#yeah i sympathise with that! like if it's with other trans/queer people i can talk about it more but with cis people it's like. trying to

[maveriquecultureis]

Maverique culture is cringing whenever someone asks you about your gender presentation because being forced to choose between feminine, masculine, neutral/androgynous, etc feels so restricting and wrong

maverique culture is!

[microsuedemouse]

this post got longer than anticipated so I'm putting it under a cut - it's just me musing about writing queer characters and how best to include representation in my work without making their queerness the focal point of their existence.

a couple of days ago out of nowhere an idea came to me to solve a narrative problem in a story I've been working on in various iterations for over a decade but haven't actually thought much about in definitely months, if not over a year

(which was interesting in itself, and speaks perhaps to that idea of letting a project shift to the back of your head when it's not cooperating with you, and maybe it will continue to simmer back there and when you check on it again it will have developed some)

but anyway part of this solution involved the introduction of another character, who would probably serve as a recurring but tertiary presence for the story as a whole, such as it is. (like so many of my projects, it's never had a singular distinct plot, so much as just a premise and a cast and possible storylines.) and said character, the moment I started writing her, very obviously to me, turned out to be trans.

and it all got me thinking again about the ways that gender/sexuality/related topics have historically existed in my writing and my characters and my worlds. I have been consciously aware of my inclusion of queer characters in my work since sometime in high school - probably around the time that sites like tumblr began to educate me more on social subjects and I started to become actively invested in them - but even now, some 10+ years later and having come to the understanding that I am neither straight nor cis, I am almost never compelled to make characters' queerness like... loud or obvious or A Point.

like. okay. so. if I'm being totally honest, there were many years during which I sympathised with R*wling over the whole 'Dumbledore is gay but it just Never Came Up' thing because I've got lots of characters whose queerness likely wouldn't come up in the story the way I was telling it. (I hope I don't need this disclaimer but: I no longer sympathise with that, or really anything she says. she is a terf and I do not support her.) because their gender/orientation/etc. doesn't necessarily have any impact on or relevance to their story arc as it exists in my head. I have characters who, yeah, you'll know they're gay, because they have romance subplots - but I also have others for whom it wouldn't be relevant to bring it up unless I engineered a reason for it to come up.

and I've been mulling it over for a few days and I think some of it probably has to do with my OWN feelings about identity and how it's perceived by others. being ace and bi and nonbinary are all parts of who I am, yeah, of course, but under most circumstances I really don't feel strongly about having other people know that. yeah, okay, it can be annoying sometimes to be Assumed Straight or Assumed Female but by and large those things are all very internal to me and I don't actually care what other people think when they look at me. so like, even though I 100% understand the importance of unambiguous representation, I don't personally feel the need for it in most cases.

so you wind up with me sitting here, looking at this new character who's not big enough in the story to have a whole Thing about being trans, and whose transness is far from the most interesting or relevant thing about her... wondering how to make it clear without feeling like I'm shoehorning it in. I know how to code her, how to include lines of dialogue and things that a sharp reader could pick up on and go 'hey this makes it sound like she's trans,' but I'd love to be able to be more direct than that without making it a whole Thing. it's a lot more relevant that she's a super-friendly party animal, that she's a nearly-full-time sugar baby, and most of all that she's a demon who uses human secrets like currency, collecting and trading them as social capital! being trans is not anywhere near the front of the list when it comes to prominent aspects of her character and with her being tertiary to the story I'm left wondering how to include it in a way that isn't overly obvious or like, crammed-in-for-the-sake-of-it.

and, idk. I think this branches off into a lot of other conversations for me, too. like how I don't relate to my peers' way of exploring and celebrating their queerness by talking about it all the time or viewing everything through that lens. or how I love when people have all kinds of different headcanons/reads of their favourite characters based wholly on what they want to see but that doesn't do anything for me personally - if I'm reading a character as queer, that's gonna be based on something I'm picking up in the text itself; that's just how I read. or how I'm not actually particularly more compelled by queer stories/romances than by cishet ones.

but I dunno. I dunno. I want to be a responsible and proactive writer who is direct about the inclusion of queerness in her writing, because audiences need and deserve that. but I don't wanna make queerness the centre of a character or story if it's not about that already, and I don't wanna shoehorn their queerness into the dialogue/narration just for the sake of having it there. (and as a writer, I can't rely on subtle visual cues, like pride flags in the backgrounds of scenes or whatever - like, if I mention them, I'm Making A Point Of Mentioning Them. if you draw a pride flag on a bedroom wall in the background of a comic panel and don't comment on it, it's just environmental storytelling, y'know?)

idk. I'm still growing as a writer, and I'm sure eventually I'll figure out how to do this in a way that works for me. but for now I'm left sitting here looking at another queer character wondering how to do her justice without turning it into a whole unnecessary ordeal.

[karanan]

So my old tiny little town I just moved from (where my family lives) is organising a pride parade this summer! Which is fantastic! I feel like small, conservative areas absolutely need more queer visibility. Just because it’s a small town full of farmers doesn’t mean there magically won’t be any queer people living or being born there (yours truly being an example of that).

There’s this trans woman that’s been on the news lately, starting to work for awareness in the region and like I want to contact her and lend a hand because boy howdy did I wander in the dark when I started my trans meetings and stuff. There’s like no support for Swedish-speaking transgender people in Finland (in case anyone missed it, Finland is a bilingual country and Fennoswedes are a linguistic minority and yeah of course we can be queer too). So far she’s made a page on FB for queer people and it’s a good first step, and she’s organising this pride parade. I also read about her organising meetups for local queer people and that’s gonna be worth so much! I’m only sad that my timing sucks as I moved across the country and won’t be able to attend any meetups. I will be able to go to the pride parade though! I mean, I should be, unless something comes up. There’s no set date but they’ve said late summer so it should be nbd.

Now for the less fun part. The bigots. My family has been very supportive of me. Some more perfectly than others, but for what it’s worth, they’re trying. And the people that matter the most have been the most understanding and tolerant. Except for my uncle. He’s a 50+ white straight priest. He’s never said anything bad to my face but he keeps going on weird Facebook rants about how oppressed Christians are. He had an interview with a local newspaper when my hometown had a pride parade a few years back, where he was like “all this gays vs homophobes business is a waste of time when there are more important issues like children starving in Africa” (lmao lmao lmao lamldmaoaosdml) and that shit irked me even back then like ok Uncle Fucko, it might seem pointless to you, but to me it’s literally my life. Talk about derailing.  And now, this time, he commented on some fanatical circle jerk post written by a (known) local hate speaker and Christian fanatic who went on about the bible and sinners and all that jazz, about how “Christians are the most oppressed group of people in the whole world”--his actual words, translated from Swedish. ? ??? ???? ??? ?? ? ?? ????? ? ?? what the actual fuck. He’s like, offended that he, as a white straight middle aged cis man and a Christian doesn’t get parades and doesn’t get applauded for speaking up etc. I’m honestly not surprised yet also incredibly disappointed. You bring shame on the entire family. Fuckbucket. Like yeah, Ostrobothnia has a rather high amount of bigots so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising but like... does my existence mean nothing to you? Usually the straight cis people can only relate or sympathise with queer people if they run into one in the wild so like you even have an easy free pass to learn better here AND YET

I’m gonna turn up to the pride parade extra hard. Get my gay little trans dude hands all over your precious hometown.