#his transness is quite important to both his character and his story

[bruhstation]

is henry trans in your au

eeyup! he’s nonbinary (transmasc) and gay! here’s him from last year’s pride month art :)

[damnation-if]

Hi! ok so i was thinking about fanart and stuff and it made me think a bunch of thangs: Seeing as this is a game where gender, pronouns, and genitals are chosen separately i wondered on whether any of the ROs, excluding nonbinary options, were trans. I've seen other games make a characetr trans regardless of gender choice (in Moonless, Silas is either a trans man or a trans woman) or have the same sex characteristics regardless of gender (like maybe being cis as a woman but trans as a man). I was curious so i thought i'd ask! Maybe it doesn't really matter much seeing as they're demons and their bits might be just too weird to really mean anything and gender is more for aesthetics? Also, how explicit will the sex scenes be? I have no problem with smut but i guess that just because the story is about sex doesn't necessarily mean that it'll be super explicit. Will the scenes for the nonbinary ro's be written neutrally without mentioning sex characteristics or do they have a set bodytypes? Thank you for your attention!(also i am curious about your angel game idea, would you tell us more about that some time? :0)

hi, thank you for your ask! there's a bunch of good questions in this one, so i'm going to answer them under a cut just because it might get long while i Discuss my answers :)

Seeing as this is a game where gender, pronouns, and genitals are chosen separately i wondered on whether any of the ROs, excluding nonbinary options, were trans.

the answer to this one is Yes And Also Sort Of Yes, albeit with some technicalities tacked on... to start with, Arianis falls into the category of having the same sex characteristics regardless of gender: f!Arianis is a trans woman, though m!Arianis is a cis man. some aspects of f!Arianis's transition have been magical in nature, while others have been more mundane, like taking hormones - this is to clarify that despite this being a setting with transformation magic, she didn't simply magically transform perfectly into her preferred body. some people might prefer that kind of transition, but it wasn't a priority in particular for f!Arianis.

next, you're right of course that though that when it comes to the demons that it does make the concept of cis/transness a bit weird to navigate, particularly for the older ones. Heluur and Twilit were both alive before physical forms were a thing at all, so it's kind of a metaphysical conundrum establishing what kind of agab that gives them lmfao. however, they did both personally have Some level of control over how their physical forms turned out once they were moving into physical space (and then later being forced to stay there), so if you want to consider their agab the ones that they took when they first settled on a physical form, then that's at least a place to start from.

but to be honest, i don't personally think that Twilit in particular would consider that to be their agab, since they still both had concepts of gender and identity back when they were noncorporeal. i guess it's up to you as a reader whether you agree or not and how you'd feel about it if it was your own situation, but i feel it's important to at least explain where each character sits on the spectrum of that decision haha

Heluur would consider himself cis despite the. wibbly-wobblyness of Choosing a physical form, but Twilit, in each of the selectable gender options, would be more inclined to choose trans. not just because as far as they're concerned their agab is "chaos" but also because they regularly change their physical form (including their sex) using magic and reinvent themself when they feel like it. however, i've never quite made a big announcement talking about this mostly because i'm aware that some trans people understandably feel uncomfortable with the casting of characters who are shapeshifters and etc. as good trans representation when it's essentially bypassing a lot of the struggles that real trans people face (though i'm also of course aware that there are other trans people who are fine with it and even like it a lot, as no marginalised group is some kind of monolith lmao).

basically i've been choosing to treat it as a fact about Twilit as a character, without necessarily assigning a label applicable to regular irl humans to them, since the regular irl humans to whom the label applies may have different and conflicting opinions about whether it also applies to Twilit. whether people consider them to be trans or not, the facts about their actions and thoughts aren't going to change. they would personally lean towards calling themself trans whatever gender is selected for them, but more because they absolutely wouldn't consider themself cis than because of personally believing that their experiences with sex and gender are congruent with those of trans humans.

hopefully that's a helpful answer lmfao... sorry it's a bit long but i do feel like it's a topic worth giving the respect of a thorough explanation. the other binary-gendered ROs all consider themselves cis.

Also, how explicit will the sex scenes be? I have no problem with smut but i guess that just because the story is about sex doesn't necessarily mean that it'll be super explicit.

the sex scenes will be explicit lmfao. i understand if some readers are uncomfortable with/don't want that, which is why i've always tried to put "put yourself first! don't play something you're uncomfortable with!!!" all over my posts and so on, but that is how it is. i have no problem with people choosing not to read - in fact i'd rather they do that than force themselves - so i do try to be as upfront as possible with this sort of information.

Will the scenes for the nonbinary ro's be written neutrally without mentioning sex characteristics or do they have a set bodytypes?

this may be somewhat contentious (as again, no marginalised groups are a monolith), but to me personally, as a nonbinary person, i often feel uncomfortable with explicit sex scenes that make a point to gloss over sex characteristics for nonbinary characters... it makes me feel. de-sexed, for lack of a better term. purposefully excluded to a certain extent. like, despite being nonbinary, i do Have genitalia, as do basically all other people, nonbinary or not. however, i do understand the reasons for people feeling the opposite, and i don't think they're invalid or that people Shouldn't feel that way.

again, i understand if people choose not to read the game based on how they feel about this decision, but due to my own personal perspective as a nonbinary person, i will be writing the nonbinary versions of Arianis, Malkorath and Twilit with set sex characteristics... n!Arianis has male sex characteristics (as you can probably guess from the earlier explanation regarding them), and n!Malkorath has female sex characteristics. in Twilit's case, it's going to be decided using a random selection variable lmfao.

i wouldn't ordinarily make such a blatant Announcement of these kinds of facts (in general i'd probably prefer to let it just come up in the game) but due to the nature of this game, it's going to come up sooner rather than later anyway lmao.

also i am curious about your angel game idea, would you tell us more about that some time? :0

i've already talked A Lot in this post, but to give a brief kind of outline, it's a game that is very much about being an older sibling on a number of levels.

a god whose favourite child is humanity and who expects the elder sibling of angels to shoulder a bunch of the responsibility for caring for and protecting humanity essentially casts a bunch of angels out of heaven to come down to earth and kill an evil god who is trying to destroy all humans, and the group of angels that the mc is a part of has to deal with the trauma and travails of trying to get through the horrors of the war on top of dealing with how they're treated by their god. mc also has a younger sibling angel with them that they're trying to protect; i had the idea to use choices to subtly relate the way that the mc feels about humanity and the younger sibling to reflect each other lmao.

it's in a fantasy medieval-adjacent setting where the evil god has brought about eternal winter and roughly half of the ROs are humans that the angels end up having to work with (though the other half are from among the mc's angel comrades). it lives rent free in my head still i'm afraid XD i hope this is okay as a short brief on it!

[izzyspussy]

controversial take but like. i don't like trans eddie headcanons because i feel like.

