Episode 19: How do I write different genders?

This week, Crys and JP talk about writing characters along the gender spectrum and give examples to familiarize yourself with them.

Crys: Hello, friends. This is Episode 19 of the Write Away podcast and it is December 8th, 2020, as we are recording. I’m Crys Cain with my cohost…

JP: JP Rindfleisch.

Crys: So how was your writing week, JP?

JP: It was good. It’s been getting better ever since the first time that we talked about it. yeah, I’ve just been in revision mode and still pumping along.

So things are going well.

Crys: I did not get much writing done last week. I didn’t get much work done last week and my to-do list archive shows that. I think what had happened is it finally got cooler here, so it wasn’t like burning alive, for three weeks straight. So I was super productive and then my body was just like and we’re going to chillax now.

I did get started on a new romance on the last week because I had to post a snippet for readers, but it was only a thousand words, and that was it. But I did get some writing done this morning and I need to get a lot of writing done today. So we have a topic we both feel very strongly about today.

I am going to first warn our dear listeners that we might get a little ranty, just a little, but we’re going to make it really helpful as well.

JP: We promise.

Crys: So we’re talking about writing along the gender spectrum. This was prompted by the book we’re talking about next week for our book club, Invisible Ink. And it’s really a small part of the book that inspired a lot of ire. So rather than take up the entire book club space with the rants, we felt we would let out our frustrations here and talk about how we might do better.

JP: Yeah. Especially since I sent you like two minutes of ranting.

Crys: So tell me what it was that sparked it for you, JP.

JP: Okay. So we are reading Invisible Ink and there was a point in which he talks about how people–and explicitly men and women–have both a masculine and a feminine approach to what they like and what they enjoy. Masculine is more of that high action and feminine is more of that emotional character development.

And it was just… it frustrated me at the start because it just seemed… men like all this high action and women like all these emotional feelings. And then he referenced a book that was written in 1989 and it is called the… do I have it here? Oh, Brain Sex, Real Difference Between Men and Women.

I am a person who loves science. I graduated with a degree in biochemistry, and the Invisible Ink book was written in 2010 and it references a book that is 21 years old. In science terms, it’s a little old. Since then we’ve come a long way, and there’s actually a dispute and a complete disagreement with this idea that men and women have different brains.

To the point that there is now a different book that I would reference, written in 2019, so a little after Invisible Ink, by Gina Ripon called The Gendered Brain, which basically just means that brains are neuroplastic. There are no men and women brains, and there is none of this like masculine, feminine approach. So that’s my mini rant.

 It sparked a frustration because it’s this assumption that there is this masculine and feminine approach to everything. I think even using those terms are outdated, because I know men, who are straight, who knit and do all these “feminine” things, but we call them feminine. And I think that’s detrimental to letting people grow in that space.

Taking a step back.  What is gender?

Gender is a social construct. It’s basically what we impose on children and on each other to assume roles for what we want people to act like in society. Take the example of pink. We assume pink is for girls ,yet Theodore Roosevelt wore a pink christening dress. It wasn’t always for girls–pink was a red color and it was meant for boys and light blue was a flower color and it was meant for girls. Yet now everything pink is for girls and we just assumed that girls have to have pink. 

Crys: One of the frustrations I know we both have in fiction these days is that most writers, not all, but most writers still conform to the Western social structure of gender. And that, one–doesn’t accurately reflect where we are now as a society and, two–does not accurately reflect where humanity has ever been.

I mean when you get down to bare tacks, if you took away society, which we can’t. Society is part of what it means to be human. But if you dig down to just humans, gender is BS.

JP: Very much so.

Crys: We have sexual characteristics–

JP: –and even then, okay. So now we’re going to talk about my favorite thing because I can’t hold it back.

This is one of the things that frustrated me. I learned this in my genetics class in college, and it was never discussed in high school. But everyone in high school has this belief that X and Y are sex characteristics, sex chromosomes, and there’s only boys and there’s only girls XX, XY. That’s just not true.

That’s not how genetics works. Genetics is messy. There are six biological karyotype sex characteristics that can survive outside of the fetus. There’s X, XX, XXY, XY, XYY, and XXXY. Now most of these characteristics look like what we would consider men and women, but they have very different karyotypes and also they can just present differently.

For a very long time there has been this group of people that we would call either intersex or have differences in sex development. You would think, “Oh, this is a small population.” It’s not.

It was previously thought to be 1 in 2000, but more science is showing that this group of people is more of 1 in 60, which is 1.7%. In perspective, 1.5% of children born have autism.

So we have more information for parents about their children with autism than we do about parents who have children that are either intersex or have differences in sex development. So that is an astounding number. And when you talk about 1.7%, you’re talking about more than 70 million people on this planet.

Crys: Massive truck stuff, up, motorcycle stuff happening next door. No problem. One of the examples that I came across in years ago was of a community that had a high level of intersex, a population in the village of Salinas in then Dominican  Republic.

