Question What do you call a race with four genders?

My Muse has been bugging me to work on some Star Trek fan fics based in the Star trek Online timeline, which besides being sick is the reason no Whateley fic updates from me this week, and I'm kind of stumped as to what to call the Andorian's gender set up; Quad gendered race just sounds odd, yet it is accurate.

Cryptic wrote: My Muse has been bugging me to work on some Star Trek fan fics based in the Star trek Online timeline, which besides being sick is the reason no Whateley fic updates from me this week, and I'm kind of stumped as to what to call the Andorian's gender set up; Quad gendered race just sounds odd, yet it is accurate.

Extremely "social"

Cryptic wrote: My Muse has been bugging me to work on some Star Trek fan fics based in the Star trek Online timeline, which besides being sick is the reason no Whateley fic updates from me this week, and I'm kind of stumped as to what to call the Andorian's gender set up; Quad gendered race just sounds odd, yet it is accurate.

Nuclear family with live-in mother in laws.

I call it "unlikely." Although I'm a bit of a Trekkie myself, and one of my favourite hard SF authors (Isaac Asimov) once hit this trope (in The Gods Themselves), the thing is that, evolutionarily speaking, more than two genders do not make any sense.
Sexual reproduction does have an evolutionary advantage over sexual reproduction, in that it accelerates evolution by spreading genes through the population, with the disadvantage of complicating the reproductive process. Adding more genders makes reproduction less likely to succeed and gives no obvious evolutionary advantage over two-gender sexual reproduction.

So, if you are going to work with this theme, try to come up with some sort of fan-theory on why life on Andoria evolved in this odd and unlikely way.

There are actually some spieces like this on earth. (I don't konw about Andorians, just 4 gendered races on earth)

Generally speaking (from what little I know) is there as on 'female' gender and multiple 'male' genders with large dimorphism between the different types of males. Technically speaking they are all male but you can clearly tell the different males apart.

If you want completely separate genders I'd limit it to 3. Have one male, one female, and one half way inbetween that can both impregnate others and become impregnated.

The Four gender thing started with a throw away line that got interpreted as four genders, I forget the exact line or what series it was in, but cannon authors jumped on it in recent years. And they did go into the 'WTF is wrong with your evolution to require this?' aspect. And then they pulled something out of Bashire, Crusher's and a few other doc's collective asses and saved the race, but left them just as muddled.

Memory Beta "Andorian Genders" has the break down of what's been written about their messed up repro system.

Cryptic wrote: My Muse has been bugging me to work on some Star Trek fan fics based in the Star trek Online timeline, which besides being sick is the reason no Whateley fic updates from me this week, and I'm kind of stumped as to what to call the Andorian's gender set up; Quad gendered race just sounds odd, yet it is accurate.

Shouldn't that be four "sexes," not being up on Andorian biology does it take all four to reproduce?

Mercedes Lackey had a three sexed species. The third was Neuter, and acted as nannies and teachers for the species.

John Varley's Gaea trilogy had a centaur like race that had two sexes, but a child could have from 1-4 parents.

Various polynesian islands also have three genders. Not too hard to extend that to a fourth.
But it still only involves two for actual procreation.


Come to think of it the old english upperclass " have the kid and hand them off to the nanny until they leave for boarding school" is damn near the same.

Think of how backbreaking it can be to get together with a sex partner, of all the complications and obstacles; now increase the initial factor by two.

On the upside, their Romantic Comedies must be hilarious!

There's a great scene in A Wizard Alone by Diane Duane, after Kit's family accidentally gets alien cable*:

“Oh, my god,” Kit’s mama said, “what are they doing?”

Anything that could so seriously gross out Kit’s mama, the nurse, was worth a look. Kit grabbed a plate and ducked back into the living room, looked at the writhing, thrashing, stridently colored image for a moment, then took the remote away from his mama and punched it for subtitles. “Oh, okay, thought so,” he said, reading them. “It’s a soap.”

“Not of any brand I recognize,” his mother said. She looked scandalized.

“It’s real basic, Mama,” Kit said. “Boy meets girl meets thing meets other thing. Boy loses girl loses other thing finds thing. Boy loses thing gets girl loses thing. Then thing gets thing. Happily ever after…” He tossed the remote back to his mother.

She fielded it badly as she studied the screen for any signs of boys or girls, and looked like she was having trouble finding any, though there were plenty of “things.” “Basic, you said?”

“Old, old story, Mama. You should see some of these guys’ literature. Shakespeare’d have loved it.” Kit considered that briefly: his lit class had been doing the late Shakespeare comedies, and suddenly a whole set of opportunities opened out before him. “Just imagine A Midsummer Night’s Dream with ten or twelve extra genders…”

*actually, pretty much any scene related to the fact that they accidentally got alien cable is pretty hilarious.