Speculative Fiction as a Genderfluid Medium
Content notes:
Spoilers for “We Who Have Been Raised by Tigers,” An Unkindness of Ghosts, and “Dead Dog Mans the Lighthouse”
Discussions of abuse, colonization, queerphobia, misogyny, and racism
Brief mentions of slavery, suicide, self-harm
Most fiction written in English takes a hegemonic perspective; that is to say, cishet,[1] male,[2] white,[3] and abled.[4] This may partially reflect demographic trends in the book industry,[5] but even when accounting for the identity of the writer, there is a litany of works for which the marginalized writer takes the perspective of a less marginalized individual. James Baldwin comes to mind, such as when he writes from the perspective of a white man in his first major queer publication Giovanni’s Room. Oscar Wilde has his fair share of heterosexual characters, as do other queer writers such as Louisa May Alcott and Virginia Woolf. Historically, queerness frequently had to be rendered in subtext to evade censorship or rebuke. Despite constraints, however, many writers found means, speculative and otherwise, to explore the complexity of gender and sexuality, often to transcendent effect. In this vein, I will be discussing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and how their speculative natures allow the reader to inhabit different worldviews of gender with their culture-borne defenses considerably lowered. I will further discuss the works of contemporary writers, primarily “We Who Have Been Raised by Tigers” by P.V. Vamsidhar, An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, and “Dead Dog Mans the Lighthouse” by Max Franciscovich. In these works, the authors implement speculative elements and perspectives to explore how abuses of power, such as colonialism and coercive control, inform and are challenged by gender-expansive perspectives and experiences.
Orlando and The Left Hand of Darkness: speculative vessels for the genderqueer
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando[6] follows the story of its eponymous protagonist, who begins as a young man in the Elizabeth era before transitioning through the centuries, and across sex and gender, to become a woman in the year 1928. The dreamlike fluidity of Woolf’s writing smooths transitions between time periods and genders, although at times Orlando is jarred by an awareness of their gender and place in time. As Woolf writes, “Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us.”[7]
Moments of awareness notwithstanding, there is an internal logic, consistent with dreamlike consciousness, that keeps the reader in a sort of trance, a lulling suspension of disbelief that allows one to easefully lapse from one century, and one gender, to another. To try and make Orlando’s transition too concrete would make for an entirely different story, and one that would likely not be so well received in Woolf’s time. The queerness of the story is inherited by the dreamlike qualities of it, and by its humor. In contrast, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness,[8] another piece of classic lesbian literature released around the same time, does not mask its queer characters, nor its righteous indignation at injustices perpetrated against them, behind comical disguises and surrealism, and this may have in part contributed to its vastly different reception, resulting in its banning and the author being tried for obscenity.[9] Woolf implements a sleight of hand that allows her work’s genderqueerness to escape censorship. This is comparable to Alfred Hitchcock escaping Hollywood censorship when directing Psycho. However, where Hitchcock used the suggestion of violence and sexuality, rather than their outright depiction, to evade the censors,[10] Woolf employs the slippery nature of the world she has created to skirt around censorship. In this world, everything is beautiful and amorous while evading categorization to some degree. (Take, for example, the Russian Princess Sasha, who mesmerizes Orlando even while Orlando initially struggles to discern her gender based on her appearance.) This lack of categorization is fundamental to queerness. Orlando’s accompanying rapture seems, then, a celebration of queerness. Accordingly, so too is Orlando’s devastation, as, in Woolf’s words, “nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.”[11]
