Episode 166: Writing Trans Characters
In episode 166, Flourish and Elizabeth are joined by friend of the podcast and recurring guest Destination Toast to talk through Toast’s recent stats on trans, nonbinary, and gender-diverse characters on the AO3. They supplement this quantitative analysis with qualitative observations and experiences reading and writing trans characters, including letters and voicemails from Gavin Daphne, Flash, AlessNox, Thomas, and Elizabeth. (Yes, a different Elizabeth!)
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:50] Friend-of-the-podcast Destination Toast has been on the podcast many times! Their most recent appearance was episode 138, “2020 By the Numbers.” You can find all of their work on either their main tumblr or their fandom stats sideblog.
[00:02:42] Our interstitial music throughout is “Theme from penguins on parade” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:03:25] Toast rn:
[00:04:19] Toast’s official stats post: “Trans, nonbinary, and gender-diverse characters on AO3.”
[00:07:24] Turns out Flourish did *not* invent the term “mare’s nest,” but its etymology is interestingly muddled…a real mare’s nest of a term, if you will.
[00:09:08] See? Total mare’s nest.
[00:17:44] You can see full lists of fandoms with the highest percentages of the “Trans” tag/subtags and “Nonbinary character” tag/subtags in the first chapter of Toast’s meta!
[00:20:17]
[00:21:40] You can find Gavin Daphne on Instagram and on AO3.
[00:24:54] breathedout talked about writing f/f—and about fans often failing to substantially engage with gender around male characters—in episode 144, “Writing Women.”
[00:30:14] (Letter-writing) Elizabeth is referencing this post from the Scarleteen tumblr; Mo Ranyart’s full answer is on the Scarleteen website.
[00:31:04] The “extra” stats Toast ran off to research upon reading our guests’ letters, including the distribution of the “Other” relationship tag.
[00:36:48] We talked about reader-insert fic in episode 160, “The Original Character.” We read Anisa Khalifa’s (a past guest!) response during episode 162, “Ways of Seeing.”
[00:39:42] Our INCREDIBLY CUTE tiny zine collaboration with Toast, which went out to $10/month patrons this past summer:
[00:41:22] AlessNox’s fic is “Love Relinquished, Love Remembered.”
[00:42:38:] Yes, you can find Toast’s stats about trans OCs in the bonus chapter of their meta!
[00:44:54] The OC Flourish was talking about was in their Elementary/Sleepy Hollow crossover “The Hellhound of the Rockefellers,” which, as a reminder, they wrote for a Yuletide recipient who was VERY GRATEFUL AND PROMPT IN EXPRESSING GRATITUDE.
[00:46:22] If you still haven’t listened to our “Race and Fandom” series, they are episodes 22A & 22B and episodes 135A & 135B.
[00:47:11] Flash’s fic: “Sparkles Like an Emerald (but it’s plastic just the same),” and a whole bunch of trans!Illya stories!
[00:47:32] Tommy, aka the Green Power Ranger, did not make it into the 2017 Power Rangers film Elizabeth was totally unaware of until reading this letter.
[00:49:32] In “Turnabout Intruder,” Kirk’s ex—bitter because women aren’t allowed to be starship captains—tricks him into switching bodies with her, then tries to hide what’s happened and just take over his life. As you might guess, it does not end well for her, and it’s not, uh…the most sensitive portrayal of bodyswitching…but it is extremely compelling for fanfiction purposes.
[00:57:39] Flourish, often:
[01:00:08] If Toast isn’t an omegaverse expert, how do they explain THIS!?!?!
(Here are the actual omegaverse stats.)
[01:01:05:] And yes, once again, the stats on pregnancy are in Toast’s bonus chapter.
Transcript
[intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #166, “Writing Trans Characters.”
FK: A very brief title that could have been expanded in a variety of ways…
ELM: [snorts] OK, for the sake of titling, so we discussed this in advance, we’re not just talking about trans characters, we are talking about trans, nonbinary, genderqueer—
FK: Right.
ELM: Gender diverse characters, using trans as an umbrella term.
FK: Right, and I will say that I understand that “trans” is not everyone’s umbrella term, but as a person of that persuasion it is the term I use, and so it’s snappy and we’re gonna use it right now.
ELM: “Person of that persuasion” sounds so like, [FK laughs] I don’t know, like, the year 2000. You know?
FK: [laughs] Anyway, that’s not the only thing in the title that could be expanded though.
ELM: [overlapping] I love it. Right, so this is not just about writing, it’s also about reading, it’s about fanworks, it’s about headcanons, it is folks talking about the way they think about canonically trans characters, or writing or reading or imagining their favorite characters as trans. So, as you may remember from a hundred years ago when we first started talking about this, actually I think it was November of last year?
FK: [laughs] Feels like a million years ago somehow, and yet also yesterday.
ELM: So, friend-of-the-podcast Destination Toast put together some stats from the AO3 on this subject, and asked if we wanted to talk about them on the podcast, and we did! But we also thought that it could be interesting and fruitful to kind of pair that quantitative data with people’s qualitative personal experiences. So we put out a call for folks to share their experiences about reading, writing, about their own gender identity, and the way that it relates to their fanworks, consumption and creation. And we got what, like, half a dozen great responses?
FK: Yeah! It’s delightful.
ELM: So yeah! I think that we should get Toast on the call, and start talking about these responses and the stats!
FK: All right, let’s do it!
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back! And we’ve got Toast! Hey Toast!
Destination Toast: Heeeyyy! [ELM and FK laugh] Great to be here again.
ELM: Toast, how are you doing?
DT: I’m doing really good!
ELM: [laughs] This is, this is a big burst of enthusiasm. [DT laughs] That’s great, that’s great.
DT: I like being on the podcast, I am feeling all active in fandom again for the first time in a bunch of years, for reasons other than just stats, ’cause I’ve fallen in love with a new fandom, I’m just happy about fandom stuff and it’s good to talk to you guys.
ELM: Oh, this is heartwarming.
FK: [overlapping] Awwww…
ELM: All right…
FK: OK, well why don’t you kick us off then, because I know that you had some in-for-ma-tion for us on this topic. [DT laughs] Sorry, that was an extremely, ah, oh God…
ELM: [overlapping] It was the face that you made, and actually… [DT laughs] Look, he’s never gonna hear this, but it was so reminiscent of your husband [FK and DT laugh] that actually it startled me a little, I was like oh…goodness.
FK: [still laughing] I, we’ve been together a long time… anyway, so…
DT: [laughing, overlapping] That was amazing.
ELM: OK, I regret bringing up Nick Montfort. Now his name is in the transcript.
FK: [laughs] Thank you, thanks for that. OK, Toast. Back to you. What do we need to know?
DT: All right. I was really excited to get a chance to look at stats about trans characters and other nonbinary and gender diverse characters, I’m gonna use trans as an umbrella since you’re doin’ that for this podcast and that’s great. I basically had put it off for a long time, even though I was really fascinated by it, because tagging is really hard and complicated in this area in a bunch of ways. But, I updated a whole bunch of my data gathering abilities, and went and looked at this last fall, and so thank you so much for having me on to talk about it.
One of the big things I wanted to highlight right off the bat is just, the overall popularity of writing trans characters is increasing a bunch. Started to see a surge around like, 2014, and it has just kept growing a whole bunch, especially for the sort of umbrella term “trans” and the umbrella term “nonbinary character,” which do not include one another. These are two separate tags. “Genderfluid” is also increasing quite a bit, but at this point “trans” is used on over one in a hundred fics on AO3, and “nonbinary character” is used on over, uh, about one in two hundred fics on AO3. So, that’s pretty cool to see actually, and a big increase over time.
ELM: Is this one in a hundred total fics in the entire archive? Or one in a hundred new fics?
DT: Yeah! That’s a great question. In the past year, over one in a hundred works created or updated on AO3 have used the tag “trans” or one of its sub-tags. And about one in two hundred of those works have used the tag “nonbinary character” or a sub-tag.
ELM: That’s, I mean that’s pretty substantial I think, when you get down to it. Especially comparing it to pro media of all sorts.
DT: Yeah.
ELM: Right? I can’t imagine one in a hundred characters on television are trans right now.
DT: [overlapping] Right? And it’s—
FK: [simultaneous] Definitely—
ELM: [overlapping] Maybe not, but, [laughs] I don’t think so!
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, no, that’s not the case.
DT: To be fair, it’s…to clarify, it is fewer than one in a hundred characters probably, because this is ‘number of fanworks’ and there’s a bunch of characters in each of these fanworks.
ELM: Gotcha.
DT: But still. The percentage of stories told is still impressive to me, how many stories are getting told in this space.
ELM: Yeah, I mean I guess one of the things that we always have with any kind of stats around any marginalized groups…obviously this, this is like, when we’re looking at numbers about various racial groups, too, is it’s hard to tell from tags who is centered in a story, and who is not, right?
DT: [overlapping] Absolutely.
ELM: So that obviously is a limitation of this kind of data gathering.
