“So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve had to work to expel it –
– we all get to dream.”
N.K. Jemisin
I have a bias against my own identities.
This is a hard thing to admit. It always has been. Nobody, I suspect, actually likes to come out and say they’ve always quietly side-eyed other people like them. Maybe they’re slow to approach those with whom they share some identity or intersectionality. Maybe they judge those people harder than they would anyone else. Maybe they steer clear of books written by or about people who share their identity. Maybe they avoid writing those books themselves.
The writing community is full of identity crossovers. Some queer authors default to straight characters and vice versa. Some queer authors default to differently queer identities, but avoid their own. Broader crossovers include POC to white, disabled to non-disabled, women to men. There are a plethora of reasons it happens, and internalized stuff is not always part of the picture. There is a certain freedom from judgment that comes from defaulting to a “safe” option of character identity, and the biases of the writing industry can tie a career to that choice. There’s also emotional labor involved in writing and sharing one’s own identity, and nobody is obligated to take that labor on.
All I’m saying is, there can be many layers at play… and I also know I’m not alone.
I answer yes to that whole first paragraph. Less so than I used to, but I started this post with an N.K. Jemisin quote because she put into words what I was struggling to capture otherwise: the poison we internalize and how hard it is to expel it.
Back to those identities.
I am an asexual AuDHD trans man with a smattering of other neurospice that’s most likely dyscalculia (numbers dyslexia… yes, I have an engineering degree. long story) and an audio processing disorder. Without going into detail, integrating with society has been a lifelong process for me, and there’s a lot going on in my brain.
One of the fun things about this combination of identities is that they play off one another. Many are double-edged swords. Writing is a special interest of mine, which jacks up my writing speed and ability to remember character eye colors to sometimes inhuman levels. I’ve got a view of both sides of the gender spectrum. And learning to write romantic plots with both the ace and the ‘tism working against me has been… a ride. A fun and rewarding one. But let’s just say it’s a good thing I respond well to challenges.
I’ve become able to celebrate many of these things. But for one reason or another, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with them, and unpacking that has been a lot of years in progress.
I’ll start at the beginning.
I was raised by women. My mother was a stay-at-home mom of four neurodivergent children, and was as close to the head of the household as either of my parents could be. Her social group was our social circle, and most of them were women. Many were single, usually divorced. Some went on to remarry, and several married women. I am one of four siblings, all assigned the same way at birth, two of whom date women. On my mother’s initiative, we read books with strong female leads, from Girls to the Rescue to Inkheart to Dragon Keeper. It’s funny in hindsight, but one reason it took me so long to figure out I was trans is simply a lack of male role models. I knew a thousand ways to be a woman, but very few to be a man.
My characters at this time skewed male.
Writing played a core role in my gender journey. Perhaps the biggest thing it provided me with was a breadth of male representation that I actually related to. I could write characters who were quirky, sensitive, unemotional, queer, flamboyant, dainty, tough, weird. I could write strong sibling relationships, friendships, and found family, couplings I’d never read in all those childhood books, and characters who preferred to stay alone. Over time, I saw the parts of myself that had yet to come to light, and a shift occurred.
Identifying as a man fit. It also, as a fun side effect, freed me to untangle dysphoria from internalized misogyny, which every person in our society carries to some degree. It was around this time that the balance of my main characters took a sharp swing towards women. To this day, my female MCs outnumber my male ones more than two-to-one. When nonbinary characters enter the picture, only a fifth of my main characters actually identify as men.
This is not a coincidence. In fact, it started quite intentionally, as I noticed my previous bias and decided to head in the opposite direction. Partly for fun, and partly because it made me faintly uncomfortable—and here the wrestling with internalized poison began. In modern-day society, even with the way I was raised, in a country with a halfway decent ranking on gender equality, it is impossible to avoid internalized misogyny. It doesn’t matter how you identify. It is a part of your life, and it spills over into things like writing.
I quickly discovered how much I enjoyed dealing a roundhouse kick to my biases by writing characters I loved with identities I continued to balk at. A good few rounds of this, and I began to forge new associations: ask me to picture an engineer, a scientist, a mayor, a monarch, or a starship captain today, and the image that leaps unbidden to my mind is no longer a man. Most of the love interests I write are women. So are the heroes. So are the villains. So are the deities. Nowadays, I sometimes have to check myself so I include at least some men in important roles. My major characters follow similar gender ratios to my main ones: two-thirds women. This is a ton of fun and I highly recommend it.
