Some of this is inspired by real life but a lot of it is just created for the setting. I put a note next to one item in particular that gave a pre-reader a concern as to whether that was actually a thing that happened in real life. Also note that I am cis myself, so I have limited perspective on some of this stuff. I have help from people that know more than me and they've generally approved of this write up. If I can get a good write up for 2nd mechanics done I plan to include something like this in the book.
The General Public
The average human considers sex to be an intensely personal and intimate subject not to be discussed in open conversation. Many major religions include a concept that sex is at best a distraction from greater issues and at worst a dangerous lure to sinful behavior. Individuals that espouse a philosophy of being more open about sex and the discussion of it are often characterized as making excuses for promiscuous behavior. This is to the point that most cultures avoid giving their adolescents anything like a proper education on how sex and sexuality works. In this culture of avoidance and willful ignorance, deviations from the norm stand out and tend to make people feel uncomfortable.
Much of humanity is heterosexual but there are a great number of misunderstandings of how sexuality works even in that demographic. Homosexuality is common enough that it has received a grudging amount of attention, but a lot of the population would prefer to ignore it if they could. When presented with two individuals of the same gender identifying as a romantic couple, most people prefer to change the subject to something else immediately. This can as often be an attempt to be polite, as some can feel like they’ve stumbled upon a private subject and don’t wish to be rude by prying into the private lives of the homosexual couple. By comparison, the same revelation that a heterosexual couple are in a romantic relationship normally provokes several polite questions about how they met or other such things. The politely-look-away reaction is generally only triggered by heterosexuals if the conversation somehow stumbles onto their actual sexual practices.
Another reaction some people have is to become incredibly curious and begin to pry into questions about the relationship. Again, this is often driven by an attempt to be polite and accepting, however there is a definite tendency to overcompensate and thus start asking indiscreet or inappropriate questions. Many such people lack the context to understand relationships outside the heterosexual and this leads to questions that are an attempt to fit those relationships in their frame of knowledge. One of the most well-known of these is: “who is the man and who is the woman?” which quite thoroughly betrays the misunderstanding the speaker has. Both this reaction and the look-away reaction reveal how much outside the individual’s comfort zone the realization of a homosexual relationship is.
The religious response to homosexuality is variable but heavily leans towards the intolerant. A lot of the most violent responses to homosexuals have come out of religious groups. While a lot of these religious groups are considered fringe denominations by the major branches, they are often very vocal and have substantial followings. By comparison, religious organizations that are accepting of homosexuals often seem to be smaller and have fewer members willing to present themselves publicly. This is further complicated by the fact that the more central and moderate religious groups mostly prefer to stay out of the conversation entirely refusing to take a stand one way or the other.
Beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality, there are other, less common forms of sexuality. Of these, the most recognizable is bisexuality which often receives a lot of discrimination from both homosexuals and heterosexuals. A common accusation is that bisexuality doesn’t exist and that people claiming to be bisexuals are either pretending to be gay or else unwilling to come all the way out of the closet. Some of the discomfort with bisexuals also seems to stem from the idea that a person might be unable to not act on a sexual impulse. Thus the reputation that any bisexual is going to want both a male lover and a female lover. This can cause misunderstandings where the partner of a bisexual might begin to believe that their partners are flirting with other people when they are not. This is an entirely unfounded belief and most bisexuals would prefer to have a stable monogamous relationship.
Asexuality is another poorly understood situation as most people find the idea of not being attracted to sexual acts at all to be an utterly alien concept. Asexuals might still have sex for other reasons including to have children or in an attempt to fit in and this can cause confusion about what asexual means. Some assume it is the same when a person chooses to be celibate. However, just like a celibate heterosexual still experiences sexual desire while they are abstaining, a sexually active asexual does not experience sexual desire just because they are physically having sex.
The usual assumption is that an asexual person has simply “not met the right person yet” or is a “late bloomer.” More dangerous assumptions include the idea that asexuality is a result of some sort of mental trauma and must be fixed. There are many, of course, who simply assume that the asexual is lying about their lack of interest. Asexuals that are outgoing are especially considered to be lying due to a common societal belief that desire for social interaction is somehow inherently attached to a desire for sexual activity.
