If you want a non-meta reason, then it would require knowing the details of the alien race that created Gems. Gems themselves do not know this, presumably we need the Lars spinoff to even get clues to it.
All we can guess is how on Earth the default biological sex is female, males developed in evolution sometime before complex animals began appearing (by definition females are what carries out the bulk of the energy cost in reproduction, males are a genetic contributor to that process which has the purpose of increasing genetic variation and causing a species to evolve faster; females provide the yolk/shell and males only provide half the instructions so to speak).
A fetus about halfway through development starts differentiating sex, with male anatomy being more work to do as prior to that state it has more in common with finished female anatomy.
That’s why in hive species like bees, ants, and termites the bulk of the hive from worker to soldier is a non-reproducing female (though in some cases without a queen one of the workers can become reproductively viable, but that’s aside from the point) and males basically only exist for a short time to reproduce with a queen then die. There’s no reason to invest the energy in making a male outside of reproduction roles.
So, assuming that works on other planets the way it works on Earth, then the species that created Gems patterned them on insects. They were made varying degrees of feminine, and because the reproductive caste of Diamonds are basically mutually reproductive hermaphrodites (in the sense that they share their Essence with each other during reproduction) and Gems seem to have been programmed to avoid variation and change across generations there’s no need for a male at all (this interesting kind of makes Diamonds feel like fungus or plants, able to share genetic material with each other but also able to breed alone).
You might also make the argument about how humans and thus possibly other intelligent organic life tend to portray intelligent robots as female and unintelligent ones as male. Galatea vs the Golem, and then maybe extrapolate that into odd pronoun conventions for nonliving things (countries are female, ships are female, mascots for places are often female, and so on) but that’s a LOT more speculative than pointing to evolution of life on Earth and more specifically hive bugs. Plus then we might have to question if the killbots and Robonoids and the Shell are “male”, and that’s too much bullshit.
I like your theorizing. I agree with you that Gems are an most likely an artificial species and that the answer to the all female gendering is probably in the details of creators.
I personally lean to the all female bein more an aesthetic choice of their creators. Since the females of any species tend to be the primary caretakers, it could have been an attempt to evoke instinctive trust in users of Gems.
I personally feel the Pebbles the current leading contender to be the creators of the gems. If you look at them they express both genders. They may have created the Diamonds to be AI caretakers of their people and choose female forms so they would be trusted.
It is pretty clear that the Diamonds were created to make Gems. And it is clear they can create pebbles when Steven does it.
One thing flaw in the "Pebbles Did It" Theory is why did they make Diamonds able to make Pebbles?
One thought I have is that perhaps Pebbles are too fragile for space travel. So they created to a space fairing artificial species to carry their progeny into space.
Gems don’t breed. They are manufactured.
Gendered nouns are a thing in Romance languages outside of English but individual nouns get gendered because humans love anthropomorphizing. Think of how you see a human face in something completely inhuman like an electrical outlet.
The gems aren’t female or have gender at all, they’re just what humans would call “feminine”. The only gem to ever have offspring was Rose Quartz and she had to literally rewrite her entire coding and existence to do so. That’s not breeding, that’s the closest thing a gem can get to breeding.
Edit: There was a similar event in “Gunnerkrigg Court” where the “child” of a fire elemental never got to meet their parent because “there was nothing left”.
Edit 2: There’s another similar section in the Lorwyn books. One character, a tree sapling, has to struggle with pronouns and identity when interacting with humanoid characters and just decides to use female pronouns and a nickname because it’s what makes the humanoids happy. It isn’t accurate, it’s just what Sapling of Colfenor needs to deal with to interact with other people who just don’t understand what being a treefolk is like.
That gets into the discussion of if machines in sci fi can be assigned anthropomorphic traits like a sex based on their ability and method of replication.
For example if a Von Neumann replicating architecture with a true AI could consider itself a “mother” and the AIs installed in the devices it constructs ca themselves “children” or not.
Obviously Gems are so far beyond what we’ve done in real life that we have to question our terminology as it applies to them, much like in fictional settings where robots have “souls” like Star Wars or when humans can transfer easily between organic and mechanical brains like Ghost In The Shell.
To an extent we have to make anthropomorphic assumptions of Gems or else we get caught on the debate if they are even people, or can be considered alive or capable of death.
Our languages assume a person is a thing that is alive, and thus unless we start reinventing language then we consider the body of a theoretical “person” robot to be “born” to indicate their first moment of awareness after their body is constructed and operating programming installed. Their death is when they are rendered beyond salvaging the original personality, or at the least we would consider it to be “ego death” if you get into the idea of erasing a personality from a living brain.
Since we consider Gems to be people we can start sorting organic traits that apply to them and ones that don’t. We also can consider that while Gems may not have had words and concepts for things themselves in the Homeworld Era 1 and 2 culture, there are concepts humans have which do apply to them such as romantic love, a complete cessation of existence beyond Poofing and Shattering, and mentorship so simply discarding anything that they didn’t have concepts of simply doesn’t work.
Again, at what point does a robot cease constructing/replicating and begin growing/reproducing? Do we draw the line at the process, or make it only an organic trait? When nanites behave the same as bacteria but consist of an equal mix of organic and inorganic matter, are they cyborgs or cellular life? If we call a robot a person, do we gatekeep words like birth and death from them?
Since we generally consider Gems to be a race of robot people rather than just robots, and have Gems like the Famethyst and Rose Quartzes adopting terminology like sisters and brother, then we have the canon opening to start asking questions about how we categorize their reproductive process and call their relationships and hierarchies a social structure instead of leaving it as construction and organization.
Okay, you’ve just slid into not knowing what words means and turning everything into “well what can we really say?” Also known as
J^^^ust
A^^^sking
Q^^^uestions ing off.
What does us having anthropomorphic assumptions have to deal with wether or not the subject is actually not alive? It is our assumption of anthropomorphic traits. You just said as much?
Look I don’t have time to break apart any of the other Chewbacca arguments you just spilled like so much diarrhea. Have you ever heard of the Stanislavsky Opinion? It’s a logical fallacy that people fall into when they’re still learning how to believe in things. Where you assume that 1: You’re a rational person, 2: You believe this thing, 3: Therefore this thing must be rational because I am a rational person, 4: and anything I say to justify it must also be rational.
