I suppose this is all my fault, as these characters live in my head

[ultranos]

Alex is currently stymieing all efforts to write them. Actually, this is rather unfair to Alexander. Alexander will calmly point out, as many times is necessary, that Alex is Alex, and doesn't actually give a whit what pronoun is used. It's actually my problem. I guess we could say that Alexander is genderqueer. (Alex's backstory, as described in "Taming Fenrir" is that they were born female-sexed, raised as male, and due to genetic-engineering fuckery, required a metric fuckton (ask any scientist; this is totally a valid unit of measurement) of treatments, some of which included male hormones, as a child/teen to not die. This is also sci-fi, so work with me here. Alex's public identity is as a man. In private, she'll use male or female pronouns pretty much as he feels like.)

I'm mostly trying to figure out how to write them so as not to horribly offend anyone. Any suggestions? (This is locked down so that, if I did fuck up in the above, I trust you guys to take me to task for it. The last thing I want to do is hurt anyone.)

On a less relevant note, it's incredibly satisfying to be able to fire up Universe Sandbox and figure out reasonable-sounding interstellar travel and neatly side-step Scifi Writers Have No Sense of Scale.