1: his entire character arc and storyline are so intrinsically wrapped up in the outside expectations of his assigned gender and sexuality as a straight man and how having the specific pressures associated with that hinder him as a developing person. i don't think him being afab makes sense in the context of his story and the character interactions, especially with his mother (and therefore also It, and therefore the entire plot, because that's how that works in this case). i simply don't think you can make him afab and still have even remotely the same fundamental storyline, and if you don't have that then you don't have that character anymore.

characters where their gender is not so inherent to their arc and/or is not quite so dependent on the specific experience of one particular gender and the socially attached sexuality don't have this problem. say izzy hands, whose gender is not that important beyond that the generalized thesis of his canon is "this is what it means to be a man". he could be any type of man and still be the same guy playing the same role in the narrative and having - generally speaking - the same dynamic with the other characters. or dean winchester, whose character does have some dependency on the gender and sexuality expectations others have for him (and that he has for himself), but in a way that is a little more nebulous and not concretely connected to the actual plot. the villains would be the same, the plot points would be the same, and even the primary on-screen character dynamics would be - again generally speaking - basically the same if he were afab. i really do not think this is true for eddie.

i think you could still have eddie if you made him a trans woman. and i even think you could make a close enough mirror of him as a cis woman (if you did it right re: the themes and why his gender is so important in the original and how that would translate, which in the cis-swaps i've seen in this fandom has not been the case - but then again cis-swaps as a general rule are not very good or well thought out lol). but i really think that in order to make him ftm you'd have to change so much about how the story goes, and if you try to keep everything the same it doesn't work narratively/mechanically speaking. things just plain would not have happened that way, and no one seems to even try to make them happen the way they would have in those different circumstances.

and because of this, most trans eddie headcanons really come off as shallow and even though i know in most cases they probably aren't they do feel transphobic to me. like... why him? because he's small? because he's prissy? because he doesn't perform and arguably does not enjoy the specific kind of masculinity expected of him, one of the fundamental conflicts of his character as-is like i mentioned above? why not, say, mike or ben? hell, why not bev?

and 2: i think it's important to acknowledge and be comfortable with and celebrate when cis men and trans men have experiences that can strongly relate to each other. as a trans man, i really identify with eddie and some of the experiences he's had or that i imagine he would have if his story continued.

this is obviously more personal and not so much connected with narrative coherence, but a cis man who knows how i felt the first time i wore gender affirming underwear, or finally had sex with the right gender dynamic, or shed the gender roles assigned to me one by one until i was just left with who i genuinely am, or made the choice to recover from childhood gender-motivated abuse, etc etc etc is really validating and nice. and tbh i think that is its own kind of representation.

it's not just true that trans women and cis women both have Women's ExperiencesTM and that trans men and cis men both have Men's ExperiencesTM, but also that many experiences we might associate with transness are not exclusive to transness and nor are they things that only happen to or are felt by people of the same assigned gender. like. it's not only that trans women have experiences of womanhood that cis women have, it's also that cis women have experiences of womanhood that trans women have (and the same goes for men), you know what i mean?

and it's just really disappointing to me that ftm trans eddie specifically is the most popular trans headcanon in the IT fandom, to the point of any other trans headcanon being fringe. and that it does generally seem to be because of transandrophobia-typical reasons like his size and "feminine" qualities (and frequently he is made to be more "nonthreatening" as well, even when not trans smdh). and that no one seems to want to engage with the particular gendered experiences involved in his character unless they make him trans first (in which case tbh they just erase them Differently, not less).

you don't have to be trans to have a complicated or interesting gender! you don't have to only identify with people who are just like you! sometimes trans men and cis men is the same! i just wish we could do something different one time!!

[copperbadge]

pagemelt on tiktok did a 2-part video on Stealing Harry! how does it feel knowing how deeply important that fic is to so many people?

As many of you know I am a Fandom Old, and never has there been a moment where I felt older than when I was trying to get onto TikTok to see these videos. Oh man I am so old. But what lovely and thoughtful tiktoks those were! Just truly delightful and a lot to consider.

For those of you who are curious and/or very new to tiktok as I am, here are the videos:

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMRMAErfP/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMRMAt3df/

Hopefully those will load in browser, but I can't make promises. Anyway, I had many thoughts but I'm not really a video guy, so I wrote this here and I'm going to drop a link to Pagemelt and hopefully she will see it!

I have a lot of feelings, most of the time, surrounding Stealing Harry; as odd as it is to say it really was a defining moment in my life, though I didn't see that for many years.

In terms of being influential or meaningful to others, of course I'm extremely proud and touched, and so glad I could offer such positivity. Writers do their craft for a lot of reasons, but I've always wanted to write in order to interact with others -- to touch people or teach people or offer them my opinion, although this wasn't as consciously vocalized when I was younger. To have written something with the impact of Stealing Harry, especially at the age of 24, was a real accomplishment for me, but the kind that is mainly seen looking back -- it's the kind of feeling that comes of years of compilation, for lack of a better word, of conversations with others about the work. At the time it was very popular and that felt extremely good, of course, but I didn't understand why.

In some ways I still don't -- I also have a lot of bafflement when it comes to the story, because why THAT story, at THAT moment, and still today? I've had guesses before -- people love a kidfic, and there's plenty of romance and sex, and much of the fic is a sort of emotional hurt/comfort -- but I do feel as though Pagemelt put her finger on something in that regard which I hadn't fully considered.

Her take on Stealing Harry is extremely cogent and thoughtful, particularly since she's looking back at the fic as a reader and really thinking about the experience. Like, bisexual representation that wasn't stigmatized was really important for her, and I think perhaps both Remus being secure in his love as a gay man and Sirius being truly uncertain about his sexuality as someone who has had romantic/sexual relationships with women and strong feelings for men really spoke to people. Struggling with identity or with knowing your identity but feeling attacked for it, and also wanting that security in identity, I can see how the adult relationships in Stealing Harry could speak to people. I'm so very glad they have.

I also think she were spot-on about her discussion of some of the flaws in the story. It WAS written fifteen years ago and the environment in fandom was different. Certainly I love to write a strong redemption arc, so I would have added more nuance to Snape's had I had the reading of Half Blood Prince beforehand, but I think I still would have written it. That said, she's not wrong that there was a strong shift in fandom attitudes towards Snape based on HBP, though it took a few years after the end of the series, at least in my experience, for that to arrive.

I hadn't really thought about the name issues, with Tonks; she was definitely read as queercoded even at the time she first appeared in canon, but specifically trans-coded readings for Tonks weren't as visible and trans headcanons for characters in general, while I'm sure they existed, weren't vocalized as much, for perhaps self-evident reasons given how much transness was respected (or rather, not respected) in fandom at the time. People not always respecting Tonks' name in Stealing Harry does land differently today. It's something I, to my dismay, wouldn't have consciously thought of if I were writing the story today, the idea that respecting Tonks' chosen name was an important gesture to trans readers, so I appreciate having that pointed out.

