A question for the transgendered crowd

This is a very dodgy subject to tackle. I have a trans friend who is on hormone patches and I regularly step on toes by not understanding her situation or the politically correct way of discussing it. I've known her since she was a toddler, her late mother was my best friend. I even changed his nappies as a baby. (please note the pronoun change) He showed none of the behaviour that the rest of the world see as indicators that he was trans. The few cases that get reported are apparently the exceptions not the rule. They don't all dress as the opposite sex, play with the other genders' toys or show obvious traits of the opposite sex to their physical structure.

When i was introduced to his boyrfiend I was prepared to accept he was gay, but found it much harder to take on board that he was trans and wanted to be called by a girl's name. So now I try to remember to use the female pronoun and she gets more feminine. My love for her remains unaltered but i worry because she has got a lot of hassle to come in life.

My advice is to talk to trans people before you formulate your writing, because otherwise you're going to step into huge pitfalls on this one. They are very very touchy about how they are treated and written about.

I'm glad you're taking it seriously because the problem is that the rest of us simply don't understand. I thought as i was fairly respectful and accepting to the LG community that I could take it on board. But I fell into all the cliches for expecting trans to behave in a certain way and I couldn't see my friend in the other gender. I wanted to believe for a time that he'd change his mind and decide that he was simply gay. It was only after some long conversations with her that I began to understand where she was coming from.

Technical discussions by the medical profession don't help. Thinking you are tolerant and understanding, you'll still find you get brickbacks. I'd recommend you contact your local LGBT group and see if you can talk to some young people. But if you are located in Osaka that might be difficult. If you can't get some feedback from trans individuals then message me and I'll try and see if my friend will communicate with you privately.

J.S.F. said:

she was born a man and had the prerequisite operations in which to become a woman.

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There's your first problem. You're bringing the assumption that operations are "required" to "become" a woman.

Your character is a woman with or without any operations.

My question is whether I should reveal her changeover near the beginning or have it gradually introduced with hints along the way.

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I think it'd make the most sense to reveal her birth sex the POV character realizes it.

Princess Marina said:

He showed none of the behaviour that the rest of the world see as indicators that he was trans. The few cases that get reported are apparently the exceptions not the rule. They don't all dress as the opposite sex, play with the other genders' toys or show obvious traits of the opposite sex to their physical structure.

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"The few cases that get reported"?

I'm not even sure what you mean by that.

Much of the difficulty most people have with these sorts of issues is the assumptions they bring to the table over what makes one "male" or "female" and what is "masculine" or "feminine." The idea that clothes or toys are inherently gendered is one more thing to let go of.

Almost Perfect is a great YA novel about a guy who falls for a girl and then learns she is transgender, and how they both deal with their relationship. I thought it was realistic and sensitively dealt with. I think its important to not make the story exclusively about Straight Cis Guy Problems, even if he's the protagonist. The conflict he faces as boyfriend of a trans lady is important, and yet pretty minimal compared to what she faces every day living her life.

I feel I should point out that saying "she was born a man" implies that her mother literally gave birth to a full-grown man...

Disclaimer: not trans myself.

JSF, I applaud -- very much -- your desire to represent trans people in your writing. However, like some other posters here, I worry that the wording of your post is indicative you haven't quite done enough research yet to pull this off.

Also, rather than just having a character who happens to be trans, it sounds like you're writing an "issue book." Which is much, much harder to pull off, and also runs the risk of appearing to try to "speak for" trans people and their experiences. Because of this, you're going to be under much more scrutiny. (As you are probably aware.)

Here are the pieces of your post that worry me, as someone who has trans friends and some (small) awareness of trans issues:

J.S.F. said:

the MC of the story is a straight male--eighteen

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As others have said, be wary of filtering trans issues through a straight cis male lens.

finds out later that she was born a man and had the prerequisite operations in which to become a woman.

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I know you explained what you meant to kuwi, but it worries me also that you worded it this way in the first place. She was born a woman, was a woman before the surgery, and was a woman after the surgery. Full stop.