Asexuality is often confused or conflated with being aromantic as well. An aromantic person experiences no romantic attraction to other people and is perfectly satisfied with friendships and other non-romantic relationships. An aromantic person can be of any sexuality and an asexual can still experience romantic attraction to another individual. However, because the general public assumes that these two desires are linked together, they have a trouble accepting the idea that one can happen without the other.
The meaning of pansexuality is not entirely agreed upon. Some people think the term bisexuality as someone who is sexually attracted to multiple genders is inclusive enough while others insist that there is a difference between bisexuality, sexual attraction to both men and women, and pansexuality, a sexual attraction to individuals regardless of gender. For those that encourage the use of both terms, a bisexual individual wouldn’t find an androgynous or intersexed individual sexually attractive where as a pansexual person might.
Another misunderstood situation is where someone has a sexuality that is triggered by characteristics not normally related to a sexual drive, for example a sexual attraction to intelligence, foreign languages, courage, or physical features unrelated to sex. The knee-jerk reaction is to assume that this is a sort of bisexuality where there is a preference for the feature in question rather than that the feature triggers the sexual reaction on its own and physical sex has nothing to do with it.
The development of reproduction technologies turned out to be a catalyst for these issues to be pushed into the public eye. The original intention of these technologies was to help couples that were having difficulty conceiving. In the eyes of many doctors this included homosexual couples. Artificial insemination and surrogate mothers were the start during the late 60s and 70s. These techniques were progressively improved upon until artificial conception, allowing viable reproductive cells to be created from any genetic sample, was first approved for public use in 1991.
In each case, the realization that homosexuals were using the technology to start families caused an outcry from certain segments of the population in each country. In some countries, this resulted in the outlawing of the technology entirely as well as banning the entry of individuals conceived in such circumstances In other countries there were regulations put into place to prevent the technologies from being used that way.
(This next paragraph is, as far as I know, entirely me imagining horrible things that fanatics might do in this setting. I sadly have no trouble believing that similar or worse things have happened in real life, but this revolves around tech that hasn't developed yet in our world.)
In 1996, a conspiracy of social workers and other individuals was exposed in the United States. They had been breaking into medical records and identifying such children. They would then mock up some excuse to declare the parents unfit and then take the children. In most cases these children would be placed with more “acceptable families” but at least one individual was found to be murdering these children. The general anger and horror at the actions taken caused the weight of public opinion to tip in the favor of greater protections and rights for homosexuals in the remainder of the 20 th Century and onward into the 21st Century.
By 2012, same-sex marriage was legal in most of the US and Australia. The North Africa Alliance did not go so far, but did pass a new round of laws increasing the penalty for hate crimes. Of the four so-called Pillars of the Free World, the Cultural Republic of Chinese and Mongolian Peoples took the least legislative action on the subject, causing the US and Australia to appear more progressive though the CRCMP has much fewer instances of violent bigotry than the other three countries.
Advances in understandings of how a child gestates in the womb as well as genetic mapping have created a great deal more awareness for and tolerance of gender identity issues to a point. This is especially true as there now appears to be a ready “fix” for a lot of intersexed conditions in the form of gender reassignment via genetic modification. That said, there remains a lot of misunderstanding about both the conditions and the treatment.
Several long-term studies, ranging from one to five years in length, performed with volunteers showed definite results that most people feel incredibly uncomfortable when forced to spend long periods of time in the wrong gender. Likewise, transgender individuals that have undergone a genetic modification to reassign their physical sex have shown to respond well and acclimate quickly to the new gender. Despite this, a handful of countries have outlawed the process and, as with artificial conception, banned individuals who have undergone the treatment. The treatment is also very expensive due to the fact that it remains classified as a cosmetic procedure.
The public response to gender reassignment by genetic modification is mostly to try to avoid the subject at all. This is something that is difficult to do given the large amount of outcry from assorted groups, some focused on genetic manipulation in general and others focused specifically on the alteration of gender. There are accusations that the studies on living in the wrong gender are only finding a human created problem. This can range from assumptions that not enough time was granted to acclimate to the gender, through theories that the genetic treatments are not complete enough, all the way to accusations of deliberately manufacturing the desired response.
It is now possible for a person to choose their phenotype and physical sex, an unparalleled freedom of self-expression that has opened a veritable pandora’s box by some perspectives and the holy grail by others. While the prices of such genetic modifications are high compared to procedures used to correct a genetic defect, they are still often within the reach of the middle class. There are some organizations, driven by various motivations, that have endeavored to keep a list of individuals who have genetically modified their appearances. Some individuals of older generations have taken to having the significant others of their children researched to see if they have had any work done. Likewise, some employers have attempted to circumvent discrimination laws by using such organizations to identify whether a job applicant is what they appear to be.