By nestling queerness within dreaminess, Woolf’s writing seems considerably less risky than Hall’s. How can it be taboo to change gender if the world we occupy is a dream? This is an unassuming approach, perhaps, but it allows readers to occupy and experience queerness while their pre-existing notions are briefly set aside. Ursula K. Le Guin also eases us into a queer world by taking the perspective of a cis, binary man negotiating with and observing genderfluid aliens in The Left Hand of Darkness.[12] The genderfluidity of The Left Hand of Darkness is relatively overt, as it is in Orlando, yet the reader absorbs it, particularly in the beginning, with the distance of an ethnographer and diplomat. The Left Hand of Darkness is unique in that its primary perspective is not genderqueer, yet it is the vantage point of someone immersed in a world of gender unlike his own. So, while the non-queer or unknowingly queer reader may feel somewhat at home in the primary perspective, they may still experience the discomfort of being a displaced stranger. And yet, alien gender is not as taboo as human genderqueerness. In this way, alienness operates as a vehicle through which queerness can enter public consciousness, as it did when Le Guin’s novel was released in 1969, several decades before the term genderfluid became more widely regarded as a queer identity.[13]
Like Orlando, The Left Hand of Darkness excels at making the familiar strange, but where in Orlando, the familiar is made strange by moments of awareness of one’s context, in The Left Hand of Darkness, what is strange and what is familiar comes down to cultural differences. We see this by the main character Genly Ai’s suspicion and revulsion toward the genderfluid Gethenians, an aversion the Gethenians reciprocate with their own sets of biases. They see him and others who are binary and static in their sex and gender as perverted, permanently occupying a state of “kemmer,” which is to say, differentiated into male or female and thereby able to have sex and procreate. Neither of these inclinations—toward reviling a fixed, binary gender or a fluid one—is more correct than the other (though perhaps we are more predisposed to sympathize with our primary narrator and everyman, Genly); rather, they are merely different worldviews, and the truth of them is based on context alone. Genly’s eventual insight and subsequent ability to at least partially understand the Gethenians, particularly his friend Estraven, comes from his displacement into a new context. Similarly, Orlando’s displacement allows them to, in moments of insight, bear witness to the exposed nature of belief and being. Speculative fiction is a uniquely powerful vessel for this purpose—for alienating us, as readers, from ourselves and familiarizing ourselves with the other. Whether through alien genders or slippery narration, it induces insight in a way not fully accessible by the literal. And in doing so, it destabilizes what is by default considered to be true.
Of course, The Left Hand of Darkness and Orlando only capture certain elements of gender, and though they do so skillfully, I would be remiss not to address their firmly Western perspectives. Racism mars the pages of Orlando from the opening sentence, which depicts Orlando sword fighting with the decapitated head of an African man, which is thereby made a prop rather than a body part. Subsequent depictions of Black people in Orlando, at their most generous, are of them as background, not beings with agency and depth. And although the perspective character in The Left Hand of Darkness is a dark-skinned man, he seems to come from a post-racial society in which race does not seem to have much bearing on his social status or perceptions of gender. So, to address the complex interplay between gender, racism, and colonialism, we must turn to other works.
The decolonized past and future in “We Who Have Been Raised by Tigers” and An Unkindness of Ghosts
In “We Who Have Been Raised by Tigers”[14] by P.V. Vamsidhar, the main character, an Indian man called Peril, receives an implant that enables him to access memories from a past life. The narrative weaves together two of Peril’s incarnations: their current one as an assigned male in a late capitalist society resembling our own, and their past life as a woman, a tiger princess in ancient South Asia. The character reckons with their yearning for the femininity and freedom of their past while still experiencing the gendered pressures of their present-day incarnation. The growing pains of learning new ways of being are palpable, and the use of second-person perspective calls on us to more immediately exist in this space and to sit with the discomfort that the protagonist experiences as they (we) remember bygone, yet novel, ways of being.
