Anyway the point of my posts about Lord English and about troll gender so close together was that I’d been talking about it in the headcanon chat and I’ve come to the pretty solid conclusion that it’s English’s fault that trolls even have gender.
If you think about the fact that trolls logically should not have biological sex outside of the mother grub / troll dichotomy, then the idea that trolls developed a concept of gender identity seems absurd. But as it happens, a lot of Alternia is absurd; it’s a near-comical caricature of a fascist dictatorship, because it was engineered that way. So of course it follows that someone (read: the lizard man English and his puppet government) decided that trolls should be gendered.
And there’s precedent for it to be that way! English is from an incredibly binary race (a species one could almost say is composed entirely of binaries), and, unfortunately, as is well-known, his biggest policy is misogyny. Which is an easy policy to carry out when all you’re doing is trolling cherubs and humans, and messing with carapaces; but it’s difficult to do when you’re at the helm of a race who are, for all intents and purposes, non-binary. So naturally, he imposed a gender binary on them, completely arbitrarily.
And it just thematically fits; if there’s an fascist or imperialist ideal that you could possibly apply to a species to make it a dystopia, it’s been slapped onto Alternia; and a completely arbitrarily imposed gender binary is just… one of those colonialist things.
Trolls having binary genders is ridiculous because it’s just part of the endless set of ridiculous rules deliberately placed onto Alternia to make it ridiculously dystopian.
This is doubly relevant now we know that cherubim don’t have differentiated sexes either.
Yeah! I briefly touched upon it during my commentary of the Epilogues, but the text basically outright confirms my interpretation of Alternian gender on page 19 of Meat:
CALLIOPE: my ideas aboUt gender were entirely inflUenced by my time watching earth.
CALLIOPE: i sUppose i only thoUght of myself as a girl because my, Um…
CALLIOPE: my brother took mascUlinity qUite serioUsly.
CALLIOPE: cherUb existence is dichotomoUs, bUt not in the same way hUman biology is.
CALLIOPE: it’s all so very circUitoUs and arbitrary.