Should I or Shouldn’t I? On Writing Trans Narratives Respectfully
by John Jacobson
Writing about yourself is hard. Writing about something, or someone, that you understand is hard. Writing about something or someone that is oppressed, stereotyped, and dehumanized by society is hard – especially when you don’t understand that struggle on a personal level.
Trans narratives are vital to the young adult book community. Trans teenagers often seek resources that can be found online, in libraries, and through other relatively quiet methods. Our voices as people outside of the gender binary are quiet when we’re young because we’re often met with varying degrees of unsafe environments. The dramatic amount of trans women, mostly of color, murdered this year alone proves how important these resources are to us.
Many writers want to help. Teenage narratives are rife with opportunities to explore what makes us human; they are narratives encapsulated with veiled simplifications of universal struggles, wrapped up in a few hundred pages and through a few important characters. Many writers in turn have continued to branch out in the characters they write, trans and other non-binary characters included, in order to make a sense of the growing world we are collectively aware of.
The question has become: can someone who doesn’t know us write about us? And, more importantly, if someone can, how do they do it well?
It’s a question that I think many of us still don’t know the answer to, at least when it comes to nuance, or circumstance. We obviously don’t live by a particular code of conduct as writers, or even as readers or editors, when it comes to addressing our direct experiences. Books involve imagination and they involve looking at the lives of people we never would have known before. Whether that involves the writing or the reading process, you’re bound to want to explore past the boundaries that you know.
What I struggle with as a non-binary writer and reader is how I want it to be addressed. I don’t want writers to avoid writing characters like me – because obviously I almost never see myself in fiction. I want to be able to read books and feel like a facet of my identity is represented.
Then again, sometimes I read about myself and the research/characterization/awareness of what it means to be non-binary is such shit that I almost wish it had never been written at all.
I want there to be more of an emphasis on research and vetting. If you’re an author that is writing about a trans or nonbinary character, you need to be aware that whatever you’re constructing about them may not be accurate. You as the writer have the power to construct a story – this is true – but that’s no guarantee that the story you’re telling is one of a trans or nonbinary person, regardless of how you label them. Stories need to be researched whether they’re fictional or not. There needs to be a sense while reading and writing that, yes, someone has been consulted and varying life narratives have been considered. This was more than just a single thesis paper or a few articles from the internet – this was work.
Too often, trans and non-binary people are not given the humanity to be considered important. This is one way to change that. If you want to write a story about us, about someone in our community of identity that is rich and complex and individualized, then you need to give us agency and humanity in the process of writing.
The character cannot merely be a puppet – they need to feel human, and they need to read as humanized to the people that identify with the character the most. It’s very easy for you to think a character is three-dimensional if all you have to go on is a set of stereotypes; it’s much more difficult when you live that experience, and understand exactly how hard it really is.
It’s difficult. It’s not something the writing and reading community can agree on readily. But I think, for the sake of trans liberation and for the sake of better books and writers, we need to campaign for a better understanding of how to write the trans and non-binary communities. We need to have higher standards. That doesn’t mean barring anyone from telling our stories, but that means having our stories told based on our realities, our pain, and our individual truths. To do that, trans people need to be more than labels for characters or plot devices – we need to be present in the process, and we need to be considered more so than the cisgender audience that will most likely be consuming our stories as well.
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John is an aspiring writer of queer fiction. When they’re not hammering out undergrad papers at Ithaca College, John is co-editing for Spencer Hill Press, freelancing for Heroes and Heartbreakers, and reading gloriously sexy books about empowered people finding love (and other things, too). They’re also obsessed with coffee and gender/sexuality studies (read: nerd alert). You can find them on Twitter @dreamingreviews saying opinions about things and discussing their dating woes.
