Questions for trans women.

thedeadflag:

tura23:

I’m writing a post apocalypse story with a trans woman as a character, and my research is getting me nowhere. Whenever I google trans + apocalypse all I get are posts by crazy conservative jackasses.

How would a trans woman deal with a post apocalyptic situation?

I need to know about what happens to her physically – what hormones does she need to take and how often? What happens if she can’t get them? Are there other things that I don’t know about?

I mean, I’m going to be honest with you, it kind of grinds my gears when people think up certain types of setting that would essentially ensure our suffering and then toss trans women into them, and wonder “Hrm…how would she deal? What medication would she need and what if she couldn’t get any?”

Like, no one wants to write fics where trans people can reasonably be happy. And that’s a big problem. The world is hard enough as is, what’s the goal or purpose of making life exponentially harder for us besides some detached morbid curiosity? It’s honestly the most common thing. Folks are always thinking up story ideas that would make our existences harder, worse, more painful, as if it’s a challenge. It deeply confuses me.

About a year back, someone approached me with an idea they had for a fantasy setting akin to when pirates were going around (so like, the 1600s or something maybe), and they wanted to have a trans woman character as a main, and one of the first things they talked about was wanting to know how trans women would deal with not having access to modern medicine.

My answer was either don’t write it, implement magic as a means for her to readily and easily have access, or add in a time-traveler that gave an implant that disperses meds indefinitely. You can’t just set trans characters up for failure and then happily write about it. That’s transphobic and horrible.

Like, our medication is literally medically necessary. That means that without it, we are in clear and present danger of dying. Sure, it’ll almost certainly be by our own hand, but that’s how it works, and the medical community has known that for decades now. Healthcare inaccessibility is a major reason why around half of us attempt suicide at least once before we’re 20, and our ‘success’ rate at that is very much higher than any cis demographic.

So my answer would be to have this ‘post-apocalyptic’ setting occur 20+ years in the future, where she’ll have already had an implant that indefinitely takes care of her hormone levels on its own (there are already prototypes, they should be a thing by then). Otherwise, you’d end up having to write about her suffering from dysphoria far more than you would her interacting with the setting and whatever plot you might have thought up, and as someone who isn’t a trans woman, that wouldn’t be your story to tell.

My 5 simple rules for writing trans woman characters are as follows:

1. Know cissexism like the back of your hand, both in characterization and world-building. (some links here, here, here, here, and I have plenty of results in my cissexism tag that could probe useful even if I use that tag very frequently, and here’s a good trans 101 that I generally deem as required reading for my friends)

2. Don’t write PiV sex involving trans women, and if you want pregnancy, use IVF/IUI

3. If world-building, minimize our suffering (don’t leave us without access to transition, make society less terrible to us without tokenizing the oppression we face into a single evil entity)

4. Trans characters should have some dysphoria (which cannot be fucked/loved away), because almost no trans characters in media representation have any dysphoria at all, and that’s an important and exceedingly common part of our experience that gets neglected and erased all for cis writers’ convenience

5. Humanize us as the #1 priority, because our default state of being fetishized will by default render us as an object/device to be used in a story rather than an actual person. That means not using us as a vehicle for sexual fetishes, that means not fetishizing our bodies and transitions as the primary focus of our characters.

I have a larger post with links on how to write us, how not to write us, what pitfalls to avoid, but it was created within the context of fiction with romantic/sexual elements, so the lion’s share of it probably won’t apply

So ultimately, how would a trans woman handle a post-apocalyptic scenario? Largely, much in the same way as any other woman. Any story where we don’t have access would just be transphobia, and it’d almost certainly be insultingly unrealistic. Like, I’m telling you now, if the world shifted into a post-apocalyptic state where medication would not be able to be created for us, hundreds of thousands of trans people would literally kill ourselves within a few days of each other. Such a story would be a very brief and painful one, and not one someone who isn’t one of us should write about.

Ensure there’s always, always easy access to hormones. Never let that be a plot point. There’s plenty of other things to focus on. If we haven’t had surgery, we’ll probably still be tucking. Shaving, if necessary, is still annoying, even if HRT slows growth (though it at least significantly thins out, lightens, and slows body hair growth). Dysphoria is going to be there, but HRT would likely help keep it from being overwhelming, so it’d be easier to write for cis authors. There’s still going to be transphobia from some folks if you don’t ‘pass’. etc. etc. etc. I can’t give much more specific advice without knowing what kind of post-apoc setting you’re considering, since there’s a wide range of them and all. 

If you have any other questions, hit me up, I’d be happy to answer them if it could help