Complexities of outing while #ownvoices

ChaseJxyz

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For reference, I am a pansexual demi-boy (i.e. nonbinary ftm).

So I just watched an episode of tv (Schitt's Creek) in which a character in his first gay relationship was unintentionally outed to his parents by a third party. I was annoyed, which only increased as it went on, as the episode ended up being "will his parents accept or reject him? oh the drama!" and the pain he's dealing with having to tell his parents he's bisexual (or at least, not het) to his parents before he was ready, while the other characters feel guilty about this whole thing. There was a couple in-the-closet jokes, too, which didn't help. It ended with mentioning things like the Trevor Project and It Gets Better as if it made up for it. The show has said dumb things about pansexuals early on but otherwise this gay relationship was being handled very well. Something about this being A Very Special Episode tm for The Straights really rubbed me the wrong way.

So it got me thinking...every queer character has to be "outed" in your story in some way, either to the reader or to other characters since the reader is probably assuming any given character is cishet unless told otherwise (like how many readers assume a character is white). But with race, you really can't hide it, nor can a character hide it from another character. Even in a perfect (fictional) world where there is no homophobia or transphobia, you still have to show and/or tell the reader that this character is queer, which is tricky because revealing this information might have been traumatic in some way for many of us (as well as for your readers). And as I think about this more, it also feels kinda yucky to have trans characters be treated differently (or worry they will be treated differently), but how can you say they're trans without outing them in some way? It's all confusing and I'm not sure what's the "right" answer. I know there is no one objective right answer, but there's probably better answers than others, aren't there?

In my current project there are 2 trans characters: a trans woman and a trans man. The trans woman (K) is a human and works with J and C and they all work for G. C is new and a child and J explains to C that K's body is different and people will sometimes say awful things about her, and to not listen to them. J feels really bad for having to do this but she worries C might hear rumors before K talks to him about it. The trans man (W) is a phoenix; like in real life birds that don't look sexually dimorphic to our (human) eyes have UV-colored markings to differentiate sex, so to humans he can say he's male and they're none the wiser (and because of how birds make sounds with their syrinx his voice wouldn't give him away). But phoenixes are more old-fashioned/conservative (you will have 1 mate for forever etc)(and this is ultimately the reason for the conflict of the story, the phoenix's very different worldview/morals compared to humanity's) so he was never able to "pass" among them. He gets into serious debt with G so he can learn the spell to take a human shape, and since that can look like whatever you want, he has_a_ body that passes all the time, but there are still people who question why he's choosing to be a human all the time. During the story, G offers him a deal to do [plot relevant thing] to erase the debt, and the MC is annoyed/upset he's doing [thing] for his own benefit, for a debt he won't tell her why, but as the story progresses he ends up doing [thing] out of genuine love/care for the MC. MC has her own secrets she's keeping from him (so villain won't target him, too, regular danger stuff), and at the (emotional) climax of the story they both come clean to each other, and she doesn't care that he's trans and it doesn't change how she views or treats him. And with the power of friendship and trust they can do a special magic thing and beat the bad guy.

The story doesn't revolve around these characters being trans, they do stuff besides hide this "secret," they have bad things happen to them and suffer for reasons besides being trans...but I can't help but worry that I'm going to come off in a way that will upset/hurt a lot of queer people. I've seen discourse on how it's bad to make trans characters shapeshifters (namely, Alex Fierro, child of Loki, from Riordan's books), or that characters should just be trans, don't ever bring up their past, don't treat them any differently for being trans. I know that since I'm trans myself I have that #ownvoices angle, but I also don't want to use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card for not doing a stellar job (I have an old friend who got her sff series published by That Big SFF Publisher and its "orientalism" and totally-not-Japan-even-though-we're-using-Japanese-honorifics get ignored/a free pass because she's PoC/queer <but not Asian>). I'm more aware of facial/body features that can hint someone is trans, but if I only imply a character is trans by using those things, I worry cis people won't get it at all, or trans people conscious/dysphoric about those features will be hurt. My characters don't live in a perfect world, prejudice between races (more specifically, species, and I know figuring out what word to use is a whole other post) is the source of all conflict, so transphobic people DO exist...it's just not in-your-face as it is IRL.