They have a group of people called hueve doces, who are assigned female at birth, they present female at birth, but around 12, their sex hormones kick in and testosterone increases and they develop male genitalia, because they are XY, but they have a deficiency in something I’m not even going to attempt to pronounce. You can Wikipedia.

Learning about this group of people started me on my whole gender exploration as far as what actually exists.

 That’s just talking about the biological level of gender is BS. We all live in a culture. We live in a society that defines what gender is, but the binary definition is not universal.

JP: It’s a silly concept that we base our entire lives off of. This binary ones and zeros, when even the biology itself is messy. So taking aside the whole biology portion of it, we are all individuals. We are all our own people and sometimes you’re just not born with the mentality that associates with the actual biology of what you were born with and that’s okay.

We have groups of people that are significant enough, that are higher than 1% of the population who are trans and non-binary. And I think it’s  a big mistake for us as writers to just ignore them and just erase them in our writing.

Crys: Okay. So let’s get into some definitions first, because I know that we’re using some terms that we’re really familiar with, but our listeners might not be.

So I’m going to start with cis-gender, or cis. Most people are actually not aware of this term, even though, if you don’t know this term, this is probably how you identify. Cis-gender is: I was assigned a gender at birth, and I still identify as that gender. So if you were assigned female at birth, which we also refer to as AFAB, I’m assigned female at birth and you still believe you’re a female, you’re a female.

Same with male. You might also hear the term cishet and that kind of, that just refers to people who are born the gender that they identify as and they’re heterosexual. Those are extremely common terms.

Transgender is… most people will understand it to be: they identify as the opposite of the binary that they were assigned, but a lot of non-binary people also identify as part of the trans community. A lot of them will choose gender reaffirming surgeries to not go from one side of the Western ideal of male to female, but somewhere in the middle.

And then there’s a basket of terms, and I’m not going to define each of them because a lot of people will define these as differently, but they all mean, to some extent: I don’t identify as male or female in the way that Western society deems it. And that’s non-binary, also referred to as enby, agender, bigender, gender-fluid, or gender-nonconforming. And then intersex often fit into those categories, but they may not. They may identify elsewhere.

Even historically, gender has not conformed to a binary. Western culture has developed this binary, but if you look throughout the world, there are many cultures that, pre-colonization, accepted more than one gender. One of my favorite stories is the sworn virgins of Albania,  which is a cultural definition of women who became the patriarchs of their families due to blood feuds killing out all the males.

But regardless of war, there are plenty of cultures that have non-violent reasons for having a culture of acceptance. I’m just gonna list off some countries and areas: Samoa, Nigeria, Thailand, Hawaii, the Zapotec culture in Mexico. In Indonesia, there’s a group called the Bugis– they have definitions for five genders going back at least six centuries.

How do we do better as writers? How do we do better?

JP: I think it is important to just be conscientious when you are writing. I’m not saying that all of you need to have non-binary and trans characters in your books, but I am saying that take a consideration as to what you, what your characters are within your story and see if those characters could exist within that story.

And if they could, write them in. I don’t feel like you are going to do terrible. As long as you write them as a normal character, there’s no need to have someone run into a room and be like, “I’m trans!” That doesn’t make sense. I don’t do that. I’m not trans, but I don’t run into a room and say, “I’m gay!”

That’s just not how I introduce myself as a person. I think that it’s just important to take a consideration that the world is multifaceted and we as writers have a responsibility to also include that within our text, because you don’t know who you’re reaching out to. Without that representation, people grow up thinking that things are always binary ones and twos.

So yes, your world may be a fantasy world. It may be something that completely is non-representative of what is out there in society, but there may be a kid growing in the Midwest who’s questioning their life. And your story is the one that impacts them.

Crys: I think one of the best ways to grow your conscientiousness about this is to surround yourself with stories.

One of the best ways is to actually know people in real life, but it’s weird and not cool to just go seeking out intersex and trans people just because they’re intersex and trans, that’s I dunno, that just feels really, creepy to me. And often in rural communities, like where I grew up, there’s not a out visible representation of these people, the way that you might more easily find in a city.

It doesn’t mean they’re not there. It just means that they are not out.

One of the best ways is to watch things that have real intersex and trans people. We are going to link some, media in the notes. JP has listed a couple of documentaries. I’ve watched Disclosure and it was beautiful and I fucking cried.

I have not watched The Gender Revolution.

JP: That one’s good.

And so also sometimes documentaries can be a little heavy. When we’re talking about : How could I write a trans character? How could I write a non-binary character? I like to take examples from TV shows and movies .

I think I would encourage you to check out the show Euphoria. They have a character, her name is Jules and she is transgender. They just do a really good representation of this character.

Crys: Without making it the defining characteristic of the character.

JP: Exactly. I think that’s key for us to us as writers to take a look at and see. How will their people include these characters without making it such a spotlight? 

Crys: The cartoon She-Ra, particularly season two, has a lot of characters who are from all spectrums of gender and sexuality. Highly recommend that if you are a cartoon fan. It’s not just for kids. Though it’s amazing for kids.  I think you have another documentary listed here that I missed, We Exist.

