A Single Unified LGBT Character Thread

What tropes and cliches should I avoid about trans/non-binary characters?

So, I'm tyring to add two trans characters to my story. I really have little to no clue, but I made so that they are well rounded characters and their gender identity is just one of their many characteristics and not the centre of the story. My worries come from how my portrayal of them can be perceive by the reader. With the first character, the lady, I'm more or less secure of the portrayal as I'm drawing inspiration from a good friend of mine the same age of the lady. But with the second character, the boy, I'm on my own since my friend realized to be trans as an adult and didn't experiment strong emotional energy in that direction in her formative years, plus to womanhood and not manhood as the character. In my tack on him I'm using the Sweet Polly Oliver trope combined to Lady Looks Like a Dude, but to me it seems that this way I'm missing the point of portraying his gender identity. Plus, he escaped being a child bride. Do these tropes give the misrepresentative idea that my boy is just a girl who think is advantageous to pass as a male or that it's just "a phase" / a result of his trauma? It will be a good idea to state that his feeling of being a boy predate all of the above, to prove that all happenings in his life just happen to line up with his identity, without coursing it?

The biggest things that come to mind are

• Don't act like medical transition (hormones, "The Surgery") are the beginning and end of being transgender. As a corollary, don't act like a character who hasn't yet medically transitioned is still their birth-assigned gender.
• Don't make a habit of having your only nonbinary characters be Non-Human Non-Binary. This can't really be a strict rule (cause like say if you're writing in a setting that doesn't contain any humans, then obviously all of the non-binary characters will also be non-human), just something to keep in mind in general.

Other than that, the general rule of "write several of them so that one character isn't your audience's only point of reference" should serve you fine.

I'll ask again if since it was on the bottom of the last page.

Are there any seminal books on writing LGBT characters in particular?

I dunno about books, but there is a fair amount of academic literature on LGBT characters.

I hope I'm not disrespectful but I want to put a twist on Norse mythology. The gods protected Lif (female) and Lifthrasir (male) from Ragnarok (Norse Apocalypse) so they could repopulate Midgard (our world). Would them being homosexuals and rebelling against the gods come off as offensive?

Edited by ChicoTheParakeet on Nov 4th 2020 at 9:22:10 AM

I do not know how to respond to this, as I am not very familiar with Norse mythology. Perhaps someone else could answer it.

There was a doublepost from Random Questions here, but it has been answered on that thread.

Edited by TheWhistleTropes on Nov 23rd 2020 at 11:33:14 AM

I am going to write a Cyberpunk dystopia set about 230 years in future that shall contain some LGBTQ+ characters and I'd like to avoid pitfalls and Unfortunate Implications , so here are my points.

1. I want to have a Anyone Can Die situation, but seriously want to avoid the associations of Bury Your Gays , also I don't want that the reader thinks "This character is straight, so she/he will die."

2. I don't want to tell or explain the sexuality of the protagonist, also I think for her it just wouldn't fit to her personality to fall in love in the situation the story is set in.

3. There are some more characters whose sexuality isn't told, so they could qualify as . Ambigously Bi 4. There are two female characters who become a couple during a timeskip, so the readers are informed about that, as it isn't a major plot point. So there romance develops not on-screen, because in-universe, the first person narrator just isn't present then.

Edited by Mysterium on Dec 3rd 2020 at 6:01:49 PM

1. Big part of Bury Your Gays is when they're the only ones to bite it (similar to Black Guy Dies First situation) or when it immediately follows the reveal of their sexuality or start of a relationship. If you're going to earn Anyone Can Die chops, it should be fine as long as it isn't an immediate pre-mortem thing.

2-3. This is fine. Not everybody has to commit to a relationship, or develop a crush, or even be horny for anybody. I do not think they'd be necessarily snatched up by bisexual people to identify with, but asexual folk totally could go for them.

4. I think it'd be better if you at least show some seeds for the relationship before the skip? But overall, a timeskip is fine when relationships aren't the core focus of the work.

