Request for stories with non-binary gender or sex representation

I have a request! I read primarily fantasy and science fiction with a strong preference for speculative works, and I'm regularly frustrated by the paucity of diversity in gender and sex representation. It's a little nonsensical, since both are already complicated for humans (1) and other animals (2). It's especially irksome when you consider fiction often restructures social and physical norms, sometimes wildly. How is it authors can imagine entire economies based around dragon flight but not women who don't like cooking and dresses? Or a more complex set of sexes than the two-sizes-fits-all model to which most stories default? Okay, slight exaggeration, but seriously, how are dragons more plausible than a different set of clothing division?

I admit this is more rant than request so far, so let me take a moment to try and flesh put what I'm looking for; book recommendations that include non-binary genders or sexes. Examples would be a culture or species that has more (or less) than two distinct sexes that are male/female, or gender roles that vary wildly from "boys like math, girls like feelings" stuff. I would enjoy books that focus on this, but I'm primarily looking for stories where this is just part of the world.

For reference, the following media are the sort of thing I'm looking for:
Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler
The Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie
The Worldbreaker Saga by Kameron Hurley
Knights Errant by Jenn Doyle (3)
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold (I would count the men of Athos as being a non-traditional society in terms of gender)

Plesse, let me know what you've seen! I know this is oddly specific, but it's become a pet peeve of mine after noticing speculative fiction stories always default to the traditional, reductive binary for sex and gender. I think it would be nice to read novels with an understanding that things are more complicated than that, and especially an exploration of how complex they could be.

(1) http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943
(2) http://humoncomics.com/archive/animal-lives
(3) http://knightserrantcomic.tumblr.com/

(Cross-posted by my blog)

I just read A Long way to a Small angry planet where the humans share their ship with several species with different family and gender norms - one that speaks of losing all the daughters in a community to war, and another where children are raised by surrogate families and those families are large self chosen groups with changing relationships between multiple partners. It was a good read.

They can be a bit slow going, but Samuel Delany's books would fit your criteria. Nearly all of them feature sexual relationships that are not necessarily heterosexual, and in more than a few cases, not binary. There was even one book -- Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand, I think, that focuses on (among other things) the development of the sexual impulse in an interspecies environment.

Will have a think, but meanwhile you might want to ask in the SF Fans group too.

Maybe the society of Darkover by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It has a blend of some very traditional roles and expectations, and groups and individuals that are a lot less so due to various subcultures, social groups, actual or perceived necessity and the existence of a near-human interfertile gender-fluid native species. Though you might have to select and pick whatever books fit best as there are many and not all may bring those topics and characters to the fore.

Iain Bank's Culture might fit too. For the most part the meat of the books involves characters and events at the margin or outside of the Culture, but for those living in it sex change is probably one of the milder forms of body alteration within the realm of the very possible for those so inclined, and it seems remarkably free of expectations to perform in a given way due to birth or current apparent gender.

>5 Jarandel: The Darkover books that best offer an alternative are https://www.librarything.com/series/Darkover%3A+The+Renunciates

Also MZB The Ruins of Isis about a planet where the women rule.

Off the top of my head, a few older works (mostly from the 1990s):

Shadow Man by Melissa Scott features a society with five genders, two corresponding to what we would call intersexed people.

Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman has a society with three genders; people of the 'neuter' gender are considered subhuman.

There are any number of Planet of the Women books in older SF, most either in the "they're just waiting for a good man" or the "feminist utopia" branches. Nicola Griffith's Ammonite, written in the 1990s in response to this dichotomy, takes the radical notion that a planet inhabited only by women would be pretty much like any other planet.

Mary Gentle's Golden Witchbreed is a straight riff on The Left Hand of Darkness, except that the natives of the planet are genderless until puberty when most of them acquire a permanent male or female gender. The sequel is dreadful.

Neither the Tiptree Award winners nor the Lambda Literary Award winners will be 100% what you want, but they're as good of a place to start as any.

In Califia's daughters, the gender roles are reversed because men are an endangered species.

Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction is a collection of short fiction that hits the brief.

Ilario by Mary Gentle also features an interesting commentary on gender. This is a fantasy set in a medieval Europe.

>8 Ennas:

Having men and women be different species would be a much larger change than just reversing gender roles!

>8 Ennas:

I'm not familiar with that title, so I'm just wondering in general... Women aren't treated as if we were an endangered species (on the contrary, our limited value as sex toys and wombs notwithstanding, we are treated as if we were expendable and/or of no or little consequence), so I don't see how that's a reversal?

Moreover, one very obnoxious feature of "real life" is that men, or rather, Real Men, are already considered to be rare and precious--add to that click bait proclaiming "the end of men" (because any right women achieve clearly must needs take away something from men!)--and the premise couldn't be more unoriginal.

Maybe Herland, about female utopia, is more of a gender reversal? Not quite what the OP is looking for though.

All of these suggestions sound awesome, librarything was definitely the community to ask!

In response to the conversation between >8 Ennas:, >10 lorax:, >11 LolaWalser:, and >12 krazy4katz:, I wasn't specifically looking for gender reversals, but they would fit the criteria I provided. For the same reasons >11 LolaWalser: mentioned I would tread cautiously, but I do have a local library with a decent selection, so I'm more than willing to try it.

Thanks to everyone for your responses, I look forward to checking all of them out.

>11 LolaWalser: Please don't eat me!

In fantasy books, often set in medieval Europe, usually the men fight and the women cook. In this book I mentioned, there are only a few men on earth (the rest died of an y-chromosome specific virus or something, iirc), so they are not allowed to do anything dangerous, for fear of extinction. Extremely so. Which means that women do all the things usually done by men, like guard duty, wood chopping, etc.. Feels kind of "reversed" to me. That's all. Don't you think you're overreacting just a little bit? ^.^

>14 Ennas:

You seem to be reading stuff into my post. I don't understand what you think was the "overreacting"--I was merely curious, because I don't know the book (or you), why you thought that what you described represented gender reversal. I have some idea of it now, thanks.

>13 kaydern:

I'm not much of a sf/speculative fiction reader (even less of fantasy), but I'm very interested in the topic of your thread. I wish I could contribute more by way of what you're looking for but what few examples I could think of were already mentioned. Perhaps you'd be interested in some of the suggestions made in this thread:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/195576

It's much more broad than your topic, but a lot of suggestions were about non-stereotypical characters and set-ups.

One recent read I can recommend in that vein is Terry Pratchett's Strata, where the main character is a woman who used to be a planetary designer (landscaping on a truly monumental scale!) and who follows her curiosity to another world in the company of two aliens, one of whom is also female. They are all defined by their interests and personalities rather than gender or race etc. Rather amazing for a book from 1981!

>14 Ennas: I see what you mean now! That does seem like quite a shift in traditional expectations, now I want to find a copy.

>15 LolaWalser: Ah, I suppose we should just leave it up for now, I'm hopeful that there are other suggestions in the big wide world of literature. I like the topic you linked as well, I think there will be a lot of good books there to dig into.

While not all of the stories meet my own criteria, there have been a few at Apex Magazine (http://www.apex-magazine.com/) that fit the bill. They have most of the current issue available online and the short stories are fantastically strange.

Dragonoak might be along the lines of what you're looking for! Book one was a bit slow for my taste, but I've been told that part 2 is much more well paced. The author is nonbinary themself.

Other than that, have you had a look at these lists?
http://nonbinary.org/wiki/Fictional_depictions_of_nonbinary_gender
https://xanwest.wordpress.com/2016/03/03/books-by-trans-and-non-binary-authors/
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/30118.Non_Binary_Genderqueer_Genderfluid_Gen...