Trans Representation in YA Is Only the Beginning
by Everett Maroon
In the November 8, 2015 issue of The New York Times‘ Book Review, Malindo Lo opened a review of two novels with a note about diversity in contemporary YA fiction. It was an eloquent, simple summation regarding the ongoing conversations about representation: “
I’d like to focus on one very important word in her opening. Quality. Quality representation. Because while including transgender and gender nonconforming characters is an important shift in contemporary young adult fiction, I believe it also matters how such representation is handled, what messages accompany that representation, and what readers see through the course of character development, plot development, description, and subtext, and priorities in the narrative.
Put simply, representation matters. As Casey Plett wrote for The Walrus earlier this year, after looking at four novels that had trans or intersex protagonists:
This might make for inspiring reading, but it’s odd to spend a few hundred pages with someone who goes through hell and emerges with all the flaws of a Disney hero. The reader scarcely knows anything about the characters’ inner lives.
Representation, or the mere inclusion of trans or gender nonconforming characters isn’t enough. It’s not even a good start, really, because how we write about trans people matters. It matters to the story, it matters to the reader, and it matters to our cultural consciousness. Books aren’t inanimate objects in the same way a chair is—the appeal of a book is the attachment a reader makes with the story as its told, and afterward. Good stories become our ghosts, following us around, sticking in our minds and leading us to new stories, yes, but new understandings. If the takeaway about a trans character becomes “being trans is awful,” then the representation is problematic, untrue, reductive, and uninteresting. (Also, haven’t we moved past The Well of Loneliness in the last hundred years?)
Ultimately, trans people are people. Inasmuch as anyone is “fighting the power,” trans people come up against powerful institutions and personalities. But where is the story, the hook, the situation about which readers will want to know more? What makes a trans character interesting is not any of the following:
* Their surgical status
* Their body parts
* Their alliance to gender stereotypes (e.g., “I’m strong because I’m really a man inside”)
* The split between their bodies and their identities
* Their fear of transitioning or coming out
* Their relatives and/or their relatives’ responses to their gender identity
What makes a trans character interesting is what makes any character interesting. It’s the same thing as what makes them real. If we look at characters that have stuck around our collective consciousness for a while—Jane Eyre, Ishmael, Scout Finch, Sethe, Holden Caulfield—we see characters that illuminated the stories around them in a believable way. We may not have liked them as people (Caulfield is a notable jerk!), but we could understand them and we could get a sense of them. We knew them directly, and we knew people (often ourselves) who had something in common with them. If a trans character is set up throughout a novel as some kind of troubled, benevolent, brave person (always with the brave! trans people as brave people is now a trope to avoid), it pushes readers away.
Humans are complex, nuanced, contradictory. We are amalgams of interesting things—experiences and moments being some of those things—but if we are boiled down to one major aspect of our lives, we lose our interestingness. It’s not enough for a writer (especially a cis writer, but anyone is capable of the following) to include a trans character or protagonist in their story, if the character’s entire arc is about their transition. Transition could be a plot point, maybe, but it has to be handled with honesty and not platitudes. Trans people are not just sweet white children trapped in the wrong body, so representation needs to move past this mythic paradigm.
In fact, let’s throw the whole “trapped in the wrong body” thing out the window. Well first, open the window. Now pick up the trapped in the wrong body idea—I’ll wait, I know it’s heavy and whimpering—and there you go. Look, it grew wings and flew away. Writers of today and the future, I beg you: NEVER write a character with that concept as your subtext, or foundation, or starting point, whatever. Want to know the truth? It was a throwaway comment in an early interview with Christine Jorgensen in the 1960s, because the interviewer could not get his mind wrapped around the idea of a transsexual. But like I said, some ideas (okay, I said characters) are like ghosts, and that ridiculousness has haunted us in something like total desperation for more than forty years.
So if I would rather authors not write tropes, stereotypes, misinformed concepts, or boringness into their trans characters, what am I looking for in the future of trans representation?
I love this question because I love answering it.
