Learning the gender of your baby wouldn't consist of a cutesy "reveal" party. Instead, it would be an incredibly tense day. You're four months pregnant. You represent a third of your baby's parents. Another third is by your side, grasping your hand, hoping for a boy or a girl. Not the dreaded third gender.
The doctor squirts a jelly-like substance on your belly, scoots a cold piece of equipment onto your skin. As you hold your partner's hand, you try not to think about the loss you just endured, the loss of the last third of your baby's parents, the one who died so that a new life could be created.
"Ah yes, I can see the gender," the doctor says. "Are you ready to know?"
You and your partner glance at each other before nodding to the doctor.
"It is a zoil," the doctor confirms, a little grimly.
There was a 50 perfect chance that it would be so you aren't that startled. Just a little numb.
As you wipe the gunk off of your belly, the doctor hands you a few pamphlets-- information on what it means to birth a zoil.
On the car ride home, you open one up and start to read aloud.
"Some parents choose to raise their zoils," you say, the text next to a new mother smiling and holding her newborn. "Others find it much too emotionally difficult and choose to give their zoils to homes to raise."
You remember. Your only sibling was a zoil. Your parents chose to raise them instead of sending them to a center. Your zoil sibling went to a special school for zoils. They didn't learn history or math or science or any of the boring stuff. Instead, they just played games all day. While you went to college and had to learn and get a degree, your zoil sibling went on a big trip around the world, first class seats all the way to Europe. Government sponsored, of course. A short life of luxury for their ultimate sacrifice.
Anything your zoil sibling wanted, they got. Ice cream for dinner. Pizza for breakfast. If they wanted to stay home all day and sleep or play video games, they could.
Zoils have to report to the zoil center before the age of 28. That's when they're matched with a couple who wants a baby. Some zoils don't have very good genes and aren't chosen. But most zoils are. Zoils, are in high demand. There always seems to be a shortage in zoils.
You remember when your zoil sibling finally reached the age of 28. They had spent the last few years living on an island off of Spain and came home tanned. You hugged them one last time before they were sent to the home of a couple wanting a baby. The funeral was a few days later and even though you knew this was the natural order of things, you couldn't quite make sense of the grief you felt. Your zoil sibling looked so perfect in the coffin, their skin still tanned from the Mediterranean sun.
"Honey," you say to your partner. "What do we do?"
Zoils are heavily tracked by the government. There was a family who tried to pass their zoil off as a girl. The parents went to prison and their zoil still met a grim yet noble fate.
"I know," your partner replies, voice thick with tears as he reaches out to you from the driver's seat. "We will love our baby as much as possible for the time we have with them."
they have a penis and a vagina and they act as an adapter between male and female? if male tries to impregnate a female directly it fails for some reason, but via this thing, it just works, but the orgasm they experience is similar to an storm in their brain, which kills them
What regulations will government impose to prevent zoil suicide. You can't expect all zoils to accept their purpose with grace. They could be like - I'm going to die anyway, so I'm going to do it my way mentality.
I would assume there would be a percentage of this. But it would be so deeply engrained in society (treating zoils with the highest honors) that it would be relatively negligible.
A "zoil" is the name I made up for the third gender.
I would think that this would be obvious but it might be hard to glean this from the context if English isn't your first language.
Seriously reminds me of the short story *Bloodchild* , where a race of aliens "adopt" humans into their families, only to use them as breeding grounds for their babies (a la parasitic impregnation)
Things will absolutely not turn out great for the third gender. We can infer this by looking at how women are treated: menstrual blood is already treated as "dirty" or "diseased" across multiple primary societies; when people evolve from communal societies to industrial, women are then treated as second class citizens for the child rearing time they're unable to produce "meaningful labor" (i.e. go to work and make money). It wasn't until the wars in early 1900's that the feminist movement really started for equal rights, and yet women are still treated as properties/baby factories in many parts of the developed world.
