Girls Who Want Boys Who Like Boys To Be Girls: Some Thoughts on Genderbenders

[affablyevil]

When I read a genderbender fanfic, it has always made me queasy when I see that the author has chosen to play the pronoun game; that is, change the pronouns to align with whatever the character's current physical sex is, regardless of how they think about themselves internally.(1) It wasn't until I read pandarus's Not Time's Fool that I was able to articulate why. The story is about Dean Winchester being turned into a girl (in the "probably forever" sense) and having to make adjustments, compromises, and re-learn how to navigate social behaviors and cues. While there is a brief element of "Oh no my dick!" which is common to these kinds of stories, more importantly the story was about what he had to do to maintain his sense of identity in a transgendered body.

And that's when I realized that stories that make a character who has for his entire life considered himself to be one gender be mostly comfortable in a new gender, putting on dresses and flirting in a socialized female way, and changing the pronouns, are in fact promoting a cisnormative psychology.(2) Which I found utterly revolting.

Not that I necessarily avoid genderbender fic or AUs, because they are often an interesting commentary on society on the part of the writers. However, I do tend to be more wary of what they are (unconsciously or not) promoting. Also there are often the complications of the phallocentric issues going on with power and penetrative sex, and which party is "losing power" by being penetrated and that crap. Anyway, I am grossed out by forced heteronormativity and anyone insisting that I should act a certain way because of the set of body parts I was born with.(3)

I've been reading up a bit about transgenderism, mostly because I don't really understand gender conviction in the first place.(4) Despite this, I've been mostly getting sidetracked by reading about transphobia and biphobia (especially in LGBTQland) and raging at whoever tends to be online at the time at hypocrisy of people who fight against heteronormatism but propagate sexual binaries. Raaaaage.

Anyway, I guess my point here is that there's a lot of interesting things going on in fandom, but there's a lot of internalized or subtextual phobias that crop up while we explore these ideas. I urge authors to think about carefully: yeah, it's fun, but are you unconsciously promoting an ideology that you don't want to be?

I guess that's what we need betas for? I don't know. In the end, the only one who's going to be responsible for what you've written is the person staring back in the mirror.

(1) I'm not talking about the always-been-a-girl AUs or always-been-a-boy AUs — those come with a different set of complications.
(2) Yeah, welcome to like 1999 or something. Sometimes I am slow okay, especially when I don't have the vocabulary to articulate the problem.
(3) How much do I love it that Castiel (and Lucifer, lol) have (so far) expressed zero preference for the gender of their bodies? Okay this is pre-watching 5x10 so who knows if that'll get Jossed but I love it as it stands now.
(4) I can better intuitively understand gender as a social construction (with some enforced alignment to physical characteristics) rather than the idea of gender as an intrinsic inclination. I'll grant you that some people will likely be more convinced by one or the other, and that neither have been cohesively invalidated (or are likely to be in the foreseeable future).

Comments

[ibroketuesday.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting post. I don't have a lot to add on the subject, but great read.

[affablyevil.livejournal.com]

I'm glad! I'm very interested in these trends in fanfiction, since it can be such a playground for different kinds of exploration. But yeah sometimes I have to yell for the brakes, if only privately.