An alien race of three genders.

[DOAHunterX]

Would anyone be interested in a story, or series of stories, about a race of aliens that are born of two sexes, but mature into a typically male gender that produces sperm, a more androgynous female that produces eggs, and a hyper feminine third gender that the female releases her eggs into via an ovipositor? Yes, I'm aware that is a long question. I'm also unsure of what other features these aliens would have. Should these aliens have multiple pairs of breasts? An udder? What various other kinks should this race have?

 

[ericrodman101]

Only three? How about the capacity to orgasm by thought transference? Are they in any way humanoid so that the ovipositor is internal, say and emerges when required? Or are we talking weird and wonderful on first meeting?

 

[LupusDei]

Hmm... so, do we have two sexes, where all the nominal females have ovipositor that let them trade their fertilized zygotes around, so they voluntarily specialize into egglayers (Ef) and wombs Wf?

That's fun until one realizes Ef are basically parasites... To make them less so, we may declare two distinct development pathways that lead to Wf unable to independently conceive, and Ef unable to grow an embryo. Now Wf has no use for ovipositor, nor to ever have sex with a male, unless, Ef can release unfertilized egg in Wf freshly seeded by an M. Then there's no need for sex between Ef and M, and we're ending up with two distinct essentially male sexes Em and Sm that release two different types of sperm into growth environment that just happens to be within otherwise infertile form of their own species.

Logical escalation would be true three sex race with need of all three to contribute genetic material. Who said there can't be triple spiral genetics. Do different orders of mixing lead to different outcomes? Do one or any of the three branches bind with our Terranoid double spiral freely? (Okay, that's probably a stretch, but not less impossible than FTL I would suggest.)

Now, with humans in the mix we have a combination five sex race, where at least two can semi-independently reproduce in double spiral genetics form. Can any other combinations of two do the same in specific circumstances (failure modes)?

We're back to Ef and Wf trading zygotes by optionally developed ovipositor... baseline human female (Hf) can't have, marking them with distinct disability and disadvantage.

But what if there's fourth functional gender (Rm), that with an ovipositor, distinct from either the fertile ovary and the welcoming womb, only tasked with the transmission of the fertilized zygote from one to the other?

The full reproductive cycle then goes:
1) Sm has sex with Ef and fertilizes the ova;
2) Rm has sex with Ef, remove the fertilized zygote and store internally;
3) Rm has sex with Wf and implants the zygote in the womb.

Eiter Rm or Wf or both can provide additional necessarily genetic material, in form of above mentioned third spiral or much more mundane mitochondria or other alike symbolic elements (potentially including nanites from a robotic Rm).

Now, baseline human female can be defined as special case of combined Ef/Wf able to independently conceive in sex with Sm directly, cutting out the Rm if she so chooses, but can still benefit from one's presence in the right time. The removal window may be very limited as she can't hibernate the zygote as true Ef probably can (and Rm must), but even that ability might plausibly be introduced in Hf by medicine or gene editing.

While the Rm can be -- and likely is -- arbitrary nonhuman, we may still be even looking at advanced human evolution, which artificial Rm introduced as the ultimate solution to abortions debate (possibly just shifting blame around, as I imagine a popular Rm may collect many many more encapsulated eggs than they can ever hope to gainfully distribute).

But also, we can have arbitrary complex alien biology just accidentally able to provide Rm services to humans as well, and by doing so, gainful sex with aliens with no necessity to declare biological compatibility... beyond the optional symbiotic system Rm may add, and then with a bit of stretch, alien wombs capable of gestation of human embryos, including, even possibly to more advanced stages than the human nutrition system allow. Then we blend in as Ef(h) and Sm(h) in what's possibly a huge nomenclature of forms and genders in possibly six++ sex hive.

 

[SteelPoint]

Go and visit the Ltbgfzy6~#£ pages and see if your idea of "more than two genders" cuts much ice there...

 

[Bramblethorn]

IIRC Iain M. Banks had a three-sexed alien race in "Player of Games".

 

[AlinaX]

IIRC Iain M. Banks had a three-sexed alien race in "Player of Games".

