What word would you use to refer to trans or nonbinary person in a pre modern setting

I’m not one of those type that think a game is some how is historically inaccurate because of the presence of queer people. I know that they always had existed is just that the term hadn’t been invented yet. And that is the key term for me “hadn’t been invented yet”
I liked that I was able as an enby in Baldur’s Gate 3 but the term nonbinary itself felt very out of place for me in a quasi medieval setting. Other people’s opinions are going to be different and I fully admit to this being a me thing
But I just want to ask other people’s thought on this

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The modern western terms hadn’t been invented yet. There are plenty of other communities who did have words for them. Think of the Indigenous Americans, several people from the Pacific Islands, and likely a lot of others where the knowledge has been lost to time. Go do some digging there.

Looking at Norse mythology the deity Loki would probably be described as some form of trans/non-binary/gender fluid today since he gave birth to at least one his children. I can imagine they might have had a term for it. We just don’t know what it was.

When in doubt, you could always refer to a person by their name rather than pronouns, and just not stick a gender label to them in the context of the game.

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Language is also maluable. Māori is a good example of this, as the word Takatāpui has effectively become a term these days to mean something along the lines of LGBTQIA, to the point that places here actually use LGBTTQIA to include it.

I’m also one of those kinds of people who kinda doesn’t mind being a bit anachronistic with terms in a story sense. Primarily as whilst yes, not being anachronistic with terms can help set the scene a lot more in the historic part that something is trying to play, at the same time, it seriously can be a limiting factor purely based on what we know at the current time.

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If you’re writing high fantasy or other speculative fiction, even if it’s kind of based on medieval Europe or whatever, gender attitudes should be given careful thought as part of your worldbuilding. Don’t just plop modern values and terminology into a quasi-historical setting and call it a day. Make it feel organic to your world. A good way to start might be to research how different societies around the world and throughout history have approached gender

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There are a couple of Ancient Greek mythology/fantasy books with trans women protagonists that I liked a lot for many reasons, including how they talked about gender: Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane and The Scales of Seduction by Rien Gray. Do check content notes for both, as they won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I really liked how they made it very clear what was going on with the protagonists’, and other characters’, genders without using 21st-century terminology.

In that regard I also enjoyed The Companion by EE Ottoman (a cosy trans romance set in upstate New York in the late 19th century), The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo (a trans horror and romance In 1920s Appalachia) and the Out of True series by Rien Gray which (a fantasy world with an Arthurian feel).

I don’t particularly mind anachronism when it’s a setting that isn’t the real world. It’s not eyebrow-raising to me to see the word “trans” or even “nonbinary” in a fantasy world with pre-20th-century trappings especially if characters use a fairly modern register in speech. Historically-flavoured fantasy settings will almost always be anachronistic in other ways too anyway - that’s part of the fun of writing in them. (I also don’t remember whether the term “nonbinary” is used in the BG3 game beyond the character screen)

There is a book called Before We Were Trans that may be of interest - I’ve read a bit of it and found it good. It is interesting separating out how trans people have referred to themselves vs how cis people refer to them. It’s also a good idea to think about how the individual characters (cis and trans alike) think about gender. Some might think of themselves as a completely different gender to male/female, some as part of male or female, or a combination of both or more.

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I also recommend Before We Were Trans because it’s great and will put you in the context of when certain terms came into widespread use.
Writing Fantasy and Scifi is really about doing whatever you want and exploring whatever you like, you can have sky cities with upside-down infrastructure, or you can just have modern setting+.
I think you correct in wanting to avoid popular modern terms if you are not writing in a modern setting because certain ideas and phrases might be popular now but who knows how trends, language and ideas develop and change in a decade or two? Maybe someday ‘nonbinary’ will seem too clinical for us, just like homosexual is falling out of use.
Recently I came across ‘Achillean’ which is the masculine equivalent of ‘Sapphic’ which I think is very neat and poetic and it might become more popular in the future. My point is: imagination! It’s okay.
Language changes, it’s the ideas and people that you should focus on. If you get that right people will still relate to them many years later.

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I thought Chronicon Apocalyptica handled this very cleverly. No matter your gender, you lived and worked at an Abbey / University on academic projects. You could be known as a monk, a nun, or a scribe.

Describing characters by their job / station / condition (like apprentice, orphan, youth, brigand, clerk, page) seems like an elegant and even more historically accurate system of reference than modern English terms. For much of European history, kids were put to work at a pretty early age, and class / station mattered a lot in first impressions. Not to mention that so many children died before they reached adulthood, adults were less likely to invest as much attention on young peoples’ identities as we might today.

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Nonbinary is an already vague term that could refer to anything and everything. Just describe what your character feels and the reader may or may not interpret that with the modern concept of nonbinary.