This is a long post! I worry about things a lot! Writing that coming out scene is going to be real rough and I know I'm going to doubt myself so much, and I know I can never write something that makes no one upset. The people who will get mad that queer people even exist in my world I couldn't care less about, my stories are not for them, but I also don't want to hurt a community that has done so much for me. If any of my fellow QUILTBAGs have tackled something like this in their writing (or at least, read things like this) I would really appreciate your insight.
 

DorianFrost

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While I'm genderfluid myself, and the vast majority of my characters are queer in at least one way, figuring out specifically how to make it clear to the reader that my trans characters who use solely she or he pronouns are trans is something I've left until later (I'm in early drafts in both my current WIPs, and my previous works have been either solely for myself, or confined to a small collaborative writing community where I can just state my characters' identities to them). However, I've seen this handled well before, and read several essays (ownvoices) on how to and how not to show characters are trans. There are two that I can think of right now that I think would be relevant to your questions specifically.

In their twitter essay, Ways to Introduce Characters That Are Trans (And Pitfalls to Avoid), Corey Alexander outlines both scenarios to avoid in showing the readers and the other characters that a character is trans, and examples and suggestions for what to try instead. They note, and I agree, that this is mainly directed at cis writers, and that if you're ownvoices, their perspective doesn't have more authority than yours. However, since you noted you want to be careful about not hurting other queer people (which is good, obviously) I do think their suggestions are helpful to keep in mind.

I think the essay On Obligatory Scenes In Trans Romance by Austin Chant would be relevant to how you're looking at approaching W revealing his being trans to the MC – especially the part where you seem to be framing W keeping his being trans as a secret he needs to 'come clean' about.

At the end of the day, within the queer community, and even more specifically the trans community, we're all different in what we do and don't want from representation in a story. That can even vary from one time in a persons life to another with the same person. What will be uncomfortable for one person could be validating for another. It's good to read what others within the community have to say on it, and take that into account, but when it comes to a character who shares your identity, it's your story to tell.
I would suggest looking for a sensitivity reader for the character who's a trans woman though.

I hope this is helpful :)
 

ChaseJxyz

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Thank you for those links, I really appreciate it. I know this is something that I'm going to have to go over multiple times in editing to make it work, including having mtf betas.

I think a problem I was having was thinking about the wide breadth of trans people I see in my online spheres. There are some who believe that you can be 100% stealth and marry someone and never tell them you're trans, or that a character that's trans should be treated just the same as a cis character and you never mention they're trans...but then that's not really representation, isn't it? I don't want to pull a JKR and say "guys trust me on this" after the fact. And as you said, what's validating for some people is going to be upsetting to others. It's good to hear someone else tell that to me. Again, thank you for the words/links, it will be added to my collection of things to think about.
 

Animad345

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Ah, such an interesting thread! In the first chapter of my WIP, my MC meets a gentleman of the same sex and is clearly shown as being attracted to him. It later comes up that in the past, he's been very attracted to women as well. It is sort of acknowledged naturally in his internal narrative that he's bisexual, and it isn't 'voiced' at first. Later in the novel it does go into how much he has struggled with it, feeling like a freak because he'd always known that there were straight people and gay people, but not bisexuals, and didn't know there was even a word for it throughout his teens (it's set in the past, before this term became well-known). Later, he gets sort of 'outed' but only to his parents and three closest friends, who all react wildly differently. His love interest, the guy from the first chapter, is firmly closeted and there is at least one person who suspects, but mostly he's been able to keep this a secret. I'm partway through my WIP, and at first I felt that he would be eventually outed, but it might actually turn out that he isn't. He's never really accepted being gay, so it's very much a conflict within himself.

Edit: in my own experience, I've only told my family about my bisexuality. It's sad to think about, but I didn't want to tell my friends for fear of how they would react. I know that if they reacted badly, they probably aren't the best people to be friends with, but it's difficult as I don't have that many friends to start with! Also, as a woman in a brown community, I know people would gossip about my parents and I really don't want that to happen to them. The most important thing to me is that my family accept me for who I am, and I am eternally grateful for this, knowing the incredible pain people go through when their families do not. There's also that aspect whereby, if I ended up with a man, I'd maybe never have to officially 'come out' because people would just assume I was straight. I'd thought I was bisexual for years, but only came to terms with it recently when I started a relationship with a fellow woman.

