Gender and Flowers

The issue of gender and the Flowers is a perennial (if you'll excuse the pun) one amongst members of the PPC. Some hold that Flowers have actual genders, and are bound to them. Others claim that they are mere honorifics, similar to the names adopted by the Firstborn.

Notably, the Kudzu has been identified by various agents as male or female at different times. This may mean that Flowers may choose or change their own genders, or simply be assigned genders by individuals from gendered races.

Evidence for Actual Genders

 * Many of the Flowers seem to have personalities to fit their stated genders. The Sub Rosa is very distinctively female, while it would be very hard to think of Hornbeam as anything other than male.
 * The issue of Dandelions. These Flowers have a uniform distinction between male and female: the females have seed-heads, while the males have flower-heads.
 * A Yellow Rose has been known to wear a vine bikini. And flirt outrageously, exclusively with "male" Flowers.
 * In the Real World, as a flower is the reproductive organ of a plant, it does have a sex; however, flowers most often contain both male and female organs in the same bloom.
 * The Division of Mpreg is headed by the Male Ginkgo; Ginkgos and a few other trees are unusual in that instead of producing both male and female reproductive parts, they only produce one.
 * It is possible for a Real World human to have a mental gender different from their physical gender (or despite an androgynous physical gender); so it should also be possible for androgynous Flowers to have mental genders.

Evidence for Honorifics

 * Well... they're Flowers. Flora do not generally have genders; unlike humans, most Flowers belong to species without genders.
 * Flowers are working with many species with binary (or mostly binary) gender distributions, some of whose languages (notably English) do not even have widely-used pronouns for sentient androgynous beings. It would be natural for agents speaking these languages to assign genders simply for convenience's sake, and to avoid having to awkwardly refer to a flower as "it".