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So I've been thinkin' about writing a lot lately, and a few recent stories have spurned a bit of an odd series of thoughts in my noggin'.
A lot of trans fic, whether intentionally or unintentionally, tends towards fantasy to some degree or science fiction. That's not to say ALL stories do, but even when it's very light -- whether it be the miraculous power of subliminals to change you utterly or a brand-new magic pill that does the same -- a lot of trans stories delight in utilizing fantastical gadgets or wonder drugs to do the dirty work.
My question, though, is this:
In a serious high-fantasy or high-tech, futuristic science fiction universe... would trans characters even, really, exist?
Think about it. If you're talking about worlds with transformation magic, or tech so advanced people can re-constitute half-way across the galaxy, what would really be the value of one's birth sex? Sure, things like SEXISM might still exist, to a certain degree, or subcultures where those who abandoned the natural way of things were somehow unclean in the eyes of something-or-other, but in general, if we're talking about worlds where half-dragons can cast magic and sword fight with undead lords, or where space ships can warp us between galaxies and we can repair mortal wounds with the help of an organ replicator, why would being trans be more than a temporary thing?
I guess, as far as STORIES are concerned, it has less to do with the possible than with the narrative, and giving readers a way to more easily identify with their characters. After all, in a world where gender can be as fluid as "well, I saved up for a bit so I could spend the next year having a girl holiday" it would be hard to fit current societal expectations or understanding of sex and gender into that context, since what's to then stop every couple who's expecting a child having both parents able to breast feed, or even swap turns as mother and father? If anyone can be whatever they desire, even changing (relatively) easily, then even things like physical strength or mental preference are pulled into question when you can never be assured that anyone ever started out as one or the other.
It truly is strange, isn't it? That we can only enjoy the possibilities of such fantastical changes if we place the limits of our current understandings/views/trappings of sex and gender on them? We place such value in those trappings that they outweigh the value of all the other things such worlds, such abilities, could offer us.
In a lot of ways, the tales need those trappings to be enjoyable for most people, to be identifiable, since part of what readers often want out of their trans stories is to take the character's journey of transformation and discovery with them. Without those changes, that shift in attitude and expectations and views, does the tale lose its value? Is a story still a trans story if the character behaves as though a change from male to female, or something in between, is no more inconveniencing than changing their top?
Perhaps that's why, more often than not, I tend more toward real world-esque tales. I find that that grounding in our current set of rules makes it easier to write relatable characters without having to hand-wave all the reasons why the world should mean their attitudes or opportunities should be different. It's also why so many trans sci fi or fantasy stories don't really appeal to me: they treat the change too often as inconsequentially easy from a tech or magic perspective, but still try to act as though it's somehow a Big Deal anyway, when people have proven that it takes less than a single generation after something is introduced for its ease to be unappreciated and the issues it fixes to be seen as inconsequential to begin with.
Why would one's physical sex and/or gender presentation be any different?
What are your thoughts on the matter?
Melanie E.
Comments
John Varley
John Varley, a mainstream SF author, has several stories that deal with this theme.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Robert Heinlein
Another SF author.
Have a good day and enjoy life.
Charles Stross
Charlie Stross also wrote some SF novels where a character changes physical sex, although not necessarily voluntarily ...
That's assuming technology will come with rationality + freedom
Societies/religions/governments like banning things just so they can have
control over people, rile up the masses against a relatively powerless
scapegoat of an internal enemy and Make Andromeda Great Again
And remember...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifLqzLEB3E0
Yin and Yang
If you accept the premise that there are two genders your discussion has merit.
The reality is that there are male and female characteristics with a constant flow as to what exists within an individual at any time.
In a harmonious world people are gender fluid.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Agreed.
With my question mostly hinging on that very subject: what defines masculine and feminine is fluid in and of itself, with society's own feelings as to what attributes fit each changing over time.
So, why would alignments that fit with what our current (last 100 years or so) society's feelings on gender are be applied to a theoretical future or fantasy world, and more to the point, why would they be considered to have merit if sex itself were equally as fluid as anything else?
*hugs*
Melanie E.
Deus Ex Machina
Those of us born in the Ice Age were told in hundreds of ways that our internal struggle for gender affirmation was hopeless.
When faced with a hopeless situation, we yearn for some totally unexpected power or event to solve our frustration.
The Greeks called this kind of resolution deus ex machina. The machine of the gods.
Sci-fi gives us a world where mundane problems have been solved -leaving us to work on the far end of Maslow's hierarchy.
The answer to your question would seem to pivot on whether you think gender self-actualization is mundane or more esoteric.
