A Single Unified LGBT Character Thread

Is this thread still active? Because I have a story idea I'm brainstorming with an FTM transgender lead.

This thread is always sporadic. Go ahead, share your thoughts.

Alright, so I got the idea because I was reading about cockatrices, and I thought how they're created (a rooster egg hatched by a toad) would make an interesting story premise, about a toad trying to raise a young cockatrice she just hatched.

Now, I was wondering how a rooster egg would be created. A cisgender rooster would probably be unable to lay an egg...but what about a transgender rooster?

So, the story I came up with is set in either France or Germany during the 17th century. One of our leads is a female toad who doesn't like having to leave her eggs behind and wishes she could take care of her children. Because her husband cheated on her in favor of a salamander, she has no choice but to find a new mate.

She comes by a chicken farm and meets and befriends one chicken who was born a hen but identifies as a rooster. Because of this, he's the target of bullying and harassment by the other chickens, including a big mean transphobic rooster. This FTM rooster has no choice but to leave the farm with our toad heroine.

As they bond with each other, the toad learns of this rooster's desire to become a father. Later, the rooster lays an egg (it's implied, but not directly stated, that the transphobic rooster raped him), and the toad agrees to help hatch it. Sure enough, the egg hatches into a cockatrice, and the two new parents have to work together to keep this youngster out of trouble, especially since he's having a little too much fun with his petrification powers.

The toad also has a couple friends in the form of an earthworm and a snail who, being hermaphrodites themselves, help the rooster learn to accept his gender identity. They tie pheasant feathers onto his tail, and thorns onto his legs to act as spurs, so he can pass as a "real" rooster (though they explain to him that he IS a real rooster on the inside, and this stuff is just for cosmetic purposes).

So yeah, the main reason I have a trans character here is as an excuse to create a rooster egg for a cockatrice to hatch from. With that said, what do you guys think? Does this sound like good trans representation to you?

Edited by MrMediaGuy2 on Oct 11th 2019 at 9:05:21 AM

A side detail question: antropomorphic or just talking animals? Though the dressing-up portion sounds like regular animals talking.

That aside, yeah, that sounds like good representation overall. Story involved with trans issues but not purely about them is good, going into just living life as a completely normal person (well, besides super-child troubles) is great. I'd personally do even less dark, not rape but maybe something like a child from trying to suppress himself and "fit in" as a girl. But that's just personal taste, your way is still fine for the story type.

Edited by Adannor on Oct 11th 2019 at 7:41:15 PM

I was thinking something like a Mouse World, where the animals wear clothes but still do animal things. But thanks.

One small thing; avoid saying a trans person "identifies" as their gender; they are a member of their gender full stop. Identifying a certain way and having a particular gender identity aren't the same thing.

What do you guys think of writing neutered animals as having an Ambiguous Gender compared to unaltered ones? Is this transphobic or is okay under Deliberate Values Dissonance?

I've seen this used in various xenofiction works involving animals that identify sex by smell rather than looks. Some examples: Warrior Cats has a throwaway line where Bluestar mentions Rusty is "still a tom" (paraphrasing) because he hasn't been neutered, in Tailchaser's Song a neutered male cat is androgynous to Dude Looks Like a Lady levels (with Firefoot not initially realizing Windflower was male), Feline Wizards depicts altered cats as having No Biological Sex according to other cats.

Many people do use "identify", but I've never liked it myself.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Dec 18th 2019 at 8:00:24 AM

Hey, I'm asexual and legitimately have no clue how to write sexual emotions. How on Earth do I write that sort of stuff, if I ever do? It's unlikely that I will, and most of my characters are ace because that's all I know how to write, sexual-wise. If I don't need to touch on sexual emotion, I can write allosexual (I think that's the word for sexually attracted people, if I remember right) characters, but in a romantic scenario, I don't know how to convey that level of attraction. How do I manage? I don't want to make all my couples ace because I'm worried of giving the impression that all LGBTQ+ people are ace or something alone those lines.

I'm under the impression that asexual people are even more underrepresented than a lot of other LGBTQ+ people, so a world of ace will probably help the balance instead of hurt it.