Though, I am a little proud that, subconsciously, I did sort that out as a current writer -- I don't know if Pagemelt knows that I'm rewriting the story into an original fiction, but in the original-fiction version Tonks is very much gender-questioning and their name and how the adults can help them through it is a whole entire subplot -- Remus finds out about the shift in names, asks Andromeda about it, draws his own conclusions, and then speaks to a canonically trans character about who should (or if they should) offer to be a sympathetic older queer presence in their life.

So overall, I'm feeling quite proud both of myself and Pagemelt, delighted that Stealing Harry continues to be considered a classic text, and not unsatisfied that people are looking at it critically. As you all know from my original work I don't enjoy being told my works' flaws but I do like knowing them so that I can continue to learn and grow as a writer, and Pagemelt said some things that I think will stick with me as I continue. Plus it has made me want to get back into work on the Ozyverse, the adaptation of Stealing Harry, so once I'm no longer traveling with a bluetooth keyboard and an ancient tablet as my primary mode of communication I will get on that....

[cisphobic-mordred]

an essay on the topic of mordred’s gender

It is with the intent of being completely honest and forthcoming that I begin this essay. In the interest of serving this purpose, I disclose that I am a transgender man myself, as many of my followers know, and one who relates deeply to Mordred’s narrative. With this fact disclosed, the facts of the character may take the stage instead. Mordred, while not necessarily a trans man himself, is absolutely not a girl and in fact does seem violently uncomfortable with being referred to as such.

Mordred is a character with perhaps more depth than it may seem. His birth circumstances are somewhat unclear; while Fate/Grand Order paints him as a homunculus, an artificial creation, Fate/Apocrypha says that he was created from the union between Morgan le Fay and her sibling Artoria, who Merlin enchanted into a male body. The ramifications of this are unclear. While still creating a homunculus, it is implied that Morgana had non-consensual sexual intercourse with Artoria (who was in a male body at this time, as a result of Merlin’s magic). These are highly unfortunate circumstances to bring a child into the world with. 

Additionally, it is implied that Morgana treated Mordred somewhat cruelly, although this is also unclear. He was able to enter Artoria’s service at only a few years old due to his rapid aging, after which point canonical events such as the battle of Camlann occured. Mordred, despite his bizarre circumstances of life, seems to have a great affection for his father. His Fate/Grand Order bio says “Mordred admired his father greatly and wanted his acceptance more than anything, but all that changed with King Arthur’s rejection.” This indicates some sense of affection and can easily be tied to a trans coded narrative of a young trans person coming out to their parent or parents and being summarily rejected, although this was likely not intended. 

With background out of the way, one can begin to discuss the matter of Mordred’s gender. His Fate/Grand order profile contributes to the confusion by listing his gender as ‘female’ but referring to him with he/him pronouns. Mordred seems notably opposed to being called a woman or being referred to in feminine terms, as indicated in Fate/Apocrypha when he actively threatens his master with death when confronted with such behavior. He also refers to himself with the masculine pronoun ore, which is significantly more strongly gendered than boku or watashi, both of which are often used by both women and men, particularly in anime. While it is not unheard of for a woman to use ore, the term is generally considered exclusively male. 

Continuing from that point, another common argument for Mordred being simply a tomboy rather than a trans individual is his choice of clothing. His affinity for tube tops and shorts in Fate/Apocrypha as well as his final ascension in Fate/Grand Order often lead people to believe that Mordred has to be a woman. However, since he refers to himself explicitly in a masculine sense, one can assume that Mordred simply experiences little dysphoria and enjoys the style of clothing he is often seen in. Transness is not inherently connected with physical dysphoria.

Mordred’s summer form is often a source of contention. His profile there refers to him with feminine pronouns, seemingly vindicating those who would interpret Mordred as a woman. However, Mordred continues to refer to himself with masculine pronouns even in this form, on top of generally seeming out of character. He seems strangely detached from his other self, seeming more of a fanservice character than an actual form of Mordred. Many of dialogue lines revolve around being attracted to the master character and wishing to be viewed as cute or sexy for said Master. It’s not a difficult interpolation to assume that he is stuffing himself into a more traditionally feminine role in order to appeal to the Master. He doesn’t appear to particularly enjoy being in the outfits he wears, and is more concerned with seeming attractive to the player character. 

There are some who believe that, as Artoria is referred to with female and male pronouns interchangeably, that Mordred may also be. The problem lies within the two characters and how they refer to themselves. Artoria uses the neutral personal pronoun watashi, whereas (as previously stated) Mordred uses the explicitly masculine ore. Watashi, while a neutral pronoun, has a slightly feminine connotation. It is used more frequently by women than men, who generally use boku or ore, depending on age. Additionally, Artoria never indicates that she herself has any problem with her femininity. She gladly wears a dress in her Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Grand Order appearances, and seems at ease with being called a woman. At the very least, she voices no opposition, unlike her son.

The deeper issue lies in the basis of Mordred’s character. He is intended to be a foil for Artoria’s own narrative, and it’s likely that he wasn’t intended to be a trans character in the general sense. However, what’s done is done; regardless of intent, the character borne from this circumstance is undeniably a trans one. Whether one interprets Mordred as nonbinary or a trans man, he is vocally and clearly opposed to being viewed as a woman. For someone to continue referring to him as such despite his own arguments in the opposite, either ignorance or stubborn transphobia is at play.

Unfortunately, the issue is only exacerbated by Fate/Grand Order’s conflicting use of pronouns. While Mordred’s bio is quite explicit in his masculinity, going so far as to say “Don’t treat him as a woman. / Don’t treat him too obviously as a man,” within the story Mordred is referred to with different pronouns seemingly every time he appears. In the London singularity, the other characters use he/him to his face and in dialogue right up until the end of the singularity, at which point they switch to she/her. In Camelot, they/them and she/her are both used, and in Fate/Apocrypha all three sets of pronouns are used for Mordred.

All of this heavily contributes to the debate and confusion surrounding Mordred’s character, but it’s important to remember that Mordred refers to himself in an explicitly, wholeheartedly masculine way. When talking to a trans/nonbinary/gender nonconforming person, it’s always best to use the pronouns they use for themselves, hence the use of he/him for Mordred throughout this essay. 

It is quite easy to argue that Mordred is nonbinary, and neutral pronouns should be used for him. This interpretation is quite acceptable as well, as it is not misgendering him or referring to him in a way that he has actively indicated discomfort with. It is also worth remembering that not all nonbinary people use neutral pronouns, and Mordred can be nonbinary and still use he/him. In the end, any interpretation of Mordred is valid so long as it doesn’t involve him being treated as a woman.

