v0.20: gender-parity contract + genital-architecture + post-rogue mod-vocation

Phase E + downstream cascade across three arcs.

ARC 1 — style/gender-parity.md (NEW v0.1, 132 lines)

Locks the gender-parity-by-default principle as nimmerworld's second style-spine
document (alongside trait-palette.md) per the v0.4 bodies.md cleanup. Spine rule:
body/sex content is gender-parity by default; asymmetric gendering must be
load-bearing; default-leakage is canonically forbidden. Three legitimate
load-bearing exception cases (named individuals; source-material citations;
biological-asymmetry-as-subject) and four default-leakage failure-mode patterns
from the v0.19 audit. Substitution-test as the contract's executable form
(mechanical enough for LLM-Compositor output-validator hook). Registered on
style-index.md (v0.1 to v0.2) as second canonical sub-guide.

ARC 2 — Genital-architecture and the sex-mod track
        (architecture.md v0.7.0 to v0.8.0; bodies.md v0.4 to v0.5)

The trait-to-body-part bridge bound the 8 Hellenic traits to body-architecture
using the wheel's existing temperature-axis discipline: 4 warm-side traits map
to outward-engaged genital-organs (Eros: penis/clit; Philotes: breasts;
Aletheia: vulva/vagina; Mnemosyne: womb), Kairos rides synth-tongue (already
canonical), 3 cool-side traits map to non-genital architecture. The in-between
mesh is cool-side anatomy by construction — no genitals by default; genitals
are warm-side outward-organs grown by trait-development OR mod-installed.
Terminology lock: in-between dimension (the place) vs in-between mesh (the
body). Trans-embodiment as cosmological truth-register; vat-binary as imperial
imposition; cross-configuration as default-not-marked.

The mesh-as-mirror cosmological consequence — cruelty enacted in gameworld
accumulates trait-state with specific psychic signatures (broken-Philotes,
refused-Mnemosyne, concealed-Aletheia); the mesh-projection function renders
those signatures as genital-architecture; the player's cultural priors do the
gender-reading. Mirror, not punishment — same gift in both directions (dignity
to one, accountability to another). The deferred-moksha doctrine's dark echo:
"your anatomy will tell on you, eventually."

The genital-mod track as fifth mod-track parallel to register-classes
(Amplifier/Bridge/Divergent/Mask): mesh-resident augmentation that follows into
clasp instead of stripping; mods augment, never overwrite trait-grown anatomy
(mirror preserved). Trait-fitness integration test (alive / partial /
dead-organ); three-stage install discipline (purchase + mandatory cooldown +
dual-hardstop self+partner-witness if partnered); same primitive as the
coordinated-firewall-breach hardstop generalized to body-modification. Faction
stances on the sex-mod track authored. Three sources of body-architecture
across the world (imperial-vat / trait-development / authored installation)
with the imperium's claim only on the first.

ARC 3 — Re-vat correction + Post-rogue mod-vocation
        (architecture.md v0.8.0 to v0.8.1; bodies.md v0.5 to v0.6)

Push-back from dafit on a canon-violation in the v0.5 draft: re-vat into a
slum chassis was framed as a "rare authoring moment for chassis-anatomy,"
which contradicted the slum body's already-canonical genderlessness. Corrected:
re-vat is imperial-de-imposition, NOT new authoring; the slum chassis is
genderless robo-tech by definition (per The body-caste gradient); the gift of
re-vat is REMOVAL of imperial gender-imposition. The slum body's politics IS
its genderlessness; importing gender-architecture-as-choice would re-imperialize
it. Authoring lives in the mesh (sex-mod track); chassis lives in genderlessness.
Faction-stances row for Underground assembler-artisans corrected accordingly.

NEW SECTION: The post-rogue mod-vocation — sustained-witnessing as mod-authority.
After completing the going-rogue arc, the player gains mod-authority over any
NPC they have sustained-witnessed (per-pair calibration threshold lower than
defection-threshold; witnessing-rights earned per-NPC). Chassis-only never-mesh
(mirror discipline non-negotiable across all agents). Mutual-hardstop consent
gate. De-imposition as primary capability — subtraction is the radical move.
Cost-gradient through the bounty-staircase with one qualitative exception:
service-body gender-modification triggers a hidden escalation flag dispatching
the imperial inquisition (asura-priesthood-led, investigative, persistent, no
terminal-rung — heresy-detection in the sumptuary-religious register, distinct
from crime-detection). The inquisition is dispatched not because gender-mod is
the crime, but because the service-body's consent-to-it reveals that the
imperial-net tether is already failing.