Anyway.
Throughout this process, I was also busy expanding the range of casual representation I included in my books, as my love of learning crossed wires with my love of a good challenge. My main characters skew heavily queer and POC, with a range of neurodivergences, mental illnesses, and disabilities represented. However, during this time, I began to notice that a certain pair of identities were conspicuously absent from my repertoire. A pair that outsiders might be most surprised by, as they ought to be the easiest for me to write.
In twelve books, I’d yet to include a main or major character who was autistic or binary trans.
This was the same internal pushback I’d felt about my first female MCs, only multiplied a hundredfold. I didn’t want to write these characters, and I didn’t want to think about that fact. Thinking about it would require questioning why I avoided others with those same identities. It would require interrogating the less-than-flattering image that sprang to mind whenever I heard the words autistic or trans, especially when both appeared together. It would require facing the fact that I still didn’t tell people online how I identified—not because I wanted anonymity, but because I was ashamed of how they would see me if they knew. If it was anything like I saw myself, I wanted nothing to do with it.
Of course, I had no way to know this for sure. But media is a powerful thing, and the image it feeds us of those identities is insidious and typically no more flattering than the ones I had in mind. Characters with social difficulties are laughingstock or comic relief, painful to watch or read about if you have any sense of how social interaction should work. I can spot autistic-coded characters in seconds, especially on screen. While they’re often portrayed as smart, they rarely have the competencies I’ve worked so hard to develop. They cannot hold a conversation, they say the wrong things all the time, and social cues fly so far over their heads, you can practically hear the whistling noise as they go by.
Trans characters are only marginally better—not so much for being cardboard cutouts, but for the stories they do or don’t get to carry. Midway through university, a conversation with a close friend of mine resulted in him wondering, “Where are all the happy trans people?” and I didn’t have an answer. Where there was representation at all, it was coming-out narratives, unaccepting parents, transphobia, dysphoria, mental illness, and the extreme ends thereof. I watched Boys Don’t Cry on a recommendation and felt numb the whole way through. Where tragedies didn’t dominate, meanwhile, stories of fierce activism did instead. Those trans people were angry—and rightfully so—but the anger and fierceness and throwing-it-back-in-the-face-of-society got old fast.
Those stories have their place. They always will. Those emotions, in our society, are more than merited. At the same time, there’s more to life than hurt or anger. Those other stories are the ones I rarely see.
My experiences meeting people in real life paralleled these. I can be a social catalyst in most situations, but carrying a conversation with someone who can’t reciprocate is brutally difficult. This taints my view of other people on the spectrum. I resent them, sometimes, for not developing the same competency I have. Even if it may be more difficult for them, or if they may not care. It’s entirely a me problem. Something in me wants to connect with them, but there’s a barrier between us that I don’t know how to overcome. Even with others of my social skill level, it’s still hard. I’m too autistic to “pass” as neurotypical, but too socially alert to not notice when people don’t match my skills. So I’m stuck somewhere in between.
I’ve also met a lot a lot of angry trans people. Ones who make it their whole personality, and ones who take that anger to extremes and demonize other identities the way they demand not to be demonized. In some ways, they are the reason the most common response (by far) I got when I came out to people pre-transition was panicked apology—for harm they hadn’t done. I’ve met trans people who live a narrative that they’re the only normal ones and society is wrong, which has some truth from a nuanced perspective, but not when it fails to acknowledge that cis people exist and are still a vast majority.
And then of course there are also trans people who overcompensate for the gender box they’ve been shoved into since birth. Some embrace their true gender’s stereotypes to the point of toxicity. Others declare gender to be fake, a farce, a social construct. This, perversely, ends up dismissing not just that aforementioned majority of the population, but also trans people who do feel a strong alignment to a binary gender. I fit the binary. I do not experience gender fluidity, I have no non-binary inclination, and I do not want a gender-neutral name. Gender fluidity, non-binary identity, and gender-neutral names are all valid. They are also not the only ways that trans people experience the world.
Is there some confirmation bias here, on my part? Almost certainly. Does that erase the impact these experiences have had?
Questions I’m not sure I’ll ever answer.