FK: And it also goes sort of in other ways, right, like it’s hard to tell who’s centered, but then also I can imagine there being stories that were very, very engaged with themes about gender that would be very, like, resonant—you know, maybe without the characters identifying consciously as nonbinary, that might not get tagged that way. I would be, obviously, there’s no way for us to track that, no way for anyone to track that unless you had like, [laughs] you know, perfect AI ability to read [ELM and FK laugh] stories, which doesn’t exist, right? But, I’m curious, Toast, could you talk a little bit about how the tagging is confusing, though? Because…
DT: Yeah.
FK: I have to admit, I find this to be, like, a mare’s nest of tags, and I don’t understand how they connect to each other.
ELM: Mare’s nest?
DT: I don’t know that term either!
ELM: What…what does that mean?
FK: A tangle!
ELM: [overlapping] One of your folksy…what, like a mare, mare like a, like a lady horse?
FK: [overlapping] It’s a tangle! Yeah, it means a tangle.
DT: Right.
ELM: [laughs] No, I believe you, that’s nice and folksy, thank you very much. [FK laughs]
DT: That’s lovely, I will try and adopt it, it’s excellent. Yeah! No, I will happily talk about what makes some of the tags confusing and I will also say just to your point, yeah, I am only looking at what people are tagging, so this definitely misses a bunch of things, and there’s also, just looking through some of the fanworks that showed up in my analyses, some of them have like fifteen different tags maybe about different aspects of gender and gender identity and experience, unrelated topics maybe like pregnancy or other things, which I think we’re gonna talk about a little bit more later, but different stories will touch on lots of different things about gender, or there will maybe sometimes just be like, one brief tag of like, “Oh, there’s a trans character in here.” So I think that the way these stories engage with things probably differs a whole lot, and as you say some of them aren’t even going to be tagged with any of these tags.
So, this is me doing the best that I can with the tags that exist on AO3 and that authors choose to use, and I think even more so than with a lot of my analyses, we need to sort of keep that limitation in mind when talking about what people are writing here. But the big thing that I found that surprised me when I was trying to dig into this, which I started trying to do years ago and then was like, “Oh no! It’s a mare’s nest of tags and I can’t dig in!”
[everybody laughs]
ELM: Wow. Wow.
DT: Is that I expected there would be a couple of big tags, that some of the big tags like, “gender-related,” would actually capture all of the different gender identity tags that I wanted to look at. And that isn’t actually the case, and I think this just comes out of folksonomies like AO3 sort of evolving over time with different subcommunities using different tags, and different wranglers putting together different bits of things, and not all being consistent? But what we’ve ended up with is that the big tag “gender-related” contains “trans,” which is an umbrella tag containing “trans character” and “transgender” and a bunch of smaller tags, and it contains “genderqueer,” but then other terms like “nonbinary character” and “genderfluid” are over in “LGBTQ themes” and they’re not actually wrangled under “gender-related.”
FK: [laughing] Wait a minute, “genderfluid” is not “gender-related” according to the Archive of Our Own…
[DT and FK laughing]
ELM: [overlapping] Very strange.
FK: [still laughing] …tagging system, all right!
ELM: All right.
DT: Yeah.
FK: Truly a success, a success for folksonomies. [all laughing]
DT: “Genderless” is also not gender-related, there’s a number of interesting things here, where like, I just don’t think anyone was looking at the big picture in designing this top-down, right? You end up with all of these very funny, strange things not being arranged the way that I expected them to be, naively.
ELM: That’s really funny, is that—I mean, do you know more about how this, like, it’s my understanding that once they kind of go down a road of organization, it’d actually be quite hard to kind of, should I say it now? Untangle that mare’s nest!
[all laugh]
DT: Excellent! The mare’s nest trifecta. [ELM laughs] Yes, ah, I think my understanding is that for big tags especially, it can be really hard to sort of re-wrangle the way that things have been grouped early on, and that that is not likely to be a priority or a thing that can easily be achieved. But the wranglers agree that a bunch of this is not the way that they would design it if they were starting from scratch. But I don’t think it’s like, “Wow, they never want to try and address any of that,” but my hunch is that it’s just lower priority because it’s hard to do for a bunch of the old big tags. But that’s me reading into some things and making some guesses.
ELM: No, I mean that tracks with what I had seen, not about this, I can’t even remember what it was, but it was talking about something that was like a, a fundamental decision made early on that now didn’t feel quite…with more and more and more things added, right?
DT: Right.
ELM: I mean, that’s a danger you have with setting up any sort of folksonomy or like, taxonomy that kind of follows the, you know.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah I was gonna say, I don't know that it’s even folksonomy, right, it’s taxonomies, this is a problem, time passes and we’re like, shit!
DT: [overlapping] Yeah. Yep.
ELM: [overlapping] Right, right. With like, yeah yeah yeah yeah. So I mean, it is what it is. All right.
DT: Um, the other thing I will say just real quickly is that if you’re looking for a particular character, you know, there’s lots of tags like “trans Stiles Stilinski” or “Genderqueer Stiles Stilinski” or so on. Some of these, especially depending on how long ago that character tag was created, they’re not always wrangled consistently, and so it’s not always easy to find like, sometimes—like, “trans Tony Stark” is under the “trans” umbrella tag but not the “transgender” tag, or the “trans character” tag.
ELM: Wow.
DT: So you just end up with a very difficult time trying to track down which characters have been written about as trans and tagged as such, if you’re going to the “trans” tag page and looking at sub-tags, for instance.
So I would say, this was another thing that was challenging for me. I ended up going through like every single tag that AO3 had as of their data dump a while back, and finding all instances of character names that had any modifier in front of them and sort of finding all of the uses of, you know, “trans x” or “nonbinary x” or so on, by doing that. But it isn’t always easy to, like, search on AO3 for those, and I would recommend that people who want to do that, sort of do a tag search and do other things, don’t sort of rely on tag wrangling to find things exactly where they would expect them.
FK: That’s a really…that’s news that I can use, anyway. You know? [laughs] Like, genuinely, this is gonna…
ELM: [overlapping, laughing] Flourish, I didn’t know you were often doing searches for things on the AO3.
FK: I mean, sometimes, yeah! And like, I definitely, you know, looking more for like, reading, I’ve definitely gone and been like, I wonder who’s written this character as, in fact, trans! And like, just looked. Like, what are the characters people are writing this way? And I guess I was getting, you know. Only a sliver.
ELM: [overlapping] Well, it’s hard, too, because I mean we’ve talked about this with tags for all sorts of topics, but like, there’s a lot of different tagging styles, and you know, some of my favorite writers barely tag anything at all. Right?
FK: Of course.
ELM: And so it’s like…I mean this is also going back to what you were saying earlier about capturing like, there are probably plenty of people now and historically who’ve written…gendery things [laughs], you know?
DT: Yup.
ELM: Whether they are metaphorical explorations or explicit explorations, who don’t have any tags whatsoever, right? And potentially might not even use any terminology that you might be able to search for, and it just, that’s hard. That’s where the limitations of any AO3 search come in, I feel like. And limitations of tagging come in.
DT: Absolutely.
ELM: Well, this was a good intro, and we’re trying something unusual here, which is we wanna have you be our third responder, Toast, as we go through our submissions. So should we get to some of our letters and talk about…I know you have other specific stuff that you looked at, and I feel like these letters will prompt that sort of thing.
DT: Yeah, I’d love to sprinkle in some more thoughts throughout. Awesome.
FK: All right, well shall I read the first letter?
ELM: Please do, Flourish.
FK: All right, this one’s from an anonymous listener.
“Hello Fansplaining,
“I was so excited to hear you would be talking about fic portraying characters as trans and/or nonbinary. (Note: For brevity’s sake, I’ll use trans as an umbrella term, but I’m including the whole gender spectrum.)
“When I’m in fandoms that have little to no canon trans representation, it can be validating to see fanon trans content. Even just imagining that a character I love or relate to is trans can boost my own confidence in how I move around the world and express myself. Depicting characters as trans also allows me to flesh out characters in a way my friends and I can relate to.
“For instance, sometimes a character with healing abilities will mentor other characters, but we won’t know the full backstory of that relationship; I love to imagine these scenarios as a trans mentor who helps younger trans people get medical resources. As another example, one of my favorite characters feels disconnected from his childhood. I wrote a fic that required him to confront his past for other reasons, but I included details about my interpretation of him as a trans man who never got the boyhood he wanted or deserved.
“As these two examples show, I’ve written trans characters with a range of painful and uplifting experiences. In general, my fics tend to be bittersweet but ultimately hopeful. I do worry about the tone when I write trans fic, knowing that people are going to have different desires for trans representation.
“Self-consciousness often holds me back from including all my trans headcanons. People tend to default characters to cis even when nothing in canon says they have to be. I usually restrict the amount of characters that I depict as trans, and only include my headcanons if they’re especially relevant—as if I need to ‘earn’ a trans depiction. When I used to write characters with non-canonical gender-neutral pronouns, a lot of comments I got questioned that decision. As a result, I now stick to canon pronouns in my fics. On the other hand, I've gotten comments from people who found meaning, comfort, or catharsis in my portrayals, which definitely makes posting these works worth it.
