Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language {so the Culture will tell you}, has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language {or a good excuse for not having either}. Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person's sex in Marain, but they're not used in everyday conversation
( Iain M. Banks )
[ The Player of Games ]
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