Exploring Gender and Trans Identity in the Worlds of C.J. Cherryh - Reactor

This passage, where a spaceship captain discovers that an alien passenger has changed gender (and switched pronouns), might not be surprising in the modern sci-fi sphere, where books featuring trans and nonbinary characters are published far more regularly. But this book—Chanur’s Legacy—by C.J. Cherryh, came out in 1992, marking the end of Cherryh’s beloved Chanur saga, which began in 1981. Cherryh was writing about trans themes and identities in the era dominated by the social and religious conservatism of the Reagan administration and organizations like Focus on the Family; they are deeply interesting, and worthy of greater attention and recognition.

With a background in archaeology and classics, Cherryh is known for building complex alien societies anchored in cultures, social mores, and neurobiology foreign to humans. This leads to intricate conflicts as species’ differing customs and behaviors come into contact with each other. Often, these conflicts involve conceptions of gender.

Take the hani, the main species of the Chanur series. The hani are inspired by lions, by which we mean the males laze about while the females do everything. The males nominally rule big, sprawling estates as clan lords, but in reality, they are considered too short-tempered and irrational to be trusted with important decisions, so the females run the estates and, once the hani discover space travel, crew the spaceships. The lords’ only job is fighting off male challengers and “lying about on cushions with a dozen wives to see to the nastiness².”

Anyone who can do arithmetic can spot that this isn’t as good a deal for the males as it seems. Adolescent male hani “had to go out into the outback to live, learn to hunt and to fight each other and if boys lived long enough they could come back and try to drive some older man out into the outback to die³.” And when an aging clan lord is defeated, his reward is either death or a pitiful exile. To a hani, “Males were what they were, three quarters doomed and the survivors, if briefly, estate lords, pampered and coddled⁴.”

No wonder not every male rushes to embrace this role.

When Pyanfar, a hani ship captain and the protagonist of the Chanur series, finds her deposed mate Khym injured and hiding at the fringes of another male’s territory, “surviving, out of his time and his reason for living⁵,” she offers him a berth on her ship, telling him, “It’s different out there… Right and wrong aren’t the same. Attitudes aren’t the same… Might start a fashion⁶.”

Easier said than done. While Khym is not a stereotypical bad-tempered male—“as males went, he was a rock of stability and self-control⁷”—he’s learned to be lazy and fails to pull his considerable weight. When warned to control his temper, he complains, “We’re set up to fight. Millions of years—it’s not an intellectual thing. Our circulatory system, our glands⁸ […]”. Pyanfar tells Khym he’s “spoiled by a mother that coddled your tempers instead of boxing your ears the way she did your sister’s. He’s just a son, huh? Can’t be expected to come up to his sister’s standard⁹.”

Khym struggles because he isn’t just changing jobs—he’s switching gender roles. From a hani perspective, Pyanfar must feminize him so he can join her crew. But he learns. Pyanfar is astonished when he accepts drudge work, “by the gods, the ex-lord of Mahn on galley duty, no complaints¹⁰.” A turning point comes when Pyanfar loses her temper and nearly attacks an important hani and finds “Khym’s arm between her and the Ehrran: Khym, whose mind had gone on working when hers quit¹¹.” At the end of that voyage, she awards him an earring—a badge of honor that hani spacers earn for their travels, only ever awarded to females. Khym has learned how to be female.

Meanwhile on the homeworld, Pyanfar has started a dustup over gender roles. Mentioning men at all is rocking the boat—“Ten, fifteen years ago, you didn’t by the gods use the male pronoun in a message between clans. It still felt queasy and indecent¹²”—and Pyanfar is asking them to rethink their fundamental understanding of society. Are males just built that way? Or is it, as Pyanfar claims, “custom, not hardwiring¹³?” It’s an argument that humans have been having for decades, with the same key point of contention—once someone has been assigned a sex at birth, are they shackled to that role forever?