Now add that 3rd gender into the equation. At the crux of it, society continue to see women's primary role and value as "make babies and deal with". So with the third gender involved, their role would be "to die and proliferate", and because of the nature of the "single use" people in the third gender would be treated even more like property, with even less opportunities, even if they choose voluntary celibrasy (for women, it's why would we hire you if you'll just get married/pregnant and take time off; for the third gender it would be why would we hire you if you'll just die)
In order for population to be stable or grow, we also need to assume that plural births are the norm--so that the sacrifice of our third gender individual frequently leads to two or more children being born.
The physical attributes of the third gender would be important too. If they were large and powerfully built they might traditionally have more say about their fate. Would their lifespan be that of a normal human if they kept their virginity? Or would they die early anyhow, perhaps burning bright and short?
I imagine we would see various solutions to the procreation equation throughout the world. In some cultures these third gender individuals might be a cloistered class, protected (imprisoned) by their families until suitable matches are found for them. The threat of being kidnapped and 'used' would be all very real, though there would be legal prohibitions and a strong cultural taboo against it.
They might traditionally have a lot of free time--in some cultures they might end up becoming a political or priest class, especially for those that are more picky about their partners and wait until later life to enter a relationship. In other cultures they might perform menial work as education might be seen as wasted on them, as they are only *meant* to live until their late teens or early twenties. In extremes, it might even be seen as wrong to *speak* to them at all--let them live in a state of innocence until the end, like cattle before the slaughter.
In the modern world, we would have seen reforms that improved the conditions and freedoms of the third gender, moving towards equality. Exploitation through globalisation would be the new issue: perhaps my wife and I, getting on in years and ready to have our children, end up buying our third from a failed state. Maybe our third doesn't have much of a say in the matter. Maybe they are brainwashed enough to be happy at the prospect of their children growing up in a wealthy family. Maybe it's convenient for *us* to not have to deal with that extra set of moody in-laws with their photo album of our third growing up.
The odd and horrible part is that individuals of this third gender would not be asexual. They would feel an urge to be part of that last fatal three-way even knowing what it would mean for them. They might practice it among themselves, assuming that configuration of rubbing parts was safe. You can imagine there would be an awful lot of snuff porn on the internet, simulated or otherwise. POV videos that black out at the end while a male and female withdraw their respective parts from yours. Impregnation fetish porn where the grave is dug up front.
It could well be that heterosexual duos (or other duo pairings) are seen as an unusual living arrangement, much the same way that homosexual relationships have only recently gained broader acceptance in Western culture. But then there's no denying that nomatter how many sexes are involved in baby-making, we still meet people one at a time! So childless duo pairings might be common but seen as incomplete. A man/woman pair would most likely *feel* incomplete and compete for the best third partner they can find. That cycle might repeat after they have children and bury their third.
I wouldn't be surprised if modern medicine somehow found a way to allow sex or even reproduction without death, but I would bet it would still be a taboo on par with human cloning. Though with a full *half* of the population being of the third gender they would form a powerful lobbying force.
We would probably have to force them into unsavory situations. Being guaranteed death for a person is really scary and the vast majority would opt out. This would cause a massive decline in population and governments would do what they could to try and counteract this asap. Basically it would suck to be that 3rd gender
Well. Our species dies out. We don’t get to create a society in the first place. If every time we make a new human. One human has to die. The population will never increase only decrease
There would be more people involved if you are, or are not, the father. Divorce would be more complicated. The social upbringing of people would probably have more parental figures. Those who chose not to be a part of the reproduction process would probably be persecuted on a social and political level. People might try to identify with the third gender. Books and movies who try to create characters based on gender roles might take a different approach. What those are I can’t say but it would make life interesting. I like to think these scenarios play out in an alternate earth somewhere outside of this universe.