Yes. The middle sex was the apex and it was a deeply sexist and hierarchical society with the apex dominant.

 

[000zing]

I would describe our English Middlesex for the sake of our overseas pals but I'm afraid they'd find it immensely boring.

 

[tenyari]

If you're wanting serious SciFi you need to start thinking about why you would evolve a third sex.

If you want silly SciFi you don't care.

But back to serious.

Males evolved as essentially a genetic mutation out of females. This mutation is one way to increase genetic diversity. We could just as easily have evolved two females mating and exchanging DNA resulting in both getting pregnant. Theories as to why we evolved one sex that cannot grow it's offspring abound. The easiest theory to consider would be to have a segment of your population be of lower disposable value. A distraction for predators.

With three sexes, unless at least two of them are getting pregnant, you're starting to gain too many disposables and not enough baby production. So... why would you do that? What condition exists to cause life on that world to need to use so many individuals to produce offspring?

2 is the minimum needed to gain high genetic diversity. Is there any major added value if 3 are used? Perhaps, if breeding occurs extremely slowly - if for example you only produce an offspring once every several decades. With 3 sexes, you can have a much higher chance that siblings are diverse enough to not cause problems - and so 3 sexes favors a species that MUST rely on incest. If you can produce enough offspring that any potential individual can reliably find an unrelated mate - then you want to reduce the number of individuals needed to obtain genetic diversity.

There's still the question of why you would ever want even one sex that does not get pregnant - however that situation is the situation for most life on Earth so even though it's not logical, we obviously know it can evolve.

If you have a sex that does NOT contribute any DNA, that merely incubates, then you're wasting a lot of potential. That said, some insects produce large quantities of non-fertile individuals. Bees for example. So this situation can evolve. But it seems to only occur in cases where there is a single fertile female who's entire existence is turning out eggs... and the lack of genetic diversity becomes a way they differentiate between competing hives. Yet we can now see with modern pesticides that it vastly increases the risk of species collapse to have such sparse genetic diversity.

So... the more you mess with the '2 sexes' format, the more you hit logic problems.

 

[Carnevil9]

IIRC Iain M. Banks had a three-sexed alien race in "Player of Games".

Asimov had a three-sex race in one of his novels, but they weren't the main characters, if my memory is correct. I think the novel was "The Gods Themselves."

 

[AlinaX]

I'm uncertain about this, but...

In conception, humans get DNA from the 'father' and from the 'mother', but also get mitochondrial DNA from the 'mother'. Where the mother has faulty mitochondrial DNA, it is possible to implant mitochondria from a donor, effectively giving the child three parents.

So, okay, this isn't three sexes, but it does show how three distinct parents can work together.

 

[Bramblethorn]

With three sexes, unless at least two of them are getting pregnant, you're starting to gain too many disposables and not enough baby production. So... why would you do that? What condition exists to cause life on that world to need to use so many individuals to produce offspring?

FWIW, not all biological features can/should be explained as advantageous adaptations to the environment.
Some arise as side-effects of the evolutionary process, not advantageous in themselves but not harmful enough to outweigh advantages elsewhere. The giraffe's laryngeal nerve, or humans' insistence on squeezing babies through a major bone structure, are well-known examples.

But having three sexes required for reproduction seems like it would complicate things significantly (matchmaking is hard enough with two sometimes!) so it would take some explaining. There are major advantages to sexual reproduction, in being able to mix-and-match - if you develop a mutation which allows you to digest milk better, and I develop one that helps me resist skin damage from sun, we can have babies that combine those advantages. It's not immediately clear that adding a third participant to reproduction would bring enough advantages to make it worthwhile.

FWIW, having more than two sexes (or "reproductive types") is well known in nature. For instance, there are nematodes with three sexes (characterised as "male", "female", "hermaphrodite": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5593846/; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trioecy for more) and the fungus schizophyllum commune has 23328 different reproductive types, each of which can breed with 22,960 others but not its own type or others that are too similar.

However, in all of those RL examples that I'm aware of, reproduction only requires two individuals of compatible sexes. I don't know of any case where three different sexes all have to interact for one act of reproduction.

