estirose

I’ve been reading the linkspam about Transgender characters. I, too, would love to see more transgender characters, and have indeed written a main transgendered character (Erin, the protagonist of my YA novel “Delicate Appendages”, has always been transgender, in a way. She’s a third sex, but she perceives herself to be a girl.) Transgender fic tends to be really really rare, and I would love to read more transgender fic.

That being said, I don’t know whether to be upset about or tired of finding out about how the things I’ve written potentially offend people. (Then again, the excerpt from “Delicate Appendages” rather offended one of my reviewers for the discussion of gender and parts.) It’s like, you can’t seem to write a fic without offending *someone* by forgetting a particular bit of privilege in your own life. Honestly, I try to be sensitive to issues that I know about, but at some points, I want to scream about how overwhelming it is to keep things in balance and write a fic, or to write a fic and later find out that I am offending someone, without being able to fix it.

I write slash, and I write Genderbend. The Genderbend’s limited to one fandom only, and it’s entirely the “Person is cisgendered but was born the opposite sex than in canon” variety. In fact, I have three characters that are Genderbent, of the same canon character, and they are not the same person, except in name and some personality. They are OCs. I label them OCs. I consider them OCs. Because they might as well be. Song, Innocent, and Questing are not Kurenai Wataru; they share his name and some of his background and personality, but they are not him. To me, the Genderbend is a variant of “what if”; who would this person be if they had been born the opposite sex? In my case, Kurenai Wataru is in canon an initial recluse, so it’s easy to gender him as a girl for a What if/AU “Genderbend”. It is an exploration of who the character might be as a girl under certain situations. I’m not meaning to offend transgendered readers; it’s not meant as ignorance of transgender issues. It’s along the lines of “If I changed X and Y, what would change for this character? What would be the same?” For example, Song is female and Taiga’s Queen. In the playground scene where in canon Wataru and Taiga meet up again for the first time in years, I play with it by having Taiga meet Wataru… but it’s not two friends getting back together. It’s Taiga recognizing that the little girl he protected years ago is now his Queen, and he responds accordingly. (Song is an AU of an AU herself, so it’s kind of hard to explain, but….) Song is not precisely the Wataru of Kiva. Yes, she has the Kiva armor; but in some cases some things change. In it, I’m kind of interested in exploring gender issues; what would be different in canon if she’d been a girl? What would be the same? I’m trying to explore gender roles as I go along, and it’s not meant to be ignorance of transgender readers and potential readers; it’s meant to explore how things would change.

Um. This is babbly enough. I’ll go wander off now.