[irisbleufic]

hi, i hope this is okay to ask! I know you have an extensive cast of trans and intersex OCs in your good omens fic, who I love, but I was wondering if you’ve ever considered writing Aziraphale and Crowley as living a more explicitly trans experience in your fic? I know you’ve written meta on the subject, but I haven’t seen it in your published fic. Or other canon characters! thanks for all your work in this fandom and I hope you’re having a good day.

My answer to this might be slightly disorganized, as I’ve been thinking it over from a number of angles since you sent it many hours ago.  Your primary concern seems to be that I haven’t written any of the main canon characters in Good Omens as what you consider to be “explicitly” trans.  I’m going to look at CoT as a primary example, since that’s the one I’ve worked on consistently for years, which also holds quite a large proportion of my overall GO-fic wordcount.

My original-character version of Raphael inhabits an intersex-variant human body; he’s genderfluid as far as his expression via clothing and adornment from day to day, but still prefers he/him/his pronouns.  I feel very strongly about depicting nonbinary and genderqueer characters who still prefer masculine pronouns, as I feel like that’s been relegated to the sidelines a lot of the time in spite of the number of people I know for whom being nonbinary and preferring he/him/his is a reality (this shows very strongly in my Gotham fanfiction, too).  Madame Tracy’s niece, Petula, who never appears onscreen, but who is referenced quite a number of times in conversation is explicitly shown, in my text, to be trans.  There’s also my original-character version of Asmodai, who in his ethereal form goes by he/him/his, but inhabits a human body and uses she/her/hers pronouns to execute a particular directive on earth.  I started writing this work before I understood just how deep the rabbit-hole of my own queerness went; namely, I knew I was bi (pan, I’m never sure which label I most prefer) in my early twenties and that something unusual had been up with my biological-sex related bodily experience since forever, but I did not yet know I was intersex or understand that my unease with being called a woman had everything to do with being nonbinary/neutrois.  So, the depiction of main cast in Good Omens was not, at the time, a priority due to limited experience in the world and limited self-understanding.  I felt safer executing representation in the form of OCs and canon side-characters, to test the water.

When it comes to main-cast characters in some of my other fandoms, though, things written in, let’s say, the past 7 - 10 years?  I’ve written plenty of them as intersex, nonbinary, and trans (and various intersections of those identities).  My Great Gatsby and Gotham fic are the best examples I can point to off the top of my head.  My Pacific Rim fic, to an extent, is the best place to find they/them/their-preferring nonbinary characters, although a lot of them are also OCs and secondary cast.  This is because I was writing PR fic in a painful transitional period where I finally knew everything about myself, but was with an emotionally abusive who didn’t want me to be open about those things.  From about 2013-2015, I was desperately working it into my PR fic in any way I could.  Said partner tended to read my fic even though they weren’t in fandom; I realize now how intensely monitored I was, how deep the unspoken threats ran.

Now, I’m going to switch back to the matter of Aziraphale and Crowley in the novel, and the essay I co-wrote with @trans-aziraphale.  As the text presents them, and as I have always understood it, they have cultivated their queer masculine identities (whether the authors intended it or not) with as much care as any trans-masculine human I know.  While I’m not undergoing any kind of medically-assisted transition beyond having had top surgery, I am a more strongly trans-masculine leaning nonbinary individual (even though I still tolerate she/her/hers pronouns alongside my preferred they/them/theirs; this is complicated, and it applies mostly to the people who met me when she/her/hers were still the pronouns I predominantly used, or have known me since birth).  I’m speaking from some lived experience in addition to the way the text leads me to read it; I think it’s important to have that in the equation.

Depending on how you look at it within the fictional framework of Good Omens, gender is either a) not innate to angels and demons, or b) angels and demons do have gender, but it’s inexpressible in human terms.  When an ethereal creature (henceforth both angels and demons will be referred to this way) inhabits a human body, we can assume they don’t generally identify with it deeply, or even prefer to express a human gender while they’re at it.  Aziraphale and Crowley, as the essay covers in more depth, break every one of these norms.  They actively prefer being man-shaped; they do nothing to disabuse humans of the notion that they’re a) queer and b) together, at every turn in the text where it becomes an issue (and the answer to that is “many times”).

If it’s bodily configuration, so to speak, that you’re most concerned about, I’m going to touch on that for a second, too.  The way I handle scenes involving physical with them has always been somewhat a step apart from how I handle intimacy between humans, and my readers over the years have consistently remarked upon this.  Regardless what genitalia or other biological-sex characteristics their bodies have, they are navigating a kind of attraction and intimacy that does not come instinctively to their kind.  If I were to give one or both of them genitalia/characteristics different from the ones they have in my stories, it would make very little difference to the way I handle their experience of intimacy.  It’s alien and wonderful and strange, and far more about the emotional closeness amplified and cultivated by the act.

For me, their experience is already trans, and trans enough, even if it’s a fictional variety of transness.  There is nothing I could possibly do to make their experience more explicitly what it already is.  Might I have chosen to put them in differently-configured bodies if I had known myself as gender-nonconforming and intersex at an earlier date?  Will I ever write them in differently-configured bodies in future?  Maybe, but what does it matter now?  My perception of them is set, and I know them well, and I love them as they are.  What is literature for, if not to reflect our hard-won realities in terms of the fantastical?

[holy-fate-worse-than-death]

Dick Grayson is "camp" in its purest form

Did you know:

The word "camp" comes from the cant language Polari, a crypto-lect spoken in 19th century Great Britain (though it was spoken in other centuries in GB as well, just less frequently). It was primarily spoken by gay men, cross-dressers, sex workers and Romani people.

In fact, Polari has a lot of its roots in Romani dialects of that era, though it also incorporates words from Thieves' Cant, Mediterranean Lingua Franca, Yiddish, romance languages, and Cockney Rhyming Slang.

Other words that are from Polari include:

Drag/drag queen (from the Romani word "drataka", meaning "skirt)

Naff (dull, boring, hetero)

Ogle (to stare at)

Butch (masculine)

Notably, Polari is related to an almost identical language, Polyaree, which was (and still sometimes is) spoken by Roma people, predominantly those who travel e.g. in circuses, merchants, immigrants, etc.

Romani people (and especially Romani LGBT+ people) are still oppressed throughout Europe. They are often targeted by the type of xenophobia that is levelled against immigrants, even in areas where Romani people have lived for centuries.

In Spain (especially Madrid) Roma LGBT+ folks have taken to calling themselves "sexual dissidents", as they feel it's more inclusive of poor LGBT+ people and POC LGBT+ people (especially Roma)

While Roma people have lived in Spain for over 600 years, they still face discrimination and are labelled as outsiders and g*psies, who have had the vast majority of their culture stolen. For instance, flamenco dancing actually has Romani roots. Yet, to most westerners flamenco is seen as quintessentially Spanish.

And don't even get me started on how many people don't know that "gypsy" and "gypped" are racial slurs. (Romani people are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group btw.)