Khym adapts to a female role out of necessity. In Chanur’s Legacy, though, we meet a male hani who adopts a female role by choice. The adolescent Hallan has decided to “fight biology and go to space¹⁴.” Hallan is a miserable fit for the traditional male gender role. He’s shy, curious, bookish, and terrible at fighting. He surreptitiously reads romance novels. “Whether you read him as trans or queer, the feeling of being an other is palpable. He cannot survive the violent life dictated to male hani, his only role to sacrifice his body in a system he does not believe in, but is forbidden to travel the stars and seek something else for himself on account of his gender,” says Dorian Dawes, author of A Dream of Saints.

Hallan isn’t just escaping from a bad lot in life—he actively wants to be female. He “insisted he was one of the girls, that he was cool-headed, he wanted to play the game on their terms¹⁵.” And he wants not only the female role, but female biology. He has “[i]llusions he was a girl¹⁶.” He dreads that in the future “when he got all his size and hormones kicked in for good and earnest, he wasn’t going to be worth anything but one thing until he was as old as Khym Mahn and hormones had stopped making him crazy… worst of all, to think that, over the next few years, he might progressively lose his self-control and his reason¹⁷.” Fearing your hormones turning you into someone you don’t want to be—it’s a feeling all too familiar to trans people.

Yet everywhere he goes, people see only his birth sex, and misunderstand him because of it. When he impulsively hits someone and lands in jail, everyone assumes he’s another crazy male hani, but “[t]ruth was, he’d been scared, not mad²¹.” He’s desperate to prove himself, but his rookie mistakes get blown out of proportion. An alien passenger flips out at the sight of him, protesting that “our presence has been assaulted by strange persons of male and violent gender²².” Dorian Dawes sees a strong connection to the trans experience: “This idea that you are bound to your biological sex, and everyone perceives your male hormones as a threat to female spaces feels all too familiar in 2025, and Cherryh uses this metaphor with devastating precision.”

Among the hani, gender is rigid. Among their neighbors the stsho, gender is fluid. The stsho are “trisexual hermaphrodites, one of each triad bearing young: but that same individual may exist within another triad as a non-bearer. Stsho refuse to explain²³.” When stressed, stsho go through a transition called Phasing and come out an entirely different person, sometimes with a new gender that, thanks to hormonal changes, is capable of reproducing in its new role. “Stsho change sex, change person, change everything²⁴.” After phasing, they are treated as a completely new entity, and “it was not at all polite to recognize the refurbished person²⁵”—that is, to deadname them.

The stsho use their own pronouns: gtst for the neuter gender, which engages with outsiders; gtste for (more or less) female; gtsto for (more or less) male; and gtstisi for those currently Phasing. Finally, elder stsho take on a completely genderless role—different than neuter—with the pronoun gtsta. For the stsho, gender is a temporary role that changes many times over their long lives, due to stress, politics, desire to find a mate, or for countless other reasons.

Interactions with the stsho can be complicated, unsurprisingly. The opening vignette comes from Chanur’s Legacy, where hani captain Hilfy accepts a contract to deliver a vase from a stsho governor to a stsho ambassador. The vase turns out to be a formal marriage proposal, which indicates “[t]he nature of the alliance. No’shto-shti-stlen’s position within it, which of the three… an emblem of proposed gender²⁶.” Since only one gender serves in politics, many parties have a strong vested interest in the exact nature of the offer, and Hilfy finds herself embroiled in intrigue.

Finally, we have the kif. The kif “hit the ground at birth competitive, aggressive, and (some scholars surmised) having first to escape their nest before they were eaten²⁷.” “What their genders are is a matter of guesswork²⁸” and “he” is used by outsiders only by convention. Instead, their culture is organized around a principle called sfik, which translates to something like “face.” For a kif, life revolves around gaining sfik or causing others to lose sfik. They have no other model for social interaction.

Usually.

Skkukuk is a castoff from a former kif master who considers him worthless. Given to Pyanfar as a gift, he initially “looked sinister in one instant, beaten and pathetic in the next²⁹,” devoid of sfik and clearly not flourishing within the kif social order. As author Tuxedo Catfish put it on Bluesky, Skkukuk is “somehow trans despite belonging to a species whose closest analogue to gender is ‘how much boss are you’.”