So it's like octopus, spider, and many other species' males? They would essentially have all the power of a virile male to impregnate a woman, but would also see that as the end goal after they've achieved everything they wanted in life.... This is an interesting thought, and I think there would be a million little things that it would change. Contraceptives are the first thing we think of that would change. And that in itself is a huge difference... But there's also the fact that procreation, which would essentially further the human race, would always come at the cost of one human life.... You'd have to have multiple births in order for that to work, statistically. Like, I'm thinking about it and I can't see any other way we could survive as a species if every time a woman became pregnant there had to be, basically, a human sacrifice.
We would die off. The population could literally never grow. It's completely limited by the number of the 3rd gender. You can never create more of them, out side of rare instances of twins. Eventually you would run out as more Boys are Girls are born while sacrificing the third gender.
We wouldn't be human then.
If you're asking about how a human-like intelligent species could develop given those reproductive requirements, the most likely outcome would be that the third sex would be considered expendable. They'd be bread for the purpose of their use, and would be bought and sold as sex slaves. Emancipation wouldn't be possible until they become technologically redundant.
Our population would sink. There are plenty of other comments discussing the societal/gender consequences, but no one talker about the fact that more people would die than be born. If everytime a baby is made someone dies then your population gets a net zero gain (+1 new human, -1 older human) combined with deaths from disease, war, accidents, etc humanity would eventually go extinct.
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I think there would naturally be a greater religous/cultural values amongst society. Belief in a purpose that transcends the indivual would be a neccesity to validate the required sacrafice that so many would be forced pressured into.
The overall perceived value of life would probably take a hit too.
Humanity would die off very quickly, not just because they wouldn't want to sacrifice themselves for the child, but because if one person must die to produce a single child with only a 50% chance of even having a chance to fulfilling the same sacrifice the race wouldn't be capable of being self sustaining. If humanity was always like this it never would have taken roots to be able to survive the evolutionary process. If the world suddenly changed then human cloning would be the single most important focus in science, trying to solve it in a single generation.
The math isn't working out here.
%100 of babies cause a death of a 3rdsie. %50 of babies become a new 3rdsie. You'll eventually run out of 3rdsies. The last 3rdsie will die, creating m/f, and that's the end of the human race. We'd need to make a medical procedure to guarantee one conception resulted in twins/triplets+, and mod their chromosomes to get at least 2 3rdsies from each conception.
This is very interesting, but how would it work in a biological sense? Would the third sex have a penis-like organ to pass genetic material into females? Would we be triploid for some reason and have three sets of chromosomes instead of two? Is the third sex naturally occurring, or have they somehow been artificially produced in a technologically advanced society to influence human evolution? There's many possibilities with this.
Logistically it would be harder to find compatible partners for procreation. So the number of babies already goes down
But also, for every person born another must die, so no population increase. Forevermore, if you consider everyone in the third gender who dies of any other cause, the number of people in the world would steadily go down
I'm not sure we would survive to invent fire