“I do want to acknowledge that unfortunately, a lot of the ways in which fandom fails to be inclusive often apply to trans headcanons. You still see a prioritization of thin, white, able-bodied characters, as well as characters who are male in canon (regardless of what gender one is portraying them as). This obviously erases the diverse array of trans people who exist in real life. Issues also come up regarding stereotypical portrayals of trans people. Still, I’m glad more people are creating trans fan content, and I hope this area of fandom continues to evolve.
“Thanks again for featuring the voices of writers who depict characters as trans, and I hope you have a wonderful day.”
That was from anonymous.
ELM: That was a great letter to start off with, thank you very much, anonymous!
DT: Yeah, that was really interesting. I’m gonna jump in and just say that it makes me think a bit about which fandoms people tend to be really accepting of and excited about trans headcanons, and which fandoms maybe that’s less common, and of course I don’t really know what the reader response is to in different fandoms, but I can see which fandoms tend to give rise to a whole bunch of trans headcanons, and I find it really interesting that there were lots of fandoms that are podcast fandoms, or video game fandoms, as well as a bunch of animated properties, in the list of fandoms that had the most trans and nonbinary tagging in my analyses. And so I sort of find it fascinating and wonder whether or not it’s easier to portray those characters with more diversity in a number of dimensions, maybe, in the audio medium particularly.
So, Magnus Archives, The Adventure Zone, Penumbra Podcast, and several other podcasts just have a whole bunch of different characters that people frequently headcanon as trans or nonbinary, and I just find that, that sort of makes sense to me intuitively but I hadn’t really thought about that so much before.
ELM: That’s really interesting. I feel like it’s interesting to hear that you’re seeing it in narrative fiction podcasts and in video games, but not books? Because you would think that, like, I could see while film and television, you also have the actors, and there’s like, you have to kind of make an active decision to read against, you know, if it’s a cis actor playing a cis character, or like, ostensibly cis character in a show or whatever—you know what I mean, it’s kind of like racebending, right?
DT: [overlapping] Yeah, absolutely.
ELM: [overlapping] It’s analogous, right? But the fact that books, where it’s even less than voice actors being involved, or the visual representation in a video game, that’s interesting to me.
DT: Yeah, I agree, and I will say that some of this I think is just due to the baseline, which fandoms are getting really popular right now, and that there has been an increase of podcasts and video games and animated properties overall, over the past few years. And so some of this is just a function of that, I’m sure.
ELM: That’s interesting.
FK: At the same time I wonder whether part of it might be because books give you such a view into characters’ interiority? Obviously not every character, you know, but if you have a book that’s from their perspective and it’s in their head?
ELM: You say this, but…
FK: Not to say that that doesn’t lead you to…not to say that you can’t do it, but I wonder whether that would make people tend to be like, “OK, but we heard their thoughts, and it didn’t seem like they were, you know…”
ELM: Yeah, but, my counterargument is that’s never stopped anyone from making every single character in every single book ever published gay in fanfiction, right? Like, you know, even if like… [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] That is extremely true. [DT laughs]
ELM: [laughs] Even if we get a lot of their interior thoughts, and you have to create brand-new ones to explain that these—
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Yeah, even if their thoughts are about boobies!
[everyone laughs]
ELM: right, exactly, so.
FK: Even if they literally become the awooga wolf, you know…doesn’t matter!
[all still laughing]
ELM: No, I take your point Toast though, that like other than Harry Potter, and obviously Lord of the Rings probably continues to be a big book fandom, but those also have movies attached to them, right? We’ve talked about this in the past, it’s rare to find a popular book-based fandom that doesn’t have a visual component kind of overlaying people’s imaginations.
DT: Right. And Harry Potter was, in fact—there were a bunch of characters that showed up in my analyses, which is unsurprising because Harry Potter fandom is very large and shows up in almost all my analyses about anything, but yes. There were certainly books there, and the biggest ones were often represented, it was just interesting to me how much it was mostly other media types.
ELM: Interesting. OK, shall we move on to the next letter?
DT: Yeah!
FK: Let’s do it, I think this one’s a voicemail!
ELM: All right, next voicemail? Oh, you’re right! So, this is from Gavin Daphne, who’s actually the person who initially sent in a different voicemail asking if we could do an episode along these lines, and so we corresponded, and they offered to re-record talking about some of their own personal experiences writing. So I’m delighted to receive this, uh, expanded voicemail. So, let’s listen!
FK: Let’s do it.
Gavin Daphne: Hi Flourish, hi Elizabeth. My name is Gavin Daphne, they/them, and I’ve been a fan of the show since I saw you do a panel at Geek Girl Con a few years back. I wanted to talk a little about my experiences with gender and transformative fandom.
For background, I’m a nonbinary transfem who identifies as a lesbian. However, I was involved in transformative fandom spaces for a long time before I realized I was trans or queer. I spent a lot of time in heavily femslash-dominated fandoms, various anime fandoms, as well as Once Upon a Time and similar shows. I also sought out non-fandom sapphic romance novels.
I had a hard time connecting to male characters, either as viewpoints or as romantic interests. So when I discovered f/f fiction, it was a complete revelation. I knew these were the romantic stories I connected to the most, but since at the time I thought I was a straight guy, I didn’t really understand why. You had a guest on a while back who talked about femslash as being a liberating, empowering experience, and it is for me now, but at the time I was really ashamed of my interests and pretty furtive about them. However, in the end, they helped me come to terms with my identity, and I don’t know if I would have realized who I was as quickly without these stories and communities.
My interaction was transformative fandom and gender nowadays is a little different. I read a wide variety of fanfic, but whenever I get into a new fandom, I devour all the fics in the trans character and nonbinary character tags on AO3, and I even read things from fandoms I’m not in if they have those themes. I’ve also written a few fics exploring trans themes from different angles, usually in fandoms where I can’t find any other works like that. There’s a tremendous source of catharsis in reading and writing these stories, and I've been working on writing a transfem Garrus Vakarian fic that I don't know if I’ll ever publish, but I just needed to write.
Thanks for all you do, and I'm really looking forward to the episode.
FK: What a wonderful voicemail! I was really struck by how much that marches with some people that we’ve talked to in the past about how fanfic like, helped them see their own identities and how they were like, “Why am I interested in this? Ahh! Gotta figure it out!” Right? Across about gender and about sexuality, too.
ELM: Yeah, I was really struck by this voicemail, the kind of journey of it, right? The contrast between using femslash to come to that realization versus what they do now, which is like, look for more explicit…you know…I don’t know, it is very interesting to me, it makes me think too, like, Toast earlier, you were talking about gender, the gender tags…
DT: Yeah.
ELM: Writing about…gender doesn’t just mean… [laughs] I mean, all right, this is a big thorny ball of discourse, but like, to me, gender is connected to, like, theories about gender, and you know what I mean? People are like…is this too discoursey to go down this road?
FK: No, no, go down it!
ELM: You know what I mean, people are like, “My gender is a pizza” or whatever, and you’re like “OK, you do you.” But to me, gender is connected to structures of gender, and sex, and all these things, right, it’s related to like, it’s a theoretical concept. So I think that one of the things in that episode with breathedout, who we talked to about femslash, was talking about how so many of dude slash, like male/male slash fics, don’t deal with them as men? Right?
DT: Yeah.
ELM: And a lot of femslash inherently deals with these characters as women, and talks about gender, and like, their gendered experiences and gendered bodies and stuff, and it’s just very interesting to me to think about, especially to think about from the perspective of writing different kinds of people and different kinds of bodies and experiences.
DT: Yeah, absolutely.
FK: Definitely.
DT: Yeah, I love hearing about people’s journeys, and how they interact with fic that they’re writing or they’re reading, and of course this is something that tags very rarely pick up on. And sometimes you get a sense from authors’ notes, you know, about the journey that the author was on, and how a particular fic that they were writing helped them to think through aspects of identity, and I really enjoy getting those insights, but I also try and keep in mind when I’m doing analyses of tagging that that’s almost always going to miss out on things about where the author of a work was with regard to how the work helped them think through issues of identity. Because that’s just not usually how tagging works, and a lot of people either don’t know where they’re gonna end up on their journey or want to keep aspects of that private or so on.
So I just want to acknowledge that like, people are super interested in this kind of question and ask me things sometimes like, “Oh yeah, what do you know about the demographics of the people writing this kind of work?” and my analyses don’t get at that at all, but I love hearing stories like this.
FK: All right, well, shall I read the next letter then?
ELM: No, you read the last letter!
FK: All right, you wanna read the next letter?
ELM: Yeah, that’s the way we do it! When Toast is here we should make Toast read a letter.
DT: No!
[everyone laughs]
ELM: No, don’t worry Toast, you don’t have to read any letters. I’m excited that we have you responding to letters. But just before we move on, I really, Gavin Daphne, thank you so much for this, I really appreciate such a thoughtful voicemail. And also to have other people’s voices!
