Re: unconventional gender depiction in media, and how language and media affects thinking
By coincidence, I spent a long time reading various sci-fi books consecutively which each had nonstandard approaches to gender. One book series (Ancillary Justice) used she/her pronouns for all characters because the protagonist's culture did not have the social concept of gender, and in-story the protagonist mentions the choice of using female pronouns when translating the story into English. In many Greg Egan books, most of the characters are uploaded human minds or AIs which exist independently of any specific body or avatar, so traditional gender norms don't necessarily apply. In some Greg Egan books, the protagonist and some characters were agendered and used unconventional pronouns such as ve/ver/vis. In another Greg Egan book, none of the characters had gender, and male and female pronouns were used seemingly randomly and often changed for individual characters in text and dialog (I assume there may have been some grammatical, social, or situational pattern or intention to it).
These books each had interesting worlds that captivated me (for non-gender-related reasons). I often visualized scenes in my head and day-dreamed about the possibilities with the stories' technologies and characters. I quickly noticed that my mind usually wanted to use the characters' genders as the first step in picturing how a scene would look and play out. These books rarely answered the question of characters' genders (at least not in a way that matched up to my cultural expectations), so I had to break that habit in order to really get into the stories. I had to really think about the dynamics between the characters in order to imagine the books' scenes instead of doing my usual pattern-matching of scenes against preconceptions of how male and female characters interacted.
I think this shift in thinking stuck with me. The "male" and "female" buckets in my mind became much less defined. I think I truly internalized that those mental buckets are just shortcuts that we over-rely on. It became increasingly obvious to me that neither gender had an exclusive claim to any quality that I previously considered gendered, including qualities that I was attracted to. Long story short, I'm now in a same-sex relationship and identify as bisexual. It didn't occur to me as a possibility before these books. I know some people will read this and decide this all must mean that I was always wired up to be bisexual and in denial until now, but I don't think it's that. I believe the mind is much more plastic and malleable than most people think, but our culture rarely gives the opportunities to put this plasticity to use.
I would really like to see some more research done on Whorfian effects of gendered language. It certainly seems plausible that a language that forces speakers to remember and pay attention to every person's gender will affect how its speakers think, and there are plenty of languages that don't do that, for comparison, so perhaps there are some interesting experiments that could be done.
By coincidence, I spent a long time reading various sci-fi books consecutively which each had nonstandard approaches to gender. One book series (Ancillary Justice) used she/her pronouns for all characters because the protagonist's culture did not have the social concept of gender, and in-story the protagonist mentions the choice of using female pronouns when translating the story into English. In many Greg Egan books, most of the characters are uploaded human minds or AIs which exist independently of any specific body or avatar, so traditional gender norms don't necessarily apply. In some Greg Egan books, the protagonist and some characters were agendered and used unconventional pronouns such as ve/ver/vis. In another Greg Egan book, none of the characters had gender, and male and female pronouns were used seemingly randomly and often changed for individual characters in text and dialog (I assume there may have been some grammatical, social, or situational pattern or intention to it).
These books each had interesting worlds that captivated me (for non-gender-related reasons). I often visualized scenes in my head and day-dreamed about the possibilities with the stories' technologies and characters. I quickly noticed that my mind usually wanted to use the characters' genders as the first step in picturing how a scene would look and play out. These books rarely answered the question of characters' genders (at least not in a way that matched up to my cultural expectations), so I had to break that habit in order to really get into the stories. I had to really think about the dynamics between the characters in order to imagine the books' scenes instead of doing my usual pattern-matching of scenes against preconceptions of how male and female characters interacted.
I think this shift in thinking stuck with me. The "male" and "female" buckets in my mind became much less defined. I think I truly internalized that those mental buckets are just shortcuts that we over-rely on. It became increasingly obvious to me that neither gender had an exclusive claim to any quality that I previously considered gendered, including qualities that I was attracted to. Long story short, I'm now in a same-sex relationship and identify as bisexual. It didn't occur to me as a possibility before these books. I know some people will read this and decide this all must mean that I was always wired up to be bisexual and in denial until now, but I don't think it's that. I believe the mind is much more plastic and malleable than most people think, but our culture rarely gives the opportunities to put this plasticity to use.