I have sometimes been asked with respect to my fiction, "What the hell is a 'gendertrope'?"

"Gendertrope" is a word from Baseline, the language of the fictional world of dath ilan; it appears in my stories about dath ilan and dath ilani.

I have observed that (1) the meaning of "gendertrope" seems hard for many people to grasp initially, and (2) once people do grasp that meaning, they sometimes use the word in ordinary conversation with other people who know it, including those who previously complained they didn't know what it meant. So "gendertrope" seems a concept-handle worth explaining for reasons beyond fiction alone.

A dath ilani would first start by noting that gendertropes are a radial / prototype-based category, such as are natural to natural language, rather than their having been carefully mathematically defined.

A dath ilani would then tell you a "gendertrope" is mostly definable as a (big prominent prototypical) subtype of a "personality-trope" (usually a "relationship-trope" / "interpersonal+personality-trope"^[1]); narrowed to such tropes with (1) a gender skew / links to other aspects of gender performance, OR[fuzzy]^[2] (2) that are useful for sorting people into good relationships of the mating / build-a-life-together subtype.

I shall start by explaining the supercategory, relationship-tropes.

An example of a non-gendered (friendship-)relationship-trope: "Finds it awkward to initiate conversation, yet hates awkward silences". Two people both with this relationship-trope are unlikely to form good two-person friendships of the hanging-out variety. Two such people might do fine in a startup where there's always work to discuss, or in a larger friend group where other people do initiate and/or carry on conversations. But if they plan to hang around a lot with just the two of them, they may run into problems.

Similarly, "tidy" and "untidy" are relationship-tropes of the subtype "should these people live in the same house". "Tidy" and "untidy" are especially central instances of group-house+relationship-tropes, because you can go down a list of tropes like that one, and quickly filter out a lot of people that *you* shouldn't try to move into a house with.

Which is to say: Relationship-tropes often-but-not-always have the connotation of being facts that are useful for quickly predicting who you shouldn't form a kind of relationship with. After all, that's why civilizations invent relationship-trope standard libraries with standard names in the first place, so that people can quickly exchange a lot of summarized information that has been validated as predictively useful about their future prospects for relationships of various kinds.

On to gendertropes proper!

"Wants kids" is considered a gendertrope, even before considering gendered specifics like "heterosexual man who wants kids", "heterosexual woman who wants kids", "gay guy who wants kids", etc. Because just the "wants kids" / "does not want kids" part is immediately useful for sorting any two people considering getting into a long-lasting build-a-life-together sort of a relationship. It's useful even before getting into considerations of how that preference is "gendered"; that is, how the trait "wants kids" has a substantial degree of statistical covariance in its quantitative strength and in its further details, between different sets of people weighted by their degree of membership in standard "gender" cluster-hierarchies (like "man", "woman", "gay man", etcetera).^[3]

So "wants kids" is (the classic example of) a "gendertrope" with no gender connotations if you just say the phrase by itself. It's a "gendertrope" because it's about sorting mating-ish and/or build-a-life-together arrangements. (Rather than being about "who to be friends with", or "who to found a startup with".)

Conversely, "grandfather", "grandmother", etc, while not about assortative mating per se, are also considered (central) gendertropes, because dath ilani grandparenting presentations vary strongly with gender / the gender+clustering-hierarchy+weighted-sets. That is: grandparenting styles are sufficiently strongly predicted by gender (in dath ilan), that they feel gendertrope-ish even if nobody is using them to decide to get into mating/lifebuilding relationships.

You can be a "grandmother" without having any grandkids per se if you go around grandmothering people (in the dath ilan conception of that term). It's a (gender)trope rather than a have-grandkids test. The Grandmother Faction in planetary politics contains many women with no grandkids.

"Willing to do a ton of childcare if financially supported in that" is a gendertrope that matches both usual connotations of the word: its average characteristic varies between gender-clusters, and it is a fact that some people would want to know early in order to predict mating relationships that are likely to work for them. So "paid-childcare-willingness" has both the grandfather/grandmother quality, plus the wants-kids/doesn't-want-kids quality.

