#Nonbinary character or character with complex and nuanced gender exists

[cosmicredcadet]

"This fandom is so queer friendly!" This fandom literally hates, bisexual, trans, nonbinary, and aspec people but ok.

[ceo-of-sloppy-women]

i fully believe that if you swapped the genders of men and women in (almost) ANY media people would ask where all the men were and start speculating there was some sort of crisis that caused them to be so few. And/or why all the men have been reduced to 2dimensional characters only there to further the women's journeys and not their own. (note: i specify men and women here because you can't really switch nonbinary genders around, not to invalidate nonbinary individuals). Examples:

The Hobbit - imagine if all the dwarves were women, Bilbo was a woman, Smaug was a woman, so on and so forth, with Tauriel and Bard's daughter becoming the only two men. Seriously this movie is such a sausage fest that if you switched the genders around people would be ranting and raving about how it's such a feminist piece of media where a bunch of women save the world without the help of men.

Star Trek - I know Star Trek is very progressive for its time, but imagine in Enterprise if Data, Worf, Geordi, Picard, and Riker were all women. Worf becomes a strong, independent woman who's a terrible mother and extremely grumpy. Imagine how many people would just straight up hate her and reduce her to that instead of understanding the nuance of the character? Or, Riker, being a massive flirt would just be called a slut (in a negative manner)! Now picture the backlash that would come with Beverly being a man - a character barely acknowledged by the writers who only appears to reiterate what Picard says and sometimes do some medical magic for the brief moment she's on screen.

Don't get me wrong, I love all the aforementioned media. This is not a critique of their writing or characters; this is a critique of the portal and inclusion of women in media as a whole and how it correlates with societal standards.

Women can be complex characters, just like men can be, but they never get to be because the moment we do people complain like we lit their pants on fire and reduce them to 2D portrayals. Example: the Horizon series. Because god forbid a woman exists beyond being a sexual object for men that furthers their goals.

[nose-bl]

Jim is amazing nb/genderqueer rep for many reasons but one of them is the writers didn't shy away from the complexities of gender and queer identities and they let Jim just be themself even if it's confusing to other characters or even the audience

One thing that gets to me is the way Jim is also not sure about their own gender. When asked if they've been a woman the whole time their answer isn't a clear "yes" or "no" but actually "yeah, i guess, I don't know". And later when the crew is going on about Jim being a woman and being different Jim snaps and explains that the crew has known them as Jim, they're still Jim, and that's it. The crew eventually gets it and they all use they/them proonouns on Jim

I'm used to nb characters getting introduced as already knowing their identity for sure and using they/them strictly, or it only being implied by a character being magically refered to as they by everyone (even people who've just met them) and it's not that this kind of unrealistic rep can't be good or valuable but I live for messy, complicated genderqueer people fucking around with gender

Jim never uses the words trans or nonbinary or genderqueer (and why would them? in the 1700s they didn't have the same terms we have today to express all this shit), but their story is so obviously a trans one and the writers really don't shy away from that messiness but rather embrace it, even if a cis/binary audience doesn't understand it. Because Jim isn't there to teach us about what nonbinary means. They're just there to exist and make us actually feel seen. So much trans/nb rep just feels like an opportunity to teach cis people what we are and what our terms mean in a very simple and non-nuanced way. But ofmd isn't about that at all

It's so unapologetically queer and it's not a chance to teach cishets about us. In fact, if cishets don't already understand the nuance of queer identity, they probably won't understand a big chunk of the series (and that's fine. they are not the target audience)

Another thing that stands out to me about Jim is like- they sleep with Olu. And it's no big deal. And i fucking love that. Jim's gender isn't invalidated for it, and Olu's sexuality isn't a big deal either

I am so happy about sex and sexuality for genderqueer folks being explored here in such a simple but meaningful way

don't know where else i'm going with this but i guess tldr: ofmd is some of the best queer representation I've seen bc they don't mind getting super messy and confusing and nuanced and letting the characters just be queer in ways cishets might never understand