None of that, meanwhile, captures the fact that being either of these things is hard, and there are facets of that difficulty that will never go away. I’d love to not hear electricity, or to have loud sounds or itchy clothing not cause something bordering on psychological pain. I’d love to be at peace with a body that I’ve lived most of my life in an uneasy truce with, marked by stints of more intensive fighting. I’d love to not have to think about both these things all the time, and how they—and I—fit into society, and where, and where is safe to tell how much about myself, but here we are.
Back to writing.
I’ve always known, in some form, why I steered clear of these identities. Why it was so much easier for me to write ace characters because my experience of that identity skewed positive, and why other types of neurodiversity “clicked” with me even as I avoided my own. Facing down my writing, I knew it was the best tool I had at for doing something about that bias. I knew from experience that it’s easier to write and love a character you relate to than it is to love yourself. But I also knew, without a doubt, that it was going to be hard.
Surprise surprise, it was.
The first time it happened was by accident. The second main character in my second series revealed himself as trans near the end of the first book. Shortly after, I realized I’d been autism-coding him all along. This stuff gets fun when you use writing as a way to process things. But the thing was, this character started out as kind of an asshole. He had shit to unpack on other fronts, and I didn’t write him to be likable. This wasn’t much of a surprise; that whole series was me surreptitiously processing lateral violence in the queer community. But I realized what it meant with a very literal sigh.
I had, unsurprisingly, written some of the things I hated most about myself (and others) into this character. Then I’d fitted him with the very identities I was biased against. If I wanted an on-screen representation of my own internal poison, I couldn’t do better than that.
I still have a love-hate relationship with that character. I relate to parts of him and hate that I do, and I consider him an interesting person. He’s got traits that I admire. But on a scale of my favorite characters, he started near the bottom, and wouldn’t climb that list until the later books of the series. I wouldn’t write those for another 3-4 years.
So I tried again.
This time was deliberate: an ace trans man who starred in a novella that I still love dearly. This character is a sweetheart, and I would take up pitchforks to protect him if he was real. But I don’t think we’d be friends. He didn’t make the favorite-characters list, either, though he started further up it than the first attempt. This time, I’d written rep I liked in a character I wouldn’t look to as a role model. He was good to write, and chipped a little further into my resistance. Now, at least, I’d been inside the head of one binary-trans character I could point to as positive representation. Baby steps.
So I tried again.
If you hadn’t gathered already, I’m stubborn. This is a theme of my entire writing journey.
Attempt number three was a major side character in another book. I liked this character. They were nonbinary, autistic, and proud of it. They were chaotic neutral to a fault, brilliant, mischievous, and played a central role in the story. Then I realized the main character too was trans—a trans woman this time, the first one I’d ever written. I could get behind both characters, and they had an excellent dynamic. Then that book fell to the wayside as other projects took priority at the time.
Attempt number four(?) was another trans-woman MC, and this time, something clicked. This was my first binary-trans character to hit my list of favorite MCs. I had a nonbinary one on there already, but something about the binary distinction hit closer to home. This was the first time I rooted for a binary-trans character with all my heart and not a single reservation. I yelled at the page too many times to count while writing that novella, and have reread it many times. Here was a character I resonated with.
She was also a woman, which by this point was my comfort zone. And while I still can’t tell if she’s got some neurospice in her, my first reference for her struggles was my own experience. She’s a telepath in a world that excludes and fears those with that ability. I was unpacking something autism-related there.
My next step was to try for something longer. And so, being me on chaos mode with a challenge-goal and no respect for a sleep schedule, I took both my most difficult identities and chucked them at the main love interest of (probably) the longest series I will write in my life. They turned out nonbinary, but with a pattern of trans experience that fell very close to home. They were my second-ever POV character to have both identities, and my first to grapple with the ways those intersect. They were also the first autistic character I’d ever written who shot straight to the top of my favorite-characters list and stayed there.
I suspect that character’s position in the book was subconscious-intentional. Sometimes it’s easier to write a character you identify with as a love interest than a main MC. It’s easier to see their good sides through the eyes of someone who’s in love with them. If the relationship is healthy, the good side always wins.
This journey isn’t over yet. Since that very first character (as of the time I write this blog post), I’ve yet to write another who shares my exact combo of identities. I’ve danced around the combo like a game of whack-a-mole, applying bits and pieces separately, but rarely together. The closer I get to the full thing, the harder it gets to write a character I can actually love.
I’ll get there eventually, I think. It might take another thirty books, but I’ll write them. I’d like to reach a point where, like I found with women, it becomes harder to write a character without a certain identity than a character who shares it.
We all get to dream.