In the context of living multiple lives, Orlando’s fluidity of consciousness operates similarly. In a sense, Orlando lives another life after becoming a woman, with all the memories of her past life as a man, and this living of multiple lives imparts an androgynous wisdom not necessarily accessible to others. Instead of a past life being a more concrete construct, however, as in “We Who Have Been Raised by Tigers,” Orlando’s consciousness flows seamlessly from one incarnation to the next. There is no dysphoria, no amnesiac boundary to be crossed, no hard-won resolution of the current and past state, as Peril experiences. There is a dramatic, yet somehow anticlimactic, transition; a moment in which the narrator must ease us into the use of a different set of pronouns, and a back and forth of Orlando’s androgynous mind until she settles into her womanhood. Initially, she is not much fazed by her sex until she encounters other people’s (primarily men’s) expectations surrounding it. Her memories of her past life are fuzzy but not gone, and while she reflects differently on her past—sympathizing and rhapsodizing about a previous lover, Princess Sasha, in novel ways associated with her own womanhood—she does not seem to long for the past in the way Peril does. For the most part, Orlando merely accepts the transition from one gender to the other, as from one era to another, the way one accepts a change of scenery in a dream.
The central speculative element of “We Who Have Been Raised by Tigers” is a technological means of overcoming the limitations of one’s consciousness (accessing forgotten past lives), resulting in a transfeminine person recalling what their life was and could be, cracking their egg, so to speak. In Orlando, this limitation does not exist; it is not something to be overcome. Rather, Orlando’s speculative nature facilitates the overcoming of social stigma surrounding genderqueerness by leaning into the vagaries of consciousness and time. But while Orlando follows a person dramatically unrooted from static gender and temporal culture, “We Who Have Been Raised by Tigers” follows someone who is further dissociated from geographic culture. Here, the speculative element operates not only as a means of accessing differently gendered experiences but also different cultural ways of being and existing with nature, an inclusion which further elaborates on the experience of gender.
In “We Who Have Been Raised by Tigers,” there is considerable contrast between Peril’s current life of modern masculinity—sectioned off in cubicles and the slots of spreadsheets—and their past life of femininity—untamed, tangled in the fur of tigers, lush like wilderness. In the current incarnation, you (Peril) have a “treadmill desk by the window,” a simulation of forward motion, whereas in your past life, you rode a tiger. “The wind bit your cheeks and the world blurred around you and you whooped and held on when that lithe body beneath you broke into a run.”[15] The past is closer to nature, and this characterization echoes a Romantic desire to reject barreling into a futurity that is dissociated from nature. Femininity, too, has often been poetically entangled with the natural world: the ocean, the moon, the fox. Femininity is adornment, as well. It is eyeliner applied, before Peril swipes it away with shame; it is Peril’s fantasy of twirling in a skirt. By contrast, modern masculinity is utilitarian, corporate, or militaristic, with little in between, at least in the Western mainstream.
So too has femininity been associated with proclaimed foreign-borne excesses, invasion, and the subsequent downfall of Western culture (whatever that nebulous entity is).[16] That nature is paired with femininity, masculinity with modernity, also echoes these anxieties. Nature is unwieldy, frequently evading neat categorization. With it comes uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes fear. Uncertainty, of course, is a matter of vantage point. It is the hegemonic masculine that fears the feminine. Within this context, it makes sense how Vamsidhar treats these distinctions: the colonized body with masculinity imposed upon it versus the body that is closer to nature and can more freely embody the feminine, masculine, and all else, rather than having restrictive notions of gender imposed upon it. Vamsidhar utilizes the speculative element to capture, not only gender, but diasporic ancestral memory, which is inextricable from gender and the forces that have colonized it. By accessing the past, the character can reclaim what was lost: different ways of being that are deeply feminine and wild, untethered from the strictures of modern life.
An Unkindness of Ghosts[17] by Rivers Solomon, which takes place on a dystopic generation ship, also engages with the subject of colonized gender by joining gendered categories with other elements—namely, caste and racialized features. The lower castes on the ship consist of enslaved, dark-skinned, intersex people, mirroring how white people have historically characterized Black people as falling outside of Western categories of woman[18] and man[19], a portrayal that has been used to deny their humanity (and by extension, the humanity of any queer or gender nonconforming person). The novel’s protagonist, Aster, is dark-skinned, queer, neurodivergent, and characterized as monstrous by the light-skinned, binary-gendered members of the upper castes.