There has been a lot of outcry about the motivations of individuals seeking such cosmetic modification. For some it is simply a matter of preference and desire to have that appearance. In some cases, a person will undergo a genetic treatment to have traces of an undesired heritage removed from their appearance. Others have changed their apparent ethnicity to have a better chance of advancing in their chosen career. All of these motivations have been attacked as examples of cultural appropriation, cultural erasure, attacks on diversity, or even outright fraud. Some countries outright ban the use of this technology and will not allow anyone who has undergone such treatment within their borders.
Actors in the US, Japan, and some other nations make frequent use of genetic modification to gain appearances appropriate to some roles. On the one hand, this has made calls for specific phenotypes obsolete, but there have been other consequences. Many actors feel like they are expected to accept genetic modification for roles and that individuals opposed to genetic modification do not get prime roles. Some groups are concerned that this makes it easier for either more roles to be cast as members of privileged populations or else allows individuals of those populations to pass themselves off as minorities to take a role from a natural member of a phenotype.
Genetic modification on the unborn is illegal in all cases save where not altering something might result in the death of the embryo. For one thing, the normal mechanisms used for genetic modification can only be applied in utero with difficulty, but also because the accepted ethics of genetic modification requires that it be the choice of the patient. This usually extends to reproductive cells such that a person who has undergone cosmetic modification to appear as a different ethnicity still carries the information of their heritage in their reproductive cells. This is what prompts some of the accusations of attacks on racial purity. Gender modification is somewhat different.
When a person has been genetically modified to become a different gender, they acquire new sexual organs which begin to produce new reproductive cells using the modified sex chromosomes. There has been no research done on how to prevent this because the alternative comes with a high likelihood of complications for any resultant children. This has thus been one avenue of attack by opponents to gender modification specifically and genetic modification in general, since it can be seen that these individuals are forcing their choice of modification on their unborn and unconceived children.
The tide is working against the groups that are opposed to genetic modification with the majority of the younger generation having more or less grown up with it. This is starting to have a noticeable effect on the human perception of things like ethnicity and gender. Early on, anti-genetic modification groups had some respect and legitimacy, but groups with motivations rooted in racism or bigotry attached themselves to the movement. Many of these groups were willing to perform acts of violence and outright terrorism. As a result, most people equate being anti-genetic modification with also being racist or bigoted. Currently it is estimated that somewhere around 10% of the population has had at least minor or cosmetic genetic modification, such as hair or eye color, while smaller but still significant portions of the population have undergone more extensive modification. This includes those with practical rather than genetic modifications, such as frequent astronauts, residents of the LaGrange Point space-station, some elite soliders, and a handful of other positions. People that have had genetic defects treated by modification techniques are much greater in number.
Another problematic response to gender modification treatments are those people that offer to pay the majority of the costs on the condition that they will choose the resultant gender. The core assumption of most of these groups is that transgender individuals can be “fixed” by giving the gender assignment treatment to make them into the gender they already appear to be, thus clearing whatever genetic quirks are creating the transgender condition. There is no evidence that this works, indeed the supernatural populations (who unfortunately don’t share information with the general public) have centuries of documentation showing that it flat out doesn’t work, and are quite often compared to similarly dangerous concepts like gay reversion therapy. These same groups often suggest gender modification for homosexual individuals as well with the same general theory, that making a gay man into a woman would fix things. There are a handful more charitable organizations that have no ulterior motive and simply believe that making these treatments more easily available is the right thing to do but picking the sheep out of the flock of wolves can prove to be difficult.
While transgender and intersexed individuals have been making some progress in being accepted due to advances in understanding genetics and fetal development, gender fluid and agender individuals remain outside of most people’s awareness. People who accept the idea of transgender still have a hard time understanding the concept of a person whose gender identity might shift or for people who don’t identify as either gender. For many people, this is a point between things they can reasonably accept and what feels like someone making something up to get attention. Genetic modification doesn’t really offer an answer since it can take weeks to fully recover from the procedures. Nor do the genetic specialists in the general public have any idea of how to create a modification for removing a person’s gender or how to build in an ability to shift gender.