Each morning, I spend time deciding how feminine I feel and dress accordingly. This includes dozens of decisions regarding undergarments, dresses, skirts, tops, hair styles, make-up, scents, shoes, etc. There are days I don't feel feminine. Out comes the work boots and nail polish remover.
Some days I nail it. I almost never look the same as any other day. How I feel about my gender is one factor in expressing myself.
Good sci-fi shows us the possibilities and foibles of future worlds. A world that would rob me of the pleasures of gender expression would be odious. A world that would broaden my gender expression choices to daily organ selection would be . . . Interesting.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Strokes chin with fingers
Hmm. What shall I have today? The Hammond or the Stalin?
Penny
Sexus versus Gender
I think the SF part of changing your is more about adapting your (daily?) sexus to your gender, as fluid as the latter may be.
While a better society may accept gender fluidity and thus allow you just the kind of dress and/or behaviour that suits your self identity, this still would not help with gender dysphoria. To alleviate that you will still need some kind of physical modifcation.
Sick and bored
I've been around here close to 14 years. Thinking about stories like "Bike", and several others. As long as the plot is strong, and the story well written, a bit of TG is OK. I get bored with too much "first skirt", first bra, and so on. My own life has times of pure hell and suffering in it, so too much of that is a real turn off for me. Right now I am reading David Weber and his young adult stories. They are fun. I just finished watching "Captain Marvel". None of them mention anything about TG.
Science fiction and fantasy as vehicles
There are people that believe that we are sinning because we are wearing the clothes beelonging to the opposite sex, or that by having the surgeries we need, we defile our bodies and are going against God. Some others believe, that it is somehow a plot by the medical community, others believe we are mentally sick. While a bunch of other people are plainly ignorant or feel their sexuality threatened by someone different.
Now, take for instance Amethyst's story line in Apocalypse Now in which the main character enters a virtual reality game's beta testing where due to a coding error he ends up in the body corresponding to the opposite sex (it is a beta version after all so bugs are expected). All the hangups from the people above get bypassed and Amethyst is now able to explore the feelings of somebody being in the wrong body. The religious lemmings (zealots) can't say anything about it, because it was not something the main character sought. It is clear that the physical body of the guy is male and his virtual body is female, and while in the virtual world, works completely as a female body, so it is not like the guy is crazy (mentally ill) by thinking that he is in the wrong body (within the virtual world).
So to me, other than entertaining, one of the uses of both science fiction and fantasy is to eliminate/bypass people's prejudices or entrenched beliefs to where they will actually consider another point of view thereby reducing the ignorance in some cases and increasing understanding and hopefully reducing some of the phobia.
Hugs
Gabi
Xtrim
Focus
I think that the focus on gender in fantasy and advanced SF comes from elevating gender from an emergent biological phenomenon, whose purpose is genetic Software EXchange, to something High in the Sky, a type of Ying and Yang.
It's also certain authors' fetish. There's no escaping that.
-- Daphne Xu
Genderless Universe
I have used science fiction in some of my stories, but as people will know, I prefer my stories to be grounded in reality, however unlikely my scenarios might be.
My SciFi is longer form on Amazon including "Reframed" about a male consciousness in a female sexbot and "Robot Surgeon" about just that, plus a similar device in "Technology Malfunction" and my Star Trek story "The Transmogrifier" on Deviant Art as "Anomaly".
I am not including "Neuron Transfer", "Addiction" and "Paralyzed" even though the science there is specuative.
One story of mine that involves a mechanism others have discussed here is "Virtuality" which I wrote well before the Black Mirror episode on the same theme. This is getting weirdly close to achievable through VR.
But any SciFi that talks about the real ability to change sex in the future raises the question about what gender will be at the time that might ever come about. We started with the division of roles based on child birth and suckling and that grew into the subjugation of women and the pedestal of female beauty and grace. If that were not there would some of us crave to be female? If there were no gender there would be no gender dysphoria.
Are we headed towards a genderless future?
I will be dead before that happens - I hope. But I hope to live a long life.
Maryanne
There are plenty of ways to
There are plenty of ways to make TG themes viable in sci fi and fantasy, but I do have to say that the tg character would most likely have to start out in a society or ethnic/religious group that makes being a tg at least somewhat challenging (conflict in any story is important). I won't bother discussing social/religious and other issues of that sort. (they don't change regardless of level of technology/magic) I think I'll list a few ideas of the top of my head about how even high tech/magic worlds can have TG elements.
1 Technology/magic beyond understanding - some sort of elder artifacts that are used but not understood and some that are discovered are a complete mystery.
2 Rarity/cost of technology/magic able to make physical changes (character is a poor farmer from a backwater planet/village)
3 Risk that such technology/magic can have (high percentage don't survive the procedure)
There are plenty more i can think of, but I'm lazy !
