Ungendered or ambiguously gendered characters

NOTE: Some of the explanations below contain spoilers.

• June Arnold . The Cook and the Carpenter

• L. Frank Baum.* The Land of Oz

    The young boy Tip is eventually revealed to be the Princess Ozma.

• L. Frank Baum. The Enchanted Island of Yew
• Marion Zimmer Bradley. Darkover

    Despite its inclusion in this list, Darkover is not generally known for its ungendered characters; it does feature homosexual characters, and also celibacy as a path to magical power

• Emma Bull. ''Bone Dance''.

    Sparrow, the protagonist of Bone Dance appears to be a character whose gender the author is deliberately not revealing, but in fact Sparrow is something very different.

• Sarah Caudwell. ''Thus was Adonis Murdered'', ''The Shortest Way to Hades'', ''The Sirens Sang of Murder'' and ''The Sibyl in Her Grave''.

• Candas Dorsey. ''Machine Sex and Other Stories''
• Candas Dorsey. ''Dark Earth Dreams'' (discbook).
• L. Timmel Duchamp . "Welcome, Kid, to the Real World" in ''Tales of the Unanticipated'' Spring / Summer / Fall 1996

• Greg Egan. ''Distress''
• Kelly Eskridge. "And Salome Danced." (Little Deaths, edited by Ellen Datlow; Best Lesbian Erotica, edited by Tristan Taormino; ''Flying Cups and Saucers'', edited by Debbie Notkin and Secret Feminist Cabal, The

• Mary Gentle. ''Golden Witchbreed''.

• Phyllis Ann Karr ''At Amberleaf Fair''

• Ursula K. Le Guin. ''The Left Hand of Darkness''
• Ursula K. Le Guin. "Coming of Age in Karhide," in New Legends edited by Greg Bear
• Ursula K. Le Guin. "Winter's King," in The Wind's Twelve Quarters and elsewhere.

     On Karhide, all inhabitants are ungendered, except when in ''kemmer'', a pre-reproductive state which occurs in adults approximately one week every month. Adults may become male or female in any particular kemmer. If an adult in kemmer as a female becomes pregnant, she remains female long enough to bear and nurse the baby, and then returns to the natural ungendered state.

• Walt Leibscher. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Love?" in Strange Bedfellows edited by Thomas N. Scortia

• Laurie J. Marks . ''Delan the Mislaid''
• Laurie Marks. ''The Moonbane Mage''
• Laurie Marks. ''Ara's Field''
• Vonda N. McIntyre. ''Dreamsnake''.

    The character of Merideth is never given a gender identification.

• Judith Moffet . ''Time Like an Ever-Rolling Stream''

• Melissa Scott. ''The Kindly Ones''
• Nancy Springer. ''Larque on the Wing''

    The protagonist switches gender early in this James Tiptree Award--winning novel.

• Theodore Sturgeon. ''Venus Plus X''.

    A planet in which people have no gender.

• Caitlin Sullivan and Kate Bornstein. ''Nearly Roadkill''

• Élisabeth Vonarburg. ''Silent City''.
• Élisabeth Vonarburg. "In the Pit," in Tesseracts 2, edited by Phylis M. Gotlieb and Douglas Barbour
• Élisabeth Vonarburg. "Bande Ohne Ende," in Tomorrow, 1/94, #3

• Jeanette Winterson. ''Written on the Body''

• Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. "Allies," in Cautionary Tales

    All characters have gender-ambiguous names (like "Chris" and "Sandy") and none has an identified gender.

Credits

List originally compiled by Laurie J. Marks as "Gender Ambiguity: A Seriously Incomplete Bibliography of Fiction in Which Gender Is Eliminated or Ambiguous" (1997 May 22) available at the feministsf.org website at http://feministsf.org/bibs/ambiggen.html