I really wish people would understand that there are other forms of queer rep besides two same gendered people kissing.
A queer character is queer rep regardless of their romance or a lack thereof even. Ace and aro people exist. Trans people exist. Bi people exist. Queer characters are rep by existing, not just by who they interact with. If a character is nonbinary, they are queer rep whether they kiss someone or not. A bi character in a relationship with someone a different gender is still queer rep because they are still bi. Queer characters can even just be friends with one another. They can be single! And still be queer because that’s who they are not who they do!
This whole trend of deciding if art is valid representation based on romance and ships is reductive and dismissive of identities existing within individuals. And of the communities that we all need.
Just please, stop reducing entire identities down to relationships. Its all good and fun to enjoy your ships, but you have to remember the community is bigger than just romances.
What I can tell you as a transgender woman is that occasionally I will read trans woman characters written by cisgender authors. And I can pretty much always tell when the author is cis, even if the character is portrayed respectfully, because they get some details wrong or something. But I certainly don’t think that they shouldn’t be allowed to take a stab at it, and I actually appreciate any representation that isn’t egregiously harmful. And I certainly don’t think that only transgender women should be allowed to write transgender women because then it falls on me,and that’s rather tokenizing, isn’t it?
Also it seems like demanding that only#OwnVoices authors should be allowed to write certain characters is an excellent way to enforce a situation where most books are about cishet white people.
And no: you probably won’t get all of the specific details of someone else’s lived experience correct, in much the same way that most authors don’t get all of the specific details about how, say, nuclear reactorsorspacework. But so long as your character passes as realistically humanand not a one-dimensional caricature of what you think that other types of people are like, then I think that that’s reasonable.
“When you send me for a role and it says ‘South Asian, his name is Raj’ … I say ‘I don’t fucking want it.’ And then the next one comes in and it says it doesn’t have a race. ‘This is John. 30s. Handsome.’ … When it says that, I want that fucking role. So I want to take from the majority. That’s the only time I think about race.” —Rahul KohlionBlackman Beyondpodcast
Please, please take roles from Chris Pratt.
petition for Rahul Kohli to replace Chris Pratt in everything
i was in barnes and noble today and went to the ya section cause sometimes i find gud shit there. i forgey the name of the book alreay but i flipped over it, it read something along the lines of, “___ is genderfluid. some days she’s a girl, some days he’s a boy.”
naturally i thought “ew” and put the book back down. but the genderfluid part itself isnt the main problem—
A grown adult wrote the book.
A book about mogai is being sold to literal children. I remember I started reading from the YA section at around 11; an age where I was still super impressionable. And if an 11 yr old picked up that book, they’d most likely fall down the trap that mogai is. This type of shit is actually scary; and it’s beyond me just knowing genderfluidity can’t be a thing, it’s literally harmful to children.
Oh boohoo kids might hear about the scary genders you don’t like, fuck off and let kids learn to accept each other and themselves and not your weird alienating attitude where anyone who’s different is an evil mogai trying to corrupt the children. For any other anti-mogais reading this, here’s one of the big reasons calling yourself anti-mogai is bad, because you’re using the same terms as this fuck and a lot of others who don’t believe in nb genders, even the “normal” ones
Damn op what’s the book called I wanna read that shit…….. never seen nonbinary rep irl
From the sounds of it the book being referred to here is Symptoms of Being Human by Jeff Garvin.
Riley Cavanaugh is many things: Punk rock. Snarky. Rebellious. And gender fluid. Some days Riley identifies as a boy, and others as a girl. But Riley isn’t exactly out yet. And between starting a new school and having a congressman father running for reelection in über-conservative Orange County, the pressure–media and otherwise–is building up in Riley’s life.
On the advice of a therapist, Riley starts an anonymous blog to vent those pent-up feelings and tell the truth of what it’s really like to be a gender fluid teenager. But just as Riley’s starting to settle in at school–even developing feelings for a mysterious outcast–the blog goes viral, and an unnamed commenter discovers Riley’s real identity, threatening exposure. And Riley must make a choice: walk away from what the blog has created–a lifeline, new friends, a cause to believe in–or stand up, come out, and risk everything
Another book that comes to mind with a genderfluid main character is Mask of Shadows, by Linsey Miller.