Here is something a bit of topic to consider. Most (not all) traits that are considered feminine are a luxury/aesthetics. Most traits that are considered masculine are functionality/usefulness (in a world with magic this would likely mean gender equality a least among nobility). So in a wealthy technologically/magically advanced society (one you might even call decadent) historically feminine traits would be more prevalent(also a lot more liberal like most of western culture is getting now and why liberals should really pay more attention to economy). In a society where economy is in shambles and survival becomes a real issue over time you will see masculine traits favored far more.
In reality a lot of more base masculine and feminine traits are becoming obsolete even now. Technology makes physical size and strength meaningless (even a child can pilot a military drone remotely). Birth control and DNA testing made women much more independent and "Virtue/virginity" irrelevant. There are many more examples that I'm again too lazy to list.
Getting past the Big Deal
Three novels that were freeing to my conception of gender are:
(There are a couple of novels with the same title as Delany's, so watch out there.)
The first novel is set on a planet where sexual intercourse can leave either the man or the woman pregnant, and it's not predictable or controllable. In the second and third, it's possible for a person to completely change gender, although the way it fits into the social framework differs.
LeGuin's novel is the most remarkable, because the men-can-be-pregnant thing is NOT the focus of the story. It's in the background. It's just one element in the difficulty that the ambassador from Earth has in understanding the alien culture. The ambassador struggles along the male-female binary, trying to adjust and failing. But even all of THAT is just background to the story.
Certainly stories that are set in far-off, fanciful worlds are easier to take in. They can provide a soft subversion of old, inherited attitudes that would otherwise remain set in stone. Also, since these stories have access to transformational mechanisms of unbounded power, they can happen as quickly or as slowly as you wish. It's easier to play with the dichotomies of control and consent and of intention and accident.
Where magic and advanced tech make everything possible, there still are conflicts, and conflicts make stories.
That said -- and after re-reading Melanie's initial question, I'm sure I'd like to write some stories where these transformations are no longer a Big Deal. I don't know yet what that could mean, but I will spend some time thinking about it. At first blush, it's hard (for me) to see it differently from the Steel Beach model, in which it's possible to change everything -- even aspects unrelated to gender -- where people go back and forth, get married, have children, get divorced, change gender, and go back again.
Those changes, even if they become unremarkable to society as a whole, would still be a revolution to the person who changed, and newsworthy to the people in their social circle. Just think how -- in today's world --something as small as a nose job, or the repair of a cleft lip, can be life-changing!
This sort of story would need a deft hand, not a treatment as abrupt and ham-handed as Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil or that awful little story in which a man becomes his own grandmother.
Thanks, Melanie -- you've provoked some serious ruminations here! I hope they bear fruit.
- io
hmmmmm
I know I read STEEL BEACH I just don't remember anything about it.
A world where anybody can change anything about theirself and often do
gives me an inkling for a story about a generally dissatisfied individual who
always thinks the next change is going to bring them fulfillment and feeling right
about theirself, but it's never quite it so they try something even more radical;
like how some of the most messed up people in our world are addicted to
gurus and self-improvement fads. I say an inkling for a story because
I have no idea how it would end or even what the point would be,
so most probably never mind.
A misfit escaping from a very repressive society with strictly enforced gender roles
into a much freer and more accepting society where they feel like they have finally
come home + are like a kid in a candy store is always a favorite sci-fi theme
of mine, because to them it IS a big deal...
~hugs, Veronica
.
Story about a man who becomes his own grandmother???
Reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw the other week:
TIME TRAVELLERS CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES
And remember...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifLqzLEB3E0
Star Trek is introducing its first TG character
In the current (well, just started) season of Discovery. The character will be a Trill, which for those unfamiliar with Star Trek (and in particular DS9, who had a Trill main character) is a symbiotic species- a humanoid host and a non-humanoid slug-thing that lives vastly longer than the host and is implanted into a new one once the old host dies. Most Trill symbionts have experience of being both male and female, experience they pass on to their hosts. This new Trill character, though, will be unjoined and will be played by a transgender actor, and will be joined by Star Trek's first non-binary character, also played by a non-binary performer. More details on the characters can be found here, and have already triggered a lot of negative reaction from people who are throwing their toys out of the pram that Star Trek isn't about virtue signalling, or gender politics, or positive discrimination, or all the other things that Star Trek has been about for the last 54 years.
