SFF can understand a female character adopting male-coded attributes, but not a male character adopting femme-coded ones, and this is partly rooted in transphobia https://twitter.com/say_shannon/status/1301806170215243777

It’s the same reason fictional cis girls bind—not because they’re experiencing dysphoria, but because they want to go on Plucky Adventures and Patriachy is stopping them. Gender in SFF exists as a barrier for cis women to overcome

If you believe gender is a fixed biological state with a rigid binary, this makes sense—why shouldn’t every girl who can pull it off dress as a boy to game the system and improve her life?

To understand why an AMAB person would adopt femme attributes means you must understand that gender is internal, personal, complex. Gender exists outside economics and biology.

This is also related to @printrunpodcast's excellent ep. this week on publishing & gendered books. For so long, the default assumption in SFF publishing has been a cis white male audience, and any protagonist is evaluated through that gaze

A girl like Arya Stark can be centered and celebrated because she upholds ideas masc-coded skills are the best. Some men in the fandom disdain Sansa as weak because she uses femme-coded skills to navigate politics...

...but men like Varys and Littlefinger are HATED because they use femme-coded tactics to acquire and build power. Even Littlefinger's NAME is subtly transphobic. They use effeminacy to appear nonthreatening to cis men like Ned while stabbing him in the back.

Women who embrace masculinity to gain power in SFF are celebrated; men who embrace femininity for the same reasons are villains or at best side characters. Because the assumption that the average SFF reader is not just male, but queerphobic

But I don't believe this is true. The modern SFF audience is more diverse than ever and eager to embrace new narratives of gender and sexuality. I hope the industry realizes that 'boy genres' and 'girl genres' are a thing of the past and invests its resources accordingly

Anyway if you like books that push back against the gender binary, check out my debut YA contemporary novel MAY THE BEST MAN WIN, about a trans boy challenging his ex for Homecoming King!

Goodreads: https://bit.ly/2QhX2aR 
Pre-order: https://bit.ly/332bedO