I’m looking for the life after transition, the other aspirations these characters have, the friends who shape their lives, even the nonsense we all deal with—crappy teachers, hating algebra, escaping from one’s parents for an afternoon, sneaking into an extra movie at the cinema, getting one’s heart broken by that asshole who seemed so great before one went to second base with them. Trans people are not figureheads, tragic heroes, as untouchable as saints, they’re people. We make mistakes and we cry when we break our favorite coffee mug, and we stay up late at night reading terrific books and damn it we want to see ourselves in some of those books. Ourselves, not some person’s simplistic imagining of who we are. Ten pages in we can all tell if we’re getting the real thing or a thin veneer. Representation itself is not enough—character work and storytelling are the actual beginning of writing trans-themed fiction that matters.
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Everett Maroon is a memoirist, humorist, pop culture commentator, and fiction writer. He is a member of the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association and was a finalist in their 2010 literary contest for memoir. Everett is the author of a memoir, Bumbling into Body Hair, and a young adult novel, The Unintentional Time Traveler, both published by Booktrope Editions. He has an essay, “In a Small Town, Nothing Goes Wrong, in the anthology _Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity,_ from Ooligan Press, and a short story, “Cursed,” in the anthology The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, from Topside Press. He has written for Bitch Magazine, GayYA.org, Amwriting.org, RH RealityCheck, and Remedy Quarterly. He has had short stories published here and there. Everett’s blog is transplantportation.com.
Superheroes Saved My Life
by Cheryl Morgan
There are many things about the lives of trans kids today that leave me a bit misty-eyed. When I was at school hormone blockers were unheard of, and coming out as trans was liable to land you in an asylum getting electroshock treatment. YA wasn’t even a thing back then, so there was no point in asking for diverse characters.
We did have books, though. Paper had been invented. Reading was pretty heavily gendered. I don’t think I could have got away with reading books like Little Women or Anne of Green Gables. I was grateful for the girls in Swallows and Amazons, who seemed rather more like my sort of people anyway. I clung to Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings, but if I wanted stories with girls in that I could read I had to look to comics.
Back in those days British kids TV was all about Gerry Anderson’s puppet shows, and there was a tie-in comic that I read avidly. There was Doctor Who as well, of course, but the girl companions were a bit screamy in the early days. On the other hand, characters like Venus in Fireball XL5, Atlanta Shore in Stingray, and of course the inimitable Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward in Thunderbirds, showed that women could and did take part in thrilling adventures. I suspect that I have Sylvia Anderson to thank for much of this.
The other place I could find female characters with whom to identify was in American comics. Amazingly I was allowed to buy Supergirl comics, even though the main character was a girl. Batgirl was even on television occasionally, and I retain a fondness for Babs even now. But at heart I was a Marvel girl.
Janet van Dyne – the Wasp – was the sort of woman I wanted to grow up to be. She was rich, smart and successful. Goodness only knows what she saw in Hank Pym, but someone had to keep him in order. What’s more she was a total fashionista, changing her costume on a regular basis.
The girl I identified with, however, was Jean Grey. Like me she was a teenager with a special secret that she could not tell anyone about. If only Professor Xavier had opened a school for talented trans kids rather than for mutants I would have been right there begging for a place. X-Men, when it started, was a teen comic, which made it about as close to YA literature as I could find save for awful school-based soap operas.
Jean and I grew up together. From the shy, prim kid who was somewhat overawed to find herself the only girl in a special school, to the elegant, confident young woman of the Neal Adams era, she lived my life for me. I would have married Warren, of course. He was rich and looked a bit like Pygar in Barbarella (that is, mega-cute). Superheroes, of course, don’t get to have happy relationships. All I can say is that I’m glad I was older and had mostly deserted comics for books by the time the whole Dark Phoenix thing happened.
What all this nostalgia means for today’s trans kids I don’t know. We are all busy asking for believable, non-tragic trans characters in books so that they have someone to identify with. What I think it means, though, is that we find a way. Even when there is nothing; even when you don’t have a word to describe how you feel about yourself (I was a teenager before I even heard the word “transsexual”); you can still find something to latch on to.
