Questions about sexual presentation in fiction.

[brigid]

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

Let’s say that you are reading a piece of fiction that is well written and enjoyable. It’s got what you like in it: good characters, good world building, action, romance, happy little elves, sparkling vampires, hard bitten cynics with hearts of gold, whatever.

Let’s say that there’s a character who is one gender, but presents as another. FOR INSTANCE: you have a biological female who dresses in male clothing, uses a male or gender neutral name or nick name, and doesn’t correct people who use male pronouns.

Do you assume this character is transgendered?

If you find, via the story, that the character presents this way for social reasons rather than identity reasons, do you feel let down? Like, the character doesn’t really identify as male, but gets less crap from people/is taken more seriously when wearing pants and short hair, but has no problem having a vagina/ovaries/menstruating/etc?

If a character IS transgendered and presents/lives/identifies as female, but is a sex worker, is that offensive because it’s a stereotype? What if the character is fully accepted by the group she lives/works with, and her clients? What if the character is a minor character who is well fleshed out and realized but ultimately is a support character only (”magical transperson”)?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Please feel free to email me (brigidkeely at gmail .com) if you don’t want to post publicly.

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Comments

[cleverthylacine]

I don't know what you mean by making assumptions, but I think of cisgender and transgender as a continuum, kind of like gay/bi/straight, so I would think that this character is probably *somewhere* toward the middle of the continuum, because even if they are crossdressing for practical reasons (i.e. it's the only way to join the army), if they're actually passing and not agonising over it either, they're not as attached to their cisgender identity as many other people are.

I love trans characters, obviously, since I have written a lot of them, but I don't feel let down. Historically many people, especially women in periods of extreme sexism (most of history, iow) have cross-dressed in order to do things like go to sea, join the army, get jobs that are closed to their sex/gender. It's a fact, and if someone chooses to write those characters, accusing them of letting people down because their characters don't go all the way is kind of silly.

Besides there are a lot of people in the world whose gender presentation is often ambiguous who don't seem to be fussed enough about it to change it (not that they should) and even to enjoy the ambiguity.

Similarly, many transgender women do do sex work. I don't think you are doing anything wrong by writing about this, but I do think it's possible to sensationalise/exoticise it in a way that could be offensive.

Also, I don't think that the "magical" issue is as problematic with gender minorities as it is with racial/ethnic ones. The Magical Negro/Magical Native characters are problematic because they're part and parcel of the way people exoticise foreign cultures and their religious/magical traditions. First of all there's the presumption that these cultures have more magic than white cultures, because they're closer to nature. Sure, it's actually true that many native non-white peoples interact with nature more than the average white person does, and are hence closer to it in that way, but when people say brown folks are closer to nature there is often an underlying belief that it's because they have stronger animalistic natures than white folks.

Second of all there's the fact that these people are often extraordinarily helpful to white protagonists when they really wouldn't be, especially since these people often do not have their best interests at heart.