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queer sex and more!

in an illustrated medieval travelogue (a german translation of "mandeville's travels"), bavaria/swabia, ca. 1476

source: Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 2838, fol. 102v

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In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word 'Androgynous' is only preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three; and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round like their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: 'Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.' He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them,—being the sections of entire men or women,—and clung to that. They were being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the parts of generation round to the front, for this had not been always their position, and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the transposition the male generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man. Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood they are lovers of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,—if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, 'What do you people want of one another?' they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: 'Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?'—there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love. There was a time, I say, when we were one, but now because of the wickedness of mankind God has dispersed us, as the Arcadians were dispersed into villages by the Lacedaemonians. And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo, like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that we shall be like tallies.

- Plato, The Symposium

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"Assassin & Son" by Thomas M. Disch

Vague but interesting description of a seven-sex system:

The blobs were septsexual, a degree of sexual differentiation found only in free-form telepathic races. Joseph did not understand too precisely the entire Sephradian mating process. There were, he knew, two blobs that performed a masculine function and two others that could be called women; the "mother" was hermaphroditic, then there were two neutral sexes who served somehow as catalysts. The "neuters" were not motivated by strictly sexual desires: the function of one was largely vegetative and of the other (which Chilperic represented) digestive.

This is all very intriguing, but sadly we get few further details. Evidently mating requires one member of each sex; at one point a blob mentions that he is "needed for a mating", said to involve "six fellow-blobs", which will "take only a few minutes". We're also told that

The intricacies of dynastic politics were complicated by five-way sexual intrigues (the two neutral sexes being neutral in this too).

All the individual blobs we meet are referred to as "he", though Chilperic, a neuter, is the only one whose sex we learn. The human protagonist is bullied with the accusation that "Yer father's a blob lover! [...] Yeah -- he's the eighth man at a mating!"

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"Love Might Be Too Strong a Word" by Charlie Jane Anders Lol I enjoyed this one. The characters are said to be "human", but they're divided into a number of "dars" (sexes/castes) -- at least six of them -- which perform different kinds of work on the generation ship they call home, and possess different sets of genitalia. Most dars are capable of either "womanning" or "manning" (bottoming or topping), but which they do in any given sexual encounter depends on the dar of their partner. The social status of a given dar is closely associated with its ability to man other dars -- with the highest-ranked dar, the pilots, manning everyone else and the lowest-ranked, the dailys (who perform menial labor like food preparation and custodial work), womanning to everyone. There are apparently exceptions to the neat system, as spirers are implied to be quite high up in the hierarchy, probably second to the pilots, while boides seem to be the second lowest; yet the protagonist mentions that y's "heard the boides can man the spirers, too, but it probably doesn’t happen much" (presumably due to the status differential). The genitalia are complex, as most dars seem to have multiple openings and knobs for copulating with different kinds of partners. Of course, things don't always work out so tidily. The protagonist is a daily who doesn't like womanning, and only wants to man others (with fingers, etc). In the course of the story y mans other dailys as well as a pilot in this way.

I don’t woman. I just don’t. Oh, I have the involuntary responses just like everybody else. When I meet a particularly stout outringer, my ruhr feels a little itchy. I make a habit of wearing a scarf when I clean the outringers’ quarters, so they won’t see anything. But I just don’t like the idea.

The protagonist uses the word "heroine" to refer to yrself; this is the only time traditionally gendered language is used, beyond "woman" and "man" as verbs. Pair-bonding is a public commitment of some kind which can be formed between any two dars; though it rarely happens between the highest and the lowest. It's not clear how all of this connects to reproduction; apparently "breedpods" are somehow involved and that's all we're told. The dars that are mentioned, in order of their apparent status: Pilot Pronouns: be/ber/berself Pilots have seven fingers. Their bodies are "slender" with "all long sinews and soft skin". On their various genital appendages:

“What does this one do?” I pointed to a long vine that curled out from Dot’s sternum. “It’s uh, it’s my zud, for manning a spirer. They have an opening on that part of their bodies just for pilots, called the duz. It takes three days, and there are fifteen required positions.” It went on like that. The three bony prongs sticking out just below ber stomach were for manning a breeder, and ber thighs had matching lumps, which could expand to man an outringer. No matter what your dar, Dot had a way to man you. Just like I could woman to all the other dars. “Don’t you want to see my, uh, my tharn?” Dot gestured to ber lower back, where the outie that matched my innie was quivering with excitement. [...] I tried stroking some of the tendrils and spokes coming from the front of Dot’s body. Dot moaned with pleasure, but they didn’t grow any bigger, because I was the wrong dar to excite them. Pheromones.