Anyway, my point is: "camp" LGBT+ identities, specifically that of gay men, are intrinsically linked to Romani culture, language and history. To me, this is something that should be present in more fics, and should definitely be mentioned whenever Dick Grayson is portrayed as LGBT+

IMO it's also a very compelling reason to make Dick canonically LGBT+, because there's so much Romani/LGBT+ culture to draw from and write meaningful stories about.

It was disappointing to see no mention of Romani folks at the 2019 Met Gala, and to see other groups (e.g. white cis gay men) as the focus. Even some of the well-intentioned intersectional messages neglected to mention the historical links between "camp" and Polari. Which in turn has historical links not only with Roma, but also with countries through the Mediterranean Basin (especially Greece, Cyprus, Morroco, Libya, Lebanon, etc.)

Polari also has significant roots in cross-dressing and transvestivism (most often an early expression of transness from before there was common terminology to describe transness) and sex workers.

I really feel like this is a part of Romani LGBT+ heritage the fandom is sleeping on despite one of the most frequently shipped characters being Romani in canon and LGBT+ in fanon (and sometimes implied to be bisexual in canon as well).

I think this is partly a product of US-centrism, because I've seen a lot of articles that mistakenly pinpoint the origin of "camp" as being in 20th century America, primarily in the black community. While I think that modern camp has absolutely been shaped by black America, and black LGBT+ folks in the US have been particularly influential in transforming camp into what it is today, the origins of camp are much older and much more culturally diverse, and I think it's important to honour that.

I appreciate that this might sound like an attempt to whitewash camp, because obviously I'm centring Dick Grayson in this subject, who is usually portrayed as white-passing. But the reality of racism and xenophobia against Roma people is quite severe, and many Roma people are brown (and occasionally black, though many more were black in the 15th century when they first came to Spain).

I'm not going to compare the struggles of black Americans and Roma people in Europe, because I don't think two different marginalised groups should ever be compared, but I do think both should be included in this subject, and the history between Polari language and Romani culture should be respected and discussed more than it's being discussed right now.

Also, if you need more evidence that Dick Grayson is the most camp human on earth, just take a look at his mullet era:

/end rant

[whilereadingandwalking]

"I want to see people like me who get to do the fun stuff,” said S.L. Huang, weapons expert and author of upcoming thriller Zero Sum Game. Four authors talked about the default in the LGBTQ+ Authors on Gender and Identity in SFF panel at BookExpo 2018. 

Victoria Schwab, author of upcoming Vengeful and re-release Vicious, said that she goes “into every story just assuming everyone is queer until you insist otherwise, because I consciously push against the default.” It’s wish fulfillment—in her own works, she pushes person-first mentality of love. Growing up, Schwab identified mainly with male villains, “because they were given all of the best attributes, and attributes that when given to women characters were not considered strengths.” The authors discussed their role models and how they influenced their writing—Anders identified with Wonder Woman, while Schwab saw herself in Captain Hook. Huang pointed out that antiheroes and arrogant heroes are so rarely women. 

One of the stresses of the panel was actualization. When asked if it was enough to wonder about a character’s identity, Charlie Jane Anders, author of upcoming The City in the Middle of the Night, said, “I want to love a character both reading and writing them, and falling in love with a character means knowing them.” It’s important, although it can be tricky, to actualize identity in the text—she realized after writing All the Birds in the Sky that she could have been clearer about Patricia’s bisexuality. For similar reasons, Schwab plans to make it explicit in Vengeful that Victor is canonically asexual, on page.

“I don’t want to read stories where I’m an alien, monster, animal—I want to be human too,” said Huang, when asked about the tendency to provide representation in the form of non-human characters. While Anders likes to experiment with subversive aliens in her texts, she stressed that “if I want to talk about transness, I will talk about transness”—in other words, it shouldn’t be used solely as veiled metaphor or coding for gender identity. Seth J. Dickinson, author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant, agreed, saying that his biggest problem with this tendency is that by making the identity or sexuality metaphorical, you can lose a lot of specificity and intersectionality. 

The authors stressed the kinds of things that make a text realistic—Huang pointed out that identity doesn’t always have to be linked to sex, while Schwab pointed out that an isolated queer person in a text confuses her as “we move in packs for a reason.” Anders wants us to be honest about all the things that make up queer experience, and mentioned a story she’s written where there are nine genders and yet a character still doesn’t quite fit the given labels. Dickinson added that books can help open up a space for readers to explore themselves and their labels. 

The authors discussed making queer identity actualized and clear in historically inspired texts as well. Schwab struggled with this with Lila Bard, who she thinks would identify as genderfluid in 2018, but not in her historical-inspired setting. Dickinson, meanwhile, pushed writers to dig out queer stories from the real archives. Anders gave excellent advice by telling writers to think about the “queer gaze”: “Part of making it explicit is what they see and how.”

[ii-thiscat-ii]

What about one for Incandescence?

DVD-style commentary for Incandescence.

(Commentary is provided on the whims of the author. The author feeds on your blood. Consider yourself warned and keep sending requests.)

Ah, the single darkest fic I’ve ever written. The idea for this fic has been around for a long time. I don’t remember exactly how long, but we’re talking years at least. It’s gone through a million different forms before I even started to write it.

Let’s go.

Chapter 1

This fic was not actually supposed to be chaptered, but it grew, and then it grew, and then it grew. It was at over 12k words when I let myself be convinced to post the first part. I thought at the time it would be two parts. It ended up as three. That keeps happening.

Here, love was what made her different. Not quite nightmare, but not a dream either. Love made her bright, made her a mess of colours and smiles. Love made her more. Love made her Incandescence. 

Incandescence. The original idea involved just any random generic nightmare, but I’m glad it ended up with her instead.

I don’t remember where she came from. All I know is that she works for this. She’s good, innocent, beautiful and bright, and such a big contrast to what I’m putting her through. She’s only been with the Flock for a little while, which I honestly don’t remember why I did, but it sure makes things even worse. Pretty sure that at the end of it she’s spent more time trapped in the physical world than she spent as a sheep beforehand.

She’s also the first sheep I’ve written who’s explictly “non-binary”. It’s not a term that works for sheep the same way it works for humans, as the dream-nightmare binary is completely artificial.

All nightmares are dreams as well, and of the dreams that come to be in the Mindscape, the vast majority are smaller, nicer dreams. The problem, of course, is that only the biggest, baddest dreams survive long enough in the Mindscape to make it to a safe place to live without being eaten, and these are the ones that make it to Dipper’s mindscape and become his nightmares. Of course, when he starts rescuing dreams, most of the ones he finds are very drastically different, which makes the apparent binary appear, but the difference is much more gradual than that, and Incandescence is one of those on the nightmare end of the scale.

She’s also literally made of love. They’re all made of different emotions, giving them different ways of thinking, and she’s one of very few of them who’s capable of romantic love. Not quite the way most people do it, but she is.

