty much like 'good for you! this is a thing, isn't it? Party time! you get the sweets, someone else bring dvds, I'll find some wine! yaay!')
Yup, so many in this series that aren't the base average, but they're balanced out by some 'normal??' secondary characters. (I really dislike the word 'normal' - what I mean is that they're more towards the middle of the bell curve. damnable imprecise concepts *shakesfist*)

The Shapeshifters in my story are all agender. They "start off" as male (in appearance, they are not human but appear to be), and can only reproduce as males, but the issue of pronouns comes in as half of them appear to be female all/most of the time. And when they're female, even thought they cannot reproduce as females, they are "all woman".

A constant silly argument I have with a writer friend is whether my MC and another character are a gay couple ("couple" used as a loose term here), as originally they were both "male". But they're not human, and one of them takes female forms all the time. They could if they wanted to, both act as male or female, or switch genders. We came to the conclusion that they are the ultimate bisexual couple.

With the pronouns, it depends on who's talking about the character with ambiguous gender. One of the characters spends an equal time as a male and female. The narrator refers to them as whichever gender they are "currently". Some of the other characters have an obvious preference to stay as male or female, and the narrator and some others use the appropriate gender pronoun. Some humans refer to the Shifters as "it", others as "ter" (and the rest of Casey Miller and Kate Swifts neutral pronouns). The only reason I'm writing it in the first person, actually, is to remove a tiny bit of pronoun confusion, as my MC and narrator changes occasionally.

I have three main characters. Of them, Abby is asexual (and pretty uncaring of others most of the time so I'm feeling aromantic as well), Ben is gay although, given his character, I'm pretty sure he's asexual homoromantic and Andru is hetrosexual.
It doesn't really come up a lot in my story (aside from Ben propositioning a rescuer as a joke) although it's been touched on a little during Abby and Andru's heart to heart. It probably doesn't really come up because I don't really write relationships.

I haven't got any agender characters, but my MC is asexual.