Edited by Adannor on Dec 4th 2020 at 11:47:29 PM

Another problem is if there is only a couple of LGBTQIA+ characters in the work and they die.

I'm honestly wondering at some point whether something is going to be good or not for my story.

Three of my main characters are Autumn (cis lesbian), Liz (trans girl), and Jake (cis boy). I was intending for Autumn and Liz to end up together at some point, given that they were exes before Liz came out. However, I was talking with my counselor about it and she said that some audiences might interpret it that Liz only transitioned to be with Autumn again, and instead suggested that Autumn end up with Jake.

I feel the latter suggestion actually might make more sense story-wise, and also add more conflict. Autumn does seem to be somewhat jealous of Liz and Jake at times, and I'm thinking sometime that it might explode to the point where Autumn blows up at Liz and threatens her somehow. Liz ending up with Jake would be kind of a good idea, although Autumn could still be longing for Liz somehow.

Thematically, it would also make sense; the theme of this story, I'm thinking, is accepting the past, but not letting it define you. In this sense, Liz and Autumn ending up together would be somewhat contradictory to the larger themes at hand, since Liz is instead embracing the past where she's supposed to be the character that has already embraced the theme (moving on).

P.S. I realized while writing this that I might have just rearranged the triangle between Craig, Lotte, and Maxine in Being John Malkovich to an extent, right down to the fact that Lotte is trans^note though it's only brought up for one scene and dismissed promptly afterward^note there was one article that suggested that Craig might also be trans to an extent, however.

polyam triad tho

That's not serious advice, just Author Appeal but it could work

I don't really know if there can exactly be a polyamorous triad. Perhaps they had originally broken up because Autumn and Liz both thought they were gay (Liz pre-transition). I do imply that Autumn still has a crush on Liz, and I do think the jealousy of Liz and Jake's "friendship" does come to a major head—though I wonder if it would make her unlikeable in the long run, considering it's somewhat impulsive and would create major tension between her and Jake.

Been considering doing something involving Liz to help give her some more character development, as right now she simply feels like a static character who sort of exists to give trans representation. The only major thing that happens is that she ends up being romantically involved with Jake instead of Autumn as was originally planned.

But I don't know how to give her more development without weakening the theme of the screenplay. I was thinking it would be an arc where she learns not to be very vain, but I understand that being trans one would want to be perceived as female upon first glance; hence a mohawk, eyeshadow, half-shirts, skirts and leggings, the whole deal. I want to give her an arc that is related to her being trans, but not defined by it, to avoid Unfortunate Implications; but also one that fits the theme of not letting your past define who you are now.

In this instance, I've thought of a relationship arc that goes the opposite way. Liz and Jake at the start are definitely together together, but they're not exactly in love... like they were just trying to make each other seem better than they actually are. This relationship gets more and more strained throughout the screenplay until they break up after Jake makes a terribly selfish decision. In this case, Liz decides to put her personal feelings and care over her vanity. But I still wonder if vanity would be a sin.

I've also thought that Autumn and Liz have some pretty good chemistry with each other and make a better couple than Liz and Jake. However, it would contradict the theme for them to end up together at the end^note they were exes in the past and had broken up, before Liz came out. They may very well be a sort of ambiguous Trobed-esque relationship, but that may be contradicted because Liz has "definitely moved on" from her.

I just keep thinking about all the things to make a good bout of representation. I'm thinking she is implied to be bisexual as well, but that just would bring she and Autumn more close together. I could definitely see some Liz-Autumn fanfiction once it exists, but I don't know. It might just be a nice thing to see a Love Triangle in which none of the points are all that stable.

Hm, I've just run into a fanfic about a transgender character that starts before she comes out. The fic blanks out usage of her deadname and uses "they" pronoun at the time. Blanking I figure is obviously a good approach, but is the latter part the commonly accepted standard for writing about that situation?

Edited by Adannor on Jan 29th 2021 at 2:57:16 PM

I don't know if there's a standard approach, but that seems like it works. Either that or The All-Concealing "I".

The consensus is that a person's name and pronouns apply retroactively when you're talking about them before they started using them (unless you're doing a direct quote).

