I’ve been having issues at work with my coworker who also happens to be my best friend and roommate (yes it’s a lot of togetherness) and my boss has set up a meeting for all of us to talk later today and I’m so nervous I wanna puke :)
“But, let the self judge the right and the wrong, let others decide to praise or to blame, let gains and losses remain uncommented on. I, too, know what I should and shouldn’t do.”
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.
