[ SECRET POST #2899 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2899 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 023 secrets from Secret Submission Post #414.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[saku]

i'm trans and a writer and i understanding where you are coming from. truth be told, most of the trans representation i come across that's written by a cisgender individual is not accurate, or seems forced or over the top. it's difficult to write about something you don't experience because your knowledge of it is basically just your interpretation of something you can never actually know personally.

that being said, i don't think this inherently makes it impossible for cis ppl to write good, well-rounded trans characters. same goes for any trait imo; i think white people can possibly write good poc characters too, for instance. it's just not often the case that these characters are depicted perfectly bc for cis/white/whatever people, it's largely guesswork.

but i wouldn't hate them for trying if the character they're writing isn't for the purpose of smut or angst or the token Queer(tm) or whatever ya know

[feotakahari]

Maybe this is me being totally ignorant, but it seems like writing someone who's trans would be different than writing someone from a different culture. If I may speak personally, I wrote a hyperactive twelve-year-old girl who watches too much anime and wants to be a magical girl. Said girl has a penis, but I didn't really write her differently as a direct result of it--any difference came from how other people treated her, and her resultant isolation and loneliness. The girl herself is just a kid like any other, and I'd probably get mad at someone who tried to make her "different" just because of her genitals. (Granted, a twelve-year-old is a different story than a grown-up struggling with things like hormones.)

[(Anonymous)]

I've run across a lot of trans fic that (from the POV of a cis person) just comes across as almost creepily fetishistic, so it's good to hear it confirmed from someone who is trans that it's not just me misreading things.

[(Anonymous)]

OP. The fic in question that set me off was written by someone I felt was a friend. The sole purpose of making the character trans was so he could get pregnant.

This secret wasn't about accurate representation in media, because I do think people can write well if they put time or effort into it, the same as anything else. But having someone assume that transmen are magical guys that can pop out babies for the sake of their fetish was too much for me to stand.

[(Anonymous)]

Of course you read the fic and I haven't, so I'll defer to you on that particular story's quality but...just as a story, the basics seem pretty legit. A bio family is something that a lot of people want, and I know Oprah's done more than one "Pregnant man!" shows about trans men who kept their parts long enough to have a baby, and I think these are stories that need telling just as much as any other, and I don't think it's wrong to approach it from a fanfic angle with characters the writer is already familiar with.

But I totally get if the fic you read was not a good representation of its potential.

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't read the fic, but I know the person and they talked to me about it. The point of the fic was mpreg. That was it. That's what they write. And the person actually admitted to me that making the character trans was the only way they could "figure out" how to do it, saying that since there was no canon magic or alien/inhuman biology or anything of the like they couldn't manage to write the story any other way. I got angry at that, because making it an AU with any of those things would have been better to me personally.

If the story had started as "I want to write the character as trans" and he ended up carrying a child? That would have been fine. If they had wanted to specifically write a trans character having a child? I still wouldn't have hated it. But that wasn't what it was. Making them trans was a quick patch so they could make their fetish fic and not have to put an AU or ABO tag on it, and it pissed me off.

[(Anonymous)]

I do understand your frustration in that case. I have a friend who is trans and he told me he's pretty pissed about all those tumblr kids shouting "But men can get pregnant and have periods you erasing scumbags" when anyone says something like "only women know what that's like" because he says transmen are aware of that and for a lot of them it fucking sucks because it amps the dysphoria up to max.

[(Anonymous)]

So one fic pissed you off, and now you hate everyone?

Okay then.

[were_lemur]

Ugh, that sounds gross.