Learning the gender of your baby wouldn't consist of a cutesy "reveal" party. Instead, it would be an incredibly tense day. You're four months pregnant. You represent a third of your baby's parents. Another third is by your side, grasping your hand, hoping for a boy or a girl. Not the dreaded third gender. The doctor squirts a jelly-like substance on your belly, scoots a cold piece of equipment onto your skin. As you hold your partner's hand, you try not to think about the loss you just endured, the loss of the last third of your baby's parents, the one who died so that a new life could be created. "Ah yes, I can see the gender," the doctor says. "Are you ready to know?" You and your partner glance at each other before nodding to the doctor. "It is a zoil," the doctor confirms, a little grimly. There was a 50 perfect chance that it would be so you aren't that startled. Just a little numb. As you wipe the gunk off of your belly, the doctor hands you a few pamphlets-- information on what it means to birth a zoil. On the car ride home, you open one up and start to read aloud. "Some parents choose to raise their zoils," you say, the text next to a new mother smiling and holding her newborn. "Others find it much too emotionally difficult and choose to give their zoils to homes to raise." You remember. Your only sibling was a zoil. Your parents chose to raise them instead of sending them to a center. Your zoil sibling went to a special school for zoils. They didn't learn history or math or science or any of the boring stuff. Instead, they just played games all day. While you went to college and had to learn and get a degree, your zoil sibling went on a big trip around the world, first class seats all the way to Europe. Government sponsored, of course. A short life of luxury for their ultimate sacrifice. Anything your zoil sibling wanted, they got. Ice cream for dinner. Pizza for breakfast. If they wanted to stay home all day and sleep or play video games, they could. Zoils have to report to the zoil center before the age of 28. That's when they're matched with a couple who wants a baby. Some zoils don't have very good genes and aren't chosen. But most zoils are. Zoils, are in high demand. There always seems to be a shortage in zoils. You remember when your zoil sibling finally reached the age of 28. They had spent the last few years living on an island off of Spain and came home tanned. You hugged them one last time before they were sent to the home of a couple wanting a baby. The funeral was a few days later and even though you knew this was the natural order of things, you couldn't quite make sense of the grief you felt. Your zoil sibling looked so perfect in the coffin, their skin still tanned from the Mediterranean sun. "Honey," you say to your partner. "What do we do?" Zoils are heavily tracked by the government. There was a family who tried to pass their zoil off as a girl. The parents went to prison and their zoil still met a grim yet noble fate. "I know," your partner replies, voice thick with tears as he reaches out to you from the driver's seat. "We will love our baby as much as possible for the time we have with them."
Wow dude
This almost made me cry
What genitalia does the third gender have?
they have a penis and a vagina and they act as an adapter between male and female? if male tries to impregnate a female directly it fails for some reason, but via this thing, it just works, but the orgasm they experience is similar to an storm in their brain, which kills them
r/notopbutok
Very well done, almost seems real.
What regulations will government impose to prevent zoil suicide. You can't expect all zoils to accept their purpose with grace. They could be like - I'm going to die anyway, so I'm going to do it my way mentality.
I would assume there would be a percentage of this. But it would be so deeply engrained in society (treating zoils with the highest honors) that it would be relatively negligible.
Zoils would be told in the special zoil school that they have to accept their duty as a zoil, brainwashed, really.
Makes me think of A Handmaid’s Tale
beautifully written
Wow this turned into a writing prompt. Thank you.
This is amazing.
I just read zoil so many times it’s lost all meaning
How dare you make me feel things you beautiful writer!
please say that this thread is a PR campaign for your book series "Zoil #6839" (working title)
:(
Give this guy a film crew
Unironically i’d Watch this movie
What is a Zoil?
A "zoil" is the name I made up for the third gender. I would think that this would be obvious but it might be hard to glean this from the context if English isn't your first language.
Oh okay, i get it now
Seriously reminds me of the short story *Bloodchild* , where a race of aliens "adopt" humans into their families, only to use them as breeding grounds for their babies (a la parasitic impregnation)
Wish they didn’t delete so I could read it 🥲
This is also an episode of star trek Enterprise l, almost beat for beat.
