What Does a Nonbinary Person Sound Like in Audiobooks?
[image description: vertical strips of paper that form a rainbow and a slip of white paper that says “they/them” in black.]
These days my reading is split pretty evenly between print and audio. (Nothing against ebooks, but generally by the time I’m settling down to read I’m fed up with screens for the day.) Until recently, I hadn’t considered what a nonbinary character might sound like in an audiobook.
What got me thinking about this is that a person in my book club picked All Systems Red by Martha Wells for us a read recently. The protagonist is a robot who makes a point of mentioning several times that they don’t have a gender. About half the book club read the book in print and about half read the book on audio and I noticed an interesting divide.
Nearly everyone who read the book in print routinely referred to the robot using she/her/hers pronouns. I thought this was interesting since the robot not having a gender comes up several times and no physical characteristics that could be assumed male or female are ever mentioned with regard to the robot. I asked this part of the group why they thought they defaulted to she/her/hers pronouns and they said, in short, because the author is female and they are female, so they read the robot as having female traits.
Meanwhile, nearly everyone who read the book on audio repeatedly referred to the robot with he/him/his pronouns. When asked why they thought they defaulted to he/him/his, they said because the audiobook narrator was male, so hearing the deeper voice vocalizing the robot’s dialogue made them read the robot as male too.
The majority of people in this book club are female with a couple of nonbinary folks like me sprinkled in. The discussion over All Systems Red that night made me wonder: What does a nonbinary person sound like?
The robot isn’t specifically called nonbinary in the book and genderlessness doesn’t necessarily equate to being nonbinary. However, for the sake of not having a human equivalent to genderlessness and nonbinary being the more common language of the day, I’ll stick with nonbinary when referring to the robot.
I think because I’m nonbinary myself, it was easy for me to read the robot as being nonbinary. I didn’t feel inclined to label the robot as male or female or imagine it as such. It’s mentioned that the robot has elements of a human-like appearance, including short hair, which someone cited as making them think the robot was male, but that doesn’t hold water for me because I’ve had short hair for years––both when I identified as female and now that I more comfortably identify as nonbinary.
The audiobook question still plagues me. I think representation is important, so I googled the audiobook narrator to see if they were nonbinary. The narrator is Kevin R. Free, who uses he/him/his pronouns.
I ask myself: Would having a nonbinary narrator have made readers imagine the robot better as nonbinary? The truth is I’m not sure. I identify as nonbinary but I don’t take hormones, so my voice sounds the same now as it did when I identified as female. Though I don’t have a high voice, no one would hear it and think me anything other than female. Is it possible to have an androgynous voice? Or what would be perceived by listeners to be an androgynous voice (as opposed to how the narrator identifies themselves)?
Admittedly, I haven’t seen a ton of books with nonbinary protagonists. The only other one I can think of off the top of my head is Dear Senthuran by Akwaeke Emezi. Akwaeke uses they/them pronouns, though Dear Senthuran is a memoir, so it makes sense to me that Akwaeke reads their own audiobook.
Perhaps the answer to “what does a nonbinary person sound like?” will forever vary on a case-by-case basis. I don’t have a good answer but I think these are questions worth considering, especially as more writers write nonbinary characters. It’s possible I’ll write a nonbinary character (or several) in my own fiction at some point and I don’t think it would be doing my characters or my readers justice to not consider these types of questions beforehand.