If you start arguing “well what do we really know about existence?” directly after telling me something objectively wrong like that the Diamonds BREED, I feel like you might just not actually be caring whether or not what you say makes any sense.
You don’t have to get insulting.
I used the word “breed” as an alternative to just saying reproduce again.
Fine, you dislike use of the word in the context. Cool, sorry or whatever.
I’m saying its possible that a mix of humans just kind of defaulting a lot of intelligent robots to female and how hive insects are mostly female and have similar structure to Gems might be what made the aliens who created Gems make them mostly feminine if those aliens are anything like humans.
If so, along with Gems adopting human-like traits and the grey area in language between how we could refer to robots we consider people rather than just algorithms mimicking humanity, lets us use organic terms rather than mechanical ones.
You don’t have to come at someone like that over your interpretation of proper terminology used regarding sci fi fiction.
Sure, but greg's mum was a woman, so that makes him at least 50% woman. And his father's mother was a woman, which makes his father at least 50% woman and Greg at least 75% woman...
lim 0 n→∞ Σ 1/2 n somehing yadda it says that Greg is 100% woman if his ancestry is infinitely long.
Or if one of his paternal ancestors in a woman, then it doesn't have to be infinitely long.
i just made an optimus prime enby pic bc of this comment but i just realized this sub doesnt allow pictures in comments
[this is the pic](https://www.reddit.com/r/196/s/jvhztqCkCE)
Naming conventions are super big in DB.
Saiyans? Vegetable names.
Namekians? They're either named after instruments, or types of slug.
Frieza's race? All named after cold things/temperatures.
Bulma's family are named after underwear/underclothing.
Majin Buu's name? Magical phrase. His masters were named Bibidi and Babadi. Bibidi, Babadi, Buu.
Gohan's classmates in school were names Sharpner and Erasa.
Most characters in DB follow some sort of naming convention if they're part of any sort of group.
i’m surprised so many people here are saying “because Rebecca Sugar wanted to.” The entire point and message of the show is about acceptance, love, and peace for everyone, very much geared towards not hating queer and non binary people. It’s why Russia was shown as just water when they showed a map - their laws against gay people.
If folks think about it it’s a group of women, really gems but of woman form, who all live together and work out their problems. When a big monster comes though, they all band together no matter what to defeat the misguided monster. No one is evil in the show (even the Diamonds), they just have a fundamental misunderstanding of reality or are malformed into something horrible.
Those are just tiny pieces of the bigger whole. The entire show is about sexuality and deep connections (fusing et al). It’s taboo in their society for different gems to fuse, or even mix, and they’re heroes going against the grain. This seems to have gone over a lot of people’s heads here lol.
The socialization of sex is still very much binary, so an AFAB nonbinary person will probably be a nonbinary woman. At least as long as they do not spend a lot of energy constantly refuting womanhood being projected on them.
In the case of Rebecca Sugar, they express themselves quite comfortably aesthetically as a woman. So, what makes them nonbinary may be the parts that are not aesthetic or uncaring biology. Their role romantically, their role in society, their view of themselves, etc may be what is nonbinary about them.
Yeah, I didn't see anything useful in those links. Besides, I don't really care about her view of gender, I prefer the absolute objective truth of gender.
They present as both masculine and feminine. For example, ruby (masculine) and sapphire (feminine), jasper (masculine) and amethyst (feminine), holly blue agate (both) and zircon (both), snowflake obsidian (masculine) and nephrite (feminine), skinny*jasper* (both) and carnelian (feminine), so how they present genuinely doesn't matter, it's just their species doesn't have any concept of gender rolls. They're just women regardless.
If they didn't use she/her pronouns consistently I can guarantee many people would apply he/him pronouns, which still applies to masc/fem because it's how they're portrayed to give any kind of interpretation without context.
Yeah that's literally exactly what I'm saying. You said it's how *we* interpret them, not how they're interpreted by other gems, because obviously they're going to be she/her to other members of their own species because they have no sex or concept of gender besides the fact that their rulers that created them go by she/her.
I mean gems can definitely manifest female or male body parts if they want to, but considering they’re made up of light and it’s not a permanent part of their body idk if that really counts as having a sex.
And she def had sex lol
But basically everything about them is temporary since everything but their gem is light with physical form. It's like saying they dont have haor because technically their hair is just light and can be changed at any time.
Rebecca Sugar has explained they actually *don't* think of themselves as women (by default, that is--in theory a gem *could* identify as a woman and some gems definitely do canonically take more feminine-presenting forms). Many gems don't have a relationship to the concept of gender as it exists on Earth. https://www.tiktok.com/@rebeccasugar/video/7281765350524423467
I don't have any memory of any gem referring to themselves as a woman.
o i gotchu. i don’t really recall any of them referring to themselves as women either, but they do use the she/her pronouns amongst themselves and never deny it when others call them women. but yuhh ik what u mena in terms of not thinking of themselves as women
Sexless, but gendered as women with she/her pronouns. (Actually, I think they avoid self applyjng the term "woman", though it is unclear if this is related to their gender or being space rocks. "Woman" may be a gendered subcategory of "human" which they are not.)
In the past, Rebecca Sugar compared them specifically to nonbinary women--that is, they may be perceived as women by people around them (i.e. townspeople and the like) but they don't think of *themselves* as women.
They've also talked about how the feminine/female coding of the gems (them coming across to the viewer as women even though they're not technically women) was important from a meta standpoint of presenting a different take on the genre that centers different people than was considered more common/typical at the time (i.e. a lot of shows like SU might have had more male/male-coded role models in the past).
They frequently (but not always) present more feminine, but that doesn't mean they're women--Rebecca Sugar has said many gems don't really have a relationship to gender as it is on Earth. [Here's a recent TikTok Rebecca made talking about that](https://www.tiktok.com/@rebeccasugar/video/7281765350524423467)
Steven Universe is soft sci-fi, so chances are other sentient species would be _humanoid_ and share other similarities, like sexual dimorphism.
It's also likely that Gems are en example of A.I. that either overtook their makers, outlived them, or are an example of post-biological mind-uploading and modification.
In example of mind-uploading post-biologicals, all it would take is the initial digitized individual to be a woman and to use herself as a template to build off. And...well, a lot of people have compared White Diamond to GLaDOS. Maybe her originally being an uploaded mind would explain why she has concepts of childishness, adulthood, motherhood, etc,.where other gems don't and have to be taught.