[scriptlgbt]

my lesbian main character’s love interest is genderfluid and uses she/they pronouns. is it plausible for a lesbian character to date a genderfluid character? also, i’m not entirely sure how genderfluidity works, because i’m a cis girl. could i please have some basic info about genderfluid people and how they show what gender they are at a specific time? thank you

Honestly if you’re not sure of basics, I would refrain from representing a genderfluid character in such a prominent role (or even at all) until you’re a little more confident about it. What I can give you in one answer isn’t going to be enough to get you all set to write a well-written genderfluid character as soon as you’re done reading this. (Not to assume that’s what your plan was.)

These answers should only be used to give you a jumping-off point for research. I advise, as an essential thing, to read work by genderfluid people, whether fiction or nonfiction, about genderfluid identities and experiences. There is no one way to be genderfluid, and the wider a net you cast for learning about genderfluidity from different individuals, the more competent you will be to be able to design a character who is genderfluid.

First of all, plenty of lesbians date genderfluid characters, and even plenty of lesbians are genderfluid themselves. We’ve covered this before a few times, though I’m struggling with finding links at the moment. The general protocol is that the people in the relationship check in with each other’s comfort on the subject. The lesbian in the relationship would probably explain the complexities of their identity and the genderfluid person would probably explain if they feel misgendered by it at all. It’s not super unheard of for people to change labels to be more mindful of their partner but I would say it’s not something I’ve expected of any of the lesbians I’ve dated (as a nonbinary person). You could always have a character identify as sapphic if you feel it’s easier to write conversations about, which has the Same Energy and extremely related etymology. (Coming from Sappho, ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos.) A character identifying as one marginalized label over another does not erase other identities.

To address the genderfluidity part of your question:

Gender is not something based in ‘show’ - gender expression is one part of a really complicated mosaic of things that go together to represent someone’s gender, and someone’s gender, especially a trans person’s gender, is not as quick to be limited to cis rules of gender expression. (Although social dysphoria exists for a lot of people, so these can still be highly related, for that and other reasons.) A skirt might be how someone expresses they feel like a man, for example. It’s a lot more nuanced than even that. 

Most of the genderfluid people I know do not change their gender expression in order to give cues to cis people on how to gender them. This is a thing for some people, but generally most folks will go with presenting however is comfortable for them on a given day, and gender has widely varying levels of influence on that. When I identified as genderfluid in high school, my friends would check in with me about pronouns and gendered terms at the beginning of each day. The way I dressed, at the time, was me trying to overkill on masculine aesthetics because I felt I would not be believed to be trans if I didn’t run away from looks associated with my birth assignment. (This is not at all uncommon, I think.) 

(I dress a lot differently now, and all over the place. Right now I’m wearing a black and white striped dress. My hair is a buzzcut and I have 9 piercings and a stick n poke tattoo on my knee.)

“Gender is the poetry we create with the language we are given,” is one of my favourite quotes about this. (It’s by Leslie Feinberg.)

If any followers have resource recommendations on genderfluidity, or personal narratives on it, or good representation of genderfluid characters they know of, please reply!

- mod nat

[jennaschererwrites]

How TV Is Putting the ‘B’ in LGBTQ — And Why It Matters – Rolling Stone

“Mom. Dad. I know you don’t want to talk about this, but I do. I might get married to a man, like you so clearly want. And I might not. Because this is not a phase, and I need you to understand that. I’m bisexual.” That’s Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz), Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s resident no-nonsense detective, pouring out her heart to her parents in the show’s landmark 100th episode. To which her dad (Danny Trejo) stoically replies, “There’s no such thing as being bisexual.”

Beatriz, who is bisexual herself, wrote in GQ: “When does it end? When do you get to stop telling people you’re bi? When do people start to grasp that this is your truth? …When do you start seeing yourself reflected positively in all (hey, even any?) of the media you consume?”

