Not the gender you thought they were

[Iscah]

And here you are applying the knowledge you already have towards something you don't know much about which is a common practice for organisms that don't have a "set" binary structure compared to humans.

Basically, what I was saying is that, the qualities we associate with females, being pregnant, giving birth, care taking, etc will be telegraphed onto another creature we know very little about, if we see those qualities in said creature. But, that's just our preconception based on what we are use to. Seahorses were an example, commonly known at this point, because if someone didn't know any better, but they knew about our genderfied roles, like a young child, they would think the male seahorse is female. That's why my original comment had quotation marks around the word female. It's not that the animal was female, it's that the role is considered "female" to us, because that's what we are use to.

That is what I'm doing with the sylphs though - applying the standard concept of "childbearing gender = female" to conclude that the seed-bearing gender of sylphs must be equivalent to female - and yet the lorebook entry says that they are "generally considered 'male' by the other races". That implies the sylphs themselves do not have a concept of male and female, it's only a label that's been applied to them by the 'human' races trying to make sense of the unfamiliar sylph genders. (On a side note: it occurs to me that the sylphs' odd phrasing of "this one", "that one" for all pronouns avoids having to use "he/she", necessary in normal speech but awkward if they don't have the concept.)

So how would they come to consider that group 'male' in the first place? If you have [sylph gender A] and [sylph gender B] and you want to classify them as male-equivalent and female-equivalent, why would you overlook the primary difference that only one gender can bear seeds?

Did they not spend that much time studying them, and just say "'xio' name endings sound male, 'xia' endings sound female, let's go with that?"

For one thing, I don't recall Noraxia turning into a Hyur, but that doesn't mean anything. I'm not sure if you can say that this has any merit, since we know the Sylphs use transformation magic. We know they can take on the forms of other creatures they have seen. There is a probability that each of these Sylphs only saw that one sex, or something to that effect. But that's speculation on both parts.

It's entirely missable, but if you visit the main hall to talk to all the minor characters each time their dialogue changes, at one point you'll find Noraxia glamoured/transformed into a Hyur. (Brown skin, green mohawk and facepaint, wearing an acton and no pants. "This one is very convincing, yes?" she asks...)

She's made this disguise while already at the Waking Sands, so has certainly seen people in an assortment of races and genders. Fair point that she still might not grasp the difference, and her Hyuran form has a rather gender-ambiguous appearance. (It actually took me until my third time through the game to realise it was a male character, because I wasn't thinking of the possibility, and it only clicked because I noticed 'she' had a male-only hairstyle.)

Meanwhile it seemed that Silbexio had been 'undercover' pretending to be a Hyur for some time prior to the story (Noraxia actually mentions knowing a "walking one in the Ashcrown Consortium" which is almost certainly 'Silvie'). When disguised he uses human grammar and pronouns and - whether coincidental or not - has a more definitely female appearance.

The one thing we do know is that, canonically, the "io" sylphs are male to us and the "ia" are female to us; this is most likely because of the O and A being associated with male and female respectively. Plants are bisexual, and since the Sylph are plant-like they probably are as well, which explains why all of them can produce pods.

They don't all produce pods. (If that's been your understanding up to this point, we may not be arguing from the same set of facts here.)

From the lorebook entry that ObsidianFire posted just above:

Those sylphs who possess both stamen and pistil are capable of producing bulbs, and are classified as "everblooms."

The "females" of the race, the lateblooms' inability to produce podlings is balanced by an innate talent for the arcane arts [...]

Back down the Wikipedia rabbithole on the fun topic of plant reproductive morphology so I'm getting my facts right...

From reading the articles it seems the terms 'male' and 'female' shouldn't technically be used to talk about plant parts, but for simplicity I'll continue to do so.

A stamen is the pollen-producing 'male' part of a flower and a pistil is the 'female' part that develops into seeds/fruit.

The lorebook description says that everbloom sylphs are those that have "both stamen and pistil", which means that lateblooms must not have both - and if they can't produce pods then that suggests they are lacking a pistil. Therefore it would indicate that they do have stamens, and again would make more sense equated to male than female.

And going from the terminology section of the Wikipedia page, it seems this is a valid state for plants: "Androdioecious: having male flowers on some plants, bisexual ones on others".


Also, plants are not always 'bisexual', and some do have completely separate 'male' and 'female' plants. I was aware of holly, and Wikipedia led me to this list of dioecious plants (the proper term for it), so there are quite a few.

Plants may also produce separate 'male' and 'female' flowers on a single plant - eg. this picture of pumpkin flowers, with the large bulge (ovary) on the female flower stalk that will swell and become the pumpkin itself.