JP: Yeah. I can’t remember. Hold on. Yeah. We Exist. This is on my list of documentaries to watch. While I was researching for the show, I found this documentary and this focuses on people beyond the binary. So this includes more non-binary people.

This is on my list. I watched the trailer and I highly recommend it’s on everyone else’s list as well.

Crys: I’m also going to include a few YouTube videos with trans, for intersex or non-binary folks. Buzzfeed surprisingly is actually really good at having short, informative videos about this, and a lot of it is because a lot of their people who work for them fall everywhere on the gender and sexuality spectrums.

Those are actually good because it’s real people giving lived experience.

In book world, and JP and I talked about this, we think that often the visual medias are better for an intro into these representations because so much of how we code gender is visual confronting ourselves with both the visual part of the character and the intrinsic part of the character provides much better exposure to the reality of humans than just a text media would.

But we are readers and writers and we fucking love texts. So I do have a couple examples, or resources.

One is a romance series. It’s Ed Davies’ F-word series. Flaunt and Flirt, all the F words. And he has a lot of trans narratives in the series. He is an openly trans man himself. It’s a trustworthy source for reading–you know that you are reading something informed by lived experience.

Another one is–there’s an author, Claudie Arsenault, and I’m probably screwing up her name terribly because it’s French. But she has a  database that is of aromantic and asexual characters, but in this database, she also defines what gender the characters are. And so if you want to go read about a non-binary character this is a good resource.

It’s kind of crowdsourced. People submit things to her and she’ll out them. But it’s a really good resource, not only for gender, but also sexuality and also Claudie’s books are wonderful. The way I described them as: she goes a little over the top and gender and sexuality representation, but for me, that is sometimes a really good like palette cleanser after the toxic gender binary stereotypes that are perpetuated in romance constantly.

So yeah. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about genre for a second. Oh, genre.

There are some genres where it’s pretty easy to insert multiple genders, multiple sexualities, and those tend to be the heavily world-building genres. I would say that it is a lot easier to slide in. These narratives into fantasy and scifi because people are already looking for things that are out of their norm.

And often these gender variances are out of most people’s norm. Is there a bunch of toxic masculinity in both of those?

Yes.

Yes. That’s our society, that’s what we’re dealing with. It’s inescapable. It is much harder to introduce gender variants into traditional mainstream romance because of our Disney fairy tale expectation of happily ever afters.

I’m not saying you can’t do it and be successful. That is 100% possible, but you’re not going to be selling to the contemporary romance mainstream. You’re just not. You’re going to be creating your own little sub-niche. You’re going to find people who will probably fucking adore you because you’re not serving those toxic expectations.

But it’s gonna probably take you a while to get rolling. A friend of mine, Tami Veldura, under one of their pen names, and I can’t remember which one it is, they’re open about what their names are. I’ll put a link to Tami’s site in the bottom.

They have, on their pen name, a series of trans fairytale retellings that are just lovely. And occasionally Tumblr will come across one of their books and get super excited and they’ll see like a good boost of sales.

And that’s what they’re building their platform on–exactly what everything we’ve been talking about. Gender variance, real characters, real stories, representation, because it’s part of their lived experience as well.

 JP: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, something that was the reason that this conversation was spawned is the nonfiction world. if you’re going to cite a source, see if there is new science, newer information that you can present to the world, explicitly in the terms of these hot topic subjects.

Gender has been a thing that has been expanding and changing itself as it evolves through time. so you can’t really cite a source that’s 21 years old. So that’s my recommendation for nonfiction. Especially when you are writing this information, make sure that you are doing your due diligence and research. Just so that you have more new information.

Crys: Rather than having a question for you this week, we would like to pose a writing prompt. And that would be to write a scene with a non-binary character using they/them pronouns. We hope that you post it on the website so that we can read it.

And that would be a lot of fun if you guys did that, I’d be really excited.

JP: Same. That would be awesome.  I’ve written a short story with a they/them pronouns character. And it’s not as hard as you think. it’s one of those things that you have to contemplate about, you have to be aware about it, but, it’s not as hard as you think.

I really hope you guys try it.

Crys: Thanks for talking to me, JP. I’ll see you next week.

JP: Next week. Bye.

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Show Notes

Buzz Feed Non-Binary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcBrVj6s214

Youtube Intersex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAUDKEI4QKI

The Gendered Brain by Gina Rippon https://amzn.to/3guPdKX

We Exist Documentary: http://weexist.co

Gender Revolution Documentary: https://youtu.be/4-sPqFMBK1o

Disclosure Documentary: https://youtu.be/4-sPqFMBK1o

Claudie Arsenault Aro/Ace Database: https://claudiearseneault.com/?page_id=1320

Ed Davies F-Word series: https://amzn.to/33TZ47Z

Netflix Show: She-Ra

HBO show: Euphoria

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Correction: It was Franklin Roosevelt, not Theodore, in regard to the child wearing the pink dress.