I Needed to Win.
They Needed to Die.
Sallot Leon is a thief, and a good one at that. But gender fluid Sal wants nothing more than to escape the drudgery of life as a highway robber and get closer to the upper-class–and the nobles who destroyed their home.
When Sal steals a flyer for an audition to become a member of The Left Hand–the Queen’s personal assassins, named after the rings she wears–Sal jumps at the chance to infiltrate the court and get revenge.
But the audition is a fight to the death filled with clever circus acrobats, lethal apothecaries, and vicious ex-soldiers. A childhood as a common criminal hardly prepared Sal for the trials. And as Sal succeeds in the competition, and wins the heart of Elise, an intriguing scribe at court, they start to dream of a new life and a different future, but one that Sal can have only if they survive.
I’m trying to keep this list reasonable but I’d also suggest checking out Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase series. It basically follows the main character Magnus in his afterlife as an einherji, one of Odin’s undead warriors. Magnus is a pansexual son of Frey, once homeless soon dead, going on quests with a Muslim Valkyrie who’s a daughter of Loki trying to balance both her faiths, her half sister and his lover, genderfluid shapeshifter Alex Fierro, along with a deaf elf and fashion obsessed dwarf.
So anyway OP you can go fuck yourself and also these books sound cool.
@sapphicauthor was ‘symptoms of being human’ the one you got at gay’s the word?
It was!
It was a fairly good read but ought to come with massive trigger warnings (for constant homophobic, transphobic and lesbophobic slurs, and transphobic violence culminating in rape). Seemed to me that scene was only really included for shock value as Riley could have been motivated for the ending some other way very easily. Potentially the scene was included in order to raise awareness of sexual violence against trans people, but this would really have been much better coming from a trans author not from a cis guy.
It read much more like a book trying to educate cis people about being genderfluid and about how sad and terrible and dangerous being trans is, than it did as a book for trans teens to find rep. Indeed the author says in interviews that he wrote it after hearing his friends say transphobic things.
As much as I agree with everything else people said to argue against the OP, I personally wouldn’t be recommending Symptoms Of Being Human!
I do want up see more genderfluid books, however, I also don’t recommend symptoms of being human
I’m a bit confused at OP’s surprise that grown adults write books. I mean, that’s just … who writes books? Like, normally?
But seriously: I so wish that there had been the vocabulary we have today to describe gender when I was growing up. Back In The Day (we’re talking Nixon/Ford/Carter administrations, here–I’m old as fuck) all we had was boys on the one side and girls on the other. That was it. No room for kids who didn’t conform to either of those, and no vocabulary for non-cis kids to describe themselves or understand who they were. Just a lifetime of trying to find a way to fit into boxes that weren’t meant for you, and no way to understand why you didn’t fit. And that’s a fucking difficult way to grow up.
So yay for genderfluid characters in YA! And for gay characters! And trans characters! And every other kind of character!
Representation matters.
Giving kids a vocabulary to understand themselves matters.
Books that talk about this kind of diversity are important and necessary.
The thing with telling “cliche” stories, but with representation, is… these stories aren’t cliche for us.
Picture this. The people at the table next to you have been getting chocolate cake as a dessert for YEARS. After every meal, they get a chocolate cake. Now, it’s been years, and the people at that table can barely stand chocolate anymore. They want maybe a cheesecake. Or lemon mousse.
But your table? Has NEVER had chocolate cake. Mousse is also good, but you are SO hungry for that chocolate cake, cause you never had it before, and it’s brand new for you, and you’ve been watching the other table eat it for YEARS.
That’s what’s like getting a “cliche” story that’s representative. Has it been done a million times before? Yes. Has it ever been done for US? Well… no. Maybe it’s the 500th chocolate cake in existence, but all the other chocolate cakes weren’t meant for us (girls/PoC/queer folk/disabled folk/etc)
So it being cliche is not a bad thing. You may not want chocolate cake anymore. But we want our slice too.
“You just like She-Ra because it’s gay and body diverse and all women!”