The tharn has an "outer membrane" which apparently comes off during sex, which can be used as as evidence as to whether a sexual encounter has taken place or not. It's not clear whether the loss of the membrane is permanent or whether it grows back after a time. Pilots wear many layers of fancy clothing and live in luxury in the pilot quarter. Spirer They have "countless eyes and base-27 calculations", and many fingers as well, and apparently deal with engineering and machines. Breeder Pronouns: ?/zm Their job is to tend to the breedpods. Outringer They have a "stout" build and  work in "unshielded" areas, presumably outside of the ship? Boide Pronouns: po/por They have some kind of "bulges" on either side of their hip bones which show when they're aroused, at least in a manning way. They work with the "power units", as their bodies are "designed to withstand [the] forces" of the "radiation zone".

I looked por over: a little less squat and greasy than most boides, but still a solid brick of muscle and radiation-resistant hide. But nimble, the way you have to be if you manipulate the City’s power grid.

Daily Pronouns: y/ym/yr -- or possibly y/yr/yr, but that's probably a typo Has a harnt, a "little hole just above [the] tailbone" used for womanning to pilots (they have sex back-to-back), and a ruhr which is implied to be the one used for outringers. Though they "woman" to everyone sexually, dailies are physically strong enough that pilots, at least, would not be able to force them into sex.

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Warren Peace by Bob Shaw

A comedy which includes a comedic description of a species, the squelchers, which have a sexual system which sounds a bit similar to that in Venus and the Seven Sexes, though not described in as much detail. Six sexes, "all of whom have to fertilize each other in turn", and which are wildly different in form. The only ones described are the fourth sex, which looks like some kind of frog-ape, and the fifth which resembles a tree. The protagonist demands an explanation when he finds out that members of the fourth sex are aroused by looking at the two sticking-up prongs of a staple.

"You see, our reproductive cycle is much more complicated than yours. We have six different sexes… in six different forms… all of whom have to fertilize each other in turn. I’m a member of the fourth sex, which is mainly distinguished by the presence of these." With a strangely coy and delicate gesture, the squelcher indicated the red hemispheres on its torso.         Peace frowned. "What’s so unusual about a pair of nipples, even if they’re one above the other?"         "They aren’t nipples," Nooglenorker said in demure tones which sounded grotesque coming from an orange-haired gorilla. "They’re my gamete sacs, and an extremely well-developed pair they are, even if I say it myself. I often get complimented on them, and several times I’ve been asked to pose for glamour magazines, but of course I wouldn’t agree to that sort of thing unless it was artistically—"         "The staples," Peace cut in impatiently. "What about the staples?"         "Well, you see, a member of our fifth sex has two sets of twin-pronged ovipositors on his trunk. When my mingle-time finally comes… and I see my ideal partner… we will cling together and his prongs will penetrate my gamete sacs and… and…"

On the fifth sex:

"[...] All you would have observed is something resembling a perfectly ordinary tree."         "A tree!” Peace was astounded. “You’re going to do it with a tree!"         "Not just any old tree, Warren. My tree will be sentient, sensitive, caring, concerned for me without being too possessive, capable of adjusting its own needs so as not to intrude on my own essential living space… and… and… it will also have those gorgeous ovipositors growing out of its trunk at exactly the right height to spear my gamete sacs… and when we get together…"

Mating apparently happens during "mingle-time", and there's some complex etiquette around it (“How dare you address me by my part-name! That privilege is reserved for members of the first and third sexes in the quarter after the fourth para-mingle, and if you think I’m going to allow…”). Both the fourth and fifth sexes are called either "it" or "he" by the characters and narration. There's also a vague reference to the existence of other extra-gendered species:

He was beginning to suspect that the squelchers were members of one of those complex multi-sexual species in which reproduction was achieved by many kinds of unlikely pairings.