Unlike The Left Hand of Darkness, which treats genderqueerness as a feature of alienness, the queerness of Solomon’s characters is inextricable from their humanness. We are not eased or lulled into their queerness, as we are in Le Guin’s or Woolf’s novels; rather, we inhabit their queerness fully, from the beginning, and are faced with the ways in which this queerness, as well as other aspects of their humanity, are used as pretexts for their mistreatment. In this way, An Unkindness of Ghosts doesn’t shy away from the bleakness of slavery and colonization. And yet, fundamentally, it is a narrative of decolonization—its characters pursue gender-affirming care despite binary, normative gender being associated with power; its abused characters are shown to have complex inner worlds; and characters persist in subverting despotic authority, caring for their communities, and exacting self-determination. Aster’s role as a scientist is also decolonized, removed from an establishment that would grant it authority yet invaluable to her community’s healing and self-sufficiency.
With her methodical mind, Aster researches her late mother’s past, asserting the significance of her ancestral memory. Ultimately, Aster discovers that her mother had redirected the generation ship from its interstellar trajectory, causing it to travel back toward Earth. In the final scene, Aster touches Earth’s soil and buries her loved ones beneath it, reconnecting with humanity’s roots and with the land from which she and her fellow people were forcibly dissociated. In this way, as in “We Who Have Been Raised by Tigers,” the past is brought into modernity, and a vision of liberation is brought to the surface
“Dead Dog Mans the Lighthouse” and the nonhuman animal perspective
Having had hegemonic perspectives forced upon us, perhaps marginalized people are well equipped to fluidly traverse categories of gender and other imposed classes. Speculative fiction is unique in its ability to venture, too, into the nonhuman perspective. Take, for example, “Dead Dog Mans the Lighthouse”[20] by Max Franciscovich, which follows the story of a dead dog, called “Dog” or “The Dog,” resurrected into a human body by Marvelie, their oppressive caretaker who seeks to isolate and control them.
Despite their new, human form, The Dog maintains a certain dog-like essence that is vital to their perspective. This perspective organically affects the narrative, from The Dog’s near-undying fidelity to their keeper, regardless of mistreatment, to their repressed desire to chase seagulls. Beyond narrative influences, The Dog’s perspective also affects the prose, consisting of many artfully simplistic run-ons that track a guileless, excitable mind.
While there are limits to human language that prevent one from exactly capturing the experience of another type of animal (or, arguably, any experience), a certain ‘dogness’ pervades the voice of the narrative so convincingly, we as readers are compelled to believe we are in fact in the mind of a dog. To this effect, Franciscovich shows elegant restraint in not over-anthropomorphizing The Dog, despite the narrator’s human form. The Dog’s experience thereby parallels transness, as Marvelie insists The Dog is no longer a dog and The Dog internally asserts, “I think I am still a dog on the inside.”[21] The Dog, like many trans people who are pressured or forced to survive as a gender incongruent with their inner self, outwardly heeds their oppressor while quietly clinging to this truth and ultimately finding ways, some subtle and some brazen, to subvert their abuser.
Intriguingly, Franciscovich expressed to me that, when writing the first draft, he did not initially intend for the story to be allegorical to the trans experience; rather, he was focused on The Dog’s experience of an abusive relationship. To this I respond that, from the thematic ecology of abuse amid species transplantation, the trans experience organically emerged. Marvelie’s imposition of species upon The Dog is one of the ways Marvelie abuses, and one that mirrors the abuse of coercing or forcing someone to live as a gender incongruent with their inner world.
Paradoxically, while their experience maps onto the trans experience in many ways, The Dog is too concerned with the incongruence between their inner and outer species to even venture into the realm of gender. They never mention any gendered expectations, as these are not imposed upon them by Marvelie, who themself is nonbinary. Rather, they fixate on the confusion of adapting to a human body and the behavioral expectations associated with this new body.