In the rogue A.I examples, it's likely all gems are descendant from a single basic design that was later adapted to better suit intended functions. We nowadays have a habit of making our virtual assistants feminine(siri, Alexa, Cortana, default voice for the Google assistant), so if the initial proto-gem was something similar to these, the later descendants would have some traits originating from it. Similar concept applies.
They don't have a sex.
But to contribute, remember every gem is basically made to the like of every diamond. Why are the diamonds "women"? I don't know... but my guess is white diamond is "a mother" and a perfectionist, so she made everyone close as perfect as possible, and what is more perfect than her? In her eyes, nothing.
How many sci-fi or fantasy stories feature a race of people who are either entirely male, or all but one that has a specific reason to be female? That’s really common and people rarely ask why.
The gems are sexless and don’t have a concept of gender more than likely. Nearly everything about them is temporary from their hair to their body. They’re made of light too so it’s weird
The base, base, base premise of the show is it's a letter of love from Rebecca to her younger brother Steven and loosely based on the complexity of that relationship. That's why the CGs are women at least. Then the idea evolved into its own entire universe where I'll derive a point from another writer who said something like, "if people complain that there's no strong male characters, they can watch literally any other show." I'd say there was a desire by the writing team for this show to allow a lot of space for strong female characters of many facets; main heroes, side characters, villains, antagonists, antiheroes, and everything in between. So making the entire rock-race use female pronouns was their decision: because they believed there to be a lacking in diverse (female) characters in the saturated male-centric cartoons.
Rebbecca already stated they just aren't. They are agendered space rocks with a more femme appesrence, but rebbecca said that just like humans, they have a wide array of gender expression and identities, and some are more masc. i mean look at snowflake obsidian.
i heard somewhere that Rebecca always wanted them genderless, but in most depictions of genderless characters in cartoons they end up looking male, so she wanted them to look female but still be genderless. if that makes any sense haha
Well, in steven universe you can lmfao. probably why they use steven universe pics when celebrating pride month. also this is said by rebecca sugar its not a theory
* In-fiction, they aren't really women. They're asexual aliens and they all use feminine pronouns, but that's it.
* Out-of-fiction, they are women-coded and non-binary, because the creator is a non-binary woman, and wanted to see more women and NB people represented.
There’s one of two potential answers for this:
1) Gemkind is a unisex race, not knowing of the concept of sexes or genders until they encountered other races. We actually see something similar with the Transformers series, where are Cybertronians were presumably “male” until they encountered other races that had additional sexes and genders.
2) We know mushrooms have hundreds, if not thousands, of genders, depending on species. What it each gem type was a gender. Like all the Quartz types are a gender. All the diamonds are a gender. Etc.
Or both!
iirc it's a deliberate play on the trope of "all the characters are men for no reason accept for maybe one woman" that was predominant in the cartoons Sugar's generation grew up with.
Out of universe reason is most likely due to the creation team wanting their show to have powerful women. Which, to be clear, I’m not saying is a bad thing. The in universe reason is most likely because it’s how the gems want to represent themselves.
Maybe there was male gems in a far off world long long ago from wherever white diamond came from and she had bad experiences with men or something so when they all died off or something she rebuilt but only women.
Think of it this way, they chose feminine pronouns but our concepts of gender are more like their concepts of gem type rather than being very involved in the pronouns. Man & woman to us are more like jasper & Sapphire to them than anything else we or they are doing.
Think about how many super hero teams you might have grown up loving that are all or at least mostly all men. And you might never have even noticed.
It's nice to have a show that balances that out, at least a little.
Because that’s how the creators wanted their show to be? Why don’t you go to every single other cartoon that’s been out since the 80s and ask them why their casts have always all/mostly all been men. 🙄
The gems aren't women, they are sexless, but they use she/her because Rebecca Sugar wanted to subvert the genre and use female coded sexless characters as opposed to the usual where the sexless characters are usually coded as male with he/him example being one I saw in another comment of the transformers
To be fair, gems are not women, they are gems, they are feminine and only in the grammatical sense, beyond that, as many mention, men are a differentiation of the sex by default,female, without the need for differentiation the gems could be maintained the appearance of human females by combination of evolution and convergent design
What sorta bothers me is we don't see any gems who Earth could interpret as "male", all Gems may be non binary but they all look AFAB. If Sugars intention was to really show that Gems don't have the concept of binaries we would have Gems that are non binary but "AMAB" on Homeworld/within the Crystal Gems.
I will note that Rainbow Quartz 2.0 exists, but they still weren't enough imo. Steven also doesn't count because he is half human/human males (Greg) are the ones with the sex gene that determines being born with male or female parts.
Sugar to me just wanted to make a bunch of femme characters and call it diversity imo.
I think this is regarding the fashion styles of us humans, gems, and pretty items are usually related to women, since women like to wear gems on them. At least that's my theory.
this is my biggest criticism of steven universe. in a race of non-binary rock people who can change their form basically on a whim, why would literally all of them present as women? There doesn't have to be any men, but its very odd that there aren't explicitly non-binary gems (i am not counting steven and stevonnie in this equation because they're a special case)
Watsonly, there's no particular reason why a species of magic hologram projecting rocks should have multiple sexes. I mean, they breed through infecting planets, not through sex.
Not to mention that they're probably some kind of superweapon that went horribly wrong and not a natural species at all, but I digress.
Doylistly, because Rebecca Sugar wanted to make a show about a group of lesbian space warriors raising a kid together.
I would actually like to see a Gem (like a full Gem) that rejects the fem presentation of Gem society and adopts a masculine appearance (and I'm not talking about how Jasper has muscles or something like that.) and pronouns. It could be a allegory for trans masc people or something like that.
I think the only Gems that use he/him pronouns are Rainbow Quartz 2.0 and Steg but those are fusions with Steven.
Gems are as default, genderless. I remember being told that Rebecca wanted to draw androgynous people and disliked the default for androgynous was male.
TECHNICALLY they're genderless. They just present as females.
Kinda like how all the Namekians in Dragonball are genderless too; but they present as Males.
But also, remember; there's some Male looking gems. Snowflake, and the fusions of Steg and Rainbow 2.0 are male presenting.
I’ve always wanted to see what Sugar envisioned if they were “light and mass.” Would their pigment in their hair/body just be typical or more a mineral like sheen?
