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On Writing Minorities, from the Perspective of a Trans Woman of Color

Content Warning: Mention of Sexual Assault As a trans woman of color, a writer, and an avid player of tabletop RPGs both, I came to a realization about myself three years ago. Most of my characters in stories, most of my player characters in tabletop RPGs, and even the non-player characters my players interact with when I’m on the other side of the DM’s chair, almost all of them had two things in common. They were white, and they were cisgender. Sure, some of them were queer, most often bisexual, like myself. However, when it came to race and gender, it was difficult to put those two facets of myself into the characters I had created, no matter how similar to me they were. 

Allow me, for a moment, to exposit. Dungeons and Dragons, easily the most prolific tabletop RPG, features a host of non-human races, or “species,” as the game has recently begun to pivot to. Humans sit alongside Tolkien-esque elves and dwarves, as well as goblins and orcs. Such races are common enough in fantasy, but Dungeons and Dragons has one particularly standout race in its core rules which catches people’s eyes - Tieflings. Tieflings are, in the lore of the Forgotten Realms, Dungeons and Dragon’s flagship setting, humanoids who have a demonic or devilish ancestry, either due to a bloodline curse, a dealing with a devil in one’s family history, or a fiendish parent or grandparent. Such individuals are often marked with devilish traits - including horns, tails, and red skin. 

The risk of including a race that is inherently demonic, of course, begs to be viewed in a light that suggests problematic racial attitudes. A race that has evil quite literally in its blood draws uncomfortable parallels to the ways in which real life peoples have been treated or viewed, and ostracized as a result. Wizards of the Coast, the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, have in the past decade made attempts to retcon “evil” races, including not only tieflings but orcs, goblins, and a host of others to be just as free to be good or evil as any other race[1]. However, a problem still remains - in the Forgotten Realms, Tieflings are nevertheless regarded with suspicion, and in this light, Tieflings become a stand-in for real life racial minorities. Dungeons and Dragons’ fan run wiki cites an official book which remarks that a number of Tieflings turn to crime, choosing to embrace their heritage or simply conceding to society’s view of them - an allegory which one could argue serves as a stand in for real life racial minorities disproportionately turning to crime as a result of fewer opportunities.

However, this allegory creates a new problem - tieflings, often times used as a stand in for racial minorities to create a form of “fantasy bigotry” that exists in one’s own Dungeons and Dragons setting, have undeniable ties to creatures who are by their nature cosmically fated to do evil. There is an uncomfortable specter that hangs over every plotline in a Dungeons and Dragons game where a party of adventurers meets a tiefling criminal wrongly accused of a crime they didn’t commit, because there is any reason at all to believe they might have some inclination towards evil. I myself am not guilty of this, having created tiefling characters who existed as oppressed minorities in the first Dungeons and Dragons campaign I ever ran. The first time I played as one in a game, I used a Tiefling to explore my experience becoming a racial outsider for the first time when I went to college, but found myself somewhat uncomfortable with the fact that despite this, I was intentionally playing into the general moral ambiguity of Tieflings in the setting. 

This problem is what I will tentatively and selfishly call “the stand-in’s dilemma.” It is incredibly challenging to write characters who have some other quality as a stand-in for a real life thing, especially if that quality is belonging to a minority group. This problem is three-fold. First, it whitewashes a character, hiding their minority traits behind a plausibly deniable veneer which can be ignored to make the character more comfortably consumable to an audience that views the status of minorities as an uncomfortable social issue to be avoided. Secondly, it can problematize the character, creating unintentional connections that turn the character’s (allegorical) minority status into something which somehow justifies the in-universe bigotry. Lastly, I feel justifying a character’s minority status through a narrative in some ways devalues their quality of representation - not every trans character’s narrative should be about being trans, and not every black character’s narrative should be about their race. If these characters are not allowed to simply exist, the story can unintentionally peddle the idea that these characters' identities need to be narratively justified in order to belong in a story. 