One thing that struck a chord with me is that the new NB character in Star Trek Discovery is going to be named 'Adira'. Adira is also the name of a character from probably my all-time favourite science-fiction show, namely Babylon 5. She played an alien from a race called Centauri, which I always think of when I think of transgender aliens in science-fiction. Not because there were any transgender aliens (or humans, for that matter) on B5- it was made in the 90s after all, and networks were only willing to give the creator of the show so much rope- but because of (for want of a better term, I am writing this at 11pm after all) the aesthetic values of the alien races in question. For humans (in Western culture, anyway), the custom is for males to have shorter hair than females. For Centauri, well, this is what a male looks like, while the women all keep their heads shaved cueball bald. And that's always made me wonder. No one would blink twice at a human man with a bald head (hell, Star Trek have have had two bald male leads). They wouldn't be too bothered with a man with long hair, either. But for a Centauri man to shave his head bald? Something I've alwqays been fascinated in is how transgendered aliens would present and be accepted (or otherwise) in their respective communities. Maybe now TV has evolved enough that we'll finally find out.
tl;dr- I love science-fiction and have always wondered how TG characters would fit in alien cultures.
Debs xxxx
Symbiosis
I could work with the Trill thing, as it makes sense in the natural world, and so a natural universe.
The wonderful potentials opened up by inhabiting another completely female body I started to explore in "Neuron Transfer".
But this is particular to this species of sexless slugs without bodies.
The ability to change at will defeats all the fantasies and makes for a boring existence, switching and then switching back - for kicks.
It is like "What we Do in the Shadows". What would you do if you could forever? Answer: Nothing ... endlessly.
At least the gender change waves/epidemics/spells force a change and invite the dilemma many of us face: Live with the body I have and adjust, or go to the effort of changing it.
This is an interesting discussion.
Maryanne
was
I decline to speculate
since for the most part, I suck at sci fi.
Love, Andrea Lena
Tech/Magic
The fact that there is Magic/Tech that can change the physical gender of one person is one thing.
But the ones controlling that tech have to agree for you to use it.
Around 1980 (give or take) there was a piece of magic that would turn your sex around (one time deal)... But it was mark as a "Cursed" item.
So even with the Tech/Magic, you still have "Gate Keeper" on one side, and "Tormentor" on the other.
Reaching a greater understanding of Technology or Magic, is not a guaranty the the human (elf, ork, vulkin, klingon...) race will be as advance than it is...
Peace and Love tmf
In a sufficiently advanced
In a sufficiently advanced culture, there is undoubtedly the ability to change someone's sex with equipment. I also agree that the government and controllers of such equipment would have the last say. As well as those with money, perhaps?
How many of us aren't able to transition because of the expense involved right now? The use of such equipment may be restricted to those who have the ability to afford such a thing.
Often, at least near the beginning of the technology's existence, it is reserved for the rich and powerful.
Much as Star Trek (don't get me wrong, I'm a devout fan) likes to say we don't use money in the future, there are certainly races that do. And there are those who want power.
Many of us who enjoy fiction feel that it needs some kind of obstacle to overcome. Those who enjoy transgender fiction often feel that it needs our own large obstacle to overcome. It makes it relevant to us, so writing it in such a way makes us more empathetic with the characters.
Often, such technology could be abused as well. In one of my stories, the technology certainly exists, but it has been forced on people so much that one must wonder if it will continue past the current crisis?
Or to look at another example, the Star Trek show Picard has shown how an android as wonderfully made as Data can become something feared.
Gene Roddenberry had a very good point when he decided to make Trek close enough to out time that the problems his characters faced were still relevant to us.
That said, how much can we change in our writing to the point our readers don't recognise the same problems our characters have?
Hugs!
Rosemary
Excellent point
Rosemary's comment is so right. It's like discussions now of "access to care" -- where the words suggest that anyone can have such treatment, but the unsaid part is as long as you have the money.
I think Melanie's original point was similar to the last thing Rosemay said. My paraphrase of Melanie's point is "If the premise of your story is that change is easy, then where is the story?" If there's no conflict, how can there be real change? Then Rosemary's point goes one step further: could our characters' problems be unrelatable to our readers?
The answer to this, in my opinion, is that it is possible to conceive of a future, or a fantasy environment, where SOME problems don't exist. It doesn't mean ALL problems go away.
In my previous comment I mentioned three books that affected me deeply because they painted a world where the feeling that many of us were born with is no longer there. By the end of the book, I had this sense that it's not because there's something wrong with me. The way that these books were able to create a world where change was an available option -- that fantasy healed me. It really did. It undid this sense that I was a messed up person with a freaky desire to be something that I wasn't. Those stories normalized my feelings for me.
It's hard to put into words.
The thing is, there is a point to stories that aren't based strictly on available facts. The whole basis of fiction is that it isn't true. Of course, it must be psychologically true, emotionally true, but all the rest just needs to hang together.
- io