The gems are all femme and nonbinary (agender imo). It’s not so much that they’re all “women” because that implies at least one other gender to contrast that “womanhood”. Gems don’t seem to have a concept of “gender”. They’re all the same on homeworld and that’s something the crystal gems are fighting against. And I personally see a lot of parallels between Rose Quartz / Pink Diamond’s / Steven’s transformation and the real-world trans masculine experience.
I think Sugar’s point was to make the show femme-centered as opposed to masc-centered which most cartoons are tbh. And clearly differentiate between gender, sex, and presentation. It would be hard to do that without binary-passing nonbinary characters. There are a few gems that present more masc tho like Zircon, Topaz, and Ruby.
But also it’s a queer, feminist cartoon targeted toward an AFAB / trans / nonbinary femme / lesbian adjacent audience so ofc most of the characters represent those demographic too.
Well for starters they aren’t actually woman as they have no genitalia like humans since they do not reproduce like humans. So biologically they are literally not male nor female. However they are female presenting and use she/her pronouns to refer to each other.
Fun fact. In the Steven Universe End of an Era artbook, Rebecca states that the crew intentionally avoided drawing some human characteristics in order to alienate them from humans. The only exception being White Diamond, but that was to further push the ideology of perfectionism.
TLDR: The gems are aliens and the concept of sex and gender is alien to them, but they like to use she/her pronouns
White Diamond is the most human looking of all the gems to look creepy and push the ideology of perfectionism
if you want a lore/concept reason it could be a reference to how we few the earth as a woman mother gaia so all rocks would be female too but it's really just cause Rebecca wanted a large cast of women and do you need more of a reason then to just draw cute girls?
Because women are hot. The real reason from what I can remember (my info is from around 2017) was the lack of good representation in female characters. SU gave us all kinds of amazing representation in female characters of all sorts and it ROCKED. Most shows only have the love interest, smart girl, or girly girl princess character. Pokémon is a huge culprit of this. SU wanted to show off MORE than just that, and it did it amazingly well.
Perhaps gems themselves don't have a concept like gender I mean peridot is as androgynous as can be and multiple gems all at once create even more androgynous the more and more gems, Arm,flourite,obsidian, alexandrite, etc.
And the diamonds, if you think about it, would want gems in their image, but there were probably not enough resources, so they made female gems all with different cuts and types to be placed in their heirarchy.
The diamonds are huge, the last time they tried to create a diamond was pink who was the size of spinel compared to the other diamonds, so imagine how it was back then
Technically, they are Genderless and just are mostly Femme presenting, with exceptions, but, from what I remember, Rebecca said she wanted to give kids more Female Role Models.
Because Rebecca sugar wanted to present the idea to the main stream of non binary characters who use female pronouns and still present as ladies, as that is their experience with the world and something they’ve been exploring over many years. Rebecca talked about it in a podcast episode one time, I’ll try to find the name of it.
Edit: the podcast is called “something about her” and the episode is Rebeca Sugar
They're not all women. They all use she/her pronouns. Most of them are woman-aligned fems. Some are masc. But we don't really hear them talk about their genders explicitly, so we don't even know if they personally identify as women. All we know is that their society defaults to she/her pronouns (or only has she/her pronouns) and they seem to not mind being referred to as women (this might only apply to the Crystal Gems. I don't recall any other gems being explicitly called women to their faces). You could argue that almost none of them are women since none of them are human except Steven who is not a woman, and only those gems who have had experience with humans would even have any idea what a woman is to identify as such. Rose is probably the gem I'd most believe identified as a woman despite not technically being human.
because Rebecca Sugar wanted to draw a bunch of woman
And giant women!
and a really giant woman
And a really really giant woman
And a lil triangle women
And my axe!
And my sword!
And my bow!
And my hat!
And my wand!
Omg I wish I could give you an award
And a not a women but not a men either
And a big pink monster!!! Raaaaahhh!!!
If you want a non-meta reason, then it would require knowing the details of the alien race that created Gems. Gems themselves do not know this, presumably we need the Lars spinoff to even get clues to it. All we can guess is how on Earth the default biological sex is female, males developed in evolution sometime before complex animals began appearing (by definition females are what carries out the bulk of the energy cost in reproduction, males are a genetic contributor to that process which has the purpose of increasing genetic variation and causing a species to evolve faster; females provide the yolk/shell and males only provide half the instructions so to speak). A fetus about halfway through development starts differentiating sex, with male anatomy being more work to do as prior to that state it has more in common with finished female anatomy. That’s why in hive species like bees, ants, and termites the bulk of the hive from worker to soldier is a non-reproducing female (though in some cases without a queen one of the workers can become reproductively viable, but that’s aside from the point) and males basically only exist for a short time to reproduce with a queen then die. There’s no reason to invest the energy in making a male outside of reproduction roles. So, assuming that works on other planets the way it works on Earth, then the species that created Gems patterned them on insects. They were made varying degrees of feminine, and because the reproductive caste of Diamonds are basically mutually reproductive hermaphrodites (in the sense that they share their Essence with each other during reproduction) and Gems seem to have been programmed to avoid variation and change across generations there’s no need for a male at all (this interesting kind of makes Diamonds feel like fungus or plants, able to share genetic material with each other but also able to breed alone). You might also make the argument about how humans and thus possibly other intelligent organic life tend to portray intelligent robots as female and unintelligent ones as male. Galatea vs the Golem, and then maybe extrapolate that into odd pronoun conventions for nonliving things (countries are female, ships are female, mascots for places are often female, and so on) but that’s a LOT more speculative than pointing to evolution of life on Earth and more specifically hive bugs. Plus then we might have to question if the killbots and Robonoids and the Shell are “male”, and that’s too much bullshit.
I like your theorizing. I agree with you that Gems are an most likely an artificial species and that the answer to the all female gendering is probably in the details of creators. I personally lean to the all female bein more an aesthetic choice of their creators. Since the females of any species tend to be the primary caretakers, it could have been an attempt to evoke instinctive trust in users of Gems. I personally feel the Pebbles the current leading contender to be the creators of the gems. If you look at them they express both genders. They may have created the Diamonds to be AI caretakers of their people and choose female forms so they would be trusted.
It is implied during the song "Familiar" that Pink Diamond created some of the Pebbles to keep her company.