Another event that has caused a huge stir was the first human conceived and carried within an artificial womb. Lindsey was the genetic daughter of a volunteer couple who were unable to physically bear a child. She died at age nine after a series of immunological issues. Since then there has been an international moratorium on using the technology to conceive human beings until answers can be found. Public arguments range from theories that the parents were carriers of some undiagnosed medical disorder to the predictable assertion by opponents that this was proof of how the technology should be abandoned. Several groups have pointed out the way earlier reproductive techs have been “usurped” by homosexuals to allow them to “seem normal”.
Humanity at least seems to be predominately monogamous, but some individuals still develop to be polyamorous and there are a lot of instincts that encourage opportunistic mating behaviors. In general, most cultures publicly insist on a strictly monogamous lifestyle but there is often an undercurrent, for lack of a better word, that encourages promiscuous and even predatorial behaviors in males, often referred to as “rape culture”. This attitude is rarely explicitly acknowledged or referred to by those that encourage it and will usually only dismiss it with a statement such as “boys will be boys”. Those who point it out are mostly in the group that are trying to end it as a cultural norm. This rather unhealthy attitude results in females being punished for sexual behavior disproportionately severely as compared to males. In most developed countries, promiscuity or even simply being considered too sexual can result in social ostracism for women while some men can get away with assaults and suffer little to no punishment despite actual laws against such behavior.
The Community
The Community is similar in some regards to the General Public in that most of the existing understanding of things is based on the human idea of a binary gender system being normal. That said, the Community includes shapeshifters who can be any gender they want and species that do not fit in with the binary concept at all. The existence of professional telepaths makes the identification of gender dysphoria or other such situations much easier and shaping has much more refined and cheaper methods of changing gender than modern medicine does even with the advances genetic modification has had in the last ten years.
Throughout history, there have been varying attempts to deal with sexual and gender issues. At one time in the 5th through 7th centuries, there was a well-documented philosophy among telepaths and sorcerers that sexuality could be successfully manipulated by sorcery. Those methods, however, were eventually proven to cause numerous psychological abnormalities that often resulted in self-destructive or even psychopathic behavior. Still, attempts to “improve” on matters would persist in pockets until the Beijing Conference of 1815 classified attempts to alter sexuality as mental assault.
Telepaths and shapers that are specifically looking for signs of gender dysphoria can diagnose it in humans as young as five years old. However, it is more likely that the situation will be missed until the individual starts experiencing puberty at which point when someone experiencing a difficult adjustment might be checked as a matter of protocol. Gender transformation was one of the earliest techniques to spread throughout the supernatural population and thus the situation has always been easily addressed. The catch is in the fact that in many cases gender dysphoria was blamed on a curse by an enemy. Thus while the affected individual was easily treated, the discovery of a transgender child often led to violence directed at a convenient enemy. In the case of the Families this could result in full out war. The first realizations that this and other similar conditions were usually naturally occurring came in about the 11 th century but enemy action remained the dominant belief until the 17th century. There are still some groups that believe that to be the case in the 21st century though they are quite rare.
Throughout history, some segments of the supernatural population have considered a tradition to spend an adult year as the opposing gender. In some cases, the individual would find that they felt more comfortable in the other gender and would remain but either way it gave perspective on what each gender had to deal with. These days the tradition is no longer enforced as it was found that it caused severe psychological distress in many, however it was never actively forbidden. It is now rarely even practiced by the groups that used to hold it as a tradition. It and similar practices have resulted in the fact that the Community as a whole does not have nearly as firmly defined gender roles as the bulk of humanity.
While the Community is, by and large, much more accepting of non-binary gender and sexual arrangements, they tend to try to describe things using a binary standard as a reference point. For example, many people try to apply gender to the adze, which are collectively intelligent insect swarms containing both male and female elements. The situation is further confused by species that can’t reproduce without involving members of other species, such as the sidhe and trolls. Some human languages and cultures deal with the situation better than others, but in many cases there are places where discussing the nature of other species becomes a minefield of awkward phrasings.
Another issue is that most in the Community assume that any shapeshifter capable of changing genders is going to be both gender fluid and bisexual (or pansexual if they are aware of the differences) but that only accounts for a plurality and even then, only if the two traits are considered separately. There are many individuals capable of gender-switching who identify as one or the other gender and feel uncomfortable when they take other forms. There are also many such shapeshifters who are agender in identity.
