Since I am finally off the phone and out of class, long comment for you:
I feel like a lot of the article's rules are based around tokenism - it's a trend to include diverse characters so that the writers look like they're writing diversity, and then kill or torture them because it's "edgy" instead of like... Not being an ass and committing to it. But local trends are to write some pretty self-indulgent horror fic, which is fine until it becomes *the only thing* in most adult-oriented fiction.
There's also the headache of people arguing back and forth about a bait in switch in The Magicians (spoilers) which led the audience to believe that - holy shit, a pedophile is going to be the main villain, how often does that happen? to... Oh no, the villain is *really* the kid he abused, who is now shady af in adulthood. Johnny was pissed about that. It's easy to see the logic and where that character development could have happened, but it is such a shitty thing to do to real life survivors.
Mainstream media sucks at showing positive portrayals of underdogs. I can sympathize with the article author for steering people in that direction, because there are not enough good representations at all, but your solutions hit the problem where it lies. If you want something to be representative instead of entirely fluff or sadfic, you need to write the entire spectrum, or at least show pieces of it. A decent way to do that is to look at population estimates, too - this is what the population statistics are for this area, if you're basing it on a real-life setting, or else... model real-life and tweak based on how the culture and people likely would have developed and do world building. But it seems like the art of world building got lost among the habit of writing what's been shown to sell instead of creating genuinely new fiction. :/
>> That's a nice fantasy. <<
And it can be hilarious to make an underdog character poke fun at various villainous forces they're at odds with in society. The thing is that those can feel excessive if the entire character is based around fighting those things, or the author sucks at balancing serious issues with humor.
>> Yet another round of erasure, which is especially unpleasant for all the trans and genderqueer folks out there who are still trying to figure out what their "normal clothing" even is. <<
At least locally, if you're familiar with the cues you can spot genderqueer people by style. They have their own clothing, hair, color schemes, etc. just like women and men do. Some people intentionally dress to fit their subculture, especially if they want to signal it to other people who might have it in common. There are a few people on the local campus who wear They/Them/Their and the Transgender/Nonbinary symbol on t-shirts.
Likewise, at the convention a few people went to last weekend, it can be really easy to pick trans women out of the crowd - and distinguish them from people who are genderqueer versus crossdressing - then there's that along with the genderqueer people who were only noticeably queer because they chose to show it through their accessories. There are differences. It's okay to *show* them, because how else are people supposed to see how to take someone *at face value* instead of thinking that trans people are invisible or that someone doesn't look masculine/feminine enough to count as a real guy/girl?
>> but it does bupkis for the visibility of trans characters <<
It's like "Dumbledore is gay" all over again. It doesn't count as representation if the audience needs to be informed after the fact. So far Paranatural (with RJ), Monsterkind (with Loise), and PragueRace (various, but Untamo and Miko are the starring examples) have done good with including trans and nonbinary characters without making it a primary characteristic. PragueRace is great with that because it actually treats being trans or nonbinary as background traits that come through in other parts of the story. And I'm sure these authors aren't the only ones who do this. Good examples of trans characters do exist in comics... Just not what you'd find on bookstore shelves.
>> #5: Having characters swap brains or bodies does not count. The transgender character has to have been born transgender; it can’t be an accident.
Once again, that's pretty hard on people who discovered their nature later in life <<
They're also missing a huge opportunity to let cis readers imagine how their lives would change if that happened to them. Sure, you get the initial reactions that most people think about, but... Then what? Now you have a character who's used to being a different sex than the body they now inhabit. The extent of that change surpasses most people's ability to predict how they'd react to it - they're going to be blindsided and hunting for solutions for the most simple things that now no longer work for them, and discomfort aside. That creates a ton of unique issues along with overlap for stuff that trans people deal with. You get to show a cis person what it's like to be treated as a different gender. You can even play with gender fluidity there, if the character happens to like aspects of their different body or has the ability to change it.
>> #1: Shape-shifters, or magic users changing appearance, are not transgender unless the default form they live in 99% of the time is transgender. <<
The phrasing in that one is confusing as heck to me. Transgender is an identity, not a fixed state of being... It's also dismissive of gender fluid or multi-gender people who *might* be uncomfortable with their form some of the time but not all of the time or even not most of the time. Someone can identify as transgender but not live 99% of their life as the pinnacle of transgender experience. For some people it really matters; for others it doesn't. I imagine the same could be said to shapeshifters who routinely change their sex but whose gender may or may not change with it - and even if someone isn't transgender, routinely being mistaken for a different gender can have its own overlapping issues. I get the feeling that the author has some idea of a transgender story that... isn't. There *is* no universal experience of transness. :/ And the experiences are there have a lot of overlap with other life experiences related to dissonance between expectations/desires and reality.