She’s panromantic or omniromantic or what have you. If she likes you, she’s probably in love with you, and that’s just how she is.

The scene where she’s pulled into the physical plane is one of those I could rewrite a dozen times and still not be quite happy with, I think. How do you describe someone’s mind being torn to pieces, from the inside?

I do like the description of her realizing what’s happened, though. I played a lot with pronouns for things. You might have noticed I only ever refer to the body as ‘her’ body when it’s from someone else’s point of view. From her point of view, I took care to describe it with as viscerally revolting words as I possibly could.

In contrast, the next scene where the scientists talk about what they’ve done, the whole mood is different. They don’t know they’re the antagonists.

“She even understands human language!”

She laughed. They were both beside themselves with happiness, exhaustion from a sleepless night the only thing keeping them from still skipping, as they had after Eve opened her eyes.

“To be fair,” Ida said, “mostly she was screaming ‘no’.”

They know ‘Eve’ isn’t happy about what’s going on, but they can rationalize that. In the end, they don’t think about her as a person as much as she is a personification of their personal success. They believe they’ve created a human being, but they’re not treating her as one, which is of course the one thing that creates the conflict in this fic.

As someone who is very fond of science myself, these characters annoy me most of all because they’re very good at what they do. They’re making amazing breakthroughs which could be used for wonderful things, but they failed their ethics classes at some point and are thus reduced to mere antagonists.

It’s a shame, really.

“I don’t know!” Lolonja snapped back, and she belatedly realized that she was angry. At herself, for not taking better care. At her flock, for not staying closer to their brightest, newest sister. At him, for not being the great, all-powerful Master and easily fixing everything immediately.

I love this paragraph a lot.

I’ve gotten comments about how I make the nightmares so much like people, make them individuals, but that is, in the end, exactly why I love them so much.

They are individuals. They have feelings and bonds. They react to stressful situations in human ways, because they’re not just tools to use. They’re people. They act irrationally sometimes, and their devotion is not blind.

They’re still devoted, of course, and that means more when they don’t have to be. It means more when it’s because they think he deserves it.

Other than that, this scene is mostly the beginning of Alcor’s despair. He’s an extremely powerful character, which means that taking that power from him is a very important part of writing stories about him, otherwise you won’t have any plot. Despite that, it also means that he isn’t used to having his power taken away. He isn’t used to being powerless, which makes putting him into a situation where he truly is that much more rewarding.

It also lets me show off exactly how strong his bond with the Flock is. Sometimes they’re the only thing he’s sure is going to be there, and he really doesn’t know how to deal with that constant failing him.

The second time Incandescence opened the seeing-parts, the eyes of the body that was not-her-but-her, there was darkness. 

This scene. Was a nightmare. I almost never rewrite things. I don’t bother to. They’re just fic. This scene though, I came halfway through and then rewrote several times.

The description of how Incandescence sees the world filtered through human senses instead of directly like she’s used to was easy enough. I could do that. But the conversation. Oh god, the conversation with the person who came into the room.

I needed to show how the human would talk to her, as a thing that the human thinks it thinks is a person, while also figuring out how Incandescence would read and react to what was being said. Then I needed to have Incandescence argue while not explaining things well enough that this human understood exactly how badly they fucked up.

One side effect of that was that I had her not be able to give her name, which is of course very important. Names are important for the sheep, because it’s not something they’ve been allowed before, and her not feeling like she deserves her name anymore is such a strong sign that she’s already falling into despair.

I was stuck for so long. It was terrible. But I got through it, and then I could write the rest of it easily enough.

This scene is probably also the darkest one, wordwise. It’s the one that shows the best what I imagine it must feel like to be stuck in a body that really isn’t your own, where every movement disgusts you because it doesn’t belong to you.

I’m calling it heavy body dysphoria. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but I also don’t know what else to call it. I also didn’t actually mean for the fic to become an analogy for transness, but with the central message of ‘you aren’t your body’ I suppose it was hard to avoid.

Either way, the end of this scene is pretty much as dark as it gets. It’s the beginning of Incandescence’s descent, and it starts off Alcor’s on the other side.

The forest around the now-levelled building was mostly quiet, aside from a single set of footsteps. Likely some random hiker, who unlike the animals did not have the sense to move away from loud, inexplicable noises in the woods. A hiker who would most likely make a fuzz about a child crying in the ruins of an old house, after which there might be a lot of screaming. 

This whole scene is much better than the last one. It fits so perfectly after Incandescence falls back on the Master coming to save her as the only way out, to show that Alcor can’t find her, and that he’s horrified by this.

He’s not used to being powerless, and he doesn’t know how to give up.

The hiker actually showed up in on idea for this scene. Someone who was walking around in the woods and decided to check on the random crying child in a smashed building.

It was an interesting scene, but ultimately contributed nothing to the plot, so I left it as an exercise for the reader, by making it just a possibility that never happened.

The blip into the current Mizar’s bedroom was as quiet as he could make it. She was asleep on her bed, muttering vaguely into her pillow, and he had no intention of changing that.

Not only did he not want to bring her into this, he also did not actually need her for the next step. He just needed her computer.

Then there’s this. I honestly have no idea which Mizar this is, and it doesn’t matter. I just needed to establish that Dipper has a life outside of this one random fic, though he’s putting it on hold right now.

And then there’s Al-V, who, if you look closely, is the only person in this fic who actually manages to do shit. He’s a saving grace for Incandescence, and also for me, when I wrote this fic. I had no idea how to make any of Alcor’s scenes relevant when all they were was him flailing about in angst and accomplishing nothing. Al-V presented himself as something Alcor could do that would seem to do nothing even though it ultimately moved the plot to its end.

The last part of this chapter is just Incandescence hitting rock bottom. I had her bite a chunk out of someone and eat it, which was fun. Not for her, but I don’t actually think of my characters as people in context of myself, so it’s fine.

The first chapter is worst, honestly. By far. Maybe not in quality, but in mood. It’s dark as fuck, and really meant only to send people spiralling downwards with no apparent hope for rescue. Which of course is much more effective when it actually turns into a chaptered fic.

Chapter 2

And he was definitely not Oskar Rasmussen, intelligence officer. He was John Zipp, Mafia enforcer and currently inspector, going to take a look at the progress of the project the bosses had commissioned, and he was perfectly calm.

Oskar. Hah.

I have no idea how many times I spelled his name with a ‘c’ on accident, but it was a lot.

I also have no idea how the military works. Did you notice?

But I like Oskar. I just needed someone to come in and rescue Incandescence, but he turned out to be a pretty neat person. Intelligent enough to know what he was doing. Empathic enough to feel the significance of it.

The difference between Oskar and ‘John Zipp’ is also fun, because it let me write someone we were supposed to cheer for being really rude to those asshole scientists and then have them be scared in return. It was fun.