There’s a real cognitive dissonance to identity erasure. You can be standing right in front of someone telling them exactly who you are, and they can just look right through you, and intone, like a Westworld robot, “That doesn’t look like anything to me.” Nevertheless, it’s a daily reality for LGBTQ folks, and bi- and pansexual people in particular. (The term pansexuality, which has come into wider use in recent years, intends to explicitly refer to attraction to all genders, not just cisgender people — or, as self-identified pansexual Janelle Monae put it in Rolling Stone last year: “I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker.” However, many in the queer community define bisexuality the same way. You can read more about that conversation here.) Until recently, sexual and gender identities that existed outside the binary have been anathema to mainstream culture — and often, even, to more traditionalist branches of gay culture.

For a long time, people who identify as bisexual or pansexual didn’t have a whole lot of visible role models — particularly on television. But as our understanding of the LGBTQ spectrum has become more diverse and nuanced over time, there’s been a blossoming of bi- and pansexual representation. In the past few years, characters such as Rosa on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, David Rose on Schitt’s Creek, Darryl Whitefeather on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Leila on The Bisexual — to name just a few — have been at the forefront of a bi- and pansexual renaissance on the small screen.

But it wasn’t always this way. Even after television began to centralize gay characters and their experiences — on shows like Ellen, Will & Grace, Queer as Folk, and The L Word — the “B” in that alphabet soup fell to the wayside. Bisexuality was seldom mentioned at all, and if it was, it existed chiefly as a punch line — an easy ba-dum-CHING moment for savvy characters to nose out someone who wasn’t as in the know as they were. On Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw called bisexuality “a layover on the way to Gaytown”; and on 30 Rock, Liz Lemon dismissed it as “something they invented in the Nineties to sell hair products.”

Even some of the earliest shows to break ground for queer representation didn’t factor bisexuality or pansexuality into their worldviews. The designation basically didn’t exist in the gay-straight binary world of Queer as Folk, and was largely seen as a phase on The L Word. Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave many TV viewers their first-ever depiction of a same-sex relationship in 1999 with the Wicca-fueled romance between Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) and Tara Maclay (Amber Benson), but the show too neatly glossed over Willow’s years-long relationship with her boyfriend Oz (Seth Green) as a fleeting step on the way to full-time lesbianism. Or, as Willow succinctly put it in Season 5: “Hello! Gay now!”

Characters who labeled themselves as bisexual were considered to be confused at best and dangerously promiscuous at worst. On The O.C. in 2004, Olivia Wilde’s bi bartender character, Alex Kelly, appeared as a destabilizing force of chaos in the lives of the show’s otherwise straight characters. On a 2011 episode of Glee — a show which, at the time, was breaking ground for gay representation on TV — Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer) savagely shot down his crush, Blaine (Darren Criss), when Blaine mentioned that he might be bi: “‘Bisexual’ is a term that gay guys in high school use when they want to hold hands with girls and feel like a normal person for a change.” By the end of the episode, Blaine assures Kurt that he is, don’t you worry, “100 percent gay.”

One of TV’s first enduring portrayals of nonbinary sexual attraction came with the entrance of Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) into Russell T. Davies’ 2005 Doctor Who reboot. (Davies also created the original U.K. Queer as Folk.) The time traveler swashbuckled into the series to equal-opportunity flirt with the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and his companion Rose (Billie Piper), because, as the Doctor explains, “He’s a 51st-century guy. He’s just a bit more flexible.” Captain Jack went on to feature in his own spinoff series, Torchwood.

Then came Callie Torres on Grey’s Anatomy. Portrayed by Sara Ramirez (who came out as bisexual herself in 2016), Callie had a seasons-long arc that spanned from her burgeoning realization of her bisexuality in 2008 to her complex relationships with both men and women over the years. Callie’s drunken rant from the 11th season would make a great T-shirt to wear to Pride if it weren’t quite so long: “So I’m bisexual! So what? It’s a thing, and it’s real. I mean, it’s called LGBTQ for a reason. There’s a B in there, and it doesn’t mean ‘badass.’ OK, it kind of does. But it also means bi!”

