#🪪 (Anahita) Moreau

[novanhistorian]

Terms of Reference and Novan Historiography

1.7k words.

Happy February, everyone. I survived the last month. I have also been reading The Scarlet Letter, a fact which is largely responsible for the current peculiarity of my narrative voice; please enjoy, if possible, and if not, please bear with me.

I don't have a particularly good summary for this one; it's essentially an answer to "how does novan society handle it when someone comes out as trans and changes how they're to be referred to?", with notes on other circumstances in which one might change one's name.

I ought, first, to begin with the notion of terms of reference. This is the over-category for three things: name, pronouns, and grammatical and titular gender. The former two are straightforward to explain, as most human societies also had concepts of them; the latter is more difficult, though not by much.

Titular gender is, for English-speakers, the more familiar of these concepts. It is, as the name implies, the gender of the titles used to refer to a person—it is the difference between Mr., Mrs., and Mx., in reference to a married person. In novan Esperanto, most titles have a genderless default form and three gendered forms, the latter of which a person must explicitly specify that they wish to use.

Grammatical gender is a concept for which I am going to link you a Wikipedia article because my layperson’s summary here may not do it justice. In some languages, nouns are divided into categories called genders, and each category behaves slightly differently grammatically. Out of these languages I am most familiar with Spanish, so I shall take it as my example here. Its nouns and adjectives are divided into masculine and feminine, fairly arbitrarily; masculine nouns and adjectives usually end in -o, and feminine nouns and adjectives usually end in -a.* If one is describing a noun, one must use the version of the adjective that aligns with the noun’s gender—to do otherwise is ungrammatical. Hence gata roja (“red cat, specifically female”) as opposed to *gata rojo. The reverse is also true—no *gatos rojas. Some languages are known to change outright the way verbs conjugate, but that is very complicated and I have yet to make a study of it, so we shall stick to nouns and adjectives here.

Neither English nor Esperanto* does that, but Parrus’ and Latin, the most widespread minority languages, do. Their grammatical gendering as applied to people is split masculine/feminine/sendua, reflecting the gender trinary typical of novan and late human society. In Latin’s case it absorbed the old neuter/inanimate gender, to the consternation of philosophers everywhere; the early speakers of Parrus’, by contrast, simply decided to have another grammatical gender, and the resultant system differentiates m/f/s/inanimate.

* The closest thing Esperanto shows to this is gender variants of occupational nouns—kuiristo, “cook,” for instance—using the gendering suffix/infixes -iĉ-, -in-, -is-. This is very uncommon, and it is considered an aspect of titular gender when it does occur. This is why I did not provide actor/actress and fiancé/fiancée as English approximates of grammatical gender.

So, to recap, name, pronouns, and grammatical/titular gender are the things called, collectively, the terms of reference.

Terms of reference, once established, are often static; novan society shows little propensity to have its members’ nicknames exceed the sphere of their immediate friends, and for most people gender is more or less consistent over time. Still, they do change, and that poses a problem for historiographers.

The general tendency in post-human historiography is to call the person whatever they were publicly known as at a given time; as an example, a biography of this fellow would call him (Louis) Chevreux up until the point he became better known by the alias (Louis de) Beaufront, and from then on he would be Beaufront in a more informal biography and M. de Beaufront in a more reverent or earlier one. (Novan titles are complicated. Someday I’ll make a post about them.)

This is the rule in most every case, but there are three broad categories of special case, which I shall dispatch with here. The first two are the complete suppression of a previous name, as the result of a socially-accepted “complete hush;” the third is a special case of the second.

Our first case is the early novan Moreau, the first line header of the third gento ever created. To quote a bit of the Sketch of History I have yet to publish: “At this early stage every novan was expected to be a public figure, very open and with nothing to hide; and, unlike humans, novans were essentially only referred to by their personal names. Everywhere Evo Darwin went, she was Evo, no matter if she had never met anyone there. The news called her Evo, strangers on the street (in the tunnels?) called her Evo. Her spouse actually started calling her Darwin for a bit because it felt more intimate. The first three accepted and tolerated it, but it disgusted Anahita Moreau and thereby was one part of the cause of a major political event a few decades down the line.”

As stated, Moreau hated this. She was the first novan to sully her hands (and more importantly her species’s reputation) with politics, and a major aim of the movement that coalesced around her was correcting the name gap. The movement was internally nameless because of the Human Tenure ban on political parties, but when reference to them was made it was as “Anahita’s people” or “the Anahitists.” Partially at Moreau’s goading—she loved how it made the press and the public start calling her by her surname, like she was an equal, human member of society—they eventually simplified that to “the Anahita.” It was well underway by the time Moreau turned forty, and—expert drama-stoker that she was—she used that seminal birthday to officially donate her given name to the movement. Henceforth she herself was to be known as Moreau, no more and no less.