So sorry for the rant! The concept of 'outing' is complex, interesting and difficult.
 
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Drascus

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I'm honestly less and less a fan of the #ownvoices movement all the time. Can I write an #ownvoices story? Well I'm genderqueer and bi, but I haven't dated that many men so maybe I don't "qualify".

My father was an immigrant farm laborer but he came from Spain so I'm not Latino, though I am Hispanic. Do I qualify for #ownvoices if I write about migrant laborers?

My guess from reading twitter is that I would get pushback on both of those things! Honestly I think that's really crappy. So now I just steer away from anyone who says they are repping #ownvoices.
 

ChaseJxyz

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I'm not actually a bird but my story is about birds. So is it not #ownvoices because I'm not literally a queer magic bird? I'll have to ask the Twitter hivemind...
 

mccardey

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I think there's a bit of a fundamental misunderstanding of #ownvoices happening in this thread....
 

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Agreed! Despite what jerks on twitter want you to think, #ownvoices was *not* created to police identities. Anyone who uses it that way is being obtuse and harmful. It is about giving marginalized authors a way to indicate they are writing from about their personal experiences, which is something publishing sorely needs. The creator has been very clear on this (there’s an FAQ for goodness sake) No one has to use it if they aren’t comfortable doing so (and this comes up a lot with queer authors not wanting to put themselves and that’s 100% valid).

I totally get struggling, though. I’m a bi woman married to a straight man. I constantly question whether I’m “queer enough” but at the end of the day, I want the queer community to be as welcoming as possible. Long story short, everyone’s experience is unique, and so long as you are conscientious and compassionate, I think you will be fine.
 

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#ownvoices is meant to surface people writing about under represented cultures they participate in/belong to.

Corinne Duyvis coined the hashtag.

It's not meant to control anything or define or restrict; just identify.

I'm also seeing some collision between outing, which is involuntary, and coming out. They are not the same.
 
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Drascus

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I know what the intent of the tag is, but with all the discussion I see online, I'm just not comfortable using it. I don't want to have to justify my identity to anyone.

A lot of that may just be how horrible twitter is. I'm just dipping my toe in that social network and it's pretty shocking how fast discourse turns vicious on that site.
 

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I know what the intent of the tag is, but with all the discussion I see online, I'm just not comfortable using it. I don't want to have to justify my identity to anyone.

A lot of that may just be how horrible twitter is. I'm just dipping my toe in that social network and it's pretty shocking how fast discourse turns vicious on that site.

You absolutely don't have to use #ownvoices.

If you're going to use Twitter, use Twitter tools, including the Lists option in particular, and at least looking at the private account option.
 

Drascus

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You absolutely don't have to use #ownvoices.

If you're going to use Twitter, use Twitter tools, including the Lists option in particular, and at least looking at the private account option.

I have no idea how lists work, I'll take a look at that and see if it helps filter things, thanks for the suggestion. :)
 

neandermagnon

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I totally get struggling, though. I’m a bi woman married to a straight man. I constantly question whether I’m “queer enough” but at the end of the day, I want the queer community to be as welcoming as possible. Long story short, everyone’s experience is unique, and so long as you are conscientious and compassionate, I think you will be fine.

I'm bi and currently single but I have kids and an ex husband. Bi invisibility is a thing because people aren't really that aware of it and will just default you to your current or most recent relationship. When I was younger everyone assumed I was gay based on how I dressed (I'm not very gender conforming) but these days everyone seems to assume that I'm straight purely because I have kids. People just assume. Own voices from bi writers - whatever kind of relationship they're in - will help to increase visibility and stop people from making assumptions.
 
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laurabuzz

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I definitely find communicating that a character is trans to be really hard, yeah. I cannot think of any example that does it well that I've read/seen/played, other than smut where you can just say "her dick" and say no more about it. I have a few ways of thinking about this:

1. You can just give up on communicating it in a subtle clever way. You can just say it... If it's a contemporary story you can throw in a little line about when she started taking HRT and what her life was like then; usually this is going to go along with relatively major life changes that might be worth highlighting anyway, ie. most of my friends either dropped out of school or got kicked out by their parents at that time. If it's important you can usually find a way to add this in without interfering too much and maybe it won't be the best prose but if it's important to the story you might just have to bite the bullet here.

