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~~no big post this week,~~ down with cis
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Thoughts about trans representation in the novels I'm reading
negative
It feels discouraging to me that all the trans representation in these chinese webnovels gets fucked either by the character being fucking wierd, dying horribly, or only getting the body of the opposite gender due to external circumstances.
I bring this up because there isn't a reason for literally all 3 of these chinese webnovels that I've read to feature "trans" characters whose sex transition is relevant to the plot.
Like, the yesterday example was about this person meeting rhe protagonist after 100s of years and correcting the protagonist on their pronouns. Making him call her "junior sister" which I though was a nice way to introduce a trans character. Especially for a novel whose only mention of trans characters in the past was mentioning that the sect which prepared corpses for possession sometimes got requests from "wierd cultivators who prefered to posses bodies of the opposite sex".
But nooooo, it turns out this mf had actually fused with his twin sister's soul during birth and was being used by the villain to prepare some special magic energy. He was never trans! And correcting the pronouns was a cry for help!
It's all such a shame because writing in trans characters into these cultivations novels is really easy. There's even a "canonical" reason to do it since (yang energy => masculinisation) and (yin energy => feminisation) is already a trope. Like literally all a person has to do to get HRT in these magic systems is cultivate a set of (usually) easy/generic techniques.
Fucking ... as far as I remember even irl daoist priests did things like fellating each other to "improve their yang energy" or something (the kinds of excuses gay men had to come up with in the past lol).
Oh my god look at this meme I found
The only good transfem rep I've seen in fiction is Ranked Competitive Breast Growth and that's written by transfems. At this point I just skip anything that features explicitly trans characters because I know it's going to be terrible. You can forcefem whoever you want. Find your own experiences reflected in texts that are perhaps on their face not explicitly about the trans experience.
guhhhhhhhhjjhhhh
I've been burned too many times by shitty rep in media. How daring, you wrote a transfem character who's actually genderfluid and doesn't mind being called a man, and the circumstances of her birth are the most important thing about her. She's a tragic character, or farcical, or both, and that's if you're lucky.Unironically yeah. The bar is so low that the only advise I could give most writers is to just write a "normal" person (pretend they are cis) and offhand reveal they are trans and not have it be relevant to anything except like a scene or 2.
Some authors also need this advise to write women characters (pretend they are men while writing then ctrl+f replace the pronouns)