FK: Yay!
ELM: We have two voicemails in this episode, and I strongly encourage everyone in the future writing in to us to utilize the voicemail function. 1-401-526-FANS…OK. Anyway, our next letter is from…Elizabeth! So of course I have to read this. [DT laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Yeah you do!
ELM: [overlapping] It never should have been you, Flourish. [FK laughs] OK. Other Elizabeth writes:
“Hello Elizabeth and Flourish!
“Thank you for doing a trans episode of Fansplaining. I am an agender former kindergarten teacher so an educator at heart. If putting my own identities in a story is going to help someone know their options, feel less alone, or inform others I am all for that. Being under the trans umbrella myself it makes me feel more comfortable to be reading an author who knows we exist (or where a podcast host like Flourish has nonbinary pronouns). Just like when—”
[laughs] Flourish, Flourish is, uh, doing a little sparkly gesture right now. [FK laughs] Sparkly, is that the word I want?
FK: Sure.
ELM: Uh, anyway…
“Just like when disability appears in the text it does not have to be one of my own to let me relax more into the story knowing I am less likely to be hit with something ableist or in this case anti-trans.
“I am autistic, too, and as a group we skew more genderqueer than the population as a whole. With fanfic also having a significant portion of autistic participants it does not surprise me to have encountered as many trans readers and writers as I have. Fanfic has been an important way to fix our lack of representation in the source material for many fandoms. It has been a very natural thing for me to include trans major and minor characters like a pregnant dad side character, trans girl teen siblings, or agender reader insert because that is my world and people I know.
“Even when they don't get things right it impresses me to see people trying to be trans-inclusive. I see a lot of ‘gender neutral reader’ in the self-insert stories, but then some make the mistake of pairing it with an explanation like ‘female anatomy’ which even among cis women is not going to be standardized and ignores the fact that trans women have female body parts, too, no matter their surgical status. I leave encouraging comments where I can and drop in some vocabulary like ‘AFAB (assigned female at birth)’ being something they might want to use next time instead of ‘female body.’ But I can see they are trying though and learning as they go, sometimes for their own sake.
“There is also the joy of encountering excellent portrayals giving much needed diversity. Stories that mention top surgery, they/them pronouns, and the use of Mx. (that’s M-X) for a character have been heartwarming to see. That is why I explicitly have made agender and gender neutral characters once I started writing myself. When much of the focus in fanfic is romance it is all the more necessary for trans identities to get to see themselves in the narrative as a desirable partner. That’s not something I needed myself, but there is just as much pleasure seeing it knowing it reflects the real variety of the world and that it will benefit others.
“Just like being a physically disabled person, some days I’m just happy to know I exist in the universe a fanfic storyteller envisions. For my own work there was even the fun of writing a joke about they/them pronouns that only worked because the character was agender. Using my real life let me create novel content that I haven’t seen before. I like to use misdirection and ambiguity in my humor and ‘they’ being both singular and plural provided a good opportunity to cause confusion and show some popular characters as trans-positive, so that really felt good to be able to do that for myself as well as any other readers. Also, from a kindergarten teacher perspective, everybody should be included.
“So the first thing I ever wrote had an agender reader-insert and it was not something I had to think about. With no followers to lose as a new account the decision was easy to make, especially when I have never seen a story with an agender character in fanfiction. It reminds me of an answer recently on the the Scarleteen Tumblr where Mo who is trans himself wrote ‘being your authentic self with people, and asking them to respect your gender identity, means that it’ll be really obvious which people don’t get it and don’t have an interest in trying.’ If you are not cool with who I am, why would I care to have you in my audience? If there is any theme to my writing it is be yourself.
“Categorizing appropriately on AO3 is one issue I have encountered as a writer with nonbinary characters. When asking about that I was pleased to get a response back that some sort of nonbinary identity for the relationship checkboxes is in the works eventually. It has been literally othering to have to use the ‘other’ category geared for genderless robots and aliens.
“Thank you for encouraging participation! Sincerely, Elizabeth.”
FK: Aw man, Toast, Toast, [DT laughs] tell us about those checkboxes! [everyone laughs]
DT: Yeah, this was such an interesting letter to hear, and it actually made me run off and do a little bit of extra stats on the relationship categories, and how they relate to trans and nonbinary character tagging on AO3. Sure enough, the “other” tag out of the relationship tags is by far the most commonly co-occurring with both “trans” and “nonbinary character” tags. It especially gets used, disproportionately, with “nonbinary character” which is not surprising, ‘cause I think that’s where it’s most likely to come up that none of the other tags feel right, but yeah. The “other” tag has 3x as much use as the “trans” tag and 11x as much of the “nonbinary” tag as the other AO3 relationship category tags sort of averaged together. So I can see that there’s a lot of use of it now, and I am excited to know that AO3 is considering how best to offer categories that feel better and less othering.
ELM: Yeah, I’m really curious to know what they’re thinking along those lines, because I feel like the trouble is, just adding “nonbinary” or something is just adding one more thing to a limited list, basically, right? But I don’t, you know, maybe there’s a way that those tags could be…that fill-in could potentially be a little more freeform.
DT: Yeah.
FK: I mean—
ELM: I don’t know. [laughs]
FK: It makes me feel like maybe, I mean you know, one of the reasons that those exist at all comes from the time when AO3 was founded, when frankly, there were a bunch of people who only wanted to read slash, or who did not want to read slash ever, right?
ELM: Sure.
DT: Right.
FK: And so like, any archive that was going to have a lot of stuff, that was something people really wanted to do, was to be able to say, “I never want to see x kind of thing.” And I wonder whether…I guess as fandom we haven’t grown out of that, but I sort of wish we had. [laughs] You know?
ELM: Well, you say that about slash, but I, would you begrudge a person who just wanted to read femslash? Probably not. If you’re like, “I am looking for sapphic romance!”
FK: Yeah, no, not at all, and I mean I guess…although that’s weird to me, I understand that there are people who…that’s probably also my bias about how I use it, right, ’cause I’m usually looking for particular characters.
ELM: Sure, but—
FK: [overlapping] Whereas there are totally people who are just like, “I wanna read all the sapphic romance on this here website,” yeah, fair enough.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, and I mean, maybe less of a moral high ground on this one, but yeah, there’s tons of people who just wanna read male/male romance, right? Or just wanna read het romance, right? I’m sure people look for like, highly rated fics in certain tropes.
FK: Oh, no doubt, no doubt.
ELM: So, and I mean yeah, I think all three of us are coming from a perspective of like, “That’s the opposite of the way I think fanfic should—” [DT and FK laugh] You know what I mean? ’Cause we’re all coming from a very character- and fandom-first, but like. I think the one thing we’ve seen in our research for this podcast and our surveys is, a lot of people are approaching it from that direction.
DT: Right.
FK: [simultaneous] Yeah, all right.
ELM: And, for these folks who are looking for, you know, nonbinary romance, for agender romance, etcetera etcetera…
FK: Yeah, that’s very true.
ELM: Even more so! You know?
FK: Yeah, and you know, I wasn’t thinking about using that as a way to like, create a subset of your favorite ship that only is like, showing one of them as, I’m thinking about like, there’s all sorts of ships where there’s a chunk of it is nonbinary and that could be another way to filter, and be like, “I only wanna see fics with this ship that are labeled as being not a male/female romance.” But with this ship, you know?
ELM: Yeah. But it might be just one half of the ship. I don’t know, it gets so thorny that it’s hard to, at a certain point there’s…tags are limited, in a certain degree, at a certain point you’re not gonna be able to do it with checkboxes.
DT: Yeah. I was just thinking how hard it is to think about like, indeed, how would you filter out, for instance, just amongst, if you have a favorite ship, how would you filter out the things that are about alien and robot and so on AUs, and just leave the things that are sort of, humans of various genders but in ways that are inclusive of the ones you want and not exclusive [laughs] of anyone inadvertently. So like, yeah, it’s interesting to try to think about what kind of relationship tag could possibly be really useful there, and I can see how “other” would feel potentially, indeed, othering, but it is hard to figure out what else you would offer besides like, “misc” or something, that also is not specific at all! [everyone laughs]
FK: My, my gender is the contents of your junk drawer. [ELM and DT laugh]
DT: Yeah, the freeform idea is really interesting, I wonder, I sort of suspect that that’s probably not very feasible just on the back end, because I think that relationship categories are probably, you know, built to be a very finite set. But I’m very curious to see what thinking they come up with here.
ELM: I mean this, this whole stream of this conversation makes me think, for the 9,000th time a day, just how limited tagging can be and how relying wholly on tagging and search to find fic…I don’t know, it is quite limiting, right? You know, these are the kind of details that could be pretty easily captured in a rec. Some of the granularity of it, I think you really need something like that, and you’re not gonna be able to do it with a bunch of tags. I don’t know, it’s hard.
DT: Yeah.
ELM: There’s so many things in this letter, I gotta say, aside from us immediately zeroing in on the last section, that were great, and I appreciate how much positivity and the constructive, educating element was such a strong theme throughout.
