nimmerworld.eachpath.local/style/gender-parity.md

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, trait-palette.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.

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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 §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) — 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, §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, §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, §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)	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)	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, §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)	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 §Service bodies
Service-body honeypot + companion-honeypot deepening	../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md §The service-body honeypot
Going-rogue arc + outcast-pair geometry + re-vat outflow	../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 §The captive-bound-to-the-liberator activation
Imperial Cult doctrinal one-liners + deferred-moksha refutation phrasings	../imperial-cult/cosmology.md §The deferred-moksha doctrine
Vocation-substrate of the imperial-net market (companions, sex-workers, harvest-vocations)	../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 §Local memory architecture
Compositor canon-authoring as the LLM enforcement-point	../narrative-composition/architecture.md (Compositor output-validation hook — pending implementation)
Universal-translator corpus + player-curated trait-circle gender-neutrality	../player-experience/architecture.md §Designer-fixed cosmology

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Version: 0.1 | Created: 2026-04-27 | Updated: 2026-04-27