The bulk of the novel deals with him coming to terms with his growing feelings of attraction for her and his acceptance of the situation.

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This feels rather trite to me -- as if that's the only way a cis person could end up falling for a trans person. See below:

He also has to deal--naturally--with the opinions of his peers in school, his parents, as well as questioning his own feelings.

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It worries me a bit that you think EVERYBODY EVER would "naturally" struggle and question his own feelings about fancying a girl who happens to be trans. Maybe the MC in your book does, but I don't think that's at all a given in more progressive social groups. In fact, the subject of dating someone trans came up in one of my groups of friends and everybody just sort of shrugged and said they didn't see it as an issue (warmed my heart, honestly). It came up in discussions with another group of friends and only one girl said, "I don't think I could do it -- I feel bad about it, but I just don't think I could." Everyone else at least said they'd be open to it and most said they thought it a non-issue.

Yes, my friends have selection bias, and I think probably if you polled everyone everywhere you would (unfortunately) find that many people have issues with trans folk. And yes, trans folk (obviously) face prejudice and I'm not saying not to include that in your book. But it bothers me that you seem to consider this sort of "grappling with her trans-ness" state to be the only possible course for a cis person to fall into a relationship with a trans person -- it rings alarm bells for me that you might be writing to a stereotype here.

To tangent for a moment -- you know what I would really like to see in fiction? A trans person who is incidentally trans, and dates people like any other person in the cast, and is informed by her trans-ness, but the book is not a Trans Issue Book. Obviously, that's not the book you want to write, J.S.F., but I'm just mentioning that I'd like to see it. (Check out the way the webcomic Questionable Content has been handling Claire's character in recent strips for someone I think is (so far) a great example of a character who is a full human being and is informed by being trans but is always treated as a normal woman. In fact, the creator's lately been ship-teasing her and the main character (who knows she's trans and is perfectly unbothered by it), and there's no indication that they'd be any less likely to get together than any of the other characters.)

My question is whether I should reveal her changeover near the beginning

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It still worries me that you're referencing the reveal of her being trans as the reveal of a "changeover" -- as if she was born a man and then "became" a woman. Being trans isn't about surgery (and some trans people do not opt for surgery). It's not defined by one moment in time in a hospital. How would you have worded this if your FMC was pre-op? You could still be writing the same plot, of a cis MMC falling in love with a trans FMC. She would still be trans, and still be female, but there would be no "changeover" to reference.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, your post comes off as thinking her femaleness is all about the surgery, which is not a good place to be writing about trans issues from.

or have it gradually introduced with hints along the way.

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What hints? I'm assuming you mean stuff like references to how other people treat her, or how she reacts to a trans joke, or something like that . . . I don't think you mean "hints" as in, "hinting that she's somehow masculine in some way," but just making sure.

I do not want to make light of transgendered people or minimize the problems they face with being accepted in mainstream society, but at the same time, I don't want to preach. I would like some honest opinions on this and would be grateful for any and all feedback.

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Here's my recommendation, for what it's worth: Make the book about something else. As in, make the main plot something different, and have the romance, and your MC's struggle (or not) be part of their lives in the context of the larger plot. Because if you make this a book about "being trans" or "loving a trans person," you're making the trans person's life entirely about being trans -- rather than that person having other goals and motivations and conflict in her life, as all people, trans or cis, do. And I think that's one of the main pitfalls people fall into in writing about marginalized demographics -- making the XYZ character be ONLY about being XYZ, instead of, y'know, concerned with all sorts of other life stuff. I feel like a romance complicated by your MMC's ingrained prejudice against his trans love interest would be far, far more interesting, and far, far less likely to be problematic, as part of a larger plot about something else.

Whatever you decide to do, I recommend a LOT of research and a LOT of reading. Read as much as you can by trans people and lurk in online places where trans people talk publicly about their experiences. Find more than one trans person who will beta for you. Again, since you're writing an issue book rather than an incidentally trans character, you're going to be under a tremendous amount of scrutiny here, and as I'm sure you agree it's one of those things that's very very important to get right because there are so few positive portrayals of trans folk in literature.