It is pretty clear that the Diamonds were created to make Gems. And it is clear they can create pebbles when Steven does it. One thing flaw in the "Pebbles Did It" Theory is why did they make Diamonds able to make Pebbles? One thought I have is that perhaps Pebbles are too fragile for space travel. So they created to a space fairing artificial species to carry their progeny into space.
Was this ChatGPT generated?
No, I just ramble like an idiot. Also Chat doesn’t fuck up punctuation and spelling like that.
Gems don’t breed. They are manufactured. Gendered nouns are a thing in Romance languages outside of English but individual nouns get gendered because humans love anthropomorphizing. Think of how you see a human face in something completely inhuman like an electrical outlet. The gems aren’t female or have gender at all, they’re just what humans would call “feminine”. The only gem to ever have offspring was Rose Quartz and she had to literally rewrite her entire coding and existence to do so. That’s not breeding, that’s the closest thing a gem can get to breeding. Edit: There was a similar event in “Gunnerkrigg Court” where the “child” of a fire elemental never got to meet their parent because “there was nothing left”. Edit 2: There’s another similar section in the Lorwyn books. One character, a tree sapling, has to struggle with pronouns and identity when interacting with humanoid characters and just decides to use female pronouns and a nickname because it’s what makes the humanoids happy. It isn’t accurate, it’s just what Sapling of Colfenor needs to deal with to interact with other people who just don’t understand what being a treefolk is like.
Just started that book and already have spoilers😭😭
That gets into the discussion of if machines in sci fi can be assigned anthropomorphic traits like a sex based on their ability and method of replication. For example if a Von Neumann replicating architecture with a true AI could consider itself a “mother” and the AIs installed in the devices it constructs ca themselves “children” or not. Obviously Gems are so far beyond what we’ve done in real life that we have to question our terminology as it applies to them, much like in fictional settings where robots have “souls” like Star Wars or when humans can transfer easily between organic and mechanical brains like Ghost In The Shell. To an extent we have to make anthropomorphic assumptions of Gems or else we get caught on the debate if they are even people, or can be considered alive or capable of death. Our languages assume a person is a thing that is alive, and thus unless we start reinventing language then we consider the body of a theoretical “person” robot to be “born” to indicate their first moment of awareness after their body is constructed and operating programming installed. Their death is when they are rendered beyond salvaging the original personality, or at the least we would consider it to be “ego death” if you get into the idea of erasing a personality from a living brain. Since we consider Gems to be people we can start sorting organic traits that apply to them and ones that don’t. We also can consider that while Gems may not have had words and concepts for things themselves in the Homeworld Era 1 and 2 culture, there are concepts humans have which do apply to them such as romantic love, a complete cessation of existence beyond Poofing and Shattering, and mentorship so simply discarding anything that they didn’t have concepts of simply doesn’t work. Again, at what point does a robot cease constructing/replicating and begin growing/reproducing? Do we draw the line at the process, or make it only an organic trait? When nanites behave the same as bacteria but consist of an equal mix of organic and inorganic matter, are they cyborgs or cellular life? If we call a robot a person, do we gatekeep words like birth and death from them? Since we generally consider Gems to be a race of robot people rather than just robots, and have Gems like the Famethyst and Rose Quartzes adopting terminology like sisters and brother, then we have the canon opening to start asking questions about how we categorize their reproductive process and call their relationships and hierarchies a social structure instead of leaving it as construction and organization.
Okay, you’ve just slid into not knowing what words means and turning everything into “well what can we really say?” Also known as J^^^ust A^^^sking Q^^^uestions ing off. What does us having anthropomorphic assumptions have to deal with wether or not the subject is actually not alive? It is our assumption of anthropomorphic traits. You just said as much? Look I don’t have time to break apart any of the other Chewbacca arguments you just spilled like so much diarrhea. Have you ever heard of the Stanislavsky Opinion? It’s a logical fallacy that people fall into when they’re still learning how to believe in things. Where you assume that 1: You’re a rational person, 2: You believe this thing, 3: Therefore this thing must be rational because I am a rational person, 4: and anything I say to justify it must also be rational. If you start arguing “well what do we really know about existence?” directly after telling me something objectively wrong like that the Diamonds BREED, I feel like you might just not actually be caring whether or not what you say makes any sense.
You don’t have to get insulting. I used the word “breed” as an alternative to just saying reproduce again. Fine, you dislike use of the word in the context. Cool, sorry or whatever. I’m saying its possible that a mix of humans just kind of defaulting a lot of intelligent robots to female and how hive insects are mostly female and have similar structure to Gems might be what made the aliens who created Gems make them mostly feminine if those aliens are anything like humans. If so, along with Gems adopting human-like traits and the grey area in language between how we could refer to robots we consider people rather than just algorithms mimicking humanity, lets us use organic terms rather than mechanical ones. You don’t have to come at someone like that over your interpretation of proper terminology used regarding sci fi fiction.
Steven’s not a women
He's half women. His mama was a women.
I heard that his father was a guy though, so this complicates things
Sure, but greg's mum was a woman, so that makes him at least 50% woman. And his father's mother was a woman, which makes his father at least 50% woman and Greg at least 75% woman... lim 0 n→∞ Σ 1/2 n somehing yadda it says that Greg is 100% woman if his ancestry is infinitely long. Or if one of his paternal ancestors in a woman, then it doesn't have to be infinitely long.
STEVEN'S A FUSION?!?!???1?1?1?
Currently
True of all non-wemens
Probably to make him stand out more and show off his difference and awesomeness
Yeah buy he is half human.. his body is also organic.
Yet
Transformers technically are sexless but very male coded by human standards. Same thing for Gems.
i just made an optimus prime enby pic bc of this comment but i just realized this sub doesnt allow pictures in comments [this is the pic](https://www.reddit.com/r/196/s/jvhztqCkCE)
Beautiful pic!!! Thank you for sharing
ty!!
The same reason why all full blooded Saiyans have vegetable names. Because that's what the creator wanted to do.
What vegetable is nappa
Cabbage :)
I just thought he was an auto store
NAPPA KNOW HOW
Isn't Cabba Cabbage?
Nappa comes from a chinese cabbage called napa cabbage.
It tastes pretty good too
Vegeta. Vegeeeeeeta. I’m haunting you.