Pyanfar considers him a dangerous, annoying liability, but when she finally begins allowing him responsibilities on the ship, he is eager to please, proving resourceful and trustworthy. It is Tully, the human crewmember, who figures him out: “He want be hani… He kif, he same time got no friend with kif, he be little kif. They kill him, yes… He don’t be hani, he die³⁰.” Unable to live with his birth-assigned social identity, he adopts a new one.

Skkukuk reappears years later under the name Vikktakkht. He commands a fleet now, but still demonstrates un-kif-like attitudes. He foregoes the opportunity to turn on Pyanfar to increase his own sfik, saying, “if I aspired to be mekt-hakkikt the peace would end³¹,” even though kif supposedly can’t understand the concept of peace. He blindsides Hilfy by dealing fairly with her when she’s in a precarious situation. He takes to Hallan, visiting him in jail, doing favors for him, and offering him an honored spot at a negotiation table. Hilfy is baffled: “Why had Vikktakkht wanted him? Why had Vikktakkht insisted to speak to him, except to get a less wary answer?³²” Vikktakkht’s answer is “I find him amusing³³”—perhaps the closest he can get to expressing his feelings with the language he understands—but the real answer is something the kif are supposed to be biologically incapable of: friendship. Another alien says of the kif, “Nobody friend. Don’t got word, ‘friend.’ Just ‘advantage³⁴’”but Vikktakkht apparently does. He saw the struggling misfit who no one trusted, sympathized with him, and took him under his wing.

The trans connection here is more subtle than it is for the stsho, but the parallels are there: Being born into a supposedly immutable biological and social role that doesn’t suit you at all, suffering for failing to fulfill that role, blossoming when you find an identity that fits you, and—of course—finding community with others in the same position. Tuxedo Catfish explains, “he’s constantly mistreated in ways that don’t really register as mistreatment to him, and once people start feeling guilty about it you can almost see the wheels turning in his brain as he realizes both that this is better than the life he lived before and also that he can take advantage of it.”

Alien gender revolutions, aliens who regularly switch genders, aliens who take on social roles from other alien species—the Chanur series is full of trans themes and concepts, and many trans readers have seen themselves reflected in characters like Hallan. Today’s science fiction continues to build on the decades-long heritage of authors who used sci-fi as a space to explore ideas about society long before they were mainstream in the real world—playing a key part in that heritage is C.J. Cherryh, who took a hard look at how our society views gender and saw other possibilities.

1. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 574. (All quotations from Chanur’s Homecoming and Chanur’s Legacy come from the omnibus edition Chanur’s Endgame.) ↩︎
2. Chanur’s Venture, p. 87 ↩︎
3. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 410 ↩︎
4. Chanur’s Venture, p. 83 ↩︎
5. The Pride of Chanur, p. 196 ↩︎
6. The Pride of Chanur, p. 223 ↩︎
7. The Kif Strike Back, p. 26 ↩︎
8. Chanur’s Venture, p. 93 ↩︎
9. Chanur’s Venture, p. 93 ↩︎
10. Chanur’s Venture, p. 146 ↩︎
11. Chanur’s Venture, p. 255 ↩︎
12. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 497 ↩︎
13. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 473 ↩︎
14. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 513 ↩︎
15. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 489 ↩︎
16. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 514 ↩︎
17. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 473 ↩︎
18. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 411 ↩︎
19. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 503 ↩︎
20. Chanur’s Venture, p. 305 ↩︎
21. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 534 ↩︎
22. The Pride of Chanur, p. 17 ↩︎
23. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 668 ↩︎
24. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 589 ↩︎
25. Chanur’s Venture, p. 307 ↩︎
26. The Kif Strike Back, p. 52 ↩︎
27. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 33 ↩︎
28. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 729 ↩︎
29. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 605 ↩︎
30. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 651 ↩︎
31. Chanur’s Endgame, p. 713 ↩︎