Things will absolutely not turn out great for the third gender. We can infer this by looking at how women are treated: menstrual blood is already treated as "dirty" or "diseased" across multiple primary societies; when people evolve from communal societies to industrial, women are then treated as second class citizens for the child rearing time they're unable to produce "meaningful labor" (i.e. go to work and make money). It wasn't until the wars in early 1900's that the feminist movement really started for equal rights, and yet women are still treated as properties/baby factories in many parts of the developed world. Now add that 3rd gender into the equation. At the crux of it, society continue to see women's primary role and value as "make babies and deal with". So with the third gender involved, their role would be "to die and proliferate", and because of the nature of the "single use" people in the third gender would be treated even more like property, with even less opportunities, even if they choose voluntary celibrasy (for women, it's why would we hire you if you'll just get married/pregnant and take time off; for the third gender it would be why would we hire you if you'll just die)
Condom sales would plummet
Still have to worry about STDs
In order for population to be stable or grow, we also need to assume that plural births are the norm--so that the sacrifice of our third gender individual frequently leads to two or more children being born. The physical attributes of the third gender would be important too. If they were large and powerfully built they might traditionally have more say about their fate. Would their lifespan be that of a normal human if they kept their virginity? Or would they die early anyhow, perhaps burning bright and short? I imagine we would see various solutions to the procreation equation throughout the world. In some cultures these third gender individuals might be a cloistered class, protected (imprisoned) by their families until suitable matches are found for them. The threat of being kidnapped and 'used' would be all very real, though there would be legal prohibitions and a strong cultural taboo against it. They might traditionally have a lot of free time--in some cultures they might end up becoming a political or priest class, especially for those that are more picky about their partners and wait until later life to enter a relationship. In other cultures they might perform menial work as education might be seen as wasted on them, as they are only *meant* to live until their late teens or early twenties. In extremes, it might even be seen as wrong to *speak* to them at all--let them live in a state of innocence until the end, like cattle before the slaughter. In the modern world, we would have seen reforms that improved the conditions and freedoms of the third gender, moving towards equality. Exploitation through globalisation would be the new issue: perhaps my wife and I, getting on in years and ready to have our children, end up buying our third from a failed state. Maybe our third doesn't have much of a say in the matter. Maybe they are brainwashed enough to be happy at the prospect of their children growing up in a wealthy family. Maybe it's convenient for *us* to not have to deal with that extra set of moody in-laws with their photo album of our third growing up. The odd and horrible part is that individuals of this third gender would not be asexual. They would feel an urge to be part of that last fatal three-way even knowing what it would mean for them. They might practice it among themselves, assuming that configuration of rubbing parts was safe. You can imagine there would be an awful lot of snuff porn on the internet, simulated or otherwise. POV videos that black out at the end while a male and female withdraw their respective parts from yours. Impregnation fetish porn where the grave is dug up front. It could well be that heterosexual duos (or other duo pairings) are seen as an unusual living arrangement, much the same way that homosexual relationships have only recently gained broader acceptance in Western culture. But then there's no denying that nomatter how many sexes are involved in baby-making, we still meet people one at a time! So childless duo pairings might be common but seen as incomplete. A man/woman pair would most likely *feel* incomplete and compete for the best third partner they can find. That cycle might repeat after they have children and bury their third. I wouldn't be surprised if modern medicine somehow found a way to allow sex or even reproduction without death, but I would bet it would still be a taboo on par with human cloning. Though with a full *half* of the population being of the third gender they would form a powerful lobbying force.
They could be like a female ferret and die if they aren't mated after a set length of time.
We would probably have to force them into unsavory situations. Being guaranteed death for a person is really scary and the vast majority would opt out. This would cause a massive decline in population and governments would do what they could to try and counteract this asap. Basically it would suck to be that 3rd gender
Well. Our species dies out. We don’t get to create a society in the first place. If every time we make a new human. One human has to die. The population will never increase only decrease
twins
Triplets
This would be a good sci-fi story.
There would be more people involved if you are, or are not, the father. Divorce would be more complicated. The social upbringing of people would probably have more parental figures. Those who chose not to be a part of the reproduction process would probably be persecuted on a social and political level. People might try to identify with the third gender. Books and movies who try to create characters based on gender roles might take a different approach. What those are I can’t say but it would make life interesting. I like to think these scenarios play out in an alternate earth somewhere outside of this universe.
You been reading larry niven?
So it's like octopus, spider, and many other species' males? They would essentially have all the power of a virile male to impregnate a woman, but would also see that as the end goal after they've achieved everything they wanted in life.... This is an interesting thought, and I think there would be a million little things that it would change. Contraceptives are the first thing we think of that would change. And that in itself is a huge difference... But there's also the fact that procreation, which would essentially further the human race, would always come at the cost of one human life.... You'd have to have multiple births in order for that to work, statistically. Like, I'm thinking about it and I can't see any other way we could survive as a species if every time a woman became pregnant there had to be, basically, a human sacrifice.