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"Transit" by Stephen Dedman

Short story set in a future where the majority of human beings are hermaphrodites (“mafs”) rather than women and men (“monosexes”). The first mafs were created through genetic engineering shortly after humanity was contacted by aliens and learned that at least some intelligent species (such as the Chuh'hom) are hermaphroditic. What little we hear of the various alien species sounds interesting, but the story is mostly about humans.

Monos were extremely rare away from Earth, except in some religious enclaves where no one had maf chromosomes: otherwise, it required major surgery, which almost no one bothered with. The first human mafs were born a few years post-contact, but the chromosomes were discovered by humans, not Stigrosc: Stigs don't believe in genetic engineering. Mafs remained a minority on Earth for more than a century, but many of them -- us -- traveled to habitable solstice worlds, where there was unrestricted birthright. Others became crew on the Stigrosc ships, or emigrated to the neutral worlds; Stigs can't tell one human from another, and the Nerifar say we all taste the same, but Chuh'hom and Tatsu find it much easier and safer to communicate with mafs. Meanwhile, on Earth, as gene surgery became easier and cheaper and more countries adopted "one couple -- one child" laws, mafs were seen by many governments as a way of avoiding serious gender imbalances in the population, and various incentives were offered to prospective parents [...]"

Even on Earth, monosexes are a minority these days: Mafs make up about 68% of the population. It's also mentioned that a maf and a monosex cannot reproduce together without "gene surgery", which the protagonist does not see as a big deal.

Mafs have a penis and vulva but no external testes. We're told that a girl with large breasts looks "pregnant" to the members of the protagonist's all-maf community, and mafs look male to said girl. The mafs of this community are fairly casual about sex, given that they all have the same bits; but they seem to mostly form two-parent family units in adulthood. You call your parents Mum and Dad according to the role they played in your conception: Alex's "Dad" is er sibling Kris' "Mum", and (presumably) vice versa. Apparently the mother has greater authority over a child than the father. Mafs use e/er pronouns, and the main maf characters are mostly given names that are gender-neutral by 21st century standards: Alex, Pat, Morgan, etc. The protagonist Alex mentions that "we call our sports teams girls and boys -- no one wants to wear uniforms, so the ones with the shirts are girls. I don't know why; it's probably something that used to mean something once". This seems like a slightly odd custom to evolve given that -- at least in the current era -- girls and boys aren't usually pitted against each other in sports, even pre-puberty.

The story focuses on a kind of romance between the maf protagonist and a girl from a conservative Muslim planet where mafs don’t exist (this isn't the most positive portrayal of Islam: it's still super sexist and not a great culture for women to live in). I enjoyed reading a story told from the POV of a person from a hermaphroditic society, who doesn't initially know much about binary-gendered people and has to practice using gendered pronouns, etc.

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Star Trek Titan: Over a Torrent Sea by Christopher L. Bennett

I enjoyed this one more than Tower of Babel, as it has that first contact element I like so much. The “squales” (squid-whales) are an aquatic species

the squales had four sexes, two that were roughly male (in that they only donated gametes) and two that were hermaphroditic, exchanging gametes with each other and both bearing and raising young. (Pazlar's people theorized this was a hedge against mutation; with four copies of each chromosome, defective genes would be overridden by the majority. Given the frequent infall of asteroids rich in heavy, potentially toxic elements, it was a valuable adaptation.)

At first the squales are "it", but once the characters get to know them better the pseudo-males become "he" and the hermaphrodites "she".

Just as interesting, the Syrath crewmember Cethente is "asexual" and called "it", and we are told this about its species:

They might not have been physically indestructible, but their neural information was encoded in the same ways as their genetic information and distributed just as widely through the body; indeed, they were both facets of the same thing. Any sizeable intact part of a Syrath's body, even if "dead" for weeks, could regenerate in the proper growth medium into a new Syrath with the same basic personality template. True, many memories would be lost, even most if the surviving portion were small enough; but Syrath saw that as a way of getting a fresh start, sparing themselves the tedious sameness of immortality. So while they weren't reckless with their lives, preferring to avoid the inconvenience of dying, the Syrath had simply never evolved the capacity for mortal fear. [...] In those rare cases where separate pieces of an injured or dead Syrath were simultaneously regenerated into whole beings with the same core personality, it proved difficult for two beings with equal claim to the same identity to coexist civilly. Dying was easy; comity was hard.