There's still the question of why you would ever want even one sex that does not get pregnant - however that situation is the situation for most life on Earth so even though it's not logical, we obviously know it can evolve.

Why would it be "illogical"?

Being able to gestate a fetus requires some pretty complex physiological systems. The uterus needs to be able to expand to hold a 4-kg fetus and provide life support for it; the endocrine system needs to moderate the balance between nourishing the fetus and the mother; connective tissue needs to be able to loosen in preparation for birth; the immune system needs to prevent infection in a moist environment that connects to the outside world with a large opening located annoyingly close to the anus (thanks again, evolution!) and so on.

All of that comes at a cost, even before actually getting pregnant. Periods, endometriosis, PCOS, all sorts of crap related to the complexity of that system.

So if evolution can find a solution where only part of the species has to deal with all that bullshit, it's not too hard to see how that could be advantageous. Sure, it reduces the maximum rate at which the species can squeeze out babies, but for k-strategist species like humans that's less of an issue than our ability to feed the kids we do produce and raise them to adulthood.

 

[LupusDei]

If you have a sex that does NOT contribute any DNA, that merely incubates, then you're wasting a lot of potential. That said, some insects produce large quantities of non-fertile individuals. Bees for example. So this situation can evolve.

Since I'm a beekeeper... first, it may not even be wise to consider separate insects as individuals in a hive; rather the hive as a meta-organism (warm-blooded and immobile in contrast to its own constituent organs, cold blooded and free-flying), but even if we do that's not entirely accurate, even if generally true.

Beehive consists of up to three types of adult insects and larvae of the same: queen, workers and, optionally, drones.

Queen is an adult female. Usually there's exactly one, but that's merely a convention, a tradition, there's no technical reasons for such. Most ants don't, other bees may or may not honor it, and even a honey bee hive with two or more queens living and laying eggs alongside is possible, even if extremely rare in honey bees (a determined beekeeper could force conditions for such, but that's extremely labor intensive and not practical even though such mega hive could be very productive, at least in theory).

The working bees are all female, just stuck in adolescence. They do all the work, first and foremost, nurse larvae, and yes, they secrete "milk" all larvae are feed on for first three days.

Queen can lay two types of eggs by choice or force: unfertilized eggs from with male offspring will hatch, and fertilized eggs female offspring will grow from. The only difference between working bee and a queen is that working bee larvae switch to "hard" protein food (prepared pollen is exclusively preferred by honey bees, other bees can use various sources including meat) while the queen ever eats nothing but said "milk" secreted by young worker girls.

The working bee can't ever fertilize (no organs present for that), but can lay eggs in what's from hive perspective an annoying failure mode when her maturity isn't suppressed by pheromones released by the queen, but it can be seen as last ditch attempt to get genetic material of the hive in flight. Of course, while good queen can lay eggs exceeding her own weight everyday for years, such matured working bee can only lay couple of hundred eggs total.

Of course, only drones can grow from such eggs, but hey, there's an off chance those drones may meet a queen in a wedding flight. A hive in with such maturing of working bees happened obviously doesn't have a queen nor a chance to grow one (no fertilized egg or up to three days old female larva) for a while and will die. (It won't accept an added queen anymore without radical intervention and extermination of all such drone-bees, and while repair is possible, it is generally deemed impractical.)

Each working bee produces enough "milk" to feed 1.2 to 4+ working bee larvae (depending on conditions) and it's not a choice, she produce it as result of her normal life processes and must feed it to someone. In normal good conditions the amount of "milk" available grows exponentially while queen's capacity of egg laying, however impressive, is limited, although in most practical cases the real limiting factor is the available space in the hive's house. Mild oversupply of nursing capacity can be alleviated by coaxing queen to lay drone eggs as those larger larvae are more expensive to feed (and mature drones don't contribute, nearly to anything, besides maybe limited help in heating), but that's often not nearly enough of mitigation sooner than later. But there's an idea, let's grow queens! Those need massive amounts of milk, right?