I want to take this opportunity to say Thank You! to my big sister, Jean, for being there when I had no one else. Fiction is an amazing thing. We’d all like it to be better, but not being perfect doesn’t make it useless.
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Cheryl Morgan is old enough to have grandchildren who are teenagers, but tries not to let that be an excuse for being grumpy. Amongst other things she writes, writes about, and publishes speculative fiction; writes about trans history; and co-hosts a women’s interest radio show. You can find her online at Cheryl’s Mewsings and on Twitter as @CherylMorgan.
Introduction to Transgender Awareness Week Series
Welcome to GayYA’s Transgender Awareness Week Series!
In honor of Transgender Awareness Week, we’re featuring posts from trans and trans-spectrum contributors on various issues surrounding transness in YA. We have an AWESOME line up of contributors and posts, and we’re so excited to share them with you all!
The Awareness Week series are something we’ve started doing for all of the LGBTQIA+ Awareness Weeks throughout the year. Though we hope to include everyone on our site at all times, we’ve found that dedicating a specific and concentrated space to a community to talk about the different ways their identity relates to YA can produce phenomenal results.
During this year’s series, we’ve got topics ranging from why transgender representation is important, to the ways in which non-trans LGBTQIA+ YA is exclusive of trans people, to thoughts on how to write trans characters, and more!
So now, let the series begin!
“Instant Attraction Can’t Be Real!” The Tale of an Angry Teenage Demisexual
Asexuality in YA Series: Day 7 – Previous Posts: Introduction to Asexuality in YA Series – Aces Out: Laying the Cards On the Table – Acing Romance: On Writing YA Love Stories as an Asexual – 5 Tips and Tricks To Writing Asexual Characters – Interview with Simon Tam – Reading While Asexual: Representation in Ace YA – Being Ace: Cultural Differences and Progress
by Morgan York
I’ve been experiencing demisexuality since I was old enough to develop sexual feelings. But I didn’t know the word “demisexual” until I was 21. If I’d known the term existed as a teen, it sure would’ve helped.
For those who don’t know, demisexuality falls on the asexuality spectrum. Us demisexuals are only able to experience sexual attraction if we’ve developed a strong emotional bond with the person first. That means celebrity crushes and sexual feelings for fictional characters aren’t possible (though we may be able to appreciate that these people are aesthetically pleasing to look at). It also means we’re less likely to develop as many sexual attractions as non-asexual (allosexual) people do. For instance, I’ve only experienced sexual attraction to three people in my life.
As a teenager, I realized my attractions were unusual, but I misunderstood why. I thought, “Clearly, I’m one of the few realistic people in the world when it comes to dating. These people who see someone and say ‘I’d bang that’ are talking about the distant future, right? After they’ve gotten to know the person? They can’t possibly find the person sexually attractive just by seeing them, so they must just be feeling hopeful that an attraction will develop. As for people who hook up with someone they day they meet them…maybe they’re faking the attraction? What other option is there?”
I didn’t consider that these allosexuals were, of course, not faking their attractions, or that my attractions just worked differently from theirs. Instead, I jumped to the conclusion that these people were stupid and I wasn’t. Super open-minded of me, I know.
This attitude carried over into how I experienced YA as a teenager. Twilight exploded when I was about 15. I didn’t just dislike the series—I let everyone and their grandmother know how much I despised the books (something I avoid doing now, since I don’t want Twilight lovers to feel judged or attacked for their taste in literature).
“It’s unrealistic!” I shouted at anyone who would listen. “All they did was stare at each other a bunch, start dating, and claim they were in love. They barely even know each other. Any story that includes ‘love at first sight’ is badly written, and I’m not interested in reading it.”
That’s right, I assumed narratives involving instant attraction were proof of a poor storyteller. Worse, I assumed all YA fiction would be like Twilight. It seemed like every time I glanced over a book summary, it hinted at a romance, and I couldn’t trust that it would portray a type of love that made sense to me. So I swore off YA novels entirely and focused on classics, preferably ones that didn’t position love or romance as a central focus.