Likewise, shapeshifting individuals who prefer a single gender for partners are quite common. Asexual gender-shifters are uncommon but not rare. This often results in people from the Community making inappropriate comments about gender-shifters which causes most who grow up in the Community with the ability to be discrete about mentioning they have it.
The general public considers such things as artificial conception and artificial wombs to be controversial new things, some parts of the Community have lived with such things for hundreds of years. Non-sexual methods of reproduction are rarely used by the Community, and generally only by couples that cannot reproduce another way, but learning about it is only a matter of mild surprise. Something like learning that someone has a birthmark. The use of the homunculus ritual, to create a child without requiring a woman to carry the child to term, was first successfully used in the Community in the 19th century and it remains a matter of curiosity that the very rare individuals conceived in such a way consider uncomfortable.
It should also be noted that the Community does not consider marriage to be inextricably linked to a romantic or sexual relationship. The main idea of a marriage that the Community holds to is the idea of people pledging to support each other through every circumstance. Most married couples (close to three out of four couples) are romantically and sexually involved, but it is considered a separate relationship from the marriage. They could just as easily have a platonic relationship and seek elsewhere for romantic or sexual fulfillment. A romantic relationship, even a monogamous long term one, does not require living with the partner and it is not considered scandalous to decide some other relationship outweighs a romantic one.
Since an unrelated man and woman living together attracts attention, the practice of getting married as camouflage came about in the days after the Purges and around the time the first mortal witch hunts began. Eventually the origin of camouflage faded and it became an uncommon but accepted practice. As the regular population and the supernatural populations both rose and were forced to be physically closer to each other, supernatural individuals with a platonic marriage who happened to be the same gender began to attract more attention. As paperwork became more inclusive it became harder to follow the now old practice resulting in individuals within the Community occasionally joining with organizations in the general population that support same sex marriage.
This can create problems, especially with families and individuals who are new to the Community and become confused that what they view as adultery is not considered important. Also, the barriers of what is and is not considered out of bounds for behavior is not as firmly delineated as it is with the practice of marriage as known to the bulk of the world. For example, a Community individual would not object to their spouse having a lover unless said lover was constantly using the relationship to take advantage of, or even harm, the household. Basically, it becomes an issue if it becomes apparent that a spouse is choosing something else as more important than their partner or family.
As same-sex marriages have become more accepted in the general population, it has become easier to follow these patterns. Someone new to the Community might not be too surprised to find a gay man and a gay woman living as man and wife. However, they would be shocked to find that two women who describe each other as wives are both heterosexual and have lovers outside the marriage. This also means that there are cases where one or both members of a marriage might be asexual or aromantic. It is also not considered embarrassing to have assumed incorrectly about the nature of a marriage. “We’re married, not lovers,” is an easy statement delivered often without any sort of irony or sarcasm which members that have grown up in the Community will accept without batting an eye.
Some members of the Community and other supernatural groups that have adapted this relationship model can sometimes be condescending or disapproving of the marriage traditions of the general public. Quite often the assumption is that marriage outside the Community is less about love and a promise to support one another, and more about a justification to have sex with each other or, worse, a statement of ownership. To them, this is proof of the ignorance and carnal obsessions of the outside world. Mixing between Community and general public have caused these attitudes to become less common, but the members of the Community are still likely to be confused or offended when someone is surprised about the nature of a married couple’s relationship.
As polyamory remains illegal in a number of places, there are currently no marriages between more than two people. However, the Community does have cases with multiple unrelated adults living together. While some individuals might have a sexual relationship, it won’t always or even usually be a polyamorous relationship in these cases. If such a group of people have lived together long-term and show no sign of separating, the Community will assume they have the same sort of relationship as one of the platonic marriages mentioned above. The only issue is that such arrangements tend to attract outside attention and even that is something that younger generations of the Community have started to not worry about.
As far as children go, their biological parents are tracked for health reasons, but they are generally considered to be a part of the household of whichever parent raises them. This also means that adoption is not considered something to hide or be embarrassed of. To those that grow up in the Community the word “parents” refers specifically to the adults raising them and while it usually refers to two people can refer to more in arrangements with multiple people living in the same house. “Father” and “mother” are used in reference to the child’s official guardians whether there is a biological relationship or not. “Sire” is used to refer to a genetic donor who is not directly involved in raising the child. For example, a woman who does not live with their biological child would be referred to as a “sire” rather than a “parent” and would not be referred to as a “mother” nor would she expect to be referred to as such if she grew up in the Community. In the same manner, the Community might have an understanding of the idea of a “half-sibling”, “step-sibling”, or “step-parent”, but they will usually have to think about these terms for a second or two before they remember what the general public means by them.