Once the 2010s rolled around, representation began to pick up steam. True Blood’s Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley), The Legend of Korra’s titular hero (Janet Varney), Game of Thrones’ Oberyn Martell (Pedro Pascal), The Good Wife’s Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi), and Peep Show’s Jeremy Usborne (Robert Webb) all were portrayed in romantic relationships on both sides of the binary. But these characters’ sexual orientations were seldom given a name.

In some cases, this felt quietly revolutionary. On post-apocalyptic CW drama The 100, for example, set a century and change in the future, protagonist Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) is romantically involved with both men and women with no mention of labels. Because on the show’s nuclear fallout-ravaged earth, humankind has presumably gotten over that particular prejudice. On other series, however, not putting a name to the thing seems like a calculated choice. Take Orange Is the New Black, a show that has broken a lot of barriers but steadfastly avoids using the B-word to describe its clearly bisexual central character, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling).

A few years ago, though, tectonic plates began to shift. On Pop TV sitcom Schitt’s Creek, David Rose (co-creator Dan Levy) explained his pansexuality to his friend via a now-famous metaphor: “I do drink red wine. But I also drink white wine. And I’ve been known to sample the occasional rosé. And a couple summers back, I tried a merlot that used to be a chardonnay.”

Bisexuality got its literal anthem on the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend with “Gettin’ Bi,” a jubilant Huey Lewis & the News-style number sung by Darryl Whitefeather (Pete Gardner) about waking up to his latent bisexuality as a middle-aged man. “It’s not a phase, I’m not confused / Not indecisive, I don’t have the gotta-choose blues,” he croons, dancing in front of the bi pride flag. Darryl’s exuberant ode to his identity felt like someone levering a window open in a musty room — a celebration of something that, less than a decade before, TV was loathe to acknowledge.

For Hulu and the U.K.’s Channel 4, Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behavior, The Miseducation of Cameron Post) cowrote, directed, and starred in a series picking apart the subject, titled, aptly, The Bisexual. In it, Akhavan portrays Leila, a thirtysomething woman coming to a dawning awareness of her bisexuality after having identified as a lesbian for most of her life. The show navigates the tricky territory that bisexuals inhabit when they’re misunderstood — or sometimes outright rejected — by queer and straight communities alike. Akhavan, a bisexual Iranian-American woman, has said the idea for the show came to her after repeatedly hearing herself described as a “bisexual director.” She told Vanity Fair that “there was something about being called a bisexual publicly — even though it’s 100 percent true! — that felt totally humiliating and in bad taste, and I wanted to understand why.”

As Leila shuttles her way between sexual partners and fields tone-deaf comments from friends on both sides of the binary, The Bisexual offers no easy answers. But it also never flinches. “I’m pretty sure bisexuality is a myth. That it was created by ad executives to sell flavored vodka,” Leila remarks in the first episode, unconsciously echoing 30 Rock’s throwaway joke from a decade ago. Except this time, the stakes — and the bi person in question — are real.

The next generation — younger millennials and Gen Z kids in particular — tends to view sexualityas a spectrum rather than the distance between two poles. Akhavan neatly encompasses this evolution in an exchange between Leila and her male roommate’s twentysomething girlfriend, Francisca (Michèlle Guillot), who questions why Leila is so terrified to tell anyone that she’s started sleeping with men as well as women. When Leila tells her it’s complicated because it’s “a gay thing,” Francisca responds, “So? I’m queer.” “Everyone under 25 thinks they’re queer,” says Leila. “And you think they’re wrong?” Francisca counters. Leila considers this for a moment before answering, “No.”

Representation matters, and here’s why: Seeing who you are reflected in the entertainment you take in gives you not just validation for your identity, but also a potential road map for how you might navigate the world. For many years, bi- and pansexuals existed in a liminal place where we were often dismissed outright by not just the straight community — but the queer community as well. Onscreen representation is not just a matter of showing us something we’ve never seen before, but of making the invisible visible, of drawing a new picture over what was once erased.