A rambling, treatbrained manifesto.

So let's say, purely for the sake of argument that you and I talking about a movie or manga or a novel something, and you told me a little about something you like. However, I noticed that it only seems to have cishets in it. No queers? Sorry, dropped.

These are not the thoughts of someone normal. All media has cishets in it, though, or it used to. Until I was in my teens I didn't think about it too hard, but then I read this funny orange book, Nevada by Imogen Binnie. It broke my brain in several ways, but majorly, I didn't realise before then that we were allowed to have trans people in our narratives? I don't know why I'm like this, but it was the beginning of my downward spiral. I'm a sad little gay and always have been, so I was pretty desperate to see anything more than the average, straight people kissing, thing. Representation Matters. At first I was just obsessed with yuri manga and anime, and that was okay for a little bit. Who remembers Miss Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles? Or maybe Yurucamp? Raise your hand if someone sold you these as YURI and it turned out to be BAIT and you wasted your time because nobody would be honest about the queer content of an anime back then!!! The only manga that remain in my Tachiyomi library are So, Do You Want To Go Out, Or and After Hours. From there, it was logical to move to manhua, manhwa, and donghua about women kissing. Mage and Demon Queen, or like Soulmate, Ghosts of Greywoods, so on.

When I literally ran out out of decent webcomics about women kissing though, I stumbled my way into the murican (and it seems to be a deeply amerikkkan thing, or at least a western thing) romance novel. I have no idea how I did, but this increased my pool of stuff considerably. The other thing it did was reconnect me with trans people in fiction.

Look, if you know, you know. In movies it's only ever really The Silence of the Lambs or Boys Don't Cry. TV shows, it's all dramatic reveals on crime shows, or whatever. Bad unfunny sitcom jokes. Video games, don't even fucking try. Code Veronica deserves to be bullied. Despite the absolute state of things, I was always keeping my eyes open for trans rep, and I mean you could have been reading the Wandering Son manga, or any amount of low-quality ultra-misogynist gender-essentialist "genderbender" dogshit. I long for a future where kids don't have to deal with shit like that when lookin' for queer manga.

Novels, however, have funny tagging systems. Goodreads is so trash thanks to Amazon’s enforced decay of the site that frequently books end up with the wrong tags. And so, anything with two queer women who kiss in it sometimes gets filed under “romance”, even if it really should not. As a result I ended up discovering Detransition, Baby through my adventures gathering gay stuff. And hey, as it turns out, author Torrey Peters is at least aware of Imogen Binnie. Oh, and there’s a novel by Casey Plett, too? And then there are even more novels with transfemme protagonists outside of that??? In fact, probably a few hundred????

So here’s the thing, right? There are probably less than fifty films with trans people as protagonists, or even major characters. There are definitely less than fifty video games in that category. Novels, though? I have read thirty-six and have a further sixty on my immediate watch list to read. Probably another 40 or so on my Goodreads To-Read. If you limit yourself by rep in any other medium, you’ll be running out basically instantly. There actually are enough queer and trans books to sustain yourself on.

I do not wanna be inside the mind of your cishet protagonist, go away. Cis queers are fine, but I would really prefer you write someone cisn’t, because we can do better collectively than forcing cisgender representation down people’s throats, I mean keep that in the bedroom please. My decision has been: I will simply never read another book with a cishet protagonist, usually. Last one I did was Neuromancer by William Gibson, and holy shit did that ever reinforce why I’m doing this. It’s not an irredeemable text, but I don’t want to put up with that fucking shit. /r/menwritingwomen might be a stupid subreddit but it has a point. At time of writing the last I read any book with a cishet protagonist was in 2020. Conversely I am always interested in a decent cis queer protagonist too, like I can easily enjoy a Girl Flesh or an Our Wives Under The Sea for whatever other aspects of queer existence they might poke at. I am most enthusiastic for transfemme protagonists though, (I wish I could find nb transfemme leads but tagging makes it hard) however I am amicable to many different queer protagonists, from regular cis lesbians to nonbinary transmascs to agender peeps. Anything goes as long as it’s not cishet.

Representation of trans people by way of our own voices is more or less a fresh development of the last eleven years, so I consider myself sort of a cut-rate historical observer as well. A lot of these books, especially the ones about trans women, have their little spot on an ever-growing web that extends outward from the starting point of Orange Book, and I try to keep tabs on what sort of funny developments are ongoing. I have to read Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin and Brainwyrms by Allison Rumfitt. It’s been enriching to see how different genres and writers interact with trans fiction, and what gets depicted and doesn’t. I am an enthusiast of trans and to a certain extent broader queer representation. It is a beautiful little blossoming flower of love and I need to touch it at least once a month or else I will die.

Down with cis, up with trans.