I wouldn't mind learning more about this species... it sounds like they were introduced in the first book of the Titan series, which I've... already read?! Apparently before I started this NB-in-SF project. : | Not sure if I really want to read this entire series in the hope of more details on Cethente and its species, but I might as well add it to the list.

There's also an Andorian shen character and a Chelon crewmember who's described as a male -- this book was published earlier than Tower of Babel, but in any case given the Chelons are supposed to be sequential hermaphrodites it's not necessarily a contradiction.

(Despite all this, it's quite noticeable that the Titan has a great many alien crewmembers of a great many different species -- probably more than there are human crewmembers -- and that nearly all of them appear to come in female and male sexes which resemble the human sexes in appearance.)

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“All Good Bems” by Fredric Brown

A comedic short story involving five-sexed aliens from Andromeda II. They claim their greater number of sexual divisions indicates their superior development compared to humans, who are "still in the bisexual stage" -- just as humans are superior to the monosexual amoebas. It takes all five to reproduce. They decide to let the humans call all of them "he" as "your language is completely inadequate"; but right before making that judgment one of them corrects a human character who calls one of them "she" with "he" -- maybe indicating that at least one sex is genuinely analogous to the human male.

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Alien in a Small Town by Jim Cleaveland

This book really turned out to be... not my kind of thing. I'm not into narratives about aliens becoming more human and learning how to loooooooove (which of course must be heterosexual love, even though interspecies sexual union is impossible and the aliens have a completely different concept of gender than humans do). The omniscient third-person POV and its constant switching of perspective was also just... awkward and confusing. Anyway the Jan have three "castes, or genders". The majority are Workers or males; the huge Matriarchs, or females, rule and the sterile Warriors defend the people from outside threats. On Matriarchs:

In their youth, Matriarchs were not much larger than Workers like Paul, and at this size they would travel widely, experiencing as much of their surrounding world as possible [...]. Then, after many years, a Matriarch would find an appropriate place, literally plant herself, and begin growing into a structure the size of a small mountain, able to breed vast numbers of offspring, and grow wise and knowledgeable beyond human comprehension. As Indira understood it, a full-grown Matriarch like Dwight actually contained warren networks within her own body. A living hive.

Matriarchs are presented as having mental power far beyond the other castes (or humans), capable of focusing on many conversations and other matters at the same time. When it's time for a Matriarch to conceive the next generation of offspring, a crowd of Workers will gather for a ritual in which they battle each other for the right to attach to one of the Matriarch's limited number of mating ports (one Matriarch is said to have twenty-one of these; it's not clear whether the number is standard or varied). Warriors are referred to as "he", "over the more accurate but depersonalizing 'it'". Of them it is said:

“[...] They'd always lived apart from us, at the borders of our communities, even in ancient times. They protected us from outside threats. They had their own rituals, traditions, they often worshipped different gods. The differences were deep, neurological. They functioned better in loose societies, and were unable to learn the boring, repetitive trades required in the warren proper." At least, that's what I was always told, Paul thought.

It's also mentioned that "a Matriarch can breed a lot of Warriors in a hurry, when there's a crisis", but "The problem is what to do with them once the fight is over. They're born killers, and they don't adapt well at all to civilian society. So, the Matriarchs breed only a minimum of them, usually." The poor treatment of "leftover" Warriors by Jannite society becomes an issue that the main Jan character tackles in the latter part of the book, and by relying on human models of successful revolution he manages to win them increased rights and freedoms. Jan are said to be incapable of love and couplehood, though they have friendship. Of course it turns out that that, along with many other things including the use of symbolic language, can be learned by living with humans for long enough. And doing so is a Good Idea, clearly: altering yourself away from your natural physicality and manner of living is bad, unless you're an alien wanting to become more human in which case it's great. :\

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Star Trek Enterprise: Tower of Babel by Christopher L. Bennett