"Supervillain" (in the dath ilan sense: "somebody who'd build a fortress under a volcano if they had the money", not "evil") is considered a gendertrope even before considering more gendered subtypes like "male supervillain", "female supervillain", "asexual gay male supervillain", etcetera, because (1) supervillainy presentation in dath ilan varies widely with gender-clusters, and (2) it's a trait widely considered useful for guessing mating preferences / predicting later mating satisfaction.

Here on Earth^[4] "dominant" and "submissive" are gendertropes, even though many (but not all) people will ask the further information "dominant man/woman" or "submissive man/woman" to decide whether to proceed in a relationship. "Dominant" and "submissive" are so strongly associated with other gendertropes, and appear as parts of gendertropes, that a dath ilani in Earth would immediately classify them as being gendertropes themselves, even apart from how eg "submissive man/woman" or "dominant man/woman" have statistically different presentations inside the two primary gender superclusters. That's the way natural categories work: maybe there's a sort of intensional by-definition core, but also, anything that sure looks similar to lots of other things in the category, will be perceptually clocked as a category member.

If you unduly tried to boil down a complicated Baseline concept into a simple definition:

"Gendertrope" badly-summarizes-as personality-trope (LEANING interpersonal+personality-trope) NARROWED BY {gender-varying FUZZY-OR mating-predictive}.

This is my attempt at worldbuilding words whose definitions end up messy and clustered the way that realistic definitions end up messy and clustered. But in a world where people do want definitions to not get *that* messy, and where they are in favor of writing down all the messy parts.

1. ^{^}

   Dath ilan has a hierarchy for forming written compound phrases from words. The first layer is terms like relationship-trope using "-", and the second layer is formed from first-layer phrases by using "+" as a connector, eg, mating+relationship-trope. Often words thus connected have fewer syllables in Baseline, and can be spoken or written more briefly in Baseline than in their English counterparts.

   (This is a relatively recent ruling on my part, and older dath ilan fiction may not reflect it.)

2. ^{^}

   Fuzzy-OR: A sumlike combination of quantitative truth-degrees on both sides of the OR. Gendertropes can be about traits that have either quality strongly, or both qualities weakly. (Lakoff et al tell us this is normal for categories in natural language.) (Dath ilan has a notion of "human-psychology-fuzzy-OR" distinct from Earth's axiomatization of OR in fuzzy logic proper.)

3. ^{^}

   In ideal principle, dath ilan would tell you that the gender cluster-hierarchies themselves are defined secondary to gendertropes; that is, a primary predictive interest in gendertropes precedes the secondary clustering of people into genders predictive of their gendertropes.

   To claim to be "agender" is the sort of claim that people will treat with skepticism and provisional social acceptance, but with a lot of rolled eyes if it turns out that this person can actually be predicted quite well by the gender-cluster hierarchy. But even the "agender" claim cashes out as, "You are likely to make bad predictions by assuming that my particular collection of gendertropes is statistically correlated in the ways predicted by the usual clusters everyone has heard about", not, "I am not well-described by any gendertropes." The latter claim would sound merely false; people either want kids or don't want kids (or don't know yet whether they want kids, etc), and all of these are gendertropes useful for predicting which relationships won't work. "Agender" is thus itself a gendertrope and nobody sees a paradox in that; it means not-in-gender-clusters, not un-gender-tropeable.

   Dath ilan does not confuse the gender cluster-hierarchy with biological sex. They also don't flinch from observing the immense imperfect correlation of "male" with "man" or "female" with "woman". Being scared of definite and clearly observable facts, is as far beneath the Very Serious People of dath ilan's Civilization as would be neglecting to draw fine distinctions in precise definitions.