A large hive in swarming mood can have many dozens of queen larvae, while the old queen is put on weight loss program trying to run from young bees trying to forcibly feed her. She and most of them get out of there shortly after the first new queens cocoons are closed. That's right, the first swarm goes with the old queen. Depending on the hive's mood after that there can be up to three additional swarms afterwards, leaving as the new queens emerge, some possibly with several of them at once. They will seek to fertilize at the new location.

Once swarming mood ends, the remaining queen larvae won't be guarded anymore and the next emerged queen will seek to kill them all. If several emerged at once, there may be fighting, if workers would allow, and not choose for themselves.

The new queen will then go for the wedding flight. It's a bit risky business, one can be killed by the outside world in a number of ways or even trivially get lost (and killed by entrance guards of a strange hive she tried to get into). But the point is to meet a drone mid-flight, or a couple dozen, preferably (but not necessarily) from another hive. Those will die, as they male organs get ripped out to be incorporated into the queen, to provide plentiful supply on demand for all or most of queen's life.

She may in theory run out and need to re-flight, but such is rare, especially in human assisted beekeeping where in seeking for high intensity queens are changed often, forcefully or even naturally. If workers grow unsatisfied with the quality of the queen in a large healthy hive with ample space, and it's not quite swarming season, but there's still stable harvest they can decide to make one or few queen cans and "silently" change the queen without swarming.

Drones, yes, beyond the obvious they have no function, they add nothing to the hive, and are not bound to it. Any hive welcome and feed any wandering drone, given there's any harvest at all. So they can migrate great distances. But come a lean season, well before the freezing winter or similar drones would no longer be accepted, and soon forcibly removed from the hive. During winter months there's none remain in the hive.

Oh, honey. How I can talk about honey bees without mentioning honey even once? It's not important in reproductive functions, being merely fuel. Adult working bees and drones run on honey to the extent they die nearly instantly if they run out of honey in their tank. They routinely transfer it between them upon meeting, to the point an indicator substance feed to few will be found in everyone in the hive in under a day.

 

[DOAHunterX]

Perhaps I should elaborate on the third gender. The incubators, if you will, have a chance to develop from either the male or female sexes, though the rate this happening increases during times of bountiful harvest and decreases during lean times. They are generally either near or at the bottom of the social ladder. There is a considerable degree of disappointment and stigma upon reaching sexual maturity only to develop into such an incubator.

That said, the species generally gives birth to pairs of children at a time, excluding identical twins or miscarriages. Would people prefer a second pair of breasts, or an udder? I'm leaning toward the former, since this gives ample room for four-breasted titfucks (paizuri). If anyone can think of sexual acts involving an udder, I'm all ears.

Speaking of pregnancy, it could be said that the developing fetus is the true parasite ever since the evolution of the clade of amniotes. Good news? Vertebrates could finally be born on dry land. Bad news? We have to either develop in an egg that segregates us until it is time to hatch or live our unborn lives parasitizing our mothers.

 

[AlinaX]

Why make it aliens? Have a near-future humanity in which women choose either to be professionals or surrogates, the former taking supplements that make them lithe and athletic, the latter taking supplements that adapt them for child-bearing. Conception, by law, is strictly regulated and possible only in vitro, where DNA from all three parents are combined.

 

[sirhugs]

Why make it aliens? Have a near-future humanity in which women choose either to be professionals or surrogates, the former taking supplements that make them lithe and athletic, the latter taking supplements that adapt them for child-bearing. Conception, by law, is strictly regulated and possible only in vitro, where DNA from all three parents are combined.

sounds frightening like it ends up in The Handmaid's tale.

 

[AlinaX]

Indeed.

 

[DOAHunterX]

Why make it aliens? Have a near-future humanity in which women choose either to be professionals or surrogates, the former taking supplements that make them lithe and athletic, the latter taking supplements that adapt them for child-bearing. Conception, by law, is strictly regulated and possible only in vitro, where DNA from all three parents are combined.

Humans do exist in the story, but the vast majority of the story is told by the viewpoint of one of these alien "child-bearers". Humans in this story have their own reproductive problems.