The Dog’s gender, unlike its internal and external species, evades categorization. After all, what concept of gender does a dog have, if any? The omission of gendered rumination from “Dead Dog Mans the Lighthouse” suggests that The Dog, at least, does not possess a gendered mental schema. It is difficult to say if this is a feature of their disposition or of their species. In this vein, primatologist Frans de Waal observed that a significant proportion of non-human apes, such as chimpanzees and bonobos, exhibit behaviors that are incongruent with their outward sex,[22] but whether this neatly maps to human-like gender identity is uncertain. In the case of dogs, sex-typical behavior[23]doesn’t neatly map onto human sex-typical behavior, and sex may play less of a role in many behaviors than factors like age, size, and training.[24] (Similarly, within-group variation may exceed between-group variation when it comes to the behavior of human women and men.)[25]
Thus, datasets and natural observations may leave us less than satisfied in our understanding of nonhuman gender. So, while we may anthropomorphize animals with a human-like gender or view them instead as alienly gendered beings, altogether incomparable to humans, the truth is likely more complex than that. Yes, there are readily apparent differences between species, but the dichotomy between human and nonhuman, like that between female and male, woman and man, is contentious.[26] Like gender and sex, species is defined by a set of statistical averages.[27] Its mathematical essence is continuous, not discrete, which facilitates evolution. Beyond its adaptive survival potential, this fluidity is the playground of the speculative creator who deals in non-human or variously gendered perspectives. In this way, speculative art is a means of reclaiming complexity when it is systematically erased, when the continuum between species or between genders is denied to facilitate subjugation. The Cartesian dichotomy between mind and body, human and animal, was used to justify vivisection in Descartes’ time[28] and has contributed to the continued destruction of the natural world in favor of human consumption and ambition.[29] Notably, “Dead Dog Mans the Lighthouse” does not entirely dispense with categories; it maintains a certain level of distinction between human and dog. However, this distinction manifests as differences in experience rather than a means of erasing the value or inner world of another sentient being.
“Dead Dog Mans the Lighthouse,” while centering a nonhuman experience, captures fundamental aspects of the human condition. Among these is the self-versus-other and how the dissolution of this boundary, imposed through abuse, can leave us deeply vulnerable to harm. The story also captures the messiness of abuse and how it can resemble kindness, even to the abused. Marvelie inspects The Dog’s body to ensure they are healthy and comforts them during storms. (Never mind the clinical, invasive nature of these check-ups and the prolonged silences Marvelie subjects The Dog to.) The Dog obeys Marvelie completely and tries to proactively anticipate and respond to Marvelie’s desires to maintain the status quo—one in which Marvelie meets The Dog’s needs to some degree while The Dog exists in a constant state of self-monitoring and subjugation.
This experience, by which The Dog is abused by their owner, resembles that of an oppressed human. A queer person, if they abide by cisheteronormative standards, can more readily access acceptance and safety, at the expense of their full personhood, and their increased risk for suicide and self-harm[30] are viewed as features of their queerness rather than of their imposed self-abandonment. The colonizer, like Marvelie, may partially compensate for their extraction of labor and resources with modern medicine, some degree of comfort or wealth, and the illusion of safety. Basic needs may be bestowed upon colonized people, conditional upon behavior their colonizers deem acceptable (an often-shifting yet narrow set of goalposts). Underneath this dynamic rests the notion that freedom and autonomy are privileges and that to deny someone these privileges is not inherently abusive. This premise is a prerequisite to the “kind master” trope, which has been used to distort and minimize the United States’ history of the enslavement of Black people. A similar framework also underlies misogyny. The modern tradwife movement would have it that people assigned female at birth should marry men and depend on their husbands legally, financially, and socially, putting them at a greater risk of mistreatment. That a person is subject to another is a non-issue, provided the husband does not misuse his power, and if he does abuse his wife, then that is her fault for not submitting appropriately or for not choosing a man who will not harm her.
