Guild Wars 2

I wondered, since it seems to be common that sylvari fall in love with their own gender in the storyline – do they have a real gender? I mean they won’t need one since they won’t reproduce like a 2 gender species, since they are all brothers&sisters, born out of a tree?

(By the way, any information about the asura experiments on sylvari, where they able to breed a sylvari in a petry dish? I mean that#s an easy task with nearly all of our world plants)

I think youre confusing sex and gender. Sex is purely biological while gender transcends biology. For example, a male sylvari might not identify with the male gender and performatively be a woman. This is called transgender.

Most sylvari appear to be pansexual as far as I can tell. Most of them don’t have any hangups about the gender of their partners – they don’t even seem to care. I wouldn’t even call sylvari homosexual or heterosexual since most of them don’t appear to have a preference.

As for breeding them in Petrie dishes? Not likely. That would require advanced cloning technology, which hasn’t been acknowledged in canon.

Well.. First it is important to know the difference between sex and gender. Sex is what one is physically, while gender is what one is or thinks like or acts like psychologically and culturally. Sylvari actually seem to have both a sex (at least, they have the external parts of one sex, but they don’t have the internal parts since they can’t reproduce but can have sex) and a gender related to that sex.

In love and sexual relations neither sex nor gender (nor race) seem to matter for them however. They love who they love.

Sylvari are designed (by the Pale Tree) to look like humans, so physically they’re either male or female. But their internal biology is completely different and they’re unable to reproduce themselves, which makes having sex entirely a fun/bonding activity for them.

Under those circumstances it’s not surprising they don’t worry too much about the sex or gender of their partner. If I remember correctly some also have relationships with humans and possibly other species.

As for the asuran experiment my understanding is that they never looked into breeding sylvari by any means. They were more interested in dissecting them to try and understand how they functioned and comparing them to other ‘plant animals’ like Oakhearts and Pinesouls. The Inquest also looked into using them as a power source, although I’m not entirely clear on why since it seems unlikely they’d be any better than more conventional sources and a lot more hassle to capture and use.

On the Inquest: It seems that golems powered by sapient souls generally end up more powerful and perform ‘better’ than more conventional golems. Regular asura generally consider this to be unprincipled, but we see plenty of cases of such constructs in Guild Wars history – Jades, Shiro’ken, arguably even the Exalted count as an example where the souls were volunteers.

Using the sylvari in particular as a power source is probably largely a matter of the sylvari being unique in many ways (immune to dragon corruption, connection to the Dream) – so, from the perspective of the Inquest, it’s worth experimenting to see if sylvari-powered golems will also have interesting properties.

Referring back to the OP: I think they genuinely do have both sex and gender, but are, however, infertile. Whether they’ll continue to be is another question, but given their source, it seems likely.

Biologically, sylvari are distinctly of either male or female sex, with humans as the template for the dimorphic differences.

They seem to mostly be cis-gendered, in that their self-identified gender = their biological sex.

And their sexual orientation appears to be mostly ‘pan,’ meaning that they’re attracted to people, not genders.