I was honestly worried about what people would think about such a long part of the fic focusing only on an entirely new character all out of nowhere, but it seems like people doesn’t mind?

Most of the first part of chapter two is just me trying to find the balance between making things go too fast and not getting bogged down by ridiculous amounts of exposition. I needed to show how this whole thing worked, and to make it seem like Oskar was doing his job, but I also wanted to get to Incandescence as fast as possible. I think, in the end, I balanced it well enough, but I still have issues with parts of it.

This is also where I introduce the idea that what was done to Incandescence isn’t only trapping her, it’s killing her. There had to be a reason bodies generally have souls, and not just lumps of thought-stuff, and here it is. It raises the stakes, and it gives us a new antagonist once these ones are taken out of the picture. (Friendly reminder that an antagonist doesn’t have to be a person, but it can be such an abstract concept as an illness, or time itself.)

She was a woman, almost definitely, with ghostly pale skin and dark, dirty hair. Maybe black, maybe dark brown; it was hard to tell in the dark. She lay straight on her back on top of the sheets, wearing a thin dress, possibly a hospital gown. She was completely still, facing the ceiling and with her arms straight and limp by her sides. 

One thing I wanted to communicate and am not sure if I managed is that Eve is classically beautiful. The body was made to be attractive. Incandescence, trapped in the body, isn’t beautiful. Not only because she’s dying and the body reflects that, but because the hate she has for it reflects outwards. She does nothing to maintain that beauty because she can’t see it, and will actively try to ruin it if she gets the chance.

Oskar, here, doesn’t see a beautiful woman. He sees, at most, something that might have been one, once. It doesn’t make him very happy.

She had her eyes closed. Against the light, he realized.

“Sorry,” he said. “Is it okay if I sit down on the bed?”

And here we have the first friendly interaction Incandescence has had since she arrived.

The first thing he does is apologize, the second is ask for permission to come closer.

She tells him she doesn’t care, and he does come closer, but only a little. You can be sure that if she had said no, he would remain standing. And this is important. As is the fact that the very next thing he gives her is his name. A thing that is so important to her as a nightmare, and specifically as a nightmare.

You can draw parallels between this conversation and the one I struggled with in the first chapter. Oskar treats her as a person, not as the body she’s stuck in. He listens, he believes her, and he gives her hope.

This is also the place in writing the fic I realized I’m writing a story of a man coming in and rescuing a powerless woman, which still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so this is where I tried to give her some autonomy.

Not a lot, and still necessarily depended on him granting it to her, considering the circumstances, but she has a voice here and she lets it be heard.

“Here, I’ll show you,” he said, and she pulled herself up to watch. He pointed at his watch, digital, luckily. “You know how to read numbers?”

“Yes,” she said.

The watch. Until now, she’s been seen more or less as ignorant. Oskar doesn’t think she is, but a part of him still thinks so, because that is how she’s been presented.

He knows she speaks more than one language, but he doesn’t take it for granted that she can read numbers. Of course, the fact that she doesn’t know how long half an hour is kind of gives him a point. Then he’s surprised that she knows about seconds, and again when she can ad in her head better than he can.

Because she’s intelligent. She’s just also trapped and has had no reason to show it. Until now she’s been entirely powerless. This man gave her something. One tiny little thing, and she grabs it with all she’s got.

The next scene, the watch scene, is Incandescence alone in the darkness again. Only this time she has a ray of light. Literally. Most of it is just her contemplating whether or not it’s worth it to start hoping again, even as she already is.

I like the part where she calls Oskar’s teammates ‘flockmates’. It’s what she knows, and she doesn’t think of him as the same kind of creature as the ones that trapped her in the first place.

The second chapter ends on a brighter note than the first one, but it’s not over yet and they all know it.

Chapter 3

The first scene of chapter three is all tell and very little show. I honestly just didn’t feel like creating a whole bunch of characters just to establish Incandescence’s life at the base. Maybe I should have, but at that point I really, really just wanted to be done.

I needed to establish even more hopelessness, and explain why Al-V didn’t notice anything earlier. It happened through making all the military people so distrassed about the whole thing they’d rather not think about it.

The coffee just showed up as a natural consequence of the dream thing, which was a natural consequence of considering exactly how wrong shoving a nightmare into a human body would go. I still think she’ll probably drink coffee whenever she can get it even later, though.

I also needed to give them all a reason to be attached to her, because the next few scenes really wouldn’t work without that.

The source of the small program read the saved file considerably more slowly, as there is a large difference between truly reading something and just searching through it for a specific word. It still only took him a few seconds before his variable counters associated with success and reward spiked, and he scrambled to double-check his conclusions, a process that took him approximately five minutes and involved hacking into seven cell phones and getting access to a closed-circuit military security system. 

And Al-V to the rescue. He’s the one who got the military moving in the fist place, and he’s the one who found Incandescence before it was too late. Honestly, he’s the hero of this story by a large margin. Everyone else is just flailing.

Case in point, the next tiny scene is just a scene of Alcor taking a brief break from his ineffectual flailing.

“Hey, you okay?” Mizar asked.

The first time he had come down and tried to focus on something else, the day before this one, he had ended up crying on her shoulder.

…he’s not okay.

Luckily, that won’t last much longer.

And then the next scene. Sheesh. That was one of the first scenes of this I really wanted to write, and it was great.

It felt like a ‘pop’, a small pressure change, something weird, something you noticed, but not more than that. Still, it was peculiar enough to have them all quiet for a moment and look around curiously. Dor rubbed at an ear. 

This is possibly my favourite of all of Alcor’s entrances I’ve ever written.

Just… ‘pop’. Alcor.

And then he shows up, too worked up to think about explaining himself, in the middle of a group of armed, twitchy and overprotective soldiers. Ahh, I had so much fun with that.

Everyone’s scared, Alcor is intent on finding his lost sheep and really nothing else, and Incandescence is too confused to be sure anything is real.

The table disappeared. Not thrown aside, not moved, just disappeared as if it had never been, letting the pieces of Marilynn’s gun clatter on the floor, to make room for him as he sank to his knees beside the couch.

I like this a lot too. I needed the table out of the way, and then I thought, ‘oh right, demon, heh’ and removed it.

There were tear tracks down his face. The world’s most powerful demon sat in a heap on their break room floor, sobbing. 

Only thing that annoys me is that I felt the need to add dialogue before this part. If I could have found a way to go directly from “what have they done to you” to this, I’d be happy.

Of course, then he wakes her up properly, starts rambling about how happy he is that she’s alive, and she decides he’s being silly and kisses him instead.

I foreshadowed that kiss enough that it felt natural for the plot, but just like every other time I’ve ended my fic with a kiss, I’ve gotten comments from people who weren’t expecting it. Honestly, I just like having people kiss Alcor. Don’t judge me.