Not to zero in on the other point of critique, but I think it’s a really important one, and it makes me think about our episode a few months back on this, but the bit about female bodies in a reader-insert fic was really interesting to see, because I think it’s something that, we both see reader inserts in our journeys, in our kind of academic interest sort of journeys through fandom, but we’re not active participants in these communities.
And it is something that I had noticed a lot of, but not something I’d ever read deeply. And…I always do wonder…I think it makes me think of that letter we got from Anisa Khalifa about specificity, universality through specificity, and all that stuff, it made me think about some of those things. People are trying to be super blank but instead they wind up, like, shutting the door on people’s way in because they claim to be universal but actually—you know what I mean? It’s kind of the flip side of that, if that makes sense?
FK: Totally. Well, there’s also the aspect that like, I mean, I am not a binary trans person myself, but many people I know who are have told me about how much they’ve enjoyed reading things from a cis female perspective or a cis male perspective, and really identifying—like, sort of sinking into that in a way. Right? As one pleasure among many, obviously, I don’t think that any of those people would say like “And by the way, I never want to read about another trans person,” but I think that there’s, you know, that’s another aspect of this, what is the relationship between the reader and the sort of vessel that they’re being asked to identify with? [FK and ELM laugh] And it’s not a one-to-one correlation, right? But it can be, and maybe it’s extra nice in some ways when it is, but it’s also extra nice in some ways when it isn’t, it’s just a question of what you want to get out of that.
ELM: Yeah.
DT: That’s really interesting.
FK: All right, well, on that note, we’ve been going a little while and we’ve got a little more to read and talk about, so should we take a quick break right now?
ELM: Yeah, we should!
DT: Yay!
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back! And before we get back to the letters, we should say a couple of words about how you can support this podcast, and also how you can send in voicemails and letters of your own.
ELM: I already told people how they could send in voicemails!
FK: Well, we need to say it again.
ELM: All right. Let’s talk about Patreon first. So, that is how we fund the podcast, that is how we pay our transcriptionists, our hosting fees, how we keep the metaphorical lights on, and that’s patreon.com/fansplaining. We have a lot of rewards, Toast here is a patron.
DT: Oh yeah!
ELM: Not to blow up your spot Toast. Toast is still on the line in case you were wondering. [everyone laughs] And Toast collaborated with us on our last Tiny Zine which went out to $10 patrons. We’ll be doing another Tiny Zine at some point in the coming months, in addition to special episodes for $3/month patrons. Flourish just needs to actually watch some television, so we can talk about it.
FK: [laughs] Sorry.
ELM: [laughs] Move it.
FK: My television watching schedule was interrupted by a long train trip. [laughs]
ELM: That is false. Flourish and I had lunch yesterday and Flourish talked to me about a television show that they watched and did not like, and we are not going to be talking about it on the podcast. So I in fact know you have been watching TV.
FK: [laughs] That’s true. OK.
ELM: [overlapping] Spot. Blown. Up.
FK: All right, you’re right. You’re right. OK. But there’s other ways people can support us, and the one that we want to highlight right now is sending us a voicemail, which is by phone, at 1-401-526-FANS. As you can hear, we then play your voice on the air! The metaphorical air. [DT laughs] We’re not like, on radio waves. Anyway, we play it and it’s really nice ‘cause then you get to hear other people’s voices than just ours.
And we really really value everybody’s, you know, ideas, thoughts, comments, because they help us make new episodes like this one and think of episode topics, and all of that. You can also email us your thoughts at fansplaining@gmail.com, or send them in a Tumblr ask—our askbox is open, anon is on. We’ve also got a form on our website. Communicate with us on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram if you really felt the urge. Uh…yeah! What else?
ELM: [laughs] I think that’s it!
FK: OK great. In that case, shall I read our next letter?
ELM: Yeah, do it!
FK: This one is from AlessNox:
“Hello Flourish and Elizabeth, I hope that you are doing well. I do enjoy each podcast.
“This is in response to your call about people who have written trans characters in their fanfiction. I have written a trans character before, and I am not trans.
“I find that writing a character unlike you is one of the best ways to empathize with someone unlike you. By imaging the day-to-day life of the character, you can see the problems they face, how they are perceived and how they might perceive themselves.
“While writing the trans character in my story, I realized that I couldn’t write THE trans story, because there is not a single trans story. Because the journey depends on so many factors such as family acceptance, society the person lives in, age of transition, local laws, and even physical appearance. Each trans person’s story is unique.
“Writing the story allowed me to explore what it feels like to be misgendered on purpose. How delicate a romantic situation might be. How ecstatic it would feel to find someone who knows who you are, and accepts and even loves it. How devastating when it doesn’t work out.
“I understand that writing outside your own experience is a risk. Yes, it is possible to go very wrong when imaging the problems of people unlike you, but I think that not imaging it, and not writing characters unlike you causes its own set of problems that can be worse. The strength of writing is that you can imagine a life outside of your own experience. And if you can help yourself understand the challenges of another person’s life, then you can convince others.
“Sincerely, AlessNox.”
DT: I thought this was a really interesting letter, and I took a quick look at AlessNox’s fic that she’s talking about, because I was in the Sherlock fandom for a long time, and was curious which character she’d written as trans. So I saw that it was actually an original character, and that sent me off on a little path to doing more stats, because this is something that I saw in a bunch of things when I was doing stats last fall, but mostly I was focused on the characters who are from canon and how often they were getting tagged as trans or nonbinary. So this letter made me actually excited to look at how often original characters are tagged as trans.
So I looked at both the “original character” tag and the “original works” tag on AO3, and found that “trans” and “nonbinary character” tags were used 2–4x as often for original characters as for AO3 overall. So, I know that’s just focusing in on a tiny aspect of this letter, but yeah. I was excited for a prompt to do more stats, thank you, AlessNox. [ELM and FK laugh]
ELM: That’s like the greatest gift someone could give you.
DT: Oh yeah!
ELM: A reason to do more stats.
DT: Yes.
ELM: No, it’s, it’s interesting to me, it makes me wonder, beyond trans characters, how often people make OCs like, more diverse, essentially.
DT: Yeah.
ELM: That’s a weird way to say it, but you know what I mean. Like giving one or more marginalized identities, as opposed to overlaying that on a character who has been otherwise stated, right? Like, are more OCs…I definitely, anecdotally, have noticed in heavily white canons, the like, real smart OC of color and you’re like, “OK.” You know?
DT: [laughs] Yes.
ELM: OK. And great, like great, if you have to write an OC, sure, don’t make it a white guy, right? There’s no need. But I can also see…I don’t know, I think it’s a little complicated whether we’re talking about race or whether we’re talking about gender or whatever.
FK: Yeah. I mean, I really appreciated this letter, because I…I mean, I’ve written OCs of races other than my own, and I don’t know, I mean obviously I too felt nervous about writing something outside of my own identity, and I also agree that like, it’s a good thing for people to try to do that and then to hopefully take criticism when and if they get it wrong, right? So I think that’s cool. Like, it’s complicated.
ELM: You saying that what I just described is something you’ve done? [DT laughs]
FK: Ah, it was not in a super white story.
ELM: OK.
FK: It was in something that has canonically got a lot of, [everyone laughs] a lot of people of color in it.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, Yeah. Something that I’ve…I’ve observed a lack of, in some fics, a lack of interest in engaging with the few nonwhite characters in the canon, and like, creating a super hyper-competent OC, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah, no, this was—
ELM: [overlapping] You know what I’m talking about.
FK: [overlapping] This was…to defend myself, [ELM laughs] this had two major characters of color, two major white characters, and a nonwhite OC as well as a bunch of different other OCs. There you go, I’m defended. Defending!
ELM: [overlapping] All right, that’s fine, you’re allowed to write OCs, I too have written some OCs, sometimes you just need a, a different person to do something in the story.
FK: [overlapping, laughing] A person who is not… [DT laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Anyway.
ELM: Extra person. [FK laughs] Yeah, no, I think it’s, I was wondering if we were going to get any responses from people who were not trans or nonbinary. I think this is something that I think that people don’t agree on, right?
FK: Yeah, for sure.
ELM: Like, I think it’s worth saying, not to continually draw parallels between the “Race and Fandom” episodes but I think there are some definite parallels here, and I think we had some guests in those who were like, “Why aren’t you writing characters of color? Just do it! Don’t tell me you’re afraid, just do it!” And other people being like, “White people fuck this up all the time. Stop!” You know? [FK laughs] And it’s like, “Yeah, ah, OK!” You know?
DT: Yeah.
ELM: And I feel like this is a little bit of a same situation, I think that we’ve talked about whether the Own Voices concept should apply to fanfiction. And not just that, but like, a cis person writing a trans character, not a trans person writing a cis character, right—like, the person in the dominant group writing the marginalized identity, I just want to clarify that. I think it’s a challenging…obviously people will disagree.
DT: Yep.
FK: For sure. All right, well, will you read the next letter for us, Elizabeth?