The Community considers themselves to have a more mature and enlightened understanding of relationships than the general public, which they often feel is overly prudish and paranoid with regard to sexuality. However, they still have most of the same issues. Young adults are still prone to rush into relationships and make commitments that they later break or even outright betray. With the raising interactions between the general public and the Community and more people from outside coming in all the time, there are a number of conflicts that are starting to brew especially when the expectations of someone from outside the Community clashes with the expectations of a significant other in the Community.
There are also points of confusion within the Community as well. Some of these are due to differences in instinct but others are due to differences in culture. In general, these differences can be worked around but it can be difficult, especially if the differences are overlooked. For example, sidhe culture lacks an incest taboo between siblings due to their lack of fertility with other sidhe meaning that inbreeding is impossible. As a result, non-sidhe have a tendency to pass rumors about bizarre and even abusive family practices. Therianthropes with a consistent sexual partner are chemically incapable of being attracted to another mate, giving them a variety of reputations that often is passed on to other species that can be called werecreatures. Raven females are almost uniformly polyamorous, seeking multiple male partners which can cause problems with non-Raven populations. The occurrence of these misunderstandings tend to cause dramatic flare-ups due to the Community’s assumption that they are more tolerant than the general public are.
The Families
The primary difference between the Community and the Families is in their perception on marriage. In the days when the first Families were founded, far back in the Age of Gods, they began to use shaping tricks to make some ritual sites or talismans unusable except by humans. Overtime, they began to narrow this down so that some shards and items could only be utilized by family members. As a result, having members of their blood running around undocumented or in the hands of people outside the family proper was a security risk. As such, marriage became the Families’ means of controlling and managing reproduction and thus who had their blood and could access their greatest secrets. Thus arranging marriages between members of the Families became a matter of determining what sort of access their new in-laws would have in addition to any other political agreement.
Eventually, the matter of genetic drift caused blood-locking items to be far too problematic and some shards or items have become essentially useless or abandoned due to the Family’s genes changing too much from what the lock was designed to accept. By the time blood-locking was abandoned and dismantled in the places and items that it could still be removed, this attitude toward marriage had become tradition. Even knowing the history of the tradition and that it was now mostly moot did not change matters. To the Families, a marriage is largely a symbol of a political union as are the children produced. Sexual partners and romantic relationships outside the marriage are fine so long as care is made that children are not produced.
Various Families have different attitudes as to what constitutes a proper marriage. Most limit marriage to a man and a woman but Families that have had access to ritual methods of conception for a long time simply require at least one part of the marriage to be a woman. Some rare Families accept marriages between two men as well, on the idea that one of the men could be turned female long enough to be bear a child. Given that homunculi are a rather recently acquired ritual in the Families, they are still causing debate in the Families as to how to regard them. Most Families take into account the sexuality of the people between whom a marriage is arranged, but some families don’t care and will insist on at least one child being produced regardless of the sexual desires of the two involved.
In the last hundred years, some Families have started to consider the old ways to be obsolete. Most of these are heavily connected to the Community or at least Psyche. Arranged marriages are becoming far less common and even being looked at unfavorably. However, the idea of controlling one’s reproduction is being a lot slower to fade. They often consider both the Community’s and general public’s traditions to be chaotic and lax.
The Immortals and their Mortal Kin
The physical expression and form of Gods and Demons is a choice. It is a choice most of them don’t think about and rarely ever exercise, but it is a choice none the less. They are aware of souls and that one which identifies as female will not be comfortable in a male body, but because of their general freedom in choosing their own form they have a less firm understanding of the idea of gender dysphoria. They frequently forget that the ability to change gender is not common among mortals and under-estimate the stresses that genetic modification and even shaping rituals have on the body and sometimes mind. Though in the last case, they have experts to serve their mortal citizens who are much more aware of the situations.