   You perhaps ask what "sex" is in the first place, according to dath ilan. "Sex" refers to discernible biological facts, as they may well be considered without reference to gender at all. Considered in relationship to gender, sex is by default an internally-connected set of biological facts upstream of facts about gender. But "has dick" or "has pussy" is absolutely a gendertrope as well, since it's very useful for sorting which relationships won't work to the sort of person who demands one or the other. Theoretically the fact that one has a particular sort of biological appendage is a conceptually different kind of fact than whether you have "a genital feature enjoyed by a particular cluster of partners", some of whom might also be interested in hentai tentacles if those were on offer; but dath ilan does not trouble itself to have different words for the two viewpoints on genitalia because of their vast statistical coincidence in pre-transhumanist real life.

   It is understood and not considered confusing that all cognition is ultimately a biological phenomenon, and that the effect of sex on gender / gendertropes is mediated by sex-linked statistically-covarying cognitive predispositions that could be seen as a fuzzily semi-distinct causal layer. Dath ilan more generally has a concept of a graduated scale of "how tightly is this kind of cognition or cognitive predisposition linked to noncognitive biological observables". Eg, "thinkoomph" as something you can do polygenic covariance scores about and something that can be honed by practice or life experience; and "g-factor" as something a measured step further upstream of that which is more tightly linked to genes and harder to push on, but not perfectly linked nor impossible to push on. Sexual predispositions to gender-related cognition can vary in their level of sex-linkedness the same way.

   MtF / FtM is considered a sex and not just a gender (only) insofar as it is observed to correspond to different hormone levels or different brain presentations; is hypothesized to be downstream of prenatal exposure to hormones or xenohormones; or of course, insofar as the person is taking exogenous hormones or has undergone various surgeries. As with "male" and "man" there are different words for t-subtype+sex and t-subtype+gender.

   MtF is less common in dath ilan than among Bay Area rationalists (because I am the average dath ilani by definition and I am much more cis than the average rationalist). But based on my observation of my quietly sensible MtF friends and taking this as the presentation of competent-rationalist+MtF, I feel confident in stating: It is not a big deal or a weird political issue in dath ilan that the largest gendercluster within MtF+sex is noticeably statistically distinct from the central gendercluster for cis-females. (Or put more plainly: Never once has one of my MtF friends, including those who ask for a woman's pronouns, demanded that I declare them to be statistically typical women.)

   (My usual rules for flipping the average male dath ilani (myself) to an average female dath ilani would have MtF being equally rare with FtM. For story reasons it was overdetermined that I did not change prevalence of dominance/sadism between dath ilani men and women. So my default would be to carry over dath ilan's low prevalence of MtF to a low prevalence of FtM.)

   Dath ilan is not bothered by people leaping up and saying, "Aha! But if you can decide to take hormones because of your cognitive-gender!trans-ness, people's sexes are not strictly causally-upstream of their genders!" Dath ilani have a generally low tolerance for people trying to play gotcha on rough or loose definitions when the actual facts are clear. Nobody was claiming that the differences between sex, gender, and gendertropes had been axiomatized down to the level of set theory in the first place; and when inevitably somebody in dath ilan went ahead and axiomatized it anyway, they did so in the form of a dynamic Bayes net where downstream facts at time t could connect to upstream facts at time t+1 without that implying circular causation.

4. ^{^}

   Since the world of dath ilan is defined by myself being its median person, dominance / sadism is very prevalent and submission/masochism very rare among both sexes. Only very rich people can afford one of the few submissives / masochists that exist on the planet. Thus Civilization tries to prevent most people from accidentally finding out they have a taste for dominance/sadism, as then they would realize they have a sexual/romantic desire they are very unlikely to ever satisfy. This is why most dath ilani have never heard of BDSM at the start of any isekai featuring themselves, as occasionally turns out to be an important plot point in their stories.

   (Historical note: Thellim getting to Eclipse and freaking out over the apparent existence of a systematized social structure for people inflicting pain on other people, in the glowfic "but hurting people is wrong", was unpopular with some readers who complained that Thellim was being very unreasonable for acting so suspicious of Earthlike society generally and BDSM specifically.

   So I was like: "Got it, I'll bring you a dath ilani who is less suspicious of alien cultures generally and BDSM specifically" and isekaied Keltham to Cheliax.)