Let's Talk About [Gender]

With Crewman Gham being revealed today, he seems like a straightforward personnel on the surface. However, he took some time to get just right, mainly due to the fact that he’s an Andorian.

When Creative first got the card, the lore consisted of three words. Andorian male. Dissident. Not a whole lot of finesse involved, and this is the usual state that Creative gets the cards. Lore is very bare bones or, if we’re lucky, lyrics from some random song are in the lore. Nouns will have things that have to be in there, but by and large, they are on their own.

The issue at hand is Andorians don’t have two genders, they have four. It may seem straightforward, but in terms of the game, personnel are male or female, for the most part at least. Yes, there are exceptions, which I’m sure will be pointed out in the accompanying thread, but by and large, cards fall into one of those two categories.

One option would be to add to the already complex rules, but when you think of how few Andorains there are in Star Trek there won’t be much bang for that buck. Not just that, but Gham is the first Andorian, so the precedent had to be set here. The expanded universe has put specific nomenclature to the genders (chan, shen, thaan and zhen in case you are interested) but that’s even more complexity to something that players can pretty much intuit, but if Gham is a chan, he isn’t stopped by Male’s Love Interest, can’t contribute to card that specify a gender while not adversely affected by them, and so forth. Its possible, but it’s really not pretty.

So in the end, Creative found a way to make him a non-male male. By using the pronoun, we are staying true to the character and keeping the game in check while not adding more paragraphs to the glossary. This is something that’s been done on other occasions and will likely do again. Every card needs some sort of gender, unless it is obviously male by the picture, but we don’t write the word female on every card depicting a female. 

In all honesty, this is something you should be used to by now. If every universal personnel had ‘representative of suchandsuch’ in their lore, it would get old real fast. Switching it up adds variety and well, creativity.  We hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s lesson on sex.