ELM: Yes, I will read it! OK. This is from Flash:
“Hi Flourish and Elizabeth! I'm writing in response to your recent call for perspectives from trans people who write trans characters in fic, and this is something I do quite a bit, especially the past few years.
“My fannish name is Flash and I'm a queer trans man. I've been writing fic for many years now and I think I can trace starting to incorporate trans headcanons into my stories to the 2017 Power Rangers movie.”
OK, I gotta say sidenote, I’m elderly, I didn’t know there was a Power Rangers movie in 2017.
FK: Oh yeah, there was. [DT laughs] There was.
ELM: I’m sorry Flash, I totally missed it.
FK: They did not do a very good job, I think, of marketing it to nostalgic Millennials and then they complained that nostalgic Millennials didn’t come.
ELM: I gotta, I also think I was slightly, slightly too old for, people I babysat for were into Power Rangers. Sorry, this is totally, totally my own journey, I’m making this about me.
FK: [overlapping] Ah, well, there, it was in between you and me because I was totally into Power Rangers.
ELM: Yeah. We’re, we’re two years apart, which means that conceivably someone would have paid me to babysit you, which is absurd.
[DT and FK laugh]
FK: Can you imagine?
ELM: You know? Like I was, at age 11 I was paid to babysit 9-year-olds, and I was like “I don’t think I’m that much more competent, and you’re letting me talk to the pizza man.”
FK: [overlapping] It’s true though, yeah! Absolutely.
ELM: But anyway, OK, sorry. Sorry Flash. OK. All right. So. [laughs] Um…so, the 2017 Power Rangers movie.
“I wanted them to make a sequel and I wanted Tommy to appear and be a trans guy, but I couldn’t be sure any of that would happen so I wrote it myself.
“The story, ‘Sparkles Like an Emerald (But It’s Plastic Just the Same),’ is one of my longer works and I began writing it when I was still fairly early in my own transition. I was able to use my writing to work through issues with dysphoria, family reactions, and so on. When I finally finished it, I was in a much different place than when I started, so it was interesting to revisit past me and what I was dealing with through fic.
“The other character I most write as trans is Illya—”
Apologies to Russian people and The Man From UNCLE fandom—
“Kuriyakin from the 60s show The Man From UNCLE. I'm not sure how that headcanon started—I think it was mainly, I like the character and I'm trans so why not? I've written a few fics with trans!Illya and frequently come back to him. With this canon, I like exploring transness in a historical context. Trans and queer history is a special interest of mine, so figuring out how Illya’s transition would work is something I like. I also just like writing him as trans.
“(I’ve also always wanted to write a Trek fic where they can’t get Kirk back into his body at the end of ‘Turnabout Intruder’ and he has to transition in space.)”
FK: YEEEESS!! [DT laughs]
ELM: I knew Flourish would be jazzed about this one.
“I hope this is the sort of thing that you're looking for! I know I'll keep writing trans headcanons and I was excited to talk at you about them. Thanks for the opportunity! — Flash.”
FK: [laughing] Can I just—
ELM: [simultaneous] I gotta say, we’re looking at a Google doc right now, is this what you were gonna say too? And it underlined “at you…” [everyone laughs] as a grammatical…it’s such a fandom way to speak, and it’s like, Google Docs is like, “I’m not familiar, do you mean ‘talk to you?’” [FK and DT laugh] It’s like, nope, no, that’s not what we mean.
FK: I, I believe that it was actually, it may have been at Elizabeth and Toast but it was to me, [ELM and DT laugh] because “Turnabout Intruder” is like, it’s so terrible and bad at gender, but it’s also so good—it’s one of those things that’s like so bad it’s like, “Oh shit! This is gonna give me all the thoughts and gender feelings, what the fuck!”
ELM: Good. [laughs]
FK: So there you go. Anyway, that’s my big reaction to this. [everyone laughs] No,
I have another reaction though, which is it’s interesting…I think about how people, this relates to what we were talking about earlier with reader fic, you know, reader insert fic, people talk a lot about self-insert fanfic and Mary Sues and things like this in the context of presumed cis women writing fanfic, but obviously that’s only one of the many ways that people explore who they are and what they’re going through, through a fictional character that they’re writing. Either as a self-insert, or as identifying with a particular character, or whatever. Obviously we don’t, I mean, you know, when cis men do it I think people find it like, “Well that’s just fiction.” [DT laughs] But this is like, you know? I mean in a dismissive way.
DT: Right.
FK: Like it kinda is. But this is a different angle on that, and I think it would be…I would be really interested to hear from other people about this, and whether other trans people also have explored their own transition, their own gender through that.
ELM: Yeah, it’s interesting too because of the, obviously not every person under this broad trans umbrella has, like, transition isn’t a universal experience. Whatever transition even means, obviously.
FK: Right.
ELM: I feel like I’m just pullin’ out all the discourse greatest hits. [FK laughs] But it is interesting to think, when you think about exploring elements of your personal identity through various characters in fic, this sort of journey element that Flash was describing…I mean obviously everyone goes through journeys, right, and you could write about, be very firm in your gender and write about it one way…I don't’ know, whatever, you age, right, you could read something you wrote 15 years ago and be like, “Oh, this is what I thought life was, and look at where I’ve come.” That kind of thing, right? But I think there’s something really specific about the idea of a transition, and a transitional journey, and being able to like, work through that with fictional characters, I think its very interesting, and feels like very particular, to gender to me.
DT: Yeah.
FK: Yeah, absolutely.
DT: Yep.
ELM: OK, so Flash, you’re gonna write that fic for Flourish…
FK: YEAH! Please!
ELM: Yeah! You know, Flourish really likes gift fics.
FK: [laughs] I am not asking—
DT: [laughs] Who doesn’t?
FK: I’m not like, “Now you’re gonna write me this, right?” [ELM and DT laugh] That’s Elizabeth doing that.
ELM: Yeah, no, I did my part, I wrote you fic, now it’s Flash’s turn.
FK: Maybe I’ll write this fic, have you thought of that?
ELM: Oh wow, write it for Flash! [laughs]
FK: I’ll write it for Flash! I might genuinely write this fic, ’cause I’m very excited about it.
ELM: [overlapping, laughing and going squeaky] Oh my God, you’re gonna steal Flash’s idea! [BIG laugh from DT]
FK: I might—well—you can have two people—OK look. Every trans person in the world who has seen “Turnabout Intruder” has had a related idea to this. I’m just saying. OK. All right. Shall we move on to the next letter?
ELM: It’s the last letter, it’s a voicemail!
FK: Oh my God, you’re right! It is a voicemail! Shall we listen to our last voicemail?
ELM: We absolutely should.
FK: All right, let’s do it.
Thomas: My name is Thomas, he/him pronouns. I am a long-time listener. I’ve been reading and writing fanfiction for most of my life. I used to be in the fanfiction community more heavily when I was younger, but not so much these days—it’s more reading and writing and sharing it with maybe my close friends, if anybody.
But I have a lot to say about your question about writing trans and genderqueer and nonbinary characters—and also reading, so I guess to start on the reading front. Fanfiction has always been this really important source of authentic writing about queer people, by queer people—and that was before I was trans, before I knew I was trans—but since coming out and since sort of understanding myself better, having this source of writing by and for and about trans people has been really important. And you know, I don't want to say that that’s all, that what fanfiction about trans characters and characters who aren’t trans in canon, but are in the story, that’s not all of it. That’s one of the reasons—one of the very important reasons—that people write it.
You know, there’s a dark side, too. As a trans person who is very familiar with fandom, I kind of have this theory—you know, I don’t want to call anyone out particularly or even, like, point fingers, but some of the times when I read a trans character, a character who is cis often in the, you know, I'm a transmasculine person, so I'm often reading, you know, either assigned female at birth characters who are like, oh what if they were genderqueer or transmasculine, or assigned male at birth characters who, you know, if you added that they had transitioned at some point in their life, and that that masculine identity was a trans identity, then that adds an interesting dynamic, dimension. I think a good example of that is Zuko, from Avatar, he has a lot of transmasculine, nonbinary writing about him—Sokka to a certain extent, but Zuko is the one that I think actual trans people have really, like, latched onto as a character that they identify with on some level, myself included.
But yeah, again, there is a weird side, where sometimes, it feels like we're writing these characters and we want to see authentic stories about trans people, and then other times it feels like maybe cis writers or writers who haven't done enough research, who are writing trans bodies, because what they want is mpreg, and I don't want to accuse anyone of that necessarily, but sometimes it feels like, “Oh, I can write this body that's masculine and attractive in ways that I like, but it can get pregnant, it can do all these things…” Which, you know, with mpreg, there's fantasy for that, but it really...just the fact that people, maybe not trans people are writing trans bodies for reasons other than wanting an authentic trans representation, and that can go in directions that are, you know, sometimes dehumanizing. Like, it's not that trans people don't get pregnant, but it can be, if you're a trans person looking for a story about trans people, especially if you're a transmasculine person, like, sometimes you do, you may want to be someone who gets pregnant, but you maybe, you know, have a really like big fear of pregnancy, that may be part of your gender feelings, and it's a lot to stumble on—oh, and then here’s this character getting pregnant.