This is just my 2 cents. Thanks for being open about hearing other opinions. And again, I'm not trans and don't feel I have any authority at all in speaking about the trans experience, so consider what I've said in that light. A lot of the stuff I've talked about here bugs me when something similar applies to a different marginalized demographic that I *am* a part of, or comes from attitudes I've picked up from reading what trans people say about themselves. But if someone from the trans community or someone with more knowledge of trans issues comes along and tells me I'm wrong, listen to that person instead.

I suspect that the underlying assumptions in your posts may have actually hurt some of the trans folk here. I know it's not at all what you intended.

But it happens.

I worry about hurting people a lot because so many invisible assumptions are clothed in our words, especially in English. I try hard not to, but sometimes English bites us all on the ass, with fangs.

I second everyone else that this is something to approach with care. By presenting the character's trans identity as something that's discovered by the straight, cis main character (and that he has to come to terms with), you run the risk of not only making the book feel like an issue book, but like an issue book about straight, cis people learning to accept people who aren't like them, which can be alienating to LGBT people. You also don't want the story to come across as outdated. While transphobia is still very common in real life, I like to think that media portrayals are gradually getting better. What you've described reminds me a little of The Crying Game, which came out in 1992.

Like slhuang, it would be nice to see more stories with trans characters where being trans is not a huge deal or a central focus of the story.

Also, if you do go forward with writing about a trans character, I would recommend doing a lot of research beforehand. Though I trust that you didn't intend to suggest that having surgery "makes" your character female, I do feel like you might be falling into the common trap of focusing too much on surgery when approaching the idea of transitioning. Having surgery can be a complicated matter, and there are multiple surgeries that trans people may have over time. Other trans people either delay or forego surgery for various reasons, but still take hormones and socially transition.

I'm not an expert about MTF transitioning, so don't take my word as gold, but 20 seems kind of young to have "completely" transitioned via surgery. Bear in mind that surgery is expensive and usually difficult to come by. If your character doesn't live in a country that offers transgender-related care via socialized medicine, then she will likely need to pay for the surgery herself. She will likely have to see a therapist for a while before she can get a surgeon to agree to operate on her. She will probably take hormones, and start to live as a woman, before she has surgery. You also have to consider that there isn't just one type of surgery that trans people, let alone trans women, consider. When you say she has had the "prerequisite operations," do you mean genital surgery alone? Or has she also had breast augmentation (if she desires it) or procedures like facial feminization surgery and tracheal surgery?

And calling any surgery a "prerequisite" assumes that surgery is necessary or a hurdle that all trans people need to get past in order to transition. But that's not the case. While my understanding is that genital surgery is more common, and more reliable, for trans women than for trans men, many trans women live as women prior to reaching a point where they can consider it. Hormones and social transitioning are often bigger initial steps for people, and few people have finished transitioning by the time they're 20. Transitioning is a long process, not a single procedure.

Here's my question: why is she with someone who has such a hard time accepting her in the first place?

As for peer opinion, I had a transgendered student when I was in Japan, which is a very gender segregated society, particularly in schools. She was expected to be in the boys' group and the boys' classes, which was tough, though the teachers did do their best to accommodate her. It was the first situation of that sort at our school, and while they were far from perfect and stumbled over the issue a lot, the teachers and principals at least tried to make it work.

That being said, her classmates were overwhelmingly supportive, friendly, and accepting. They saw her as her, and that was that. Sure, there were a handful of total jackasses that went out of their way to be jackasses, but they were the minority.

I guess I just think it's not fair to assume that "naturally" everyone has a hard time with it, especially her peers. It's possible that they do, but it's possible that they don't. It's possible her friends would think he's a jackass for not accepting her in the first place.

