(Sigh.)

"...Bella did you or did you not say 'so I outed you to the aliens I found'."

"I outed you to one of the aliens I found," says Isabella, pointing at Maitimë. "I didn't shout it from a rooftop. And it's surprisingly weird to explain from scratch. The telepathy helps -" Here is the concept of role!

"What a completely bizarre conflation of a bunch of things I'd expect to be entirely uncorrelated - are they correlated in people raised without the concept, has anyone checked -"

"I am pretty sure no one has tried to raise human children without the concept of role. It'd wind up being a pretty impoverished environment, for one thing."

"We could adopt a bunch and raise them in Tirion."

"I suppose you could do that. It would have to be a bunch, though, there's irregularities like Alex even here. There, now I've outed you to plural aliens, are you happy."

"Ecstatic."

"No, you haven't, she's not even paying attention -"

"I've been wondering the extent to which gender is socially mediated, I'd have raised the children without but it was relevant to their chance to inherit - we could do a trial somewhere without gender or role and see if people independently develop a sense of one -"

"As a data point roles immediately made sense to me."

"I need approximately a hundred thousand data points."

"Do you have somewhere without gender handy to migrate a few orphanages into, too?"

Really? I can't read you clearly, Isabella remarks to Maitimë.

- made sense not as in 'fitted perfectly', more as in - oh, that's hot -

"We were thinking about setting up a new society in Endorë, we could tell everyone not to present in a gendered way -"

Not sure I follow. "I'm not sure that could be pulled off consistently by a large population."

"I bet I could coax people into it. They'd need to learn a language without gendered pronouns, are there any of those -"

"Earth has some with roled pronouns instead, which I suppose could be a sort of control group. And I'm sure there are some without pronoun division of either sort. I'm not saying you couldn't get volunteers - though I'm not confident you could, either - I'm saying it would be legitimately hard to do consistently."

"Might learn something from even a partial test."

"Yeah, maybe. You'd need a lot of kids - and you'd need them in infancy before they picked up any confounds - and while there are such infants going spare on Earth, there's lots of demand for healthy ones with verifiably absent parents, it might be hard to pull together all the data points you want..."

"Could get not-healthy ones who can be expensively healed -"

"Yeah, although that'll add up if you want thousands and thousands of them."

"I'm sure we can have a ridiculous research budget once we've been at this a while."

"There's a lot I want to do with the research budget, though -"