My first attempt at an allegorically trans character was a cis woman, the daughter of a well off family who was bitten by a vampire and turned into one herself, being hidden away by her family as a result, while they searched for a way to fix her. Unwilling to accept she needed to be fixed, she ran away from home, determined to escape her old life.

At the time, I was proud enough of the concept. She was in some ways trans-coded, in terms of behavior and attitude, and the broad strokes of her life felt, to me, to be a rough estimation of elements of my life. I showed it to a friend, asking for opinions, and he brought up something that stopped me in my tracks. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire Dracula can be read as a sexual predator, who takes what he wants - in his case, blood - by stealth or force. Much discussion has been had about how Dracula exists as an allegory for sexual abuse. In creating a character whose vampire-ness served as a stand-in for transness, I had unwittingly created a character who was also allegorically tied to sexual predation, a particularly common hateful stereotype levied against trans women, especially in the oft trotted out bathroom debate. 

However, writing a character who is blatantly and plainly trans or non-white can come with its own challenges. A recent attempt at writing a character who was explicitly transgender resulted in one I was rather happy with, a brown-skinned trans girl who used vigilantism to exist as herself while living a double life at home with an unaccepting father, who resents her for her half-elf qualities, because of her absentee elven mother.. However, this, too, stumbles into the third problem I outlined in my so-called “stand-in’s dilemma.” Her transness is made plot relevant, in a way that sticks in my craw ever so slightly. I have considered alternate versions of the character, like one where she transitions, then turns to vigilantism later. In this version of the character, though, it feels like being trans is an unrelated, additional qualifier to the character, who is already a brown skinned half-elf, a vigilante, and a magic user besides. 

A possible reason for this, I think, is that this is a form of bias I have internalized as a result of the realm of media discourse in which I grew up in, one populated by cishet white men who complained about the existence of people of color as “forced diversity”. It does not slip my mind, either, that her qualifiers are the things that set her apart from the norm - I subconsciously failed to mention, for example, her sexuality, or the fact that she is able bodied. Would a character who is white have less qualifiers, and justify more additional qualities elsewhere? Though I am aware of how problematic it is to demand that a minority character justify their existence, I cannot help but find myself discomforted by a character who simply exists this way - and even in this version, her race is made a major aspect of her character, one that must be explored to be justified as a quality of note. Perhaps it is simply because exploration and discovery of one’s gender identity is so tied up with the idea of transness, that it can’t not be a part of a character’s “origin story”, in my mind. 

I share this conflict because I believe it is one which other writers face as well, and one which I believe that we, as writers, need to interrogate. I do not believe that it is wrong to want to explore characters through allegories, or in stories where character qualities are inherently tied to their minority identity. However, I feel it’s necessary to take stock of one’s feelings on race, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of that ilk, because we must understand where our instincts and discomforts about exploring these topics come from. Personally, I feel I’m starved for transgender narratives in the media, and so I can’t deny a desire to see them explored further. However, I also think we should welcome and encourage these sorts of characters as background representation - offhand comments about a character’s transition, or even just an ID card with inconsistent information. It is valuable to see minority characters as people who exist in the world without needing to be defined by their identity, because it reduces the kinds of narratives we can explore in characters who look, act, or feel like us. When characters happen to be trans, rather than exist to be a trans narrative, we can explore trans characters who are instead defined by other aspects of their lives. When characters happen to be non-white, rather than exist to serve a narrative about what it’s like to not be white, we can see non-white characters being superheroes, fantasy heroes, scientists, or anything else. 

If you walk away having read this post with one thing in your head, let it be this - representation works best, means the most, when it reaches the point where we don’t think about it. When these characters simply exist, to the point where we no longer sit up and instinctively message our friends about how trans-coded an alien character is, about how excited we are to see an Indian character in a video game, that is what I would define as a victory. I, for one, am fond of my trans half-elf, and I’ll be keeping her in her original iteration. But she will not be the only trans character in the story in which she exists. 

How Dungeons and Dragons 5e Removing 'Evil Races' May Change the Game https://gamerant.com/dungeons-dragons-dnd-5e-evil-races-changes/

2. Tiefling | Forgotten Realms Wiki https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Tiefling