The plot of this one involves a lot of complicated political scheming among a million different factions that I probably would have been more familiar with had I read the previous books in the series. Easily the most entertaining part of the book is the "Acknowledgements" section in which the author explains how he attempted to reconcile worldbuilding details from dozens of canonical and pseudocanonical sources in his own portrayal of the Trek universe. This also accounts for some of the decisions made re: the depiction of certain alternatively-gendered alien species, in particular why they all seem to present themselves socially to some degree as female and male regardless of whether they actually have two genders or not. The Chelons, for example, were apparently designated in some background movie notes to be genderless, but a later novel series depicted them as bi-gendered. In this book the Chelons are said to be hermaphroditic but to present themselves as female or male, except for some "traditionalists" who "do not adopt a permanent gender role" (the wiki suggests that Chelons are sequential hermaphrodites, hence the "permanent" qualification). The implication that there is social pressure in the Rigellian system to have two genders is notable, and perhaps odd given that the Chelons are not the only ones in the system who aren't sexually dimorphic. The Jelna were stated to be four-gendered in one Enterprise episode and then depicted as two-gendered in another; in this book their females and males are simply subdivided into "exo-" and "endo-" subtypes.

The director [...] was of the Jelna's endomale sex, differentiated from an "exo" like Jahlet by paler skin, softer facial features, and red eyes. According to Phlox's merry lectures about Rigellian sexuality, the exomale and exofemale sexes -- distinguished by an extra Z chromosome and outnumbering the "endosexes," the more typical males and females, by better than two to one -- were the more robust and aggressive ones from an evolutionary-behavioral standpoint, adapted to handle the hunting and gathering while the endosexes stayed in camp to nurture and defend the young.

Since the endosexes are said to be the minority sexes, I can only assume that "more typical" means that they play the traditional female and male reproductive roles and that the exosexes are involved in quite a different fashion (or maybe they’re just sterile versions of the regular sexes, or something like that). Andorians also appear in this book, but I’ll have to write a separate post about them.

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"The Third Sex" by Alan Brennert

This story, obviously, introduces a third sex: "androgynes" born without any reproductive organs who have suddenly started appearing in the human population -- rarely at first, but with increasing frequency over time. (It's suggested that this extra sex was common in some prehistorical era, but died out for some reason and is now making a return.) They have "a... different chromosome, not X, not Y, something entirely new" and the POV character describes eirself in adolescence as "a bit taller than the average girl, a bit shorter than the average boy; my voice was pitched a little lower than most girls, a little higher than most boys, but with a scratchy quality that somehow made it acceptable for either sex" with "a boyish body... not muscular enough to be a boy's, but too contourless to be a girl's, either".

The story revolves around the protagonist's quest to achieve sexual fulfillment: ey enjoys sexual play with both women and men, but is unable to achieve orgasm. At one point ey tries sleeping with another androgyne, but it turns out they're "too alike" to satisfy each other.

This author at least is aware of the existence of trans people and understands how medical transition works (depressingly rare in writers who choose to tackle gender issues -- and even this author doesn’t seem aware that intersex people exist). The protagonist, raised as a girl, is given the option of a vaginoplasty but declines when ey learns that it won't actually give em sexual sensation (as ey has no erogenous tissue in the first place). Another androgyne is said to be using testosterone to present as a male. The narration gives pronouns to the various androgynes encountered according to their gender presentation: "she" or "he" for some; "he/she" for a sex worker who takes on both female and male personas; and no pronouns at all for the one other individual the protagonist meets who is actually living without gender. (I'm using "ey" pronouns in this post for convenience; they're not actually used in the story, which is told in the first person.)

In the end it turns out that what the protagonist really needs is to have sex with a woman and a man at the same time. And when ey does ey's finally able to orgasm, because as it turns out:

I wasn't lacking in erogenous tissue. My whole body was erogenous tissue.

All it needed was the proper stimulation.

The WTF of “my whole body was erogenous tissue” aside, we then get a bit of philosophizing on the relations between the genders:

I never really thought about that time, eons before recorded history, when my kind shared the earth with men and women. Why we vanished, or died out, may never be known; but the real question is, why were we there in the first place? It wasn't until Lyn, and Davy, that I began wondering... thinking about how, in the millennia since, men and women had had such difficulty understanding one another, seeing the other's side... as though something were -- missing, somehow. A balance; a harmonizing element; the third side of a triangle. Maybe that was the natural order of things, and what's come since is the deviation.

Of course if a third sex like this did exist in reality, and they actually occupied their own separate social role and everything, I'm sure they would end up seeming just as "mysterious" and "other" to women and men as they are to each other. But a world where female/male/androgyne triads are the normative relationship structure is a fun idea, anyway.

