So I’d understand why the asari wouldn’t have gendered anything on their own, but you think that once they saw other races, at least some would choose to present as male. Every asari in the three games is presented as female, and I think it shows a super simple understanding of gender and lack of imagination.
It’s really kinda boring that every asari would choose to be female, especially since I’m sure each individual has their own preferences and attractions. I’m realizing how shallow Mass Effect’s politics are, and how much broader their world could have been, instead of reducing each alien race into Roman wannabes, sexy blue ladies, and the lizard proletariat.
TLDR: No male asari feels like trans erasure.
Damn
Seriously though I think this is the take if you want to read it more charitably(?), and I also could see this as the direction BioWare takes the Asari in future games.
I’d like to point out too that Liara herself says that even though she uses feminine pronouns and everything, she doesn’t exactly identify as female by human standards. I also think it’s important to remember, if you wanna get deeper into the lore, Asari live for a thousand years and have only been interacting with alien species for something like 2600 years by the time humans showed up on the scene. I could imagine that as waaaay more time goes by, each successive generation more readily adopts other cultures’ ideas about gender identity and such similar to the way there seems to be an explosion of trans identifying folks IRL these days because of the increasing exposure everyone has to related concepts. People develop the vocabulary and stuff to explain what they’re feeling.
But I mean yeah, sexy blue alien chicks. Safe to say the creators of Mass Effect weren’t thinking about much of this.
I gotta say I can’t imagine why a species that exists outside of our gender binary would willingly enter into it and take on the negative aspects of binary conformity. It’s like “oh my people’s entire history has been devoid of gender politics and we’ve just been vibing but man feeling guilty about having emotions really sounds neat, maybe I will arbitrarily segment off portions of my personality as culturally taboo just for the fun of it :D” A gender binary is the construct of a lower order of economic development and, as we see in our own society, fades away with further development and the loss of need to sanction labor roles by gender identity
I get what you're saying, but especially in some sci fi world where magical zero mass bubbles explain everything, does exploring your gender identity have to be a negative experience? Plus who's to say an alien species outside our gender binary like the Asari would just adopt our binary alone or even the whole range of human gender expression alone? They can mate with whatever they want somehow and there's like at least 10 spacefaring species in that universe that we really don't know anything about when it comes to their ideas of gender. There weren't female Turians until like Mass Effect 3, and I don't think there's been a voiced female Salarian for example. BioWare could easily be like "yeah in Salarian culture there are 6 genders and only 6" or something in future games. This stuff could really go in any direction we could imagine.