2. I'm from Northern Ireland. NI is a 'deeply divided society', a settler-colony run through by a bloody ethno-religious conflict between Irish catholics and protestant settlers. You cannot, just by looking at someone, tell if they are protestant or catholic. In order to suss out our neighbours we have developed a huge number of codes that make things clear, and you have to learn all of them to get around otherwise you can place yourself in big danger. Saying 'haich' instead of 'aich' will mark you out as being Catholic right away. If you're in Belfast, the way you enter a taxi will signal your ethnicity to the driver; if you knock the window first or get in the back. There is one bridge which is infamous for connecting a protestant neighbourhood and a catholic neighbourhood over the river; if you're on it walking West at night, it'll signal that you're going back home to West Belfast after being out, which is where Catholics live. If you're on this bridge, you cross your heart and pray that you don't see anyone coming the other way...!

Poets from this country get a lot of mileage out of these codes. It's a pretty extreme example, but I think most communities have things like this. In anthropology its called 'authenticity' - groups usually have tests of in-groupness. These are often deliberately hostile and inscrutable to repel outsiders; you have to already know the codes, otherwise you shouldn't be there. I think it's food for though if you're working with a speculative scenario - how is authenticity constructed, how do people vet each other for authenticity and why? In Belfast, the taxi thing has some historic explanation that I don't remember; the bridge is pretty obvious; the 'H' thing is, of course, due to the differences in dialect owing to the settler-colonial scenario. If you're working with a realistic setting then you might want to go think about it and figure out how cis society constructs its in-group signifiers and how, in turn, trans people construct their own. This obviously goes on, but I can't immediately think of how. If you can figure it out you might want to submit it to a peer-review journal in addition to using it in your story :p

Your phoenix/human scenario makes me think of this one, especially - and with a bit of a twist, where they each have their own codes that don't really translate into each other's cultures... it's very clever.

3. There are certain characters who are not trans as-written but who trans women usually see themselves reflected in; there are even some characters that many cis people read as trans this way. Gwyndolin from Dark Souls is the foremost example, here - as written they are a man who has a womanhood forced on them, but most people read them in reverse; even cis people who like to make certain predictable jokes about them..! Galatea and the castrato in Sarassine are similar examples. Basically, what you say about a character isn't a great predictor of how they are going to be read. I mostly don't try and write trans characters so much as characters that trans women might see themselves reflected in; but cis women and gay men might reasonably see themselves in them, too, and to me this is a good thing. You can't really control how readers will read things and imo you shouldn't try. It's possible to fall into this attitude like, 'I don't want to let cis people think this character is cis!', but I think this is an overly oppositional place to write from.
 

mccardey

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It's possible to fall into this attitude like, 'I don't want to let cis people think this character is cis!', but I think this is an overly oppositional place to write from.
Um - the inverse has worked quite well for the cis community for quite a while...
 

ChaseJxyz

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It's a pretty extreme example, but I think most communities have things like this. In anthropology its called 'authenticity' - groups usually have tests of in-groupness. These are often deliberately hostile and inscrutable to repel outsiders; you have to already know the codes, otherwise you shouldn't be there. I think it's food for though if you're working with a speculative scenario - how is authenticity constructed, how do people vet each other for authenticity and why? In Belfast, the taxi thing has some historic explanation that I don't remember; the bridge is pretty obvious; the 'H' thing is, of course, due to the differences in dialect owing to the settler-colonial scenario. If you're working with a realistic setting then you might want to go think about it and figure out how cis society constructs its in-group signifiers and how, in turn, trans people construct their own. This obviously goes on, but I can't immediately think of how. If you can figure it out you might want to submit it to a peer-review journal in addition to using it in your story :p

Your phoenix/human scenario makes me think of this one, especially - and with a bit of a twist, where they each have their own codes that don't really translate into each other's cultures... it's very clever.

Oh I really like this. I've thought A Lot about how trans-ness works for birds, since they're really not all that sexually dimorphic, but not about words/phrases like that. I've put that on my list of stuff to worldbuild out some more.