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"Aye, and Gomorrah..." by Samuel R. Delany

More Delany: a short story this time, written in 1967. It turns out that outside the protection of the atmosphere solar radiation does bad things to people’s gonads, so a new class of sexless human beings is created to work in outer space. Although only the removal of the gonads is explicitly mentioned, it's implied that the "spacers" are without any sexual characteristics whatsoever, since they're "no longer" women or men and they have "nothing to offer" people who are attracted to women or men. They're chosen "from children whose sexual responses are hopelessly retarded at puberty". The narration avoids pronouns when referring to them. The protagonist -- who is AMAB -- is alternately assumed to be a former male or a former female by different people.

The people -- female and male -- who are attracted to spacers are called "frelks" (because they have a "free-fall-sexual-displacement" complex). It's said they feel drawn to spacers because spacers can't feel any attraction back: one frelk compares her fetish to necrophilia. She also suggests that frelks are "the sexually retarded ones they miss", since they're attracted to people who are basically children. Usually spacers only sleep with frelks for money, but the protagonist seems to be lonely and to want a genuine human connection, which apparently can't be found among other spacers (who only have "childish, violent substitutes for love", whatever that means).

Another Delany story found in the same collection, "The Star Pit", mentions (apparently nonsapient) interdimensional beings with "four sexes, two of which carried the young".

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The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany

Post-apocalyptic novel with a heavy dose of symbolic weirdness. Radiation has caused the birth of many weird mutants; some of these are "hermaphrodites" or "androgynes" -- true hermaphrodites capable of reproducing with a female partner, with a male partner, or entirely on their own, parthenogenetically. As they only carry X chromosomes, they can only produce male offspring with a male partner; while the parthenogenetically-produced offspring have only one set of chromosomes and are infertile (though one character who has a lot of Jesus Symbolism is an apparently-fertile male miraculously conceived parthenogenetically despite this being supposedly impossible).

One androgyne character was believed to be female by a male sexual partner and male by a female sexual partner, due to always having sex in the dark (the male partner, the protagonist, is disgusted and dumps the androgyne when he learns the truth). Another -- a celebrity -- is also mistaken for female by the protagonist and seems to be viewed as at least female-ish by the general population (i.e. an object for men to desire and for women to emulate). There is a set of gendered titles (analogous to Mr/Ms) placed before a person's name: La for women, Lo for men and Le for androgynes. But only once is a known androgyne referred to by a pronoun ("he") -- and I'm not sure if that one instance is an authorial slip or not.

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Fish Tails by Sheri S. Tepper

I heard of this book through this review quite entertainingly eviscerating it. But the reviewer does mention it contains a "long description of [a] complex five-gender system" so I knew I would have to read it eventually, terrible or not.

The book is, indeed, terrible. And long. God, so long. It's also a crossover sequel to I think several (?) of the author's previous series, which I have not read. However, with respect to weird, thoroughly-described alternative gender systems it does in fact deliver The Goods.

So a major character who shows up near the end of the book belongs to a semi-vegetable alien species, the "Camrath-selipedes-nosti-famikines", who reproduce through planting seeds and growing their offspring, basically. They have five sexes: isk, tan, blag, wurf and dibble. All individuals start out as one of the first four genders, and eventually become a dibble when they reach the right age. It's said the dibbles need to be mature and experienced because their role in reproduction is the most important.

The isks and tans start the reproductive process in the early spring when they participate in a kind of communal dance during which they send up clouds of pollen and fertilize each other. After this both isks and tans develop a ring of seedlike objects called "golms" around their necks. When the golms are fully ripe, the isks and tans all go out to the fields again and have another dance, where they hit each other's golms until the shells split open and the golms (which inside the shells are covered in loads of tiny legs) fall onto the ground. 

Next is the blags' turn: they dance over the field scattering "mist" from sacs on their arms over the golms. On each arm they have four sacs, one each for the "genetic part" of isks, tans, blags and wurfs. I guess (??) this means the blags' contribution determines the gender of each offspring. After that come the wurfs, who march across the field spraying "fertility liquid" from a gland behind the knee. As soon as this liquid hits a golm, its legs start spinning and it burrows into the ground and buries itself.