Then he leaned back in and they were kissing with a fervour that suited the aftermath of a weeks-long life-or-death situation. It was deep and urgent and blithely oblivious to the handful soldiers with guns still half-raised towards them. 

No seriously, this is the only part of this fic I wrote out-of-secuence because I needed to make sure the words were safe.

And of course then he impales her.

I don’t think I actually thought about that when I first came up with the idea. Of course he needed to get her out of there somehow, that was obvious. I considered having him just melt the body, but this was more fun.

The soliders, at this point, are pretty much convinced that everything is going to be fine, so having their suspicions towasds demons confirmed so suddenly and violently is a shock I was happy to give them. For entertainment purposes.

Honestly, that entire scene is such an emotional rollercoaster for them I a so happy I decided to have it from their point of view and not his or hers.

Gard’s arguments against murdering the scientists is actually something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

There are fics out there where Alcor shows up and takes over court cases one way or another, but probably, if a demon got involved with that, it would have rather nasty consequences for everyone involved. You can’t trust your evidence when there’s a demon involved. You can’t trust that the person you just sent to jail was actually sent to jail because they hurt someone, and not just because the opposition made a deal with a demon. If you can solve it without letting anyone know Alcor has a stake in the result, please try to do so.

Anyway, anyone who’s ever had insomnia knows that a lifetime of nightmares is a worse fate than death. And much more poetic in this case. I don’t actually care about letting Alcor get his revenge in this one, it’s Incandescence who needs it.

I considered Having an epilogue where Incandescence was a witness at the trial against the scientists, but decided against it. I still think the idea is funny as heck.

And then the Flock was upon her, dozens and dozens of gleeful faces, pressing up to greet her, to welcome her home, to touch her just to make sure she was truly there, and the Master dropped to the ground with them and laughed and cried and laughed.

And all was good.

In the end, this was a better ending.

[selfiecharmedlife]

RE: Our Dreams at Dusk Volume 3 or The Emotional Labor of Being Trans

     It’s been a minute, but I’ve had a couple things on my mind lately. Months ago, I read the third volume of a series that I wrote about previously. The fourth and final volume should show up later today, but I’ve been thinking about this one in particular again and I want to use it as a springboard to talk about some other stuff I’ve been dealing with lately. Before the year is over, I want to talk about emotional labor.

     Our Dreams at Dusk is a series that centers around a young queer teenager as he comes out and learns to accept himself, but what I want to talk about centers on another character that was in the background for the previous two volumes. Utsumi is an older man that works in the drop-in center. While hosting a workshop one day, a woman arrives with her daughter at calls Utsumi by a woman’s name. When he responds with confusion, the woman says they went to high school together which Utsuki confirms. That former classmate, Koyama, stays a character throughout the volume as she attempts to “reconnect” with her former volleyball teammate. While arguably well-intentioned, she exclusively deadnames him, uses she/her pronouns to refer to him, ignores correction and even lets it slip that she’s quite homophobic. 

     This pattern goes on and ultimately culminates in a confrontation where Koyama insists that Utsuki gives a talk about gender identity at her daughter’s school. After all, if Utsuki doesn’t teach people about himself how could they ever understand? It’s even for the sake of the children! However, Utsuki finally lets it out and tells her know through tears that he doesn’t need her understanding and least of all her pity. It’s a moment where I had to put the book down.

      Throughout the story, we don’t get much insight into Utsuki’s reaction in terms of perspective or dialogue, but the art does heavy lifting. His posture gets lower throughout the volume as having to make space for this woman wears him down. In one passage he affirms that he doesn’t think she’s a bad person, he sees her as misinformed and even specifically tells the other members of the drop-in house not to confront her. The lack of perspective that the reader gets feels like such an important decision by the writer. Utsuki must bottle up his own reactions in order to get through his daily life. We don’t get to see his pain as a reader because he can’t show it. It’s something he directly states later in the volume. It’s heartbreaking and relatable.

     This is also one of the few pieces of media I’ve come across that directly centers a trans person that is“transitioned.” It’s much easier to find stories about people questioning or early in the process, but Utsuki lives as a man, passes as a man and doesn’t center his transness in his daily life. As I’m now two years and one neo-vagina into the medicalization of my own process, it’s gotten harder to relate to those stories in the same way. Instead, I’ve gotten more used to having to do what Utsuki does. I sit with my discomfort when coworkers misgender celebrities or when my family members call me John. It wears at me, but I don’t have the energy to just be angry all the time. I have to let some things slide or else I wouldn’t be able to go through my daily life.

     It’s been hard to keep doing that in the past couple of months. I wrote before about my experience leading up to SRS and how my aunts were questioning my choices and making sure I was aware of how much my choices were upsetting my mother. I remember one specific case where a friend of mine and I drove up to Baltimore to visit a bookstore and see a concert. My aunt had asked to talk, so I called her back thinking it would be a short conversation while my friend went browsing. Instead, I found myself trying to defend the integrity of my womanhood against her assertions that I couldn’t be trans because she had known me my whole life. Over and over, she would tell me that she didn’t understand and that I had to help her. Eventually, I was so frustrated that I found myself crying on a street corner outside a café in Baltimore while trying not to let that slip over the phone. After we ended the conversation, I ended up having to do a Q&A session with her so that she could hopefully understand my situation better. I don’t think my aunt is a bad person or means harm, but she hurt me deeply and I had to sit their and take it while trying to explain queer 101 to her. Lesson 1: Yes, I was assigned male at birth. Yes, I am a woman. Yes, I am a lesbian. 

     All this has been especially relevant during the holidays. Both sides of my extended family center around Chicago and I made the choice not to attend again this year. Unlike last year, I was invited, but I don’t want to put myself in an environment where I’m going to have to answer questions for the benefit of other people. Especially, I don’t want to be around my sister. When I came out to her three years ago, she hung up the phone on me and blocked me on all social media. Even as things have started getting better with the rest of my family, she refuses to interact with me or acknowledge that we’re related. That reality has made holiday gift giving complicated. When I told my parents not to expect that I’d be sending a gift for her this yeah, they told me to give her time and try to be more understanding. Once again, the expectation was that I needed to be kind and understanding while ignoring my own needs for affirmation and validation. In the eyes of my family, their comfort is more important than my dignity. If I get angry and disrupt their comfort, it would threaten the tenuous relationship we have. There are no stakes for them in these exchanges and I’m expected to advocate for myself and answer invasive questions about my sexuality and gender identity before being judged.

     It’s exhausting. It’s degrading. It’s the reality for myself and I imagine many trans people around the world. We have to explain to others and sit with the discomfort or having our knowledge about ourselves questioned by people that claim to have our best interests at heart. I’m so tired from having to do this emotional work of couching my own needs to try to connect with people that I thought would love me unconditionally. This year, I’ll mostly be spending Christmas alone with my little tree and my dog. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but maybe I won’t have to skip four Christmases in a row.