Also hell yeah yugioh icon.
 

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Yeah the bird thing is intersting... my understanding is that most insects & arachnids are totally indifferent to sex; in many species it's virtually impossible for us to tell what sex they are, and it's actually impossible for them to tell, so they mate with more or less whoever they meet on the way and just dont sort each other that way. To live that way..!

Getting to leverage animal biology & behaviour is fun I think... There are a lot of species where the 'male' has two types of development they can choose(!), like in Stag beetles they can choose to have either really big horns to be better at wrestling, or to have (get this) really big genitals; it works similarly in orangutans I think, where you have large 'dominant' males who have long relationships in a kind-of territory and other males who don't live in a territory and mate opportunistically. I always wanted to see someone do something with that in an SFF setting, like, scenarios where sexuation had gone otherwise than it did for us.

hell yeah yugioh >:3

Um - the inverse has worked quite well for the cis community for quite a while...

Do you think so? I thought it was going really bad :p
 

Helix

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my understanding is that most insects & arachnids are totally indifferent to sex; in many species it's virtually impossible for us to tell what sex they are, and it's actually impossible for them to tell, so they mate with more or less whoever they meet on the way and just dont sort each other that way. To live that way..!

Lots of birds are strongly sexually dimorphic--in call, appearance and/or size. And insects might not look all that different to us, but they can tell each other apart through appearance and behaviour. As for arachnids, many of the groups have complex courtship behaviours.
 

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insects might not look all that different to us, but they can tell each other apart through appearance and behaviour. As for arachnids, many of the groups have complex courtship behaviours.

I'm basing this mostly on Scharf & Martin, 2013, although you will generally find very high rates of "same sex mating behaviour" (SSMB) when it is studied, which is consistent with it. This will vary, within a species, by enviornment, and Scharf & Martin were able to actually produce scenarios where rates of SSMB would fall pretty sharply (iirc this was mostly by adding many more 'males' than 'females'). It's hard to convert between abstract evolutionary tendencies and how this spider sees it but I just don't think there's a lot of evidence that the vast majority of insects and arachnids engage in any kind of social sexuation and many really don't have the apparatus for it. They can (likely?) tell individuals apart, but they don't create abstract sexual categories. This is also true of many other animals; frogs, for example, will often even mate with dead frogs by mistake because for frogs, not reacting to mating gestures is a consent signal. This is also true for a lot of insects and many studies use this to carry out unethical and scientifically useless experiments on SSMB.

A lot of papers on arachnids are actually pretty bad about how they design for this stuff, imo. There was one on p. phalangioides that did not sex any of the spiders studied but nonetheless claimed that "males and females cohabited" - I think this was an unearned inference that wasn't demonstrated. This same paper talked about how they studied interactions between spiders on a web by going and picking them up and putting them on some other spider's web, where they fought and hurt each other - which is only good at telling you how they behave when another spider falls unanticipated into their web. Many ethologists (pg. 9) grouse about how common these kind of experiment design errors are, although I think things are a lot better now than they were. Anyway, it is my opinion that a good deal of purported sexuation in many invertebrates will turn out to be the work of overactive imaginations with more research.
 

Helix

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That review article by Scharf & Martin is about the relative costs incurred in intra- versus inter-sexual mating. They found that 'SSS behavior in arthropods is predominantly based on mistakenidentification and is probably maintained because the cost ofrejecting a valid opportunity to mate with a female is greaterthan that of mistakenly mating with a male.' But that mistaken behaviour is not necessarily because insects can't identify each other, but because of the mating triggers -- pheromones, behaviour etc -- some of which are listed.

You can tell the difference between male and female spiders by checking out the pedipalps. Male spiders ejaculate into the pedipalp, perform some courtship moves so the female knows that he's a mate not food, and then injects the sperm into the female's epigyne via the palpal bulb. (Sometimes he's a mate and then food.) Salticidae have particularly complex courtship dances complemented by bright colours. Male scorpions and pseudoscorpions deposit a spermatophore on the ground and guide the female over it.
 

frimble3

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Well, the scorpion thing makes sense! It must be hard to mate if both parties have those long, flexible stingers.