Moreau, as a revered figure in novan culture, pretty much universally has that wish heeded. Many early Imperial biographies omitted entirely any connection of the name “Anahita” to her as opposed to the movement, taking it as a given that everyone would simply know. This is not always the case, and often a political renouncing only lasts two or three generations before the biographers stop caring.

Our second exemplar is Henryk T. I. Telkes (Ĉl*), a minor senator and secret occultist from shortly before the First Civil War. Assumed female at birth, he realized quite early that he was in fact male, and as a result he petitioned his parents to rename him. (This is typical of West-Northern riĉula culture, but atypical of the wider Imperium; it remains expected behavior to choose one’s own name if one discovers that one’s assumed or “infantile” gender is inaccurate.) They decided on Henryk, after a recently-deceased relative, he liked the name, and thenceforth no mention was made of his infantile name; deadnames, as they were called in human parlance, are the most common cause of complete hushes. Thus, in biographies of Telkes—or, more commonly, of Pseudo-Paimon, the nom de plume under which he published his books on the occult—he is throughout his whole life referred to by the corrected terms of reference, H. T. I. Telkes, Ĉl; if his infantile name appears, it is as an incidental bit of trivia.

* The absence of an italicised m, f, or s after the gender and pronoun indicators simply means one uses the default neutral titles and the grammatical gender that corresponds to one’s actual gender.

I do not have much more to write about this case, except to note that novan society is quite used to trans people and as a result does not see it as worth a fuss when one of its members corrects their publicly-known gender. (If only humanity were so polite.) Unlike a term-of-reference change undertaken for political reasons, gender-related hushes persist for the rest of time.

My third example is an exception to the rule described above, wherein no hush descends because of the preferences of the trans individual. Johan- Zanabazar (…we’ll get to this) was the emperor whose stepping-down led to the First Civil War; I end his name with a hyphen because throughout his life he went, at various times, by Johano, Johana, and Johann. He was a cadet, during which time he went by Johano; for most of her military career, including her time as an imperator, she alternated between Johana and Johann; he marked his retirement from imperatorship with a term-of-reference change, so we see him as emperor under Johano once again; re was assassinated a few years later under the pseudonym Bhagyam, with which re appears to have actually identified.*

* After Bhagyam Linnaeus (Ĉl), first Presiding Imperator; quite a common name.

He made no public or private statements about what his gender was—and believe me, historians have looked—nor did he spend much time explaining why he undertook so many changes in his terms of reference. The only official assertions he made were that he should be referred to “over the whole of time” (that is, when no specific period was in question, but rather the person as a whole) with masculine pronouns and neutral terms wherever possible, and that he did not want a complete hush placed over his past terms of reference. Even that had to come out in response to a news article.

That, dear reader, ends both our third special case and our description of the historiographical handling of terms of reference.

[novanhistorian]

The next part of the increasingly-inaccurately-named Sketch of History has now gotten long enough that I'm considering splitting it up by century. Sorry Moreau, you may get bisected. Again.

[novanhistorian]

About the Author

Sole historian, cartographer, and occasional elegiast of a nonexistent world. Likely to expand this pinned post, and even more likely to improve my profile picture over time.

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Tagged Time Periods. #⌚ human future history ↳ I shall have to change that emoji. #⌚ second imperial civil war ↳ the Imperium Novel started as backstory to this.

Tagged Topics. #🔸 the Armada #🔸 culture #🔸 Forsuno #🔸 gender #🔸 Ilajn #🔸 language #🔸 the Mining Belt ↳ tag also used for periods where it was known as the Asteroid Belt. #🔸 the Moon #🔸 novanity #🔸 the Scientarchy #🔸 Scientia #🔸 Terranovo

Tagged Characters. #🪪 Cassius Banneker #🪪 Teodosio F. G. Darwin #🪪 Alexei Kirilloviĉ Ilyasov ↳ follows his preferred romanization rather than the strict one. ↳ don’t get attached to the patronymic; I'm considering renaming his father. #🪪 (Anahita) Moreau #🪪 Memphis Mylera #🪪 Marina Staravia #🪪 Clarence Staravia #🪪 Darya Staravya #🪪 Sana Staravya #🪪 Henryk T. I. Telkes #🪪 Johan- Zanabazar

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