The fact that they have a great deal of control over what their body looks like and forget that other people don’t causes them to make gaffs in conversation when speaking to people outside of their own culture. For example, while they are aware of dysphoria they are often mystified as to why a sufferer of the condition doesn’t just change their physical sex to match their identity. It does not enter their head that it is an obstacle. One would think that the fact so many Gods and Demons used to be human would mean that they have more awareness than they do but the truth is that most of the humans that ascend to one group of Immortals or another were raised in that culture and similarly don’t understand the idea that there would be a social difficulty involved in changing physical sex.
Gods and Demons do let external factors influence their choice of physical gender. Demons, for example, will occasionally choose a physical form meant to give a desired impression. A Demon who wants to be seen as intelligent and believes women are smarter, for example, might choose a female form even if they find it uncomfortable. In the case of Gods, they will often choose a physical form to appease or appeal to a person they respect, love, or owe allegiance to. Most other Gods and Demons find this behavior bizarre and often have similar difficulties in understanding it to how many people in the general population have difficulty understanding addiction or staying with an abusive spouse.
The Immortals are so diverse in terms of gender identity and sexuality that they generally must be taken from person to person. However, there are some trends. Agender and asexual individuals are much more common among Gods than either humans or Demons. Gender-fluid and pansexual individuals are much more common among Demons. Lilith is known to identify as female and, as a result, many Demons take female form to emulate her. Vishnu is normally referred to by masculine pronouns, but is known to be comfortable in agender and female forms as well. Both Gods and Demons have a comparatively high number of individuals who are sexually attracted to differing personality types and characteristics rather than physical appearance or gender, though this is still one of the smaller sexuality groups.
Part of this divide in tendencies between the two Immortals might relate to the mortal species that each Immortal originally evolved from. The sentient dromaeosaurs that evolved into the Enki and then culturally split off into the Demons had three sexes, the third of which was required to activate the fertility of males and females. There were also conditions which could cause that species to change gender naturally. The Yaron, who would later became the Gods, on the other hand, evolved from a cetacean species that included agender individuals who were often seen as a leadership caste in their early history. For the most part, modern Gods and Demons aren’t cautiously aware of this history. The information exists in the Immortals’ shared mindscape via the memories of those individuals with ages in the millions, but it’s something people rarely think about.
In theory, growing up among humans and other mortals when they reincarnate should allow the Gods and Demons a better awareness of the situation of gender politics and sexuality, but the reality is that they are isolated from the general public. The humans they grow up among have mostly been connected to Nirvana or Yomi for generations, and are thus closer to the Immortal’s perspective on the matter. They directly avoid wide-scale mortal politics as a matter of policy and law. The humans of the general public usually avoid these conversations entirely and, upon reaching eighteen most Gods and Demons stop attending schools and thus only interact with the general public when they go to stores or other places of business.
Humans growing up in the Nirvanite or Yomian culture are generally more aware of such things for the simple fact of the physical limitations they face. However, they have the same culture reinforcement that the Gods and Demons experience. In terms of dealing with other humans from the general population or even from the Community, they are likely to get a little confused anytime the assumption of a gender or sexual binary is brought up. As with Gods and Demons, they are oddly more likely to appear insensitive due to a lack of understanding the issues that non-binary humans face in other cultures.
Gods and Demons are often not tempted by sexual activity, especially short-term flings. This is more due to their long-life spans than anything else. A God or Demon with what most humans would consider a normal amount of sexual desire might go centuries without having sex, especially if they were already older than a hundred years. There are exceptions to this but they are mostly overlooked as it is considered private business. It is only when the promiscuity is especially extreme, to the point of being detrimental to the individual, as in Aphrodite’s case; or is predatory in nature, as in Zeus’s case; that the matter is remarked upon.
As to marriage, it is rare. In Nirvana, it is usually a matter of politics and house leadership. In Yomi, marriage is almost, but not entirely, non-existent. There are extremely long-term relationships as one might expect of ageless beings, but they tend to evolve or change over time and don’t always have the same nature. Persephone and Hades are married but their relationship has shifted over time between lovers, siblings, close friends, and parent/child relationships, given Hades has avoided being seen in public for over a hundred years no one is certain what manner of relationship the two currently have. That said, there are exceptions. Amaterasu and Susano’o always possess the sort of relationship human siblings typically have, usually with a lot of bickering affection. Vishnu and Lilith have maintained a romantic love for millions of years, though they have been kept at odds by the political realities of being leaders of their respective groups.
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