Not that you can’t filter for that stuff, but it’s just interesting to see the different ways that trans bodies are being kind of pulled into this like, cis fantasy and kind of processing of gender. And on the other hand, there are trans people who are trying to write very authentically. So it’s kind of a mixed bag, but it's the only place where this mixed bag is even happening. So ultimately, I really do think fanfiction is a really important thing for a lot of trans people, for me especially. And, you know, just…you gotta keep poking around for the good stuff, I guess. And then when you can't find that, you write your own.
Thanks for listening to me. Bye, guys.
ELM: All right, Thomas, thank you so much for this very thoughtful voicemail, and an interesting, we chose the order, but I found this, when you suggested it, Flourish, to be a really interesting one to end on. I feel like there’s a bunch for us to discuss.
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: A bunch of…things. I, I had no…what’s the part of speech? A bunch to discuss. [FK and DT laugh]
FK: A bunch!
ELM: [laughs] I don’t even know the parts of speech.
FK: [overlapping] Like, like it’s a bunch of bananas and one of them is like, mpreg, and one of them is like, transmasculine characters in relationship to…
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, a bunch of bananas here. [laughs] You are doing some heavy eyebrow lifting when you said “bananas.”
[everyone laughs]
FK: Bananas.
ELM: Stop. You’re making bananas so weird. OK. So.
FK: [laughing] I didn’t even think it was weird, I didn’t even know what the brows were about, I guess my subconscious knew.
ELM: All right, I am cutting you off right now. OK, so, there’s a lot of things I find really interesting, and I really appreciate Thomas’ willingness to go for some of the critiques as well—everyone who brought up some of the more negative stuff, I think it’s important to talk about. And pregnancy is really interesting to me, and this immediately made me think of like, a kind of discourse point I’ve seen brought up a lot in the last, probably five years or so, saying that mpreg, the kinds of mpreg I’ve always known and I assume the two of you have always known, like, the old fanfiction classic, is inherently transphobic. You know, the kind of mpreg that I’ve read in the past is like, a dude, and didn’t know it but like, he’s like, “What’s that?” and then is like, “What, this guy can get pregnant?” and then everyone’s like, “That’s super strange!” Right?
DT: Right.
FK: Yep.
ELM: So like, I get it.
FK: And then there’s a butt involved.
ELM: A butt?
FK: I mean then the baby comes out the butt.
DT: Right.
FK: [laughs] I’m just saying, that’s in a lot of old-fashioned mpreg, which I always find weird.
ELM: Uh…I’ve read a lot of old-fashioned mpreg, and oftentimes the body makes a hole.
[everyone laughs]
FK: Well, either one is weird in its own way.
ELM: [simultaneous] A new hole.
[all still laughing]
FK: A hole! Just a hole.
ELM: [overlapping] Or, or, I have seen a lot of, and obviously this is where A/B/O lives as well, the omegaverse, like, a world of, where male pregnancy is a thing. Right?
FK: Absolutely, Yep.
DT: Right.
ELM: And they’re using words like “breeders” or something like that, you know, where it’s part of the…
FK: And sometimes depicting those male characters as like, especially when it’s like that, sometimes depicting those characters as intersex, although not saying intersex. Or like, you know, nonbinary or anything like that, being like “No, I’m a man, I just have like, lots of bits.”
ELM: I think…All right, not to go too far astray of this letter but I do think it’s interesting that no one brought up omegaverse, because I feel like that kind of thing can bring out the highs and the lows [everyone laughs] of interesting gender exploration. And I get it, omegaverse is not my thing, I don’t know if it’s, it’s definitely Toast’s thing, so maybe Toast you could talk about it a little bit here, put you on the spot, go!
DT: Uh…I’m not actually…super into omegaverse except statistically I find it fascinating. Um…but… [ELM and FK laugh]
FK: Toast, Toast, that’s the highest compliment you can give anything, so, that’s basically like saying “I want to marry omegaverse.”
ELM: [overlapping] Didn’t you— No, you wrote one.
DT: Yeah yeah yeah! No, I mean, sorry, no shade to omegaverse, I just meant I’m not widely read in it. And yeah, I totally wrote an omegaverse once because like, I couldn’t find a threesome alpha/beta/omega fic, [laughs] and I wanted to know how that would work! And write dystopian nursery rhymes. So yes, I totally did once write an omegaverse fic, I just didn’t want to be put on the spot as an expert, ’cause I feel like I haven’t read as much as, you know, one should to be an expert. But yes. [laughs]
ELM: Oh my gosh.
DT: Anyway, this was yet another letter that gave me a delightful prompt to jump off and do more stats, because I hadn’t looked at pregnancy-related tags in “trans” and “nonbinary character” tags, but when I did, I saw that indeed, the phenomenon that this writer is talking about sort of shows up a bit in the tags in that “trans” is way more likely to co-occur with “pregnancy” as a tag or with “pregnancy kink” also, than AO3 overall. Which does not mean that everybody writing trans male characters are writing them from a kink perspective, I also saw examples of tags where people use a tag like “trans male pregnancy written by a trans guy,” so I saw a mix of reasons that these tags were co-occurring. But definitely it was the case that “trans” and specifically “trans male character” co-occurred more with “pregnancy” tag than AO3 overall.
“Mpreg” also showed up some with “trans male character,” about 2x as often as AO3 average, whereas the “pregnancy” tag itself was 4x more likely to occur with “trans male character” than with AO3 overall. And the “pregnancy kink” tag actually 9x more likely to occur with “trans male character” than AO3 overall. But these are still pretty small numbers, just calling that out.
ELM: Nine, though. Nine is a lot.
DT: Nine! Oh it’s, it’s interesting. Also interesting to me was “nonbinary character” has about the same amount of pregnancy tagging as AO3 overall.
ELM: This is all really interesting to me, because it’s like, you know, if I’m understanding Thomas, the way Thomas is framing it, correctly, it’s like, that old-school mpreg we’re talking about, maybe there’s some of that, but this feels different, this is…
DT: Yeah.
ELM: You want a more real-world way to describe why maybe a canonically cis male actor is pregnant in your fic, right? You know?
DT: Right. Sure.
ELM: The character they’re playing, not the, you know what I mean. I don't know. I was just gonna name a man, [DT laughs] and I feel, I’m like, Billy Eichner, like, for a dollar…
FK: [overlapping] Jensen Ackles! [ELM and DT laugh] Jensen Ackles is always the one who’s pregnant in this situation. It was Jensen’s thing.
ELM: [overlapping, laughing] I was— Yeah, you’re right. I thought of, what’s his name, who’s that man, who’s Captain America? Chris Evans. Right?
DT: Right. [laughs]
ELM: We went in different—we went in similar but different directions, is what I would say Flourish. But I get why people would have trouble with the classic mpreg too, but in a way that at least gives a sort of like, a little bit of a magical distance.
Flourish: Agreed.
ELM: Right? And you’re not like, kind of butting up against people’s real experiences. I obviously understand why a lot of transmasc people would not want to read about, you know, like, obviously transmasc people can be pregnant. Right? But I understand why a lot of folks are also not into that, for so many reasons relating to gender, right?
DT: Yep.
FK: Yeahhh. [ELM laughs] And with mpreg like, also I imagine it’s probably part of the…part of the whole tone of the story, right? Like, if I read about mpreg, I think that often my assumption is that there’s this heavy romance element, and that like, it’s all, I mean this is not necessarily true, there’s all sorts of people who write mpreg in all sorts of ways, but a lot of times there’s this heavy romance element, and it’s like, all a way to have these two ostensibly gay male characters in an extremely heteronormative happy relationship, parenting a child. And like, that’s the end. A lot of times, when I’ve read it, it’s been like that.
ELM: That’s so interesting, ’cause I know it’s the stereotype but this is like, very little of what I’ve read, it’s usually like—
FK: That’s wild! Very little of what you’ve read? [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Well my ship is, my ship is Cherik, you know, like…
FK: [laughing, DT laughs] OK, well, that’s, to be fair, you’re right, and like, they’re not tending to be…
ELM: [overlapping, laughing] It’s like, someone’s got a surprise secondary mutation, and the other one’s like, “Fuck!” Right?
FK: Yeah.
DT: Right.
ELM: And then they’re like, surly about it but then it’s cute, and then, or it’s not, and then they fight with each other and argue, and then. You know what I mean.
FK: But they end up coparenting. All I’m saying is like—
ELM: No, not necessarily, Flourish.
FK: Oh my God, that’s great! OK, maybe I need to read more in Cherik of this. You’re right.
ELM: [overlapping] It’s Cherik, get with the program! Come on.
FK: But anyway, all I’m saying is I think that there’s some, that is a stereotype that, it is what I’ve read, it's not what you’ve read, there’s lots of stuff in the world—
ELM: No, I’ve read a fair, fair amount over the years, I understand what you're saying.