This was a terrible idea. Not only did I miss out on many wonderful YA novels when my age group was intended as the target audience, but I was also writing YA books at the time. Except I refused to call them YA. Since my books “weren’t like Twilight” because they “weren’t poorly written or unrealistic,” I assumed they couldn’t fit in the YA category, despite the fact that my characters were high school age.
Any writer knows that if you don’t read books in your category or genre, you’re in for a painful surprise when you try to put your work out into the world. Reading contemporary works in your genre helps you understand what the market looks like, what’s standard for your target audience, etc. Since I was writing YA amidst a sea of classics, I had none of that, and I made plenty of mistakes as a result.
This might just sound like the story of a grouchy teenager who was angry at the world and enjoyed hating on a book so many people loved. All that is true, but there’s more to it. I saw the way I experienced attraction represented almost nowhere in fiction, and spewing so much vitriol at Twilight was my desperate attempt at protesting this reality. I made an effort to put a large amount of distance between Twilight and my own work, making sure I developed future romantic partners as friends before anything sexual happened between them. Sure, I included allosexual experiences here and there, but never for the main character. Because if I didn’t do otherwise, I thought my books would be unrealistic. I wanted my books to be good, and to me, good meant demisexual.
I can say all this now because I’ve figured out what demisexuality means and how I experience it, but I couldn’t have articulated these things at the time. If I’d stumbled upon demisexuality as a teen, or even just asexuality in general, I bet a light bulb would’ve gone off. My irrationally intense distaste for Twilight would’ve made a lot more sense. I might’ve sought out books with asexual/asexual-spectrum characters, if any existed back then, and reignited my interest in YA fiction. And I would’ve been armed with more knowledge when crafting my characters’ sexualities. Instead of writing a whole bunch of “accidental demisexuals,” I could’ve been more intentional about where everyone fell on the spectrum.
This is one reason diversity in fiction is so important. People who don’t see themselves reflected in fiction are more likely to remove themselves from it. They are more likely to be confused about why “everyone else” seems to see the world differently, unaware that people like them exist and their voices just aren’t being heard.
When members of the non-majority do find that representation, they often cling to it, because it reassures them that their experience is real. What single fictional pairing was I absolutely obsessed with as a teen? Harry Potter’s Ron and Hermione. They may not have been demisexual characters—Ron’s relationship with Lavender Brown is proof of that—but they developed feelings for each other after several years of powerful friendship. That’s, like, candy for a demisexual.
In honor of Asexuality Awareness Week, I hope my fellow writers think about how they portray romance in fiction. Romance is popular in YA. I know some writers include a romance no matter what, maybe because they can’t imagine a story without one, or it’s an automatic impulse because it’s so pervasive. But does the story really need it? Can the book focus on other types of relationships, like friendships and/or family members? There’s probably more than one asexual-spectrum teen out there craving a story like this.
As for those narratives that work best with a romance, consider how each character experiences sexual attraction before you proceed. Are all of your characters allosexual because that’s what you’re most familiar with? Or, I ask while side-eyeing my former self, are they somewhere on the asexual spectrum because that’s the experience you know best? Equal parts intentionality and diversity can make us all stronger, more flexible writers.
And Twilight lovers? Let me take this opportunity to give those books an apology. They didn’t deserve the degree of hate I gave them.
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Morgan York is a writer of both YA and adult in the fantasy and contemporary genres and hopes to see her stories published someday. She recently graduated from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, a design-your-own-major program at the University of Redlands, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in “Writing Fiction: Listening, Absorbing, and Creating.” In a past life, she was an actress who appeared in a variety of works, including Cheaper by the Dozen and The Pacifier. She’s a feminist, a gamer, a traveler, and a reader of everything from old Russian novels to modern YA to adult lit. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, and GoodReads.