Time passes, the golms sprout and grow. They start to resemble adult people, but still have no nervous system or consciousness: they are only "maybe-people". Once the maybe-people reach a certain height, all the isks, tans, blags and wurfs go out the field to inspect them and decide which are well-formed and suitable for becoming people (Tepper is really into eugenics, so... yeah). Later each member of the first four sexes who is authorized to raise a child that year will select a pair of maybe-people, one of which will become its adoptive child or "chosen one". Finally, the dibbles have their turn: each dibble chooses one of the claimed pairs of maybe-people and "dibbles" them, making the final contribution which allows them to grow a brain and nervous system: they are now "becoming-people". One of the pair becomes the dibble's "chosen one"; the other that of the person who selected the pair originally.

More time passes, and the becoming-people develop mentally (their gender also becomes clear at this time). The adoptive parent of each will visit it in the field frequently, as will the rest of the parent's "maflipluk" (family, made up of multiple generations of adoptive parents and their chosen ones). The full growth of the becoming-people takes until the autumn (a long time, as a year on their planet lasts for over fifteen Earth years). When a becoming-person is fully grown, its roots dry out and the whole maflipluk comes together to help it get loose and walk home. The new person is also named at this time.

There's also a whole thing about how the "maybe-people" who don't get dibbled remain nerveless plants and are harvested and used as food. Yeah.

The main character of this species is a tan, and is referred to variously as "it", "he" and "tan" (possessive "tan's") by the narration; and at one point a dibble is referred to by the pronoun "dib". We aren't told the pronouns for the other genders, though it's not too hard to guess.

I think the whole thing is a pretty cool piece of worldbuilding, and I wouldn't mind reading more about these guys.

Another species tangentially involved in the plot, the Gobanjurians, have their own complex gender system that's only vaguely referred to, but apparently includes at least males, females or "shes", glabinours, neuters and frigles. Glabinours are "arbitrarily considered to be male", at least for the purposes of certain kinds of "same-sex-directed" aggression, though they are called "it" while actual males are "he". The "lateral anstrackle" is "an anatomical feature of both males and neuters, but not of shes or frigles". An unknown or hypothetical person is referred to as “he-she-it-or-they”: presumably that’s the full range of pronouns used by this species. But -- in conformity to what I think is one of Tepper's usual fixations -- even in a species with a bunch of bizarre alien genders, the males are still brutal tyrants obsessed with the size of their genitals. Naturally.

There's also a mention of another five-gendered species, the Eesties, who are apparently from one of the series this book is a sequel to (the "True Game" books?) So I guess I'm going to have to read those too.

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Mars Evacuees by Sophia McDougall

This is a pretty fun middle-grade book about some kids being evacuated to Mars due to alien invasion and the adventures they end up having there, including meeting and befriending an alien kid of the invaders' species.

The aliens, the Morrors, have five sexes: suth-laaa, quth-laaa, ruul, thuul and ma-lashnath. The kid, a quth-laaa, refuses to be categorized according to human concepts of gender:

"Okay, fine. Are you a boy or a girl?" Carl asked. "No," said Thsaaa. "Oh." There was a small silence. Carl considered. "Are you more... both, or more neither?" "No," said Thsaaa.

Of course we're not given a full explanation of how reproduction works for the Morrors, other than that it's ridiculously complicated:

It turned out that though there were five sexes, it was actually really rare to have five parents -- it was good if you did, because you'd probably be extra healthy and live a long time, but it was only really possible when there was peace and plenty for all Morrorkind, which hadn't happened in a while. But no one had fewer than three, and though Thsaaa didn't actually say, "And that's another reason why we think you humans are so primitive," it was pretty clear. But then it just went on and on, and Thsaaa kept stopping and explaining that though usually, most Morrors did it this way, there were like twenty percent or something of them who did it that way. And after a while, without meaning to, I sort of stopped listening, and when I started again I'd completely lost track of who was supposed to Harvest the Genetic Material from whom, and who else would then Absorb It through Their Sensory Tendrils, and what climatic conditions were required for a thuul to give birth alone, and when they wouldn't be able to without a ma-lashnath.

Terms for parents of various sexes: ruul-ama, thuul-lan, suth-laaa-hum, quth-laaa-mi (I'm guessing the inconsistent italicization is a typo). Thsaaa had all four of these (but no ma-lashnath parent), and they all lived together as one big family (though two of their parents have been killed by the beginning of the story). We're not told if they have any siblings.