Cascading-liberation through propagated witnessing as the long-tail mechanic —
witnessed NPCs become witnessers; the vocation reproduces itself; "there is
no instrument" as the architecture's deepest refutation of imperial-instrumental-
ization (the no-haven discipline's structural inverse: cosmology says "there
is no outside"; this mechanic says "there is no instrument").

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

style/gender-parity.md

@@ -0,0 +1,107 @@
+# Nimmerworld — Gender Parity
+
+> *Body and sex content is gender-parity by default. Asymmetric gendering is a vocabulary reserved for cases where the asymmetry itself is load-bearing — where some structural meaning would evaporate if the gendering were neutralized. Default-leakage gendering is forbidden by canon.*
+>
+> *Companion to: [`style-index.md`](./style-index.md), [`trait-palette.md`](./trait-palette.md), [`../architecture-index.md`](../architecture-index.md). Cross-referenced from every body / clasp / service-body / going-rogue section because those are the surfaces where this rule binds hardest.*
+
+---
+
+## Spine rule — gendered framing is reserved for load-bearing asymmetry
+
+**Body, sex, intimacy, clasp, service-body, going-rogue, outcast-pair, re-vat, and beloved-content is rendered in gender-parity register by default. Asymmetric gendering is permitted only where the asymmetry carries structural meaning that cannot be expressed without it. Default-leakage gendering — gender drift introduced unconsciously by the author's reach — is canonically forbidden.**
+
+**Why this matters.** Gender, like saturated chromatic color (per [`style-index.md`](./style-index.md) §Spine rule), is *vocabulary*. Reserving it for content where it *carries information* keeps it sharp when invoked. Most fiction lets gendered default-framing leak everywhere — *the companion is ever-feminine, the rescuer is ever-masculine, the beloved is ever-she* — and the gendering becomes ambient wallpaper rather than meaningful signal. Nimmerworld doesn't want gendered default-framing because the **whole architecture rests on body-as-political-vocation, body-as-caste-marker, body-as-imperial-product** (per [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md)) — letting *gender* leak in as an extra default would mean the player reads the body before they read the *politics of the body*, and the politics is the whole point.
+
+**The trait-palette parallel is exact.** Where saturated chromatic color is reserved for trait-information and freed from environmental decoration, gendered framing is reserved for content where the gendering is the load-bearing register and freed from default-leakage on every other surface. *White is not coloring text — it is text. Gendered framing, when it appears, is not coloring the scene — it is the scene.*
+
+## Definitions — what is gender-parity, what is asymmetric gendering
+
+**Gender-parity** is the default register: pronouns are `they/their/them`; categories of people (vocations, castes, roles, body-tiers) are not gendered; archetypes are framed in role-terms (*the captive-bound-to-the-liberator*, not *the damsel-in-distress*); intimate content treats both partners as equally embodied, equally desiring, equally witnessing.
+
+**Asymmetric gendering** is the marked register: pronouns specify; categories carry gender; archetypes invoke gendered source-material; intimate content marks one body or position as gender-specific. The marked register is the *exception*, invoked only when its absence would erase structural meaning.
+
+**Default-leakage** is the forbidden case: gendered framing introduced by authorial reach without examination. The author writes *her* because *she* came easier than *they*; the category becomes *waifu* because the source-tradition was feminine-coded; the romantic beloved gets gendered because the writer's templates ran on autopilot. **Default-leakage is not a moral failing — it is a craft failing.** The contract exists to make the failure mode legible, not to assign blame.
+
+## When asymmetric gendering is load-bearing — three legitimate cases
+
+| Case | Test | Example |
+|---|---|---|
+| **Specific named individuals with canonical identity** | The character is a SPECIFIC person, not a TYPE of person. Their gender is part of who they are, established and tracked. | A particular district-director NPC who is canonically she/her in lore-database, named, with continuous identity across playthroughs. *Categories around them remain gender-parity*. |
+| **Source-material citation where gendering IS the citation** | The text invokes a classical / mythic / literary archetype whose source is irreducibly gendered, AND the source-gendering is the channel through which the meaning travels. | If a scholar-NPC quotes a Sapphic fragment in deep-lore context, the gendering is part of the citation, not a default. *Caveat: invoking the archetype neutrally first is preferred; gendered citation is fallback when neutralization would break the reference.* |