Yup. I do. And here’s why:
I don’t have to watch every character get trimmed down to fit into some feminine archetype or another. I don’t have to watch their relationships get pruned, rewritten, carefully tiptoed around lest they come off as gay. Without homophobia and sexism as a perpetual critical eye, carving and rearranging and judging, always judging, always eager to box and to correct and to exclude, characters and art have room to breathe and innovate.
Catra and Adora’s relationship would not be so rich if not for its ability to evolve and grow beyond typical the typical barriers assigned to two girls, to let romantic subtext happen because they don’t need to hide it or queerbait or make it one of a handful of specific gay tropes. The Best Friends Squad would not be so well knit if there was an executive looking over and saying “Glimmer can be affectionate but not that much” or “We need more emphasis on Bow just being a friend”. When Glimmer cuddles with Adora in the pool or holds her gently, I don’t see the crushing silence of those girls in high school, the reminder that this was going to be completely platonic or else, that box that must be maintained. I just see two people, expressing affection, and letting the chips fall where they may because it’s okay where they end up.
The queerness and diversity of She-Ra is not a checklist, it’s a liberation. It’s freedom from all the tired old tropes and assumptions assigned to women’s personalities, aesthetics, and relationships both in media and out. It’s growth, it’s subversion, whatever you want to call it, it’s new and rich and ripe with potential.
So yeah. I like She-Ra because it’s gay. Die mad about it.
One of my favorite commissioned projects I got to work on this year. HP asked me to create coloring pages that centered around diversity and inclusion. They gave me 100% creative freedom to do what I wanted and paid me well to do it. Download the free pages here.
It is so important to see color because every color has power and meaning. From a young age we assign certain behavior to particular colors without realizing that it is harmful and something we must unlearn. For this reason, I will always put black women and girls at the center of my work. I understand that dark skin is far too often devalued, misrepresented, and overlooked.
I am a Gen Xer, and I’ve been having some conversations about photography and selfies lately, and I want to share a little bit, because I think younger queer people don’t quite understand what things used to be like.
I have no snapshots of the era of my life in which I was smootching girls behind the tilt-a-whirl at a shitty traveling carnival in a dusty empty lot. In fact, I have no pictures of any of my friends from that era aside from yearbook pictures of the friends who were in my school. I was a little goth teenager and many of my friends were also punk queers. We could not take pictures of each other.
Why? Because pictures were taken on film. And film needed to go somewhere to be developed. And if there were pictures of people “being gay” then sometimes your whole roll would disappear at the photo processor. Or your 36 exposure roll would return only 32 pictures to you. Because the processor would censor it. And aside from that, you had to be cautious about whether a photograph would somehow be seen by parents, who could kick your friend out of their house. Just because someone was holding hands in the background of a photo.
Snapshots were for kids who did sports and wholesome activities.
A little later, I had a friend who took photography and had access to the school photo lab (the art teacher didn’t care as long as no one was developing nudity), and there were some photographers who hung out with the skater kids. But prior to that, there was a whole era of my life, people who were super important to me for a time, that I just don’t have pictures of. At all. Because it wasn’t safe.
I found myself recently explaining this to a younger coworker and another colleague in the meeting, a gay man about my age, was nodding along. This was an important facet of life if you were a queer teen in the 80s. You didn’t have pictures of your people until you knew someone with use of a darkroom.
I don’t know what his TARDIS looks like. I don’t know what his catch phrase is or what he’s going to wear. I don’t know who his Companion(s) will be. I don’t know what his accent will be or how/if he’ll react to being Black…on Earth…today. I don’t know if he’ll remember Martha. (I wonder if he’ll ever meet her…or Rose…or Donna…or Amy…or Clara…)
(ADDENDUM:Of course he’ll remember Martha. He’ll remember all of the Companions and their partners—especially dear Rory.)
I don’t know anything about him…but, gahtdammit, I already love him. I mean…Look At Him! He looks so damn cool. He looks like he Knows Shit. (Some of it sublime, some of it heartbreaking.)
I can’t wait for the first time he knows who he is, and says “I’m The Doctor.”
They say “You never forget your first Doctor.”
There are kids from all backgrounds around the world who are gonna fall in love with their first Doctor, and I’m glad it’s this guy: and his name is Ncuti Gatwa. (nSOOtee GAHtwa).
And he’s a Scottish - Rawandan - Brit…Gallifreyan.
