As you may have noticed, the Vulcan third-person pronoun ish-veh is gender neutral, which is pretty cool for queer students of Vuhlkansu. Neither verbs nor objects change based on the gender of the subject.

While there is no “he” or “she” in Vulcan, there are words for “his” (t’sa-veh) and “hers” (t’ko-veh), but these are rarely used in everyday speech. Ish-veh is prefered for subjects of any gender except in formal speech, or if there is a specific need for clarity.

If the gender of a male or female subject needs to be identified, the prefixes sa- (male) and ko- (female) may be used. If, for example, you were advocating for the admittance of more women to Starfleet Academy, you could say, Bolau Starfleet whet ko-ne-lanlar, meaning Starfleet needs more female cadets.

You will find sa- and ko- in many inherently gendered nouns, such as “mother” and “father” (ko-mekh and sa-mekh), or “husband” and “wife” (sa-telsu and ko-telsu). However, the sa- or ko- may be easily removed for a nonbinary subject or a subject whose gender is not known or specified. Thus mekh translates as “parent” and telsu translates as “spouse” or “bondmate.”

As far as I know, there are no canon sources for Vulcan attitudes toward transgenderism, but the language lends itself easily to gender-neutral speech. The VLI’s lesson on Gender-Specific Nouns shows a fair awareness of these issues, and we have some relevant vocabulary, such as guv-sha'es (gender identity) and guv (gender).

Transgender (identified incorrectly by the VLI as “transgendered”) is Tuhs-guvanik/thus-guvan-. For a standalone adjective, use tuhs-guvanik. For a non-standalone adective, affix tuhs-guvan- to a noun (I will go into much more detail about adjectives in another post). For example:

She is transgender: Nam-tor ish-veh tuhs-guvanik

She is a transgender woman: Nam-tor ish-veh tuhs-guvan-kosu

How do you guys think Vulcan society would handle gender identity?