I’ve now heard of several SciFi stories which feature an “all male” race. The first was Seth McFarlane’s Star Trek show The Orville. The second is the new Supergirl movie. How on earth does anything think this even means anything, let alone is clever?

For a species to be entirely one sex, they must either reproduce asexually or else they must be hermaphrodites. There simply are no other options. “Sexes” are simply a description for how members of a species produce new members of their species. In the case of Moclans in The Orville, the species is clearly hermaphroditic since any two Moclans can reproduce with each other and either can fertilize the other and the other lay eggs. Looking at a species and deciding that if some are bigger than others they are the “males” is simply nonsensical anthropomorphizing. It is true that in most mammal species the males are larger than the females, but when you go outside of mammals nearly any set of relative sizes can be found. In many species, males are larger. In many species, females are larger. In many species, males and females are the same size. And when I’m talking about species where females are larger, I’m not talking about obscure or docile species. This is true in great white sharks, in pythons, in birds of prey like hawks, eagles, and falcons—it’s quite common for females to be larger than males in the animal kingdom here on earth.

In Moclans, the “female” Moclans are actually just smaller, weaker, more fragile Moclans. They can’t do anything that the “male” Moclans can do. From what I’ve read, it’s implied that they lack half of the genitalia which the “male” Moclans possess, so it’s not clear that they’re actually fertile but unlike “male” Moclans they certainly can’t reproduce on their own, so a colony of “female” Moclans would naturally die out without replacement, while “male” Moclans can sustain themselves indefinitely with no “females”. If there was a genetic condition in humans which made them smaller, weaker, more fragile, and significantly reduced their fertility, we would naturally consider it a birth defect, and aside from a few wackos (there are always wackos) a medical intervention at birth which would allow the child to develop naturally with full function would be completely uncontroversial.

What these shows play on in order to trick people into thinking that they’re not completely stupid is largely their casting. They cast male humans to play “male” Moclans and female humans to play “female” Moclans, and so our innate knowledge that in humans male and female are complementary kicks in and does the work the writer won’t do himself because he can’t. If you changed the casting to be all-male and had the “females” played by pre-pubescent male actors, but changed not a single word of the script, no one would think this deep in the least.

I suspect that this is why, if this ever showed up in a novel (and it probably has because everything has shown up in a novel at least once), it made no splash. Without smuggling in human male and female via actors, the fact that you’re just talking about hermaphrodites who treat a birth defect with a life-improving medical intervention would be too obvious.

I also suspect that this use of human actors to smuggle in human male/female complementarity is why defining “female” Moclans by being small and weak and fragile isn’t generally taken as being insulting to human women, even though it should be. Yes, human females are, statistically, smaller, weaker, and more fragile than human males. (Technically, it’s overlapping normal distributions, but it is certainly true that the averages are not right next to each other.) But this is not the point of female biology. If someone looks at a smaller, weaker, more fragile version of something and thinks “female!” they’ve completely missed the point of human femaleness. Human females have abilities which human males lack—that’s the point. The point is not the tradeoffs that biology generally makes for the sake of those extra abilities.

I assume that the “all male” species in Supergirl was even stupider.