30 days of fanfic meme, questions 4-6

[kindkit]

I'm doing several at once, because questions 4 and 5 are boring, or at least my answers are.

4 – Do you have a "muse" character, that speaks to you more than others, or that tries to push their way in, even when the fic isn't about them? Who are they, and why did that character became your muse?

No. There are characters I especially like writing and choose to focus on, and I also have a type of character that appeals to me, but the whole "muse" thing, er, bemuses me.


5 –If you have ever had a character try to push their way into a fic, whether your "muse" or not, what did you do about it?

N/A


6 – When you write, do you prefer writing male or female characters?

Ah, now this is a question I can answer. I write male characters, and about relationships between male characters, almost exclusively. Offhand I can think of three stories I've written from the POV of a woman; female characters do of course appear in some of my other stories, so I'm not writing the World Without Women.

I'm not even going to try to deny that there's an element of sexism in this. We're all taught that men are more interesting than women, and I also think that with a few honorable exceptions, the stories that appear in the mainstream media (by which I mean movies and TV; the situation's less obvious for books) really do portray men more interestingly and three-dimensionally than women. The men do stuff, the women are motivations and love interests. (Honorable exceptions include Buffy, Sanctuary, DS9, and to some extent X-Men; this is not meant to be a comprehensive list, obviously.) I admire people who fight back against all this engrained sexism by focusing on women characters. I, er, just don't do it myself.

Now I want to talk about my reasons, which hopefully I can do without implying that my reasons are so very special that I ought to be given a pass for reinforcing media sexism.

First reason: I am a trans man. And all my life, long before I knew (or at least accepted) that I'm trans, reading about men, "becoming" male characters in a fictional world, was one of the ways I escaped from a body and an assigned gender that are wrong. As an escape, it let me be a lot less unhappy than I might have been. And it still does, because accepting myself as trans doesn't actually change the problem of having the wrong body and being perceived as female. (First person who says "but why aren't you transitioning?" is going to get snarked at, okay? I'm not transitioning because I have a shitty job that barely pays enough to live on, and certainly wouldn't pay for expensive surgeries, and because I don't have health insurance even to pay for ordinary medical care. And even if/when I do transition (god knows I want to) it stil won't give me the fully-functioning anatomically-correct male body that I want to be in, so fantasy is always, ALWAYS going to play a huge role in my emotional well-being. I'm not ashamed of being trans, but I would rather have been born anatomically male and I'm not ashamed of that either.)

I spent a lot of years trying to be a woman, trying to identify with women and embrace that role. The brand of feminism I'd been exposed to told me that if I was uncomfortable being a woman, that was internalized sexism and bad and wrong. So, yeah, I've got issues now. I like it when fandoms have great female characters who get to do stuff and have personalities beyond being some guy's love interest. But I don't want to immerse myself in those characters' perspectives as I would have to do to write about them, or even read a lot about them. It feels like risking the loss of a self I had to fight long and hard to find, and I know that feeling is somewhat irrational but it's very strong.

Second reason: I'm queer. I'm a man who is about 98% exclusively attracted to men. Love between men moves me, emotionally, in a way that male/female or female/female love seldom does. Sex between men (and, hey, sometimes fanfic really is about the porn) excites me, while het sex and f/f sex don't. And thus the great, insurmountable problem, which is that if you have a story with a women protagonist, it is by definition not going to be a m/m slash story. Yeah, you can have m/m slash in the background, but that's not quite the same. And the exploration of love and desire between men is what I'm in fandom for; it's what I can never find enough of elsewhere.

As much as I dislike the whole "id fic" idea, and as much as I try to bring my brain to the party, I can't deny that fundamentally, and regardless of whether the story ends happily-ever-after or makes me cry my eyes out, when I write fanfic I'm writing the life I want. I write myself, over and over again. Because while writing isn't actually magic, it's the closest thing I've got.


ETA: Just to be clear, I speak only for myself. My views aren't necessarily shared by other trans* men in fandom.

Comments

[kindkit]

Thank you! It's good to know that I'm not the only one who's had these experiences and feelings.

[(Anonymous)]

I can relate, especially, to what you say about feminism and female characters: I spent a long time immersed in that same sort of feminism, and it took almost as much time to extricate myself from the notion that there was something wrong with with me because, to spite everything I'd read, I still felt male, still felt like a man. Re. female characters, I've always wanted very badly to be the sort of writer who battles sexism in their own small way by writing female characters who have identities/motives of their own, but it's difficult, because I don't feel like I really get the 'whole' woman, if that makes any sense. I can like a female character, but I never identify with her in the same way that I do a male character. As you say, writing is an escape, so it never feels as satisfying to me to write a female character as it does to write a male character.