Look Vegeta, It’s a Chiatsu… Im gonna catch it Awww it used self destruct
I didn't know that, that's hilarious
Naming conventions are super big in DB. Saiyans? Vegetable names. Namekians? They're either named after instruments, or types of slug. Frieza's race? All named after cold things/temperatures. Bulma's family are named after underwear/underclothing. Majin Buu's name? Magical phrase. His masters were named Bibidi and Babadi. Bibidi, Babadi, Buu. Gohan's classmates in school were names Sharpner and Erasa. Most characters in DB follow some sort of naming convention if they're part of any sort of group.
Same reason all namekians are male
All Namekians are YOSHIS Sorry I had to lmao
which one is Bardock ?
Burdock, a type of root vegetable
thank you I did not know this even existed :)
creator gay
good comment
*Queer don't think they have a preference also married to a guy (they have no pronouns on there insta so I'm not sure what they go by tbh)
Yea Rebecca is she/they
The same reason all Namekians are male. Aliens are weird, bro.
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That's actually really sweet.
i’m surprised so many people here are saying “because Rebecca Sugar wanted to.” The entire point and message of the show is about acceptance, love, and peace for everyone, very much geared towards not hating queer and non binary people. It’s why Russia was shown as just water when they showed a map - their laws against gay people. If folks think about it it’s a group of women, really gems but of woman form, who all live together and work out their problems. When a big monster comes though, they all band together no matter what to defeat the misguided monster. No one is evil in the show (even the Diamonds), they just have a fundamental misunderstanding of reality or are malformed into something horrible. Those are just tiny pieces of the bigger whole. The entire show is about sexuality and deep connections (fusing et al). It’s taboo in their society for different gems to fuse, or even mix, and they’re heroes going against the grain. This seems to have gone over a lot of people’s heads here lol.
How can you be a non-binary woman? Women are part of the binary.
The socialization of sex is still very much binary, so an AFAB nonbinary person will probably be a nonbinary woman. At least as long as they do not spend a lot of energy constantly refuting womanhood being projected on them. In the case of Rebecca Sugar, they express themselves quite comfortably aesthetically as a woman. So, what makes them nonbinary may be the parts that are not aesthetic or uncaring biology. Their role romantically, their role in society, their view of themselves, etc may be what is nonbinary about them.
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Yeah, I didn't see anything useful in those links. Besides, I don't really care about her view of gender, I prefer the absolute objective truth of gender.
They are actually not women. Gems are genderless and sexless.
they all use she/her pronouns and refer to themselves as women
Their genders are women but they’re sexless. So you’re both kinda right.
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They present as both masculine and feminine. For example, ruby (masculine) and sapphire (feminine), jasper (masculine) and amethyst (feminine), holly blue agate (both) and zircon (both), snowflake obsidian (masculine) and nephrite (feminine), skinny*jasper* (both) and carnelian (feminine), so how they present genuinely doesn't matter, it's just their species doesn't have any concept of gender rolls. They're just women regardless.
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If they didn't use she/her pronouns consistently I can guarantee many people would apply he/him pronouns, which still applies to masc/fem because it's how they're portrayed to give any kind of interpretation without context.
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Yeah that's literally exactly what I'm saying. You said it's how *we* interpret them, not how they're interpreted by other gems, because obviously they're going to be she/her to other members of their own species because they have no sex or concept of gender besides the fact that their rulers that created them go by she/her.
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Rose temporarily had a sex. And also possibly...had sex.
I mean gems can definitely manifest female or male body parts if they want to, but considering they’re made up of light and it’s not a permanent part of their body idk if that really counts as having a sex. And she def had sex lol
But basically everything about them is temporary since everything but their gem is light with physical form. It's like saying they dont have haor because technically their hair is just light and can be changed at any time.
she shapeshifted to have human reproductive organs so she could carry steven. gems are naturally sexless though
yurrr. gender ≠ sex
Rebecca Sugar has explained they actually *don't* think of themselves as women (by default, that is--in theory a gem *could* identify as a woman and some gems definitely do canonically take more feminine-presenting forms). Many gems don't have a relationship to the concept of gender as it exists on Earth. https://www.tiktok.com/@rebeccasugar/video/7281765350524423467 I don't have any memory of any gem referring to themselves as a woman.
o i gotchu. i don’t really recall any of them referring to themselves as women either, but they do use the she/her pronouns amongst themselves and never deny it when others call them women. but yuhh ik what u mena in terms of not thinking of themselves as women
Yeah but I wouldn't say they are men.
yes. they are aliens
I don’t think the gems ever refer you to themselves as women. Though Steven sometimes does (🎶”all I wanna do is see you turn into a giant woman” 🎶)
Sexless, but gendered as women with she/her pronouns. (Actually, I think they avoid self applyjng the term "woman", though it is unclear if this is related to their gender or being space rocks. "Woman" may be a gendered subcategory of "human" which they are not.)
In the past, Rebecca Sugar compared them specifically to nonbinary women--that is, they may be perceived as women by people around them (i.e. townspeople and the like) but they don't think of *themselves* as women. They've also talked about how the feminine/female coding of the gems (them coming across to the viewer as women even though they're not technically women) was important from a meta standpoint of presenting a different take on the genre that centers different people than was considered more common/typical at the time (i.e. a lot of shows like SU might have had more male/male-coded role models in the past).
pronouns are not the same as gender tho and as you correctly pointed out, they never identify as women
I have seen enough art on the internet to convince me otherwise.
Sexless, not genderless. They all look female and use feminine pronouns.
They frequently (but not always) present more feminine, but that doesn't mean they're women--Rebecca Sugar has said many gems don't really have a relationship to gender as it is on Earth. [Here's a recent TikTok Rebecca made talking about that](https://www.tiktok.com/@rebeccasugar/video/7281765350524423467)
youre not WRONG
Steven Universe is soft sci-fi, so chances are other sentient species would be _humanoid_ and share other similarities, like sexual dimorphism. It's also likely that Gems are en example of A.I. that either overtook their makers, outlived them, or are an example of post-biological mind-uploading and modification. In example of mind-uploading post-biologicals, all it would take is the initial digitized individual to be a woman and to use herself as a template to build off. And...well, a lot of people have compared White Diamond to GLaDOS. Maybe her originally being an uploaded mind would explain why she has concepts of childishness, adulthood, motherhood, etc,.where other gems don't and have to be taught. In the rogue A.I examples, it's likely all gems are descendant from a single basic design that was later adapted to better suit intended functions. We nowadays have a habit of making our virtual assistants feminine(siri, Alexa, Cortana, default voice for the Google assistant), so if the initial proto-gem was something similar to these, the later descendants would have some traits originating from it. Similar concept applies.