They're going to end up with another queer subgenre at a different polarity than the *current* examples, and not a diverse spectrum.
no subject
I feel like a lot of the article's rules are based around tokenism - it's a trend to include diverse characters so that the writers look like they're writing diversity, and then kill or torture them because it's "edgy" instead of like... Not being an ass and committing to it. But local trends are to write some pretty self-indulgent horror fic, which is fine until it becomes *the only thing* in most adult-oriented fiction.
There's also the headache of people arguing back and forth about a bait in switch in The Magicians (spoilers) which led the audience to believe that - holy shit, a pedophile is going to be the main villain, how often does that happen? to... Oh no, the villain is *really* the kid he abused, who is now shady af in adulthood. Johnny was pissed about that. It's easy to see the logic and where that character development could have happened, but it is such a shitty thing to do to real life survivors.
Mainstream media sucks at showing positive portrayals of underdogs. I can sympathize with the article author for steering people in that direction, because there are not enough good representations at all, but your solutions hit the problem where it lies. If you want something to be representative instead of entirely fluff or sadfic, you need to write the entire spectrum, or at least show pieces of it.
A decent way to do that is to look at population estimates, too - this is what the population statistics are for this area, if you're basing it on a real-life setting, or else... model real-life and tweak based on how the culture and people likely would have developed and do world building. But it seems like the art of world building got lost among the habit of writing what's been shown to sell instead of creating genuinely new fiction. :/
>> That's a nice fantasy. <<
And it can be hilarious to make an underdog character poke fun at various villainous forces they're at odds with in society. The thing is that those can feel excessive if the entire character is based around fighting those things, or the author sucks at balancing serious issues with humor.
>> Yet another round of erasure, which is especially unpleasant for all the trans and genderqueer folks out there who are still trying to figure out what their "normal clothing" even is. <<
At least locally, if you're familiar with the cues you can spot genderqueer people by style. They have their own clothing, hair, color schemes, etc. just like women and men do. Some people intentionally dress to fit their subculture, especially if they want to signal it to other people who might have it in common. There are a few people on the local campus who wear They/Them/Their and the Transgender/Nonbinary symbol on t-shirts.
Likewise, at the convention a few people went to last weekend, it can be really easy to pick trans women out of the crowd - and distinguish them from people who are genderqueer versus crossdressing - then there's that along with the genderqueer people who were only noticeably queer because they chose to show it through their accessories. There are differences. It's okay to *show* them, because how else are people supposed to see how to take someone *at face value* instead of thinking that trans people are invisible or that someone doesn't look masculine/feminine enough to count as a real guy/girl?
>> but it does bupkis for the visibility of trans characters <<
It's like "Dumbledore is gay" all over again. It doesn't count as representation if the audience needs to be informed after the fact. So far Paranatural (with RJ), Monsterkind (with Loise), and PragueRace (various, but Untamo and Miko are the starring examples) have done good with including trans and nonbinary characters without making it a primary characteristic. PragueRace is great with that because it actually treats being trans or nonbinary as background traits that come through in other parts of the story. And I'm sure these authors aren't the only ones who do this.
Good examples of trans characters do exist in comics... Just not what you'd find on bookstore shelves.
>> #5: Having characters swap brains or bodies does not count. The transgender character has to have been born transgender; it can’t be an accident.
Once again, that's pretty hard on people who discovered their nature later in life <<
They're also missing a huge opportunity to let cis readers imagine how their lives would change if that happened to them. Sure, you get the initial reactions that most people think about, but... Then what? Now you have a character who's used to being a different sex than the body they now inhabit. The extent of that change surpasses most people's ability to predict how they'd react to it - they're going to be blindsided and hunting for solutions for the most simple things that now no longer work for them, and discomfort aside. That creates a ton of unique issues along with overlap for stuff that trans people deal with. You get to show a cis person what it's like to be treated as a different gender. You can even play with gender fluidity there, if the character happens to like aspects of their different body or has the ability to change it.
>> #1: Shape-shifters, or magic users changing appearance, are not transgender unless the default form they live in 99% of the time is transgender. <<
The phrasing in that one is confusing as heck to me. Transgender is an identity, not a fixed state of being... It's also dismissive of gender fluid or multi-gender people who *might* be uncomfortable with their form some of the time but not all of the time or even not most of the time. Someone can identify as transgender but not live 99% of their life as the pinnacle of transgender experience. For some people it really matters; for others it doesn't. I imagine the same could be said to shapeshifters who routinely change their sex but whose gender may or may not change with it - and even if someone isn't transgender, routinely being mistaken for a different gender can have its own overlapping issues.
I get the feeling that the author has some idea of a transgender story that... isn't. There *is* no universal experience of transness. :/ And the experiences are there have a lot of overlap with other life experiences related to dissonance between expectations/desires and reality.
They're going to end up with another queer subgenre at a different polarity than the *current* examples, and not a diverse spectrum.
- Gray