FK: Yeah, so like, I think that there’s an assumption, whereas like, if you’re reading something and it’s like, this is about a trans man, then you kind of, and it’s tagged that way? I kind of would expect there to be something like, “OK, well, this is a really, really big deal.” So like, I would want that centered, right? And maybe not, them not being OK with it or whatever, and if then that turns into a very sugary fic about how this is all chill and there’s a moment to freak out, but then everything’s cool and I’m just experiencing the miiiiracle of liiiife, OK. [everyone laughs]
ELM: I mean you read a lot more het, I think, than either Toast or I do. I wonder about like, m/f pregnancy fic and how often it’s about like, the full spectrum of what baby creation is. ’Cause I also, there was one very memorable Harry/Draco fic I read back in the day where it’s one of those worlds, and now we’re just talking about mpreg but I’m gonna keep going, where it’s a world where some cis men can become pregnant, and it’s about postpartum depression. And it was just like, really sad, right?
FK: Wow.
ELM: And I was like, “Oh, hey, this feels like it was written by someone who has been pregnant, and this is like a part of life.” You know? And yeah, I, I totally get what you’re saying, that I feel like a lot of the time it is about a domestic fantasy.
DT: Yeah.
FK: For what it’s worth, just since you asked about the het romance aspect, I feel like I’ve, I kind of rarely see, I rarely read fic where pregnancy and especially children later are a big deal? And when I do, I mean I have read a bunch of stuff where it is, there’s sort of two categories, and one category is the aggressively heteronormative category… [everyone laughs] Just like, we’re going to write a generational saga, but a big part of it is going to be just like with one big happy Weasley family, everybody gets married and has children, and then their children carry things on in the next generation, and isn’t it great that they have like five children, and you’re like, oh, OK.
ELM: Look, that’s, that’s very canonically oriented.
FK: Right. And then the other…I wasn’t even talking about in Harry Potter fandom, that was just an example, this happens across… And then the other possibility is there’s some fandoms, like The X-Files for instance, where a character’s fertility or something like that is a central theme? And so like, in X-Files fandom, I’ve seen a really, really nuanced set of different ideas about pregnancy because that’s in a kind of sexist way made central to Scully’s character. [laughs]
DT: Yeah.
FK: And so people then have to deal with it. Like, it’s very very hard to write a fic where…
ELM: Yeah, I’m certain that there must be some strand of the Avengers fandom because similarly they made that central to Black Widow’s character.
FK: [overlapping] Exactly, right, there has to be.
ELM: Sorry, I feel like I led us down a pregnancy rabbit hole here a little bit, but it is a subject that I feel like we don’t talk a ton about, and yeah, I think there are ways that people…to me, pregnancy is very gendered, and I think to some people it maybe is less so, and…I don’t know, the things that Thomas was describing make me feel also like, ugh, I would hate to encounter that. Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, if it felt like people were kind of using transness as a way to like… I don’t know, just using it, you know what I mean?
DT: Right.
ELM: As a way to give a baby to the specific body that they want without actually like, engaging with anything beyond that, just as an excuse. When you could just have someone have a secondary mutation! [FK and DT laugh] If you just want a reason!
DT: And introducing magical pregnancy, you know, via mpreg or omegaverse or what have you, feels like a different, much less loaded thing, to just use that to magically give someone pregnancy, than to use transness to magically give someone pregnancy. It feels like one should be doing a lot more thinking around what that actually means, in the latter situation.
ELM: Absolutely.
FK: And I think it’s also, like, none of that assumes, I don’t know how other trans people feel about mpreg or anything like that, honestly I find reading that, even reading very very silly mpreg, I don’t always love it, but I often find that it’s kind of nice to think about pregnancy as something that is kind of divorced from gender, as a nonbinary person who was assigned female at birth, that’s like, kind of nice for me actually. To think of it in those ways.
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
DT: Huh.
FK: But that’s not, that’s not the same thing as reading a story about a character who’s stated to be trans and then like, that’s used, right, those are two different issues.
ELM: I mean this is kind of what I was getting at with saying that I think pregnancy is very tied to gender, is like, I feel the same way about mpreg, and maybe that’s a problematic element of mpreg, right, you know? But I don't know, maybe not. One of our letter-writers had a passing reference to robots and aliens and stuff when it came to gender-neutral or agender representation, and we’ve talked about this in the past, too—if it’s only robots and aliens, it’s not great, but there is also some element of…metaphors can give people more space, and actually find the space to relate.
FK: Sometimes I want, “Yes, I identify with this alien!” You know? [everyone laughs]
ELM: All right. So this is all really interesting, and I feel like, not to tie them too closely together, but talking about whether you can only write about your own experience, I think that if people are not, if folks are gonna write stories like the stuff that Thomas is describing and they’re not transmasc, I do think you should probably do some research, right? To know, because I think that what we’re describing is a huge range of kinds of stories, and just like any sort of marginalized identity, and I think a lot of our letter-writers were getting at it, you don’t know what you’re gonna get, and you don’t know if you can kind of feel…not necessarily like you need to feel safe at all times in a story, but you don’t know if you need to be kind of reading between your fingers while you’re covering your eyes, you know?
DT: Right.
ELM: To see like, “Is this gonna be something I find relatable and enjoyable, or is this gonna be something that just makes me feel, you know, takes me right out of it because it just feels like it wasn’t super thoughtful?” I don't know, you know, it’s hard, but I also don’t want people to like, constantly second-guess themselves to the point where they don’t put stuff out into the world, because people are gonna have different experiences and have different reactions to stuff.
FK: And people are gonna have different personal experiences, right?
ELM: Yeah!
FK: Sometimes I read stuff about nonbinary characters, and I’m like, “Wow, this nonbinary character is like, super dysphoric about their body, they really don’t like the body that they’re in,” and that’s not my experience of being nonbinary, and occasionally I’m like, “OK, I need to click out of this.” Like, I know it’s somebody else’s experience, but I’m not connecting to it at all. And this fic is like, trying to get me to connect to it hard. And like, I’m sure people have the opposite experience as well, of being like “Why is this character so chill with everything?” [DT laughs] “That’s not my experience of this, what the fuck?” So that’s happening even within people who are themselves nonbinary writing this, I’m sure it’s the case for people who are binary trans, I’m sure it’s for everything, right? It’s really complicated.
ELM: Absolutely.
DT: Right.
ELM: Hard. All right. Cool. [laughs] It’s really complicated. Hard.
FK: Ending on it’s really complicated and hard is not a bad ending for this episode, because it is! But that doesn’t…like, hard things are worth doing, Elizabeth!
ELM: We have Toast here, we should let Toast have the final word. Now I’m putting you on the spot Toast. What are your big grand takeaways?
DT: You know, it’s complicated and it’s hard are good ones to end on… [ELM and FK laugh]
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
DT: But I will say that if people are interested to know more about which canon characters most often tend to get written with different tagging, as trans, as nonbinary, as genderfluid, some of the other tags that I brought up, I have much more detailed breakdowns of the different ways that different characters tend to get tagged in my original analyses, and all of the stuff that came up here that was really interesting and prompted me to do more stats, I will be going back and adding that to the AO3 work that I have that we’ll link to somewhere in the show notes. So basically, I don’t have any new grand big takeaways, except if you want to follow along and see all of the data that we were talking about, and that I was prompted to go off and gather during this episode, I will at least make that available. So my takeaway is kind of, “Yay, data!”
[everyone laughs]
FK: Yay data indeed.
ELM: I feel like this would be your response to anything, “yay data,” I’m trying to think of like…
DT: Yeah, maybe.
ELM: Ohhh, Toast, do you wanna come on and talk about one of my favorite tropes, when one half of the ship gets turned into a pet?
DT: [BIG laugh] YES! Yay data about pets, yes!
FK: [simultaneous, drawn-out gasp] Yes.
ELM: I would, I would like you to analyze what, I think that it’s gonna be…I think cats are probably gonna be the most popular transformation.
DT: Oh, interesting.
FK: I don’t know, it might be but it might also be dogs.
ELM: [overlapping] You think it’s dogs? I mean, my favorites are all dog fics, but…
DT: Fascinating!
ELM: But obviously cats are superior animals, so.
DT: Yeah, I, I—
FK: Hey. All right, hey. [ELM laughs] Hey. Hey. Hey.
ELM: This is the controversial part of the episode.
FK: Hey. All right.
ELM: Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you, between the three of us…looks like we’ve got some cat people here.
DT: [laughs] Yes.
FK: Well, I think I may need to sign off now, because I can’t be around the two of you for much longer with your cat vibes.
ELM: [overlapping] I know, Flourish, Flourish, you go both ways, I know you… [DT and FK laugh] You’re bi-pet-curious.
FK: [overlapping] It’s true. I like the kitties. I am— [laughs] All right, I’m calling it now, we’ve gotten silly. [ELM laughs] I will talk to both of you later, Toast and Elizabeth. It was a pleasure to have you on, Toast.
ELM: Toast, thank you for joining us! [laughs]
DT: Thanks so much for having me, this was great.