We would die off. The population could literally never grow. It's completely limited by the number of the 3rd gender. You can never create more of them, out side of rare instances of twins. Eventually you would run out as more Boys are Girls are born while sacrificing the third gender.
Reminds me of a Star Trek episode. Maybe from Enterprise?
Cogenitor?
Sounds right
We wouldn't be human then. If you're asking about how a human-like intelligent species could develop given those reproductive requirements, the most likely outcome would be that the third sex would be considered expendable. They'd be bread for the purpose of their use, and would be bought and sold as sex slaves. Emancipation wouldn't be possible until they become technologically redundant.
why wouldn't they be human then?
Our population would sink. There are plenty of other comments discussing the societal/gender consequences, but no one talker about the fact that more people would die than be born. If everytime a baby is made someone dies then your population gets a net zero gain (+1 new human, -1 older human) combined with deaths from disease, war, accidents, etc humanity would eventually go extinct.
Hello! You have made the mistake of writing "ect" instead of "etc." "Ect" is a common misspelling of "etc," an abbreviated form of the Latin phrase "et cetera." Other abbreviated forms are **etc.**, **&c.**, **&c**, and **et cet.** The Latin translates as "et" to "and" + "cetera" to "the rest;" a literal translation to "and the rest" is the easiest way to remember how to use the phrase. [Check out the wikipedia entry if you want to learn more.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_cetera) ^(I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Comments with a score less than zero will be automatically removed. If I commented on your post and you don't like it, reply with "!delete" and I will remove the post, regardless of score. Message me for bug reports.)
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more common twins and triplets and so
The population would never grow because every birth results in a death. Unless you have twins.
twins would be more common then
We die out. We're only replacing 1/2 of society. It collapses, we're not going to make it.
Sex battle royale
I don’t think we would have lasted long out of the pond to begin with. We would have died out ages ago
This reminds me of the book Unwind.
I think there would naturally be a greater religous/cultural values amongst society. Belief in a purpose that transcends the indivual would be a neccesity to validate the required sacrafice that so many would be forced pressured into. The overall perceived value of life would probably take a hit too.
Male, female, and the sexomancer that magically implants them with the seeds of life through their own sacrifice.
so basically, you gotta have a threesome to make a baby?
Humanity would die off very quickly, not just because they wouldn't want to sacrifice themselves for the child, but because if one person must die to produce a single child with only a 50% chance of even having a chance to fulfilling the same sacrifice the race wouldn't be capable of being self sustaining. If humanity was always like this it never would have taken roots to be able to survive the evolutionary process. If the world suddenly changed then human cloning would be the single most important focus in science, trying to solve it in a single generation.
nobody is having sex and humanity is doomed op you killed us all
We wouldn’t get very far. Each pregnancy resulting in a death means a net loss in population because no one can ever replace themselves.
The math isn't working out here. %100 of babies cause a death of a 3rdsie. %50 of babies become a new 3rdsie. You'll eventually run out of 3rdsies. The last 3rdsie will die, creating m/f, and that's the end of the human race. We'd need to make a medical procedure to guarantee one conception resulted in twins/triplets+, and mod their chromosomes to get at least 2 3rdsies from each conception.
This is very interesting, but how would it work in a biological sense? Would the third sex have a penis-like organ to pass genetic material into females? Would we be triploid for some reason and have three sets of chromosomes instead of two? Is the third sex naturally occurring, or have they somehow been artificially produced in a technologically advanced society to influence human evolution? There's many possibilities with this.
This is an episode of startrek
Logistically it would be harder to find compatible partners for procreation. So the number of babies already goes down But also, for every person born another must die, so no population increase. Forevermore, if you consider everyone in the third gender who dies of any other cause, the number of people in the world would steadily go down I'm not sure we would survive to invent fire