I am just a random person who was browsing this wiki when I noticed that the way articles deal with species and sex/gender is backwards, to the point of being potentially offensive. The terms "male" and "female", when referring to human beings, are adjectives; "human" is a noun that refers to the species of human beings. So, when I read, for example, "Dedra Meero was a human female" -- this is wrong, and stupid. It should be "Dedra Meero was a female human" because "female" is the adjective, referring to her sex/gender (sex and gender are not interchangeable, but for the sake of simplicity, I'm treating them as such here), that modifies the noun "human". Cassian Andor wasn't a human male, he was a male human. (By the way, the use of past tense in these kinds of statements is also dumb and awkward.) Treating these binary sex/gender adjectives as nouns while treating "human" as an adjective means you leave no room for non-binary human beings to be written about here. What would you write in this case? "[Character] was a human non-binary" doesn't make any sense. "[Character] was a non-binary human", on the other hand, makes perfect sense. If you don't want this resource and its administrators to be viewed either as ignorant (best case) or bigoted (worst case), you should probably get on the right side of the grammar rules here.—Unsigned comment by 71.200.163.167 (talk • contribs)
- I personally can't respond to this right now, but I've taken the liberty of moving it to the Senate Hall, which is a better forum for this discussion. JediMasterMacaroni(Talk) 06:50, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
- Hello! We appreciate the insight. Either way is grammatically correct, and you can use either the sex or the species as the adjective or the noun. We tend to prefer the "species-then-sex" approach, as it's the most common in the source material, but there would be nothing wrong with saying, "non-binary human" either. That is perfectly acceptable and would be how we would identify a non-binary member of the human species. We actually already have instances of this with Ceret and Terec as trans non-binary members of the Kotabi species. As for the past tense, Star Wars is set "a long time ago," so everything is recorded here in the past tense to honor that setting. You can read about that here. Hope this helps explain our reasoning and process! MasterFred
(talk) (he/him) 06:53, 1 December 2022 (UTC) - While I personally dislike the sentence structure of "species gender," the reason so many articles do it that way is because older Legends sources often put it in that order. (Talking about a "human female" always makes me think of the Ferengi!) Please don't assume ignorance or bigotry based on this. Star Wars is strange about treating gender as a noun, but when we write on Wookieepedia about non-binary individuals, we phrase it depending on the information available to describe them. For instance, "Kantam Sy was a non-binary human Jedi Master" (name + gender + species + profession), "Lapin was a non-binary human who was part of the powerful family the House of Tagge" (name + gender + species + affiliation), "Kho Phon Farrus was a non-binary archaeologist" (name + gender + profession), "A non-binary agent of Black Sun" (gender + profession/affiliation). I suggest visiting other articles in the non-binary individuals category for further examples, as well as genderless individuals and trans individuals. Immi Thrax
(she/her) 06:56, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
- Star Wars is not "strange about treating gender as a noun"—this is a widespread grammatical practice. Any reputable dictionary shows female and male as both adjective and noun. Asithol (talk) 01:02, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
- Be that as it may, it's certainly not the norm to refer to real people in the noun sense as "males" and "females," unless it's specifically as "woman," "man," etc and not just their gender. Using male, female, or any other gender as the noun is only the norm HERE because Star Wars does it, not because people are talking like that all the time in real life, grammatically correct or not. That being said, I would not be opposed to swapping gender for species or occupation as the main noun used to refer to subjects; a source may word something a certain way but referring to it in a less awkward way doesn't contradict canon. - Thannus (DFaceG) (he/him) (talk) 19:12, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
- True, people don't generally use those terms as nouns in casual conversation. But it's more common in formal writing, which Wookieepedia strives to use. I don't strongly care what policy Wookieepedia chooses for these terms, but the idea that their use as nouns is peculiar to published Star Wars writing is counterfactual. Asithol (talk) 15:51, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
- Be that as it may, it's certainly not the norm to refer to real people in the noun sense as "males" and "females," unless it's specifically as "woman," "man," etc and not just their gender. Using male, female, or any other gender as the noun is only the norm HERE because Star Wars does it, not because people are talking like that all the time in real life, grammatically correct or not. That being said, I would not be opposed to swapping gender for species or occupation as the main noun used to refer to subjects; a source may word something a certain way but referring to it in a less awkward way doesn't contradict canon. - Thannus (DFaceG) (he/him) (talk) 19:12, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
- Star Wars is not "strange about treating gender as a noun"—this is a widespread grammatical practice. Any reputable dictionary shows female and male as both adjective and noun. Asithol (talk) 01:02, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