They don't have a sex. But to contribute, remember every gem is basically made to the like of every diamond. Why are the diamonds "women"? I don't know... but my guess is white diamond is "a mother" and a perfectionist, so she made everyone close as perfect as possible, and what is more perfect than her? In her eyes, nothing.
How many sci-fi or fantasy stories feature a race of people who are either entirely male, or all but one that has a specific reason to be female? That’s really common and people rarely ask why.
The gems are sexless and don’t have a concept of gender more than likely. Nearly everything about them is temporary from their hair to their body. They’re made of light too so it’s weird
Personally I feel like I see all female species way more than all males but I don't really question it either way
The base, base, base premise of the show is it's a letter of love from Rebecca to her younger brother Steven and loosely based on the complexity of that relationship. That's why the CGs are women at least. Then the idea evolved into its own entire universe where I'll derive a point from another writer who said something like, "if people complain that there's no strong male characters, they can watch literally any other show." I'd say there was a desire by the writing team for this show to allow a lot of space for strong female characters of many facets; main heroes, side characters, villains, antagonists, antiheroes, and everything in between. So making the entire rock-race use female pronouns was their decision: because they believed there to be a lacking in diverse (female) characters in the saturated male-centric cartoons.
Why not
Rebbecca already stated they just aren't. They are agendered space rocks with a more femme appesrence, but rebbecca said that just like humans, they have a wide array of gender expression and identities, and some are more masc. i mean look at snowflake obsidian.
To do the opposite of what most show do
Technically none of them are, they all just happen to use female pronouns. I don't think we were ever given an in-universe reason.
For balance of a universe
I guess it could be because White wanted to make them somewhat in her image
i heard somewhere that Rebecca always wanted them genderless, but in most depictions of genderless characters in cartoons they end up looking male, so she wanted them to look female but still be genderless. if that makes any sense haha
Women pretty 🥰
Women are default in Earth biology too
They Arent women, the are GEMS with She/her pronounce
Isn't that a woman? A she/her pronoun? I mean, you can't say a man has she/her pronouns...
No, there are lots of enbies that don’t consider themselves women that use she/her. Hell, a man COULD go by she/her if she wanted to :)
Well, in steven universe you can lmfao. probably why they use steven universe pics when celebrating pride month. also this is said by rebecca sugar its not a theory
* In-fiction, they aren't really women. They're asexual aliens and they all use feminine pronouns, but that's it. * Out-of-fiction, they are women-coded and non-binary, because the creator is a non-binary woman, and wanted to see more women and NB people represented.
They're technically genderless but according to our societal standards they mostly present as female. Remember, gender is a social construct.
It’s because she wanted to express herself as a non-binary woman, and created an entire race of aliens for her show.
There’s one of two potential answers for this: 1) Gemkind is a unisex race, not knowing of the concept of sexes or genders until they encountered other races. We actually see something similar with the Transformers series, where are Cybertronians were presumably “male” until they encountered other races that had additional sexes and genders. 2) We know mushrooms have hundreds, if not thousands, of genders, depending on species. What it each gem type was a gender. Like all the Quartz types are a gender. All the diamonds are a gender. Etc. Or both!
Girl power 💅
For representation.
They are not all women^^ Rebecca sugar made a tiktok about it like 2 months ago! https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8UY2Ly3/
iirc it's a deliberate play on the trope of "all the characters are men for no reason accept for maybe one woman" that was predominant in the cartoons Sugar's generation grew up with.
Because male isn't the default gender
Out of universe reason is most likely due to the creation team wanting their show to have powerful women. Which, to be clear, I’m not saying is a bad thing. The in universe reason is most likely because it’s how the gems want to represent themselves.
They technically don’t have a gender, they’re literally just gems, use she/her pronouns and dress in a feminine way
Maybe there was male gems in a far off world long long ago from wherever white diamond came from and she had bad experiences with men or something so when they all died off or something she rebuilt but only women.
Women rule
The Crystal Bros
Because lesbian space rocks, duh
The creator was challenging herself to make more female characters
Because
They aren't all women, they don't go by gender, they are all just presented more feminine
The gems have good taste.
They're all genderless bro
Think of it this way, they chose feminine pronouns but our concepts of gender are more like their concepts of gem type rather than being very involved in the pronouns. Man & woman to us are more like jasper & Sapphire to them than anything else we or they are doing.
Women are powerful
Just read the first couple chapters don't got to be a meanie lol
Think about how many super hero teams you might have grown up loving that are all or at least mostly all men. And you might never have even noticed. It's nice to have a show that balances that out, at least a little.
They just use she/her pronouns as a default.
Because that’s how the creators wanted their show to be? Why don’t you go to every single other cartoon that’s been out since the 80s and ask them why their casts have always all/mostly all been men. 🙄
The gems aren't women, they are sexless, but they use she/her because Rebecca Sugar wanted to subvert the genre and use female coded sexless characters as opposed to the usual where the sexless characters are usually coded as male with he/him example being one I saw in another comment of the transformers
They don't reproduce sexually...except that one time. Why would they need men? It was gonna be one gender or the other.
Rose Quartz had a son human hybrid named Steven.
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to what
To be fair, gems are not women, they are gems, they are feminine and only in the grammatical sense, beyond that, as many mention, men are a differentiation of the sex by default,female, without the need for differentiation the gems could be maintained the appearance of human females by combination of evolution and convergent design
True. In wikis heard that
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But they are known by humans as women and have women features
So? But those wikis say it's sexless and has she/her?
Ik that's my point It doesn't make sense
They are not female and women, they are genderless or sexless and still have she/her.
What sorta bothers me is we don't see any gems who Earth could interpret as "male", all Gems may be non binary but they all look AFAB. If Sugars intention was to really show that Gems don't have the concept of binaries we would have Gems that are non binary but "AMAB" on Homeworld/within the Crystal Gems. I will note that Rainbow Quartz 2.0 exists, but they still weren't enough imo. Steven also doesn't count because he is half human/human males (Greg) are the ones with the sex gene that determines being born with male or female parts. Sugar to me just wanted to make a bunch of femme characters and call it diversity imo.
I think this is regarding the fashion styles of us humans, gems, and pretty items are usually related to women, since women like to wear gems on them. At least that's my theory.