I do think he'd need to be very compelling to make me want them together. I'm not saying it's unrealistic to have a person sorting out their own beliefs and feelings, particularly if they've been taught something is wrong or unacceptable, but if I was reading it, I'd need to really see what she saw in him that made her stick with him even when he wasn't sticking with her, if that makes sense. The way it's described, I'd kind of want to see her say, "Get over yourself," and walk away from him. Just my two cents.

I agree that this should possibly be a subplot, not the main plot, especially as this main plot appears to have been done before. (And for FTM, the movie Boys Don't Cry comes to mind.)

Pink for girls and blue for boys is a completely made-up concept, and a hundred years ago the colors were switched. "boy" toys/clothes and "girl" toys/clothes are also implemented by society. So I do hope that you don't play into those stereotypes as well.

I agree you may need to do more research. 20 does seem young to have had any surgery at all, and maybe you mean "prerequisite" to be a legal female, but then again, there are different surgeries, or no surgeries at all, which could result in someone legally being able to be female.

I am not trans either, but do have some trans people in my life, and like others don't know if I could completely represent them but I wish you luck!

My computer's been out of commission for a while, so I missed this when it came up. I don't really have time to get into a long analysis and it's been almost a week anyway, but I'll give some quick thoughts.

1) The overall concept of adjusting to dating someone who is trans has been done before (and sometimes, done awfully), but it's still somewhat relevant if done well. But honestly, the difficulties in a relationship like that aren't generally going to be based around, "I'm straight, what if someone thinks I'm gay for dating a trans girl" things. In my experience, people who don't adjust quickly on that aren't super-likely to be dating a trans girl for long unless she has really low self-esteem and will put up with that crap. More importantly, most people seem to adapt surprisingly fast and the main reaction they have is, "Huh, this isn't as big of a deal as I thought."

The real issue is that if she's not finished with most of what she considers to be her personal path of transition, she might still have some stresses in her life that can put a strain on transition. And if she had a difficult transition, she might have mental pain to work out. _That's_ the difficulty in dating a trans person. And it's also a hard subject to write about without experience, but a good long dose of heavy research might help. (And the subject is kinda difficult to research, which makes it harder.)

Also, if she's that young and has had both hormone therapy and genital surgery? Odds are good that her being trans are going to be nearly a non-issue for her and for anyone who met her afterwards if it's been a year or two.

2) As everyone else has said, there's some problematic assumptions in that first post. Here's the ideal way to think about it: she's always been female, she had some dysphoria from having the wrong hormones, anatomical defects, and being misidentified by other people, and she took hormones and _maybe_ got surgery to deal with the medical effects until she was comfortable, and got her legal identity corrected. Some trans people really _do_ feel like they're one sex who becomes another, but that's generally the minority, and even there, there's complexity.

3) On another note, the stereotype of kids showing stereotypical "trans" behavior when young? That often happens but in small ways that nobody else notices, and it's mostly an internal thing for most kids, and being told that they're the other gender usually makes them consciously override it anyway. The majority of trans people seem to get unhelpfully told "well, I would have never guessed!" and "(wrong name) never seemed very (masculine/feminine) to me!" And quite a few of us never fit simple gender stereotypes later, either. Just like quite many other people never fit neatly into stereotypes.

Mara said:

3) On another note, the stereotype of kids showing stereotypical "trans" behavior when young? That often happens but in small ways that nobody else notices, and it's mostly an internal thing for most kids, and being told that they're the other gender usually makes them consciously override it anyway. The majority of trans people seem to get unhelpfully told "well, I would have never guessed!" and "(wrong name) never seemed very (masculine/feminine) to me!" And quite a few of us never fit simple gender stereotypes later, either. Just like quite many other people never fit neatly into stereotypes.

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I think this is a good point, and I'd add that I think a lot of "gender non-conforming behavior" can be interpreted in a lot of different ways.

A trans woman who liked to dress up in her mother's clothes as a child might come to see it as a sign that she was trans (or other people might interpret it that way). But at the same time, if a cis, gay man liked to wear his mother's clothes as a child, it might be treated like an early sign that he was going to be gay. And when a straight, cis man does it, it's proof that gender roles aren't that rigid.