As for you writing sexual feelings, gee, that would be sort of like a blind person writing about color, so I can see why you're having trouble. Um... I wish I could help you, I just need to think of how to say it...

I'm also Ace and Aro Ace no less so not much help for sexual feelings and the writing there of.

Transgender characters in fantasy - worldbuilding question.

As I understand it, transgender people haven't been recognised until recently in the West, and it's broadly a result of gender studies, and before that, recognition of gender dysphoria (I've heard it explained that trans people were mostly what we would now call transmedicalists, and then gender studies came along and broadened the scope to people without dysphoria as well). There have also been recognised third genders in many places in the world, albeit somewhat marginalised and often specifically non-sexual.

In a medievalish fantasy world, how can you put in trans people without dysphoria, awareness of gender as being distinct from sex (which implies an academic field of study around it) or putting them in a specific third gender group? I know it's fantasy and I can just make my own societal rules out of thin air, but my brain always asks "how did this come about then" and for answers I tend to look to RL and I'm just not sure.

Like, Vinland Saga introduced a trans character recently, where an assigned-male-at-birth character was raised as a girl to keep her from being sent to battle, and she continues to prefer the female name given to her by her mother than the male name given to her by her father (as he assumed they were a boy) and to identify with female gender norms. I can see a ploy like that working on some of my characters, but not as a common thing for trans people throughout the fantasy world.

I recall reading a short story where a knight presented as masc goes to a witch who is known to give you what you want most in ways you don't expect, and is turned into a dragon. "You wanted to be a dragon?" "No. It's perfect." she said, and flew away.

Well, there's also Two-spirit, which draws from a wide variety of concepts across various Native American cultures that align, in modern terms, with being transgender or genderqueer, and which didn't always lead to persecution or ostracization. I saw one interpretation of one of these Native American trans*/genderqueer concepts that describes it as the belief that such people have the body of one sex and the spirit of the other sex, or a spirit that is both. (I doubt that gets anywhere close to the truth of that concept and I'm sure we're aware of how Native American culture has been used and abused in the past, but since you seem to be going for something closer to a Culture Chop Suey instead of a dead-on replication of any Native American culture, I think it's fine to draw from that interpretation since it would be placed in a different cultural context.) And then there's the Public Universal Friend, a Quaker who nowadays might be considered AFAB nonbinary. As far as I can tell, their fellow Quakers and followers reacted to this with, "uh... o-okay".

It's worth noting that not all societies pre-1980 AD necessarily had a problem with homosexuality as a concept, and given what I've found above, that could certainly be extended to cover trans* and genderqueer/nonbinary individuals. Homosexuality and transgender also tend to have a genetic basis, and I've read some hypotheses that believe those things continued to get passed down at all in prehistoric human populations because homosexual or trans* individuals were less likely to have children and could thus be more productive than cishet family members who did, to the point that their assistance in early family clans allowed relatives to have more children and pass the genetic predisposition for LGBT+ along.

I decided a while back that my entire constructed world would, at the very least, not have a problem with homosexuality, to the point that most societies have non-gendered honorifics and titles, and marriage and inheritance laws that are determined by factors other than sex and gender. By that extension, trans* and genderqueer/nonbinary aren't exactly a foreign concept, but there are a couple societies that are completely accepting of it and have even had the time to work pronoun negotiation into general etiquette. I did the same research that you want help with, and as far as I've been able to determine, a society doesn't necessarily need to have a fancy reason underpinning its acceptance of LGBT+ individuals. And it makes sense, when you consider that a lot of the arguments against LGBT+ acceptance and rights don't hold much water, or, to put it mildly, have any basis in reality. Maybe they just... would rather worry about other things.

Edited by CrystalGlacia on Feb 8th 2020 at 11:31:12 AM

I mean, gender norms in my universe are kinda fucked already, because there's a roughly equal chance of men and women being born with basically superpowers by any other name, the women "stay in the kitchen" dynamic is much, much weaker than it otherwise would be when one of those women could potentially flood a city with lava and the patriarchy has a hard time maintaing power when women intrinsically have similar military strength to them and they can't do anything about that.

Now, one explanation I can probably fanangle in is the idea that the "Gods" of the setting are themselves gender-neutral and maybe gender-fluid - they aren't worshipped as such, but they would have had a formative influence on the first races of the world, perhaps introducing transgenderism as an accepted form of self-identification in the distant, distant past.