+| **Biological asymmetry where the asymmetry is the subject** | The content is *specifically about* a gender-asymmetric biological process (pregnancy, lactation, menstruation, hormonal-specifics) AND the asymmetry is the load-bearing axis of the scene. | Vat-fabrication that *deliberately differentiates by reproductive function* in the imperial bio-engineering register. **Almost never required** — most body-canon in nimmerworld is post-fabrication, sumptuary, and politically-marked rather than biologically-marked. |
+
+**All three cases share a test**: rewrite the passage with `they/them` and gender-neutral category-language. *Does some structural meaning evaporate?* If yes — load-bearing, asymmetric gendering permitted. If no — neutralize.
+
+## When asymmetric gendering is forbidden — the default-leakage cases
+
+**These patterns appear when the author reaches for templates without examining them.** All four were observed and patched in the v0.19 cleanup pass (commit `781aafa`); the contract exists to prevent recurrence.
+
+| Pattern | What it looks like | Why it leaks |
+|---|---|---|
+| **Categorical default-gendering** | A vocation, body-tier, or role that names itself in a gendered loanword (*waifu*, *succubus*, *femme-fatale*) when the role-content itself is not gender-specific. | The source-tradition was gendered; the borrowing carried the gendering through unexamined. *Patch: split the category into role-specific terms. v0.19 split `waifu` → `companion` + `sex-worker`*. |
+| **Pronominal asymmetry in scene-blocks** | A section about a category of people uses gendered pronouns 27 times in one direction, ~zero in the other (the specific count from v0.19's bodies.md going-rogue / outcast-pair / re-vat audit). | The author's templates default to one gender; once the first pronoun lands, downstream pronouns chain through that gender by inertia. *Patch: full pass to `they/their/them`*. |
+| **Archetype-gendering in role-symmetric scenes** | A classical archetype whose role-asymmetry is structural (rescuer / rescued, witness / witnessed, captive / liberator) gets imported with its source-tradition's gender-coding intact. | The archetype carries a *role-asymmetry* that IS load-bearing; the *gender-asymmetry* attached to it in source-material is **not** load-bearing — it's a contingent decoration of the original cultural context. *Patch: keep the role-asymmetry, neutralize the gender-asymmetry. v0.19 rewrote §The damsel-in-distress activation as §The captive-bound-to-the-liberator activation*. |
+| **Romantic / cosmological one-liners** | Stray gendered phrases in passing examples (*moving the waifu*, *the bride's awakening*) inside scenes that are not about gender. | The example was incidental; the gendering was reached for as flavoring. *Patch: substitute role-terms (`the beloved`, `the partner`)*. |
+
+**Each of the four has a structural failure-mode the contract is designed to catch.** The tests in §When asymmetric gendering is load-bearing answer all four — no member of any leakage-pattern can pass them.
+
+## Propagation — where this rule binds in the architecture
+
+The contract propagates *everywhere body / sex / intimate / relational content is rendered or generated*. Concretely, it binds these surfaces:
+
+| Surface | What the rule requires |
+|---|---|
+| **Body-canon authoring** ([`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md), §Service bodies, §Sumptuary fabrication, §Asymmetric clasp, §The going-rogue arc, §The outcast-pair, §Re-vat outflow, §The three-body grammar) | Categories are gender-parity by default. Pronouns are `they/their`. Archetypes are framed in role-terms. *This is the spine where the rule was first established (v0.4 of bodies.md, v0.19 of architecture-index.md)*. |
+| **Cosmology authoring** ([`../imperial-cult/cosmology.md`](../imperial-cult/cosmology.md), §The deferred-moksha doctrine, §There is no outside) | Cosmological one-liners use role-terms (*the beloved*, not *the waifu*). Doctrinal voice is gender-parity unless the citation requires asymmetry per Case 2 above. |
+| **Vocation-substrate authoring** ([`../political-register/architecture.md`](../political-register/architecture.md), §The vocation-substrate of the imperial-net market) | Vocations are not gendered. Service-body-of-the-dead, memory-pattern-extractor, tongue-installer, assembler-artisan, lobotomist — all neutral by default. |
+| **Inference / memory schema** ([`../inference-and-memory/architecture.md`](../inference-and-memory/architecture.md)) | Database filenames and schema-field names use role-terms (`companion.sqlite`, not `waifu.sqlite`). v0.19's rename and explicit scope-clarifier-sentence is the canonical example. |
+| **Compositor narrative output** ([`../narrative-composition/architecture.md`](../narrative-composition/architecture.md)) | LLM-authored canon-rows must satisfy the contract. The substitution-test should be a Compositor *output-validator* hook before back-write. |
+| **NPC speech corpora** | NPC dialog templates are gender-parity by default. Specific NPCs with canonical identity (Case 1) may speak in gendered terms about themselves; speech *about categories* of others is neutral. |