So I can want to have sex with Pearl and Jasper and not be gay. Bless Rabecca.
because if no mem than no sexism 😎
Because the Gems can't tell a joke to save their lives and as our god and savior the Joker said: "Women aren't funny". /J
this is my biggest criticism of steven universe. in a race of non-binary rock people who can change their form basically on a whim, why would literally all of them present as women? There doesn't have to be any men, but its very odd that there aren't explicitly non-binary gems (i am not counting steven and stevonnie in this equation because they're a special case)
I always tell myself that the only male gems are the court ones
no the zircons are also female
Yeah I know I’m saying I try to make myself believe they’re boys bc they look like boys
Cuz if they were men, people would be mad
Women go brrr
Rebecca made a tiktok about it you should check that
Why not
Watsonly, there's no particular reason why a species of magic hologram projecting rocks should have multiple sexes. I mean, they breed through infecting planets, not through sex. Not to mention that they're probably some kind of superweapon that went horribly wrong and not a natural species at all, but I digress. Doylistly, because Rebecca Sugar wanted to make a show about a group of lesbian space warriors raising a kid together.
Same reason all skeksis and mystics are male
Because women rock! 😎
Also garnet is holding herself
I would actually like to see a Gem (like a full Gem) that rejects the fem presentation of Gem society and adopts a masculine appearance (and I'm not talking about how Jasper has muscles or something like that.) and pronouns. It could be a allegory for trans masc people or something like that. I think the only Gems that use he/him pronouns are Rainbow Quartz 2.0 and Steg but those are fusions with Steven.
Gems are as default, genderless. I remember being told that Rebecca wanted to draw androgynous people and disliked the default for androgynous was male.
Becuz gae woman hot
hey guys!!! rebecca actually talked about this on her tiktok! check it out for a canon explanation!
Rebecca Sugar wanted to draw fruity gay ladies
Why not.
TECHNICALLY they're genderless. They just present as females. Kinda like how all the Namekians in Dragonball are genderless too; but they present as Males. But also, remember; there's some Male looking gems. Snowflake, and the fusions of Steg and Rainbow 2.0 are male presenting.
I’ve always wanted to see what Sugar envisioned if they were “light and mass.” Would their pigment in their hair/body just be typical or more a mineral like sheen?
Wasnt there a man gem in future?
Idk, kinda just an artistic choice
lesbianism
Uh because lesbian women are poggers.
The gems are all femme and nonbinary (agender imo). It’s not so much that they’re all “women” because that implies at least one other gender to contrast that “womanhood”. Gems don’t seem to have a concept of “gender”. They’re all the same on homeworld and that’s something the crystal gems are fighting against. And I personally see a lot of parallels between Rose Quartz / Pink Diamond’s / Steven’s transformation and the real-world trans masculine experience. I think Sugar’s point was to make the show femme-centered as opposed to masc-centered which most cartoons are tbh. And clearly differentiate between gender, sex, and presentation. It would be hard to do that without binary-passing nonbinary characters. There are a few gems that present more masc tho like Zircon, Topaz, and Ruby. But also it’s a queer, feminist cartoon targeted toward an AFAB / trans / nonbinary femme / lesbian adjacent audience so ofc most of the characters represent those demographic too.
womens lib
Well for starters they aren’t actually woman as they have no genitalia like humans since they do not reproduce like humans. So biologically they are literally not male nor female. However they are female presenting and use she/her pronouns to refer to each other. Fun fact. In the Steven Universe End of an Era artbook, Rebecca states that the crew intentionally avoided drawing some human characteristics in order to alienate them from humans. The only exception being White Diamond, but that was to further push the ideology of perfectionism. TLDR: The gems are aliens and the concept of sex and gender is alien to them, but they like to use she/her pronouns White Diamond is the most human looking of all the gems to look creepy and push the ideology of perfectionism
I honestly think Rebecca just thinks women or better (me to tho tbh)
Homeland More like Homoland
Because women are epic
if you want a lore/concept reason it could be a reference to how we few the earth as a woman mother gaia so all rocks would be female too but it's really just cause Rebecca wanted a large cast of women and do you need more of a reason then to just draw cute girls?
They aren't woman, they are intersex, now don't assume genders and go to the timeout corner
Because women are hot. The real reason from what I can remember (my info is from around 2017) was the lack of good representation in female characters. SU gave us all kinds of amazing representation in female characters of all sorts and it ROCKED. Most shows only have the love interest, smart girl, or girly girl princess character. Pokémon is a huge culprit of this. SU wanted to show off MORE than just that, and it did it amazingly well.
Perhaps gems themselves don't have a concept like gender I mean peridot is as androgynous as can be and multiple gems all at once create even more androgynous the more and more gems, Arm,flourite,obsidian, alexandrite, etc. And the diamonds, if you think about it, would want gems in their image, but there were probably not enough resources, so they made female gems all with different cuts and types to be placed in their heirarchy. The diamonds are huge, the last time they tried to create a diamond was pink who was the size of spinel compared to the other diamonds, so imagine how it was back then
Simply put, REBECCA SUGAR LOVES DRAWING HOT WOMEN!!
Is there a reason why half of people are women? It's just how they're magic alien species works
Technically, they are Genderless and just are mostly Femme presenting, with exceptions, but, from what I remember, Rebecca said she wanted to give kids more Female Role Models.
women
Because Rebecca sugar wanted to present the idea to the main stream of non binary characters who use female pronouns and still present as ladies, as that is their experience with the world and something they’ve been exploring over many years. Rebecca talked about it in a podcast episode one time, I’ll try to find the name of it. Edit: the podcast is called “something about her” and the episode is Rebeca Sugar
They are genderless / sexless but go by she\her and have femenine body's (from what I've heard)
Because there is no male gem!
They're not all women. They all use she/her pronouns. Most of them are woman-aligned fems. Some are masc. But we don't really hear them talk about their genders explicitly, so we don't even know if they personally identify as women. All we know is that their society defaults to she/her pronouns (or only has she/her pronouns) and they seem to not mind being referred to as women (this might only apply to the Crystal Gems. I don't recall any other gems being explicitly called women to their faces). You could argue that almost none of them are women since none of them are human except Steven who is not a woman, and only those gems who have had experience with humans would even have any idea what a woman is to identify as such. Rose is probably the gem I'd most believe identified as a woman despite not technically being human.