Of course that might get complicated if the writer wants to do a twist.

I'm personally of the opinion it's better not to even give a trans character a canon deadname if you can help it (just the implication that they have one).

Maybe for a nonfictiony vibe, direct quotes could probably do something like "I think that [REAL NAME] is pretty cool" instead of "I think that [DEADNAME]..."

I think in this case the fic writer was using pronouns to mark transition from "I want to be a girl" to "I am a girl" mental states. So they're kinda reflecting the current identity within the fic's ongoing timeline?

In the canon its based on, the only reference to that past goes like "Back when we thought she was a boy" from her cousin.

Edited by Adannor on Jan 31st 2021 at 9:47:17 PM

I know in early drafts of my story, I thought it would be best to make it a plot twist that my one character was transgender by revealing her deadname. But then I realized, no, that's transphobic. And then I realized, oh, I'm trans. So I could just make subtle comments about her gender identity, for one.

Revealing a deadname is bad for all because it reinforces transphobic stereotypes, and a general audience would think that whoever revealed the deadname would not be doing any harm because it's their "real name" that people seem to believe trans people abandon.

When a cis person changes their name, they usually tend to accept that. But if someone becomes a Caitlyn, a Lana, or an Elliot, then they may not as much because they're changing their identity. So yeah, I'd suggest eliding any deadnames from your work.

I couldn't have put it better myself.

Regarding deadnaming, there's a little problem I have with my fanfic, despite the character in question is not a LGBT person.

The character is is a African-Japanese girl born in Africa, but raised in Japan and she use a Japanese name when she was naturalized Japanese as a kid, but there's times when the character herself use her "deadname/old name", in this case, her birth name she used when she was in Africa when explaining some stuff about herself, and while many characters know her former name, everyone else, for the sake of convenience, and out of respect for her, prefers to use her Japanese name over her African name. For the record, the friends of the African-Japanese girl are aliens, without any cultural context about which stuff could be considered offensive for humans, including deadnaming.

Would there be a problem about that?

Edited by luisedgarf on Feb 5th 2021 at 2:51:52 PM

Well, I'm a Chinese-born orphan who was adopted at five months old by a white American couple, and they changed my name to something more Western from my Chinese birth name. Probably because I was adopted so young (before my identity formed) and because of my largely indifferent relationship with my race, I personally don't consider my birth name to be anything like a trans* person's deadname- to me, it's more like a fact. Most people don't know my birth name not because I have some special relationship with it as a person of Chinese descent, but because I consider it largely inconsequential to who I am, and I have not yet encountered a situation where other people knowing what it is would change anything. If someone called me by my birth name, I'd be more weirded-out than offended.

I don't know if she moved to Japan with her birth family, when, or how much she interacts with her native culture- all of that could influence her relationship with her African name. However, the fact that her legal name in Japan is a Japanese name perhaps indicates that her parents wanted her to assimilate to some degree, and makes me think it might make more sense for her to consider her African name secondary if she had success assimilating and considers herself at least somewhat Japanese. It could make sense for her to use both names situationally if she experiences a profound separation between being African and being Japanese- like if she sometimes travels back to Africa to visit family and they use her African name there, and she doesn't have charged or strongly negative associations with being African. Race politics can be fraught, after all, especially when it comes to people of African descent- it's my understanding that Africans are sometimes considered something of a curiosity in Japan, because they're pretty uncommon there, but I've heard that mostly from expat African-Americans who moved there as adults and didn't take Japanese names like your character. It's also kind of an odd situation that she might have her own unique relationship with.

I don't know; I think you should repost this in Random Questions and see if you can get more specific feedback there, now that we've kind of established that this is probably not anything like a trans* person's deadname.

Yeah, a deadname is one that's been thoroughly discarded for intimate personal reasons (specifically for trans people, because it's tied to a gender they had to go through a great deal of trouble to reject).

The original name of someone who was renamed because of adoption is a different beast entirely.

Is there something wrong with an asexual character having an adoptive child?