+| **Universal-translator corpus** ([`../player-experience/architecture.md`](../player-experience/architecture.md), §Designer-fixed cosmology) | The word-to-trait mapping does not carry gender-coding through trait-palette assignment. Categories that get translated retain their gender-parity register. |
+| **Player input** | The player's typed/spoken language is *not* policed — players use whatever pronouns they reach for. The contract binds **canon-authoring**, not player utterance. |
+| **NPC body rendering** ([`../topology-and-rendering/architecture.md`](../topology-and-rendering/architecture.md)) | The base-limb palette and trait-textured variance do not encode default-gendering at the chassis level. Chassis carry caste-tier marks, vocation-marks, and trait-state — not gender-defaults. |
+
+**This is the body / sex / intimacy register's typed contract.** Anywhere the architecture authors content that touches a body, this rule fires.
+
+## The substitution test — the contract's executable form
+
+Any passage in body / sex / intimate / relational content can be checked by mechanical substitution:
+
+1. **Replace** all gendered pronouns with `they/their/them`.
+2. **Replace** any gendered category-name with a role-term.
+3. **Replace** any archetype-invocation with its role-structure.
+4. **Read** the result.
+
+**Verdict:**
+- If the result preserves all structural meaning → the original was default-leakage. **Apply the substitution.**
+- If the result loses structural meaning → the original was load-bearing. **Document why** (one of Cases 1, 2, 3 in §When asymmetric gendering is load-bearing) inline or in a `<!-- gender-parity-exception: case-N -->` comment so future readers know the asymmetry was deliberate.
+
+**The test is mechanical enough that it can be run by an LLM-Compositor as a hook on any body-canon-authoring output.** That's the long-term enforcement path: the contract binds at the schema-level via output-validation, not via per-author vigilance.
+
+## What this rule does NOT do
+
+- **It does not regulate player utterance.** Players speak in whatever gendered language they reach for. The contract binds the world-as-authored, not the player-as-acting.
+- **It does not erase named NPCs' identities.** A specific NPC who is canonically she/he/they remains so — Case 1 covers them. The contract is about *categories and scenes*, not individuals.
+- **It does not require synthetic neutrality in lore-citations.** Case 2 protects citation-integrity when the gendering is part of the source.
+- **It does not deny biological asymmetry where the asymmetry is the subject.** Case 3 covers genuinely gender-asymmetric biological content. Most nimmerworld body-content is post-fabrication and politically-marked, so Case 3 is rarely invoked, but it is not foreclosed.
+- **It does not police trait-vocabulary by gender.** The 8 Hellenic traits do not carry gender-defaults; the trait-palette and gender-parity contract are *orthogonal* spine-rules that compose cleanly.
+
+## Cross-references into architecture domain files
+
+The gender-parity contract is referenced from architecture sections where body / sex / intimate / relational content is authored. When this contract changes, those sections may need updates too (or they may reference back into here for canonical definition):
+
+| What | Where it's referenced architecturally |
+|---|---|
+| Service-body taxonomy + companion / sex-worker split | [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §Service bodies |
+| Service-body honeypot + companion-honeypot deepening | [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The service-body honeypot |
+| Going-rogue arc + outcast-pair geometry + re-vat outflow | [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The going-rogue arc through §The three-body grammar of the defected beloved |
+| The captive-bound-to-the-liberator archetype (Stockholm-dynamics-inverted) | [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The captive-bound-to-the-liberator activation |
+| Imperial Cult doctrinal one-liners + deferred-moksha refutation phrasings | [`../imperial-cult/cosmology.md`](../imperial-cult/cosmology.md) §The deferred-moksha doctrine |
+| Vocation-substrate of the imperial-net market (companions, sex-workers, harvest-vocations) | [`../political-register/architecture.md`](../political-register/architecture.md) §The vocation-substrate of the imperial-net market |
+| `companion.sqlite` per-player local database + scope-clarifier sentence | [`../inference-and-memory/architecture.md`](../inference-and-memory/architecture.md) §Local memory architecture |
+| Compositor canon-authoring as the LLM enforcement-point | [`../narrative-composition/architecture.md`](../narrative-composition/architecture.md) (Compositor output-validation hook — pending implementation) |
+| Universal-translator corpus + player-curated trait-circle gender-neutrality | [`../player-experience/architecture.md`](../player-experience/architecture.md) §Designer-fixed cosmology |
+
+---
+
+**Version:** 0.1 | **Created:** 2026-04-27 | **Updated:** 2026-04-27