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We need more understanding of how there’s a culture of hyperscrutiny around the work of trans writers, particularly on the way trans life or suffering are depicted.
I routinely see a LOT of stiff prescriptivism about this, and I know I’m not the only one who finds it stifling.
I routinely see a LOT of stiff prescriptivism about this, and I know I’m not the only one who finds it stifling.
I’ve seen it said multiple times that you should never let a character’s deadname even appear in the book, which is also a de facto prescription against characters being pre or mid-transition, even in flashbacks.
One thing this does is demand that we pretend that every trans person’s life experience is neatly contained by a “post-transition self” that everyone respects and that never has any complication to it.
One argument here is usually “if you’re the writer of the book you should just choose to not have any trans-related suffering in it,” sometimes with the addition that it’s privileged and callous to not choose that.
An effect of this argument is that is misrepresents how art works as a thing living people create. Stories aren’t simply assemblages of facts that someone dryly puts together, there’s something within that drives the story and informs why we tell it a certain way.
But it also relies on the idea that there is only one artistic agenda and one reader agenda: escapism. And further still, that there’s only one kind of escapism.
This just plainly is not true and it’s not fair to act like it should be true.
This just plainly is not true and it’s not fair to act like it should be true.
It is absolutely not evidence of lack of true lived suffering for suffering to find its way into the stories that you tell based on your own life experiences. That argument is completely backward, and more to the point, it’s cruel.
There are lots of artists for whom art is a major avenue of self-exploration and processing pain. This is OKAY. And not only is it okay, it has beauty and purpose and value and it often leads to excellent art.
What if you’re going through trauma AS you write a story, and you don’t have the kind of personality that is built around imagining your suffering gone as the only way to relieve it?
It is deeply unkind to act like the art you would naturally make is therefore worse.
It is deeply unkind to act like the art you would naturally make is therefore worse.
My own life does not now, nor has it ever, had a clean line between a pre-transition self and a post-transition self. It’s always been blurry lines. And I still get called my birth name in situations in which it’s complicated to rebuke that.
Is it really serving diverse, trans-centered, personal representation to say that I shouldn’t write trans characters whose lives are *like mine*?
I dislike in general any framing of transness that defines it primarily by “transition,” whether transition as what creates transition, or the idea of transition as a chronological line, one side of which is Old Self and the other side of which is New Self.
An “identity seam” in that way exists for some trans people and it doesn’t exist for others. The reasons for that variation are complex and they can’t be boiled down to a simple, reductive thing that can be categorically written out of existence.