With all forms of oppression in which an individual is more or less physically safe or given some advantages, provided they play their role and hold their tongue, the underlying premise presides: you are worthy insofar as you serve your function, as an object of affection or pleasure, as something to be observed or dissected, as something to be extracted from and consumed. The onus is on the abused to modify their behavior to alleviate their own harm. In framing people who use their relative power to harm others as uniquely evil, one also denies human psychology, which shows us that ordinary people are predisposed to act abusively toward those who are, by default, beneath them.[31] Accordingly, Marvelie, when abusing The Dog, makes sure to draw attention to The Dog’s original species to imply that their mistreatment of The Dog is not a violation of rights. What rights, after all, does a dog have?
Speculative forms are adaptable, able to be inhabited by alien or non-human genders, as in The Left Hand of Darkness and “Dead Dog Mans the Lighthouse.” They further allow gender to be coupled with other abstract elements, such as time and proximity to nature, as in Orlando, “We Who Have Been Raised by Tigers,” and An Unkindness of Ghosts. In the latter two stories, it is further inspected in association with the colonized and decolonized body.
Both Vamsidhar and Woolf, in their treatment of the androgynous character, capture a fundamental aspect of conscious existence: the interaction between the outer world and the inner self. Woolf, in a dreamy fashion, shows the blurriness of the boundary between self and other. Vamsidhar and Franciscovich further elaborate on the ways in which this blurring of boundaries, particularly across strata of power, can be used to impose a false or diminished sense of self. But rather than lingering on the bleakness of abuse and subjugation, these narratives depict characters who assert their internal worlds as real and meaningful, Peril by exploring femininity despite colonially imposed shame, and The Dog by asserting their dogness and, ultimately, biting back. In An Unkindness of Ghosts, Aster and her community reclaim their culture and humanity, resisting the encroachment of a dominant ideology that regards them as monstrous and undeserving of rights. Collectively, these stories depict ways of exacting a power that does not abuse but rather nourishes life in its variegated forms. They show us assertions of the self that recreate and enrich the external world.
H.E. Milla is a Clarion West alumnus, PhD candidate studying trauma and epigenetics, and author of "Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy," which won the 2025 New England Science Fiction Association Short Story Contest. Currently, they live with their wife and two cats in North Carolina. "Reading as Becoming" is their second essay in Speculative Insight.
Notes
[1] Madeline Tyner, “The CCBC’s Diversity Statistics: Spotlight on LGBTQ+ Stories,” The Horn Book, accessed August 25, 2026, https://www.hbook.com/story/ccbcs-diversity-statistics-spotlight-lgbtq-stories; Gwen Aviles, “‘I Want Stories about Gays in Space’: How LGBTQ Young Adult Literature Is Changing,” NBC News, March 10, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/rise-young-adult-books-lgbtq-characters-what-s-next-n981176.
[2] Mayank Kejriwal and Akarsh Nagaraj, “Quantifying Gender Disparity in Pre-Modern English Literature Using Natural Language Processing,” Journal of Data Science 22, no. 1 (2023): 77–96, https://doi.org/10.6339/23-JDS1100.
[3] Li Lucy et al., “Racial and Ethnic Representation in Literature Taught in US High Schools,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 10, no. 1 (2025), https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.131682.
[4] “The Numbers Are In: 2019 CCBC Diversity Statistics,” Cooperative Children’s Book Center, June 16, 2020, https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/the-numbers-are-in-2019-ccbc-diversity-statistics/.
[5] “Diversity Baseline Survey 3.0 - Lee & Low Books,” accessed August 31, 2026, https://www.leeandlow.com/about/diversity-baseline-survey/dbs3/.
[6] Woolf, Virginia Orlando: A Biography (1928; Harcourt, 1973).
[7] Woolf 203.
[8] Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (1928; Project Gutenberg, 2015), https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0609021h.html.
[9] Maria Popova, “How Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Subverted Censorship and Revolutionized the Politics of LGBT Love in 1928,” The Marginalian, October 11, 2013, https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/10/11/virginia-woolf-orlando-lesbian-readings/.
[10] Steve Dollar, “Psycho’s Shower Scene: How Hitchcock Upped the Terror—and Fooled the Censors,” HISTORY, June 8, 2018, https://www.history.com/articles/psycho-shower-scene-hitchcock-tricks-fooled-censors.