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The answer to your question is simple——It depends of the culture, and the time period. Native Americans referred to non-binary people as ‘Two-Spirited’—both the masculine and feminine aspects existing simultaneously in a single vessel. The Norse has the worg ‘argr’, which literally meant ‘un-manly’. It was considered a grave insult for a male to be called such, but I think it was also used to refer to trans and non-binary people as well. In South-Asia, in Islamic culture and on the Indian subcontinent, ‘Hijra’ is an umbrella term that’s still used today, used to refer to eunuchs, transgender, and non-binary people—essentially anyone who was born with male genitalia who after growing up chose an effiminate identity.

These are only the few examples that I know of, but I’m sure that you could find more if you wanted, that corresponded to the culture on which you are writing your story. Or heck, you could just make up your own word of it’s an original fantasy story. For example, in Old English the word ‘Man’ did not mean male, but instead referred to ‘Human’ or ‘Humanity’ as a whole. The gendered terms were not man and woman, but instead was, ‘Wereman’ and ‘Wifman’——where Were refers to male, and Wif refers to female. So in your setting a trans transition from a man to a woman could be called a ‘Were-wif’ and the opposite could be called a ‘Wif-were’. Not my greatest piece of writing, but it’s just an idea to give you an example that you could make your own terms, as long as it makes sense in the setting of your world!

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Point of clarification: “Two-Spirit” is not a traditional term.

Native Americans weren’t (and still aren’t) a monolith, and each society developed its own concept of gender. Some were every bit as binary and limiting as the Western mainstream ever was. Some recognized three, or even four, genders.

“Two-Spirit” was coined in 1990 as a collective term recognizing that many Natives had gender identities within their own cultures that didn’t translate neatly into the expectations of the dominant culture around them.

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I’m no expert but I’d add that hijra is a very culturally-specific term so I would not advise using it in a game (especially outside the contexts in which it’s used in the real world, eg a fantasy setting) without a lot of research and care.

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No, no, Hijra is a bad idea as it’s considered a derogatory word. It is usually taken to mean someone who was assigned male at birth (or sometimes with intersex traits) and who has undergone a complete removal of their genitalia (not just regular castration, but the removal of the penis as well … which I would liken to gender nullification?) So it won’t really include enbies and trans men.

The community itself doesn’t seem to mind the term as much, but they live in a zone where they are constantly demeaned and treated with contempt and derogation (another thing we can thank colonialism for, but I digress) and have learned to own it.

In the Ramayana, I believe the word used was kinnar, although this again had amab connotations, and I still wouldn’t use the term now. In the Kama Sutra, the term used is tritiya prakriti (translated literally from Sanskrit/Hindi, it would mean ‘third nature’). I like tritiya prakriti, personally! It seems more neutral. It also feels like it creates space for trans folks who were assigned female at birth, since they have traditionally been overlooked in India. Sadly, only persons who were ascribed maleness have had the agency to reject the gender they were assigned and do something else with their lives. It’s still the case in many places. Bigger cities offer women and afab people more agency, but that’s not the case everywhere.

@decader123_yenvo have you played The Ghost and the Golem yet? The author - Benjamin Rosenbaum - has done a lot of historical research, and has gone with the word tumtum to describe trans people, but that I’m guessing is a term specific to Judaism? (Edit: Aha, found his username on this forum! It’s @plausible.fabulist)

@HarrisPS of course has written trans characters with aplomb…without really giving them a label, right Harris? There’ll be sentences like ‘When I last saw them, they used to be known as a woman.’ Or someone’s daughter will say, ‘Just because my father realised he was not a girl around this age…’ I would recommend everyone read Honor Bound for this reason too (of course, there are a million other reasons why we should play the book, heh).

I guess it would be okay if we didn’t have specific terms for specific things. You just have to get the sentiment across.

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Clarification: “Tumtum” is a term found in Rabbinic literature to refer to an individual whose sex cannot be determined by the ordinary process of observation. In The Ghost and the Golem, it is used for a PC with an intersex condition. There’s no particular word used for a trans or nonbinary character, just a description of them having a soul that doesn’t match what the community expects based on the body they have.

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Thank you! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: I do a mixture in Honor Bound - initially it was almost all as you mention, and then I sprinkled the word “trans” through a bit more. I don’t use the word “nonbinary”, though, mostly because it felt a bit more modern than I wanted to evoke (though “trans” is also anachronistic for the historical-ish flavour too; I just wanted clarity for modern readers). Either way though, people do talk about it!

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In description, you can describe the character sufficiently to convey what you really wish to get across about without worrying about labels at all. In dialogue, it’s much more difficult from a political correctness perspective, as most of the time, how the character is refered to should, from a setting perspective, be based on the speaking character, their attitudes, and vocabulary—and thus, the culture and time period governing those attitudes. Most of which, aren’t going to be very flattering.

Personally, I think that sort of historical honesty could really enhance the plot if it were the focus of the story and enhance the setting otherwise—however it might damage the environment CoG tries to foster. In the context of CoG, it’s likely better to ignore the setting in favor of maximizing inclusive phrasing.

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