I'm not saying that it isn't valid or accurate for a trans person to feel that things they did as a child relate to being trans. Just that it can be more about how you relate to those experiences than anything else.

And while some trans people really do know from a young age, I think there can also be pressure to be able to point to signs from when you were a child in order to "validate" identity.

Also, regarding whether your cis male character should find out in the beginning or the end...it makes a lot more sense for him to find out later, rather than sooner. from what it sounds like, your trans character has socially transitioned a long time ago, and is now doing the physical transition. revealing that your assigned sex at birth doesn't match up with the gender you identify with is basically a coming out of sorts, and while some trans* individuals are really open about it, many aren't. I feel like that this would come up most likely with regards to a romantic/sexual relationship or if they're extremely close friends, and the trans character decides to confide in the cis character, or something along those lines.

and yeah, I agree with what a lot of other people said with regards to the way you've worded things in what you've told us.

I have written about other minorities, but not trans issues yet. I'm starting to understand trans issues in general. I've read that some trans people don't like the term 'transgendered'. I suppose that's because the '-ed' suffix implies it's something that happened to them, rather than something they are.

I wonder if I might hijack the thread for a moment to ask a related question about my own WIP? (If the OP minds, please tell me and I'll be happy to delete this post and start my own thread.)

Over the course of the story, my MC awkwardly falls in love with one of the male characters (D). Various events go down and towards the end of the story, the two of them are forced to flee. In the course of this, D is injured and in patching up his wounds, it's revealed that his body appears physically female. He's not ashamed of this, and although MC is surprised, she's ultimately not troubled by it (there's a short exchange which goes along the lines of - MC: "why didn't you say anything?" D: "Nobody asked." - and that's the end of it.)

Basically, I don't want it to be an 'issue', or a stumbling block in their relationship. I just want it to be a fact about D, that he was born with female physical characteristics but has always been male, has always presented as male and has absolutely no qualms about being male whilst retaining the body he was born with. He's not a 'man in a woman's body' - he's a man, and the female sexual characteristics aren't important to that identity.

Am I over-simplifying things here? The last thing I want is to trample on toes. I consider myself pretty genderfluid but I am still cis, with cis privilege, and it's important to me that I get this right.

(The other issue I have - and this is unintentional, since the name predated the character's trans identity - is that he goes by his birth name, which is Dagny. Originally the character was a cis man who happened to have a woman's name - it wasn't until I realised, in the course of writing, that he was actually trans that I thought this might prove problematic.)

are you planning to put in an explanation--not necessarily an information dump, just a short explanation or backstory--when Dagny reveals his form, or are you planning to just leave it as is? If the female MC finds nothing wrong with his appearance and is fine with accepting him as he is, then no biggie.

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My intention is that it's treated, between them, as no more a big revelation than, say, an old tattoo, or a scar. She's surprised, sure. But he's the kind of man who knows exactly who he is, what his purpose in life is, what he believes in, and the MC needs no more explanation from him about it. (As a bit of background, this takes place in a universe in which the human race is tentatively supporting a 'we're all human' philosophy as a reaction against the cyborg population.)

Funny thing is, I actually thought the name was male before someone pointed out Dagny Taggart Changing it isn't really an issue, though - I've got the name Damien on backup.

I'm not trans, but FWIW, crunchy, I love the way you've described the reveal and how it's treated as no big deal.

Unfortunately I don't feel familiar enough with the nuances to give you feedback on the name question, as I don't feel confident of my knowledge of potential problematic associations / lack thereof. But good luck with it!

crunchyblanket said:

Am I over-simplifying things here? The last thing I want is to trample on toes. I consider myself pretty genderfluid but I am still cis, with cis privilege, and it's important to me that I get this right.

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Since you mention cyborgs, I'm guessing this is speculative fiction? I'd think this basically depends on the culture and the world you've created then.