[11] Woolf 45.
[12] Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969; First Edition, Ace Books, 1987).
[13] “Gender-Fluid | Gender & Sexuality | Dictionary.Com,” accessed August 31, 2026, https://www.dictionary.com/culture/gender-sexuality/gender-fluid.
[14] P. V. Vamsidhar, “We Who Have Been Raised by Tigers,” OTHERSIDE, June 15, 2026, https://othersidespec.com/pieces/we-who-have-been-raised-by-tigers/.
[15] Vamsidhar.
[16] Johannes Heß and Tobias Klee, “Masculine Nations, Female Personifications – The Gendered Imagery of Nationalism,” December 2, 2021, https://www.scripts-berlin.eu/publications/Think-Pieces/Masculine-Nations_-Female-Personifications/index.html.
[17] Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts (Akashic Books, 2017).
[18] Talia Bhatt, “Degendering and Racialization,” Substack newsletter, Trans/Rad/Fem, March 18, 2025, https://taliabhattwrites.substack.com/p/degendering-and-racialization.
[19] Heß and Klee.
[20] Max Franciscovich, “Dead Dog Mans the Lighthouse,” Strange Horizons, January 6, 2025, https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/dead-dog-mans-the-lighthouse/.
[21] Franciscovich.
[22] Leon Dische Becker et al., “What Apes Can Teach Us about Gender | Broadcast,” What Apes Can Teach Us about Gender | Broadcast, accessed August 25, 2026, https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/frans-de-waal-isabella-rosselini-apes-gender.
[23] Anna Scandurra et al., “Behavioral and Perceptual Differences between Sexes in Dogs: An Overview,” Animals : An Open Access Journal from MDPI 8, no. 9 (2018): 151, https://doi.org/10.3390/ani8090151.
[24] Milla Salonen et al., “Breed, Age, and Social Environment Are Associated with Personality Traits in Dogs,” iScience 26, no. 5 (2023): 106691, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2023.106691.
[25] Janet Shibley Hyde, “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis,” American Psychologist (US) 60, no. 6 (2005): 581–92, https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581.
[26] Donald M. Broom, “One Biology and the Status of Humans,” Animals : An Open Access Journal from MDPI 16, no. 1 (2025): 86, https://doi.org/10.3390/ani16010086; Becker et al., “What Apes Can Teach Us about Gender | Broadcast.”
[27] “Population Genetics | Encyclopedia.Com,” accessed August 25, 2026, https://www.encyclopedia.com/science-and-technology/biology-and-genetics/genetics-and-genetic-engineering/population-genetics.
[28] Michael Trestman et al., “Animal Consciousness,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2026, ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2026), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2026/entries/consciousness-animal/.
[29] Wm. Andrew Schwartz, “Philosophical Roots of the Ecological Crisis: The Process-Relational Worldview and Integral Ecology,” Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, November 4, 2020, https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/philosophical-roots-of-the-ecological-crisis-the-process-relational-worldview-and-integral-ecology.
[30] Richard T. Liu and Brian Mustanski, “Suicidal Ideation and Self-Harm in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 42, no. 3 (2012): 221–28, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2011.10.023.
[31] Melisa Castellanos et al., “Direct and Indirect Effects of Social Dominance Orientation on Hate Speech Perpetration via Empathy and Moral Disengagement among Adolescents: A Multilevel Mediation Model,” Aggressive Behavior 50, no. 1 (2024): e22100, https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.22100; Jeanne Therese Almerino et al., “Social Dominance Orientation, Moral Disengagement, and Masculinity as Predictors of Street Harassment Prevalence,” Psychological Thought 18 (November 2025): 601–30, https://doi.org/10.37708/psyct.v18i2.1174; Sophie L. Kjærvik and Brad J. Bushman, “The Link between Narcissism and Aggression: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Psychological Bulletin (US) 147, no. 5 (2021): 477–503, https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000323.