I've been wanting to try Dwarf Fortress for a long time, and took the opportunity with the steam release, as well as looking at how mods work. One thing that quickly came up in discussion with friends is the idea of trans dwarves, since I and most of my friends are trans. It was nice to see
this tweet suggesting they're planned at some point in the future, but since there's obviously a lot going on I decided to look at the possibility of adding it in a mod myself. But there were two problems that come up quickly.
The first is that everyone has different ideas of how they want gender in general or transgender dwarves specifically to work. Even among my friends, our opinions have ranged from "I hope nothing is changed, the way it is currently has no social gender roles which is perfect" to "I want dwarves to work like Discworld where they're all male by default and their physical sex is not relevant/known until they take a spouse, or if they personally decide to make it public" to "I want dwarves to be able to have different pronouns or gender markers in their profiles than the one they were assigned at birth, maybe at random, or maybe some internal personality trait that causes stress until they do, or maybe some of them want help from a doctor or some don't, or... [continued rambling about the possible mechanical minuteae]". It's pretty much a certainty that if Toady adds transgender dwarves, the way he designs it won't make all of us happy, because we want different things.
The second is that the way gender, sex, pronouns, etc works in the game is hardcoded and unmoddable (the "how I did pronouns" issue, as Toady aluded to in the tweet). Currently, you can assign different castes MALE or FEMALE tokens (or even NO_GENDER to revert to neither) to specific castes, but each one controls a bunch of different behaviors, including the gender marker on the bio, pronouns used for each creature, and whether/how can reproduce. So as it is you can't, for example, have every dwarf described as "he/him" but still be able to have kids. Or to model many
historical transgender or third-gender castes. It also prevents any kind of neopronouns or other genders being reflected on the creature's bio page.
Solving the second problem would also solve the first. It's the spirit of the game that everyone can customize their Dwarf Fortress experience to whatever they want, not just in in-game constraints and goals, but in modding the game itself. Making the behavior of sex and gender moddable, without even necessarily changing the default behavior, would provide this for a lot of players, beyond just the default dwarves but also to customized creatures and societies. There's already some gesturing toward this in the game itself - the fact that Orientation is moddable, for example, and that the elves, unlike other civilizations, only have Queens, never Kings, and have Princesses as both a military and nobility role. I can understand how the current implementation of gender is easy to implement as a quick default, to "look right" in most circumstances, but it is limiting the possiblity space.
I'm sure there's a lot of people that think this is unnecessary, but again, the whole spirit of the game is unnecessarily detailed simulation and customizability. Most people probably don't care if you can change the material a dwarf's toenail is made of, but you can. So, I figured I'd post something that I know I and many other people would be interested in seeing in the game.