Strictly speaking, Patriarchy as a concept in feminism is less about physical power and more about cultural norms.

Hence why attempts to simply gender flip sexism to write a Matriarchy don't work (a hypothetical society which valued women more than men would lean into something like Men Are the Expendable Gender, rather than a classical Greek "men and women swap places" sort of thing)..

I am planning on writing a bisexual trans girl in my one story, named Liz Clarke. She's a little rash in the heat of the moment but otherwise likes to plan things out (which can happen very quickly), and isn't willing to open herself up to others in fear of discrimination. I'm thinking it would be something that her friends already know and accept, but her girlfriend (pre-transition) wasn't able to witness or notice due to being trapped in a cave for about five-ish years. I want her to not be defined by her trans-ness, but not "just happen to be trans" either.

I am wondering whether I should make the fact that she is transgender a sort of semi-plot twist, or to just state it upfront that she's trans. I'm thinking about dropping hints and foreshadowing (for example, her mother says that she "killed [her] son") throughout the story, but I wonder if it's unfortunate to skirt around the issue. Would there be Unfortunate Implications in writing her like this?

Edited by TheWhistleTropes on Feb 16th 2020 at 12:58:36 PM

Making a twist seems overdone. I'd just casually foreshadow/imply it before revealing it somehow.

That was actually what I was hoping to do—a casual reveal for the audience that would recontextualize her actions and her personality, but not so much that it's jarring. I'm thinking the main three characters would call themselves the Outcasts because they're all different in some way (my main character, Autumn, would be called "The Autistic Little Sister"—the ALS for short).

Using the fact a character's trans for a twist is rather overdone, and can carry Unfortunate Implications on its own, although it can be handled well (for example, The Missing JJ Mac Field And The Island Of Memories does this very well with one of the characters the Player Character, to be exact, and was made by a cis guy who was previously known for mis-writing a trans character in an earlier game).

The best thing to do is look at each bit of foreshadowing on its own to make sure its not an ugly stereotype, and be very careful the reveal doesn't come across as an Unsettling Gender-Reveal.

Also (and this is general advice), run every draft past a trans person (even if you're trans yourself). There's always something you didn't think of.

Does anyone have some basic tips for reference for writing a trans character? Generic, child and other ages?

This years GDC was streamed online, thanks to certain developments. So they've gone and uploaded all of the presentations to Youtube.

This one's pretty good, and very relevant to this thread:

Direct link

Edited by Bisected8 on Mar 24th 2020 at 12:48:11 PM

Is there any specific consensus on how to properly write the phrase "trans woman" (and men, of course, but women are just more common to pop up)? I had a feeling that both with a space and without (transwoman) is fine, but then run into some twitter arguments that writing it without the space is a dogwhistle of TERFs because it implies trans women as a separate class of being from women. Meanwhile one person I know, trans herself, talks about characters in her writing strictly as "trans*woman" which I haven't seen anywhere else but its awkward to just get up in her face with questions.

Edited by Adannor on Mar 31st 2020 at 12:10:17 PM

Trans woman is the broadly accepted version. You're absolutely right that TERFs use "transwoman" as one word as a dogwhistle for "really a man" because "transwoman" can be a noun separate from "woman", while with "trans woman", trans is an adjective/descriptor to the noun woman, which acknowledges that trans women are women. Transphobes obviously can't countenance that, or the phrase cis woman for that matter, because their cisnormative brains can't handle the notion of their^note most of the ones I've encountered online are women themselves "woman" identity being diversified into different categories of which they belong to only one of.

The amount of shitfits I've seen about "you can't sort me into a category of my own gender!" is truly annoying. Yeah we can, we do it all the bloody time, and have done for millennia.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Mar 31st 2020 at 10:39:44 AM

I have heard some people say "transwoman" is used in some parts of Europe, but I can't find evidence of that. "Trans woman" is the most acceptable version, while "transwoman" is either a misspelling or outright transphobia.

I have a question that might be a bit odd, but here goes: what's the best way to write a 'sexy' or at least self-confidently attractive Trans character without falling into the dark side of Transgender Fetishization?