One term for a grandparent is mentioned, suth-laaa-hun-ruul -- presumably either a ruul parent's suth-laaa parent, or vice versa. Thsaaa's language doesn't have pronouns; the protagonist calls all Morrors "they" for convenience.

We get a bit of a Morror fairytale:

"I will tell you the story of the Bridge of Tham-thol-Tharaa. In the land of Ee-ee-Lathwama, there was a beautiful suth-laaa who loved a beautiful ruul. The suth-laaa had a mane of tendrils as delicate as patterns of frost on a window, and their arms flowed as elegantly in the air as weed in the water, and the ruul's colors changed as gracefully as theela-va in the sky. But they were alone, for the thirty turns before there had been many warm winters, and so very few ma-lashnath had been born. The ruul and the suth-laaa met quth-laaa and thuul sometimes, but without a ma-lashnath, the ruul and the suth-laaa could not have children. So they set out for the land of Safwalaa-aa...." The storytelling didn't go totally smoothly; Thsaaa soon got annoyed with us because we didn't always know which bits were normal Morror society and which were magic (apparently Safwalaa-aa was not a real place -- even baby Morrors knows that -- but the thing about warm winters was totally true). But basically the beautiful suth-laaa and the beautiful ruul didn't find any beautiful ma-lashnath in Safwalaa-aa, but they didn't realize it was because all the ma-lashnath had headed for Ee-ee-Lathwama, looking for ruul and suth-laaa. Then there was a series of misunderstandings that were probably more hilarious if you were a Morror, but before we could get to the happy ending, Noel interrupted.

Since the suth-laaa and the ruul only seem to need a ma-lashnath in order to breed, I'm guessing the thuul isn't the only sex capable of giving birth. Also that the other childbearing sex must also need a ma-lashnath to help only in certain climatic conditions, since the story treats a ma-lashnath as absolutely necessary but Thsaaa's family doesn't have one.

At the end of the story, we get a brief mention of interspecies romance:

And Dad particularly hated that newspaper, and since then some human and a suth-laaa Morror fell in love and now it's doing a campaign about OUTLAW MORROR-HUMAN MARRIAGE SHAM.

There are also robots and AIs whose level of sapience is somewhat ambiguous (i.e. they're generally treated as property but they seem about as intelligent as humans and the kids befriend a couple of them), at least some of whom are seen as genderless and called "it".

The sequel, Space Hostages, doesn't reveal anything more about the Morror sexes, but it does introduce another alien species that's apparently born neuter and gets to choose its sex. Non-gendered members of this species are also called "they".

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"Grownups" by Ian R. MacLeod

A story set in an alternate world where humans have three sexes. All children are born as girls or boys, and go through normal female or male puberty; but around age 15 most of them will suddenly "grow up" through a process in which "the male's testicles and scrotal sac contracted back inside the body, hauled up on some fleshy block and tackle [...] the female's ovaries made their peristaltic voyage along the fallopian tubes to nestle down in the useless womb, close to the equally useless cervix". A minority of children (female and male) will instead undergo gradual metamorphosis into the third gender, "uncles". Uncles apparently look more or less like adult men but have large bellies and breasts. They carry the babies conceived through three-way intercourse with a woman and a man, and give birth through openings that form in their bellies.

Who becomes an uncle is apparently determined by "complicated hormonal triggers". The uncles are called "he" and seem to all have masculine names; it's suggested that a female character who starts becoming an uncle at the end of the story will have to change her name and move to another town.

A marriage requires one person of each gender, but because there are fewer uncles than there are women or men an uncle can take part in multiple marriages. Typically he'll live in a separate house by himself, where the men he's married to will come over to look after the house and generally cater to his needs. There's apparently no incest taboo applied to uncles: an uncle marrying a person he'd given birth to is seen as cementing his tie to the family and generally a positive thing (this leads me to think -- though it's not stated -- that the uncles don't contribute genetically to the offspring at all).

All this is supposed to come across as somewhat creepy, since the story is really about evoking the fear children have of "growing up" and becoming someone different. At the end of the story the protagonist (now an adult man) realizes that he hasn't actually changed and that growing up is "just part of the process of living", and presumably this is true for the uncles as well.