Talli Ruksas asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

Concepts of gender identity, being non-binary, and the pronouns used for them seem to be changing rapidly even among fairly young children I'm told. I wondered if you were creating Bel today if you would have used something other than "it"? Although apparently it's preferred at about 10%.

Lois McMaster Bujold
Yes, although less for current usage than that I turned out to want the neutral pronoun a decade later much more for the biologically sexless ba. Well, different planets, different strokes...

English is desperately in need of a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and I wish SF back then had evolved some consensus on one that would have become common coin and leaked out into the culture at large, so we wouldn't be stuck now with the repurposed and confusing "they". There were a wide variety of tries at it, but no compelling uniformity was reached.

(And while I'm at it, I long for the equivalent of the Japanese gender-neutral "sensei", meaning a person having mastery in a skill. Because "mistress" does not mean at all the same thing as "master", and "master" trails yet other baggage.)

Bel actually started as futuristic furniture, just something for Miles to trip over in that first scene back in The Warrior's Apprentice (written 1984.) But then the herm regained consciousness, opened its mouth, and started to talk, pretty instantly becoming a person, and that was that.

Ta, L.

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