Gender of spanking story characters, how important?

Well I have expressed this and I stand by it. Any of the "x,y,z" ones are fine with me and convey that the person is binary. 'Singular they' would read like a typo. It's quite logical that if one wishes to describe a new category, that a new word should be employed. Since as you say, 'singular they/their' is already in use for non-binary people in certain structures, how does its use convey a non-binary individual at best, and be clear about the number of people being discussed at worst?

I should add that the biggest advocates for "they" that I've encountered are young people who grew up texting rather than composing grammatical letters and as such have no love or appreciation for language as a thing of potential beauty.

It's about equally problematic to "you." Since singular you and plural you are the same word, it is confusing, in some contexts, which is meant. To be fair, I have sometimes had the same issue with "they" being unclear as to how many people are meant.

But do you really bat an eyelash at "Somebody forgot their umbrella"?


The use of singular they turns up in Shakespeare. Can't say he didn't have any appreciation for language as a thing of potential beauty.

If you don't like singular they, fair enough, but don't blame it on texting youngsters.

Although you have made a number of very good points Bramblewine, I am with 'Kdpierre' on this one.
There is of course no one who would claim that Shakespeare did not have an appreciation for the English language nor that he has not enriched it more than anyone else, but I doubt that he was considering non-binary meanings at the time.
You are right that I would not bat an eyelid with the use of 'their' rather than 'his or her' with respect to the lost umbrella. 'Its' does not appear to work in that situation.
As far as the use of ze, hier, or zem are concerned I am unclear about the meaning of any of these terms (yes I know that like, any other term, I could simply look them up and might well do so if I had to for professional reasons) but if I was reading for pleasure I would almost certainly stop reading at that point.
I know that language develops but the point I was making stands. I am still not comfortable that I cannot easily use the word 'gay' in its Shakespearian sense without being misunderstood. This does not make me in any way homophobic as, despite being a 'straight' male, I have a number of wonderfully gay friends, in both senses of the word.
Please believe me, I am not intending to be disrespectful of any viewpoint, I just feel that as a traditionalist my views are entitled to equal respect.

And they are. Thank you for sharing.

My question right now is about how people respond to the language involved. It's not about LGBTQ acceptance or anything like that; that would be a whole different topic.

Something like xi/xer or zi/zem would work for me, though I'd accept they/them because I believe it's the most common combination in use at the moment for non-binary people. I can imagine new word, even if I would personally prefer it over they/them, could cause even more confusion.

A story in which a spanker gets to interact with a non-binary spankee for the first time might be quite interesting.

No, but neither do I assume the lost umbrella belongs to a non-binary person. Therefore each time 'they' is used, I would not know if it was describing a non-binary person, a binary person, multiple people (binary or otherwise), or was a typo. This actually happened to me with a relative I had told could bring one guest to a party I was throwing and the relative said "They are coming." She meant that her one non-binary friend was coming, but I, concerned over too many guests for my crowded space, asked, "how many people did you invite?"

I have also been told, quite bluntly, that "non-binary 'they'" is a 'preference'. If language is now merely a 'preference' then my preferences count too. Like Bartleby, with 'they'....."would prefer not to."

I'm blaming the easy acceptance of 'they' if not the origin of it, on people who care little for spelling, grammar, or even eloquence. I stand by that too. This is the "tldr" generation. If written today "Moby Dick" would simply be: wwka (white whale kicks ass).

This is certainly a fascinating topic to read. When it comes to story preferences I tend to read most genres, even if they don't match my personal play style preferences. To be honest I'm probably not going to dive into M/M stories at first glance, as another member mentioned somewhere in this thread, the M/M community seems to have its own thriving community including a story website. With that said however, if a story is talked about and it is an M/M story then I will certainly check it out.

There does have to be some criteria to capture my interest in the story. For an M/M story for example it would have to be Older/Younger in a disciplinary setting, but then again I feel that way about reading stories from any gender combination. Just the other day I was thoroughly enjoying an M/F story, the build up was great, but then for some reason the author had to include "I slipped my hand between...." and I was like, why? You just ruined a completely good story with a left field add on and I exited the story.

To me it is the build up. If the synopsis is well written then it doesn't matter to me the gender of the participants. In fact sometimes I enjoy the build up to the spanking more than the actual written description of the spanking.

In fact now that I think of it, I was going to add one of my Audio stories to the Library just this week until I saw that audios are no longer accepted, and in that story it details a young woman who enters into a dream where she is a schoolboy. It is essentially an M/F spanking story, but the actual spanking represents an M/M one as seen through the eyes of all of the observers. Actually I just checked, it was the first story that I submitted to this website 14 years ago.

It would probably be a hard story to write using the terms They/Them, however if the additional terms Disciplinarian/Submissive were also included then I really believe that it can be pulled off. It would be unique to read a story when there is no specific cisgenders to imagine. Difficult to write, but certainly possible.


I concur with this, there are certainly favorite authors that I have whose stories I look forward to reading. Likewise there are authors whose style doesn't always match my own therefore I am selective as to which stories I read.

My own stories tend to be on the milder side of the spanking lifestyle which limits how many people will read them, but the people who DO read them tend to enjoy them very much. My spanking stories are my biggest source of web traffic.

Oh, the complications don't end there! Have you heard the great debate over whether it's more acceptable to ask, "What are your preferred pronouns?" versus simply, "What are your pronouns?"

Some people get very worked up over the use of "preferred," or lack thereof... and from what I've seen, the getting worked up goes in both directions.

Which is not something I really want to get into when I'm writing spanking stories. I would prefer (ha! ) to simply use the appropriate pronouns for all my characters, including the non-binary ones, and leave it at that. But because the situation in the real world is so complicated, and perhaps even more so in the minds of spanking story readers, here we are.


And see what happened: you asked a clarifying question, and you got your clarification.

It's not really more or less complicated than the occasional confusion that arises over singular vs plural "you." Though it probably feels that way because the use of singular they to refer to a particular, known person is a within our lifetimes development, while "you" has been around for centuries.

It would indeed, although I haven't written that story. (Could be fodder for the future, though. And if anyone else wants to write such a story, I'll read it!)

Where I have inserted a decidedly non-binary character, it's a spanker and it takes place in an alternate world (fantasy world, with magic). The emergence of that character actually led to a thread of worldbuilding: it became a world where, while most people are cisgender male or female, there's also a recognized segment of the population who are not. So, non-binaryness is considered just another version of normal.


I've never written a story without cisgenders either, although if you want to, feel free! What I've done is included a non-binary character along with cisgender ones.

Personally, I don't like the terms disciplinarian/submissive for my own fiction (or my own play). Even if the story is about a disciplinary spanking, I wouldn't say, "The disciplinarian brought out the paddle." I'd just put the character's name in there: "Marty brought out the paddle." (I don't actually have a character named Marty, that's just an example.)

But using those words does remind me of a literary example where a noun becomes the third person pronoun used in a non-gendered society: Marge Piercy's Woman On the Edge of Time. For those who haven't read it, it features a future utopia where gender is a thing of the past and everyone is referred to as person or per instead of she/her or he/him.

I'm avoiding the binary/non binary, sex v gender debate here but there has been discussion of "you" which can be singular or plural.

We used to avoid that by having "thou" singular, and "you" plural.

Some of my American friends avoid it by using "you" singular and "you all" or "y'all" plural.

"They" traditionally means them, plural, but is also a non gender specific him or her. Traditionally used when gender was unimportant or unknown---Eg "The errant pupil enters the punishment room through that door, then they bare their buttocks." One could use "he/she bares his/her" but it would be a bit unwieldy.

Geoffrey Stirling.