Fan fiction "tenderized my brain"
Members of online FTM/transmasc communities tend to talk about fan fiction and anime the way they talk about sexual trauma or autism. Of course, someone can be trans and also have a traumatic past. Of course, you can be trans and autistic. Everything is incidental. Sure, I read a lot of fan fiction in the years before I came out as trans. You could even say I was obsessed. But one thing didn’t lead to another. Their self-understandings are pure and untouched in the way that nothing is ever pure and untouched. But to be human is to be adulterated, to be the ever-changing composite of influences chosen and unchosen.
Maybe consuming fan fiction was a “dysphoria coping mechanism” or maybe it was an irritant, the strange incubator of impossible desires and intolerable discontents.
Along the way, community members drop hints about the underlying reasons fan fiction was so appealing. These accounts are heavy with heterosexual despair: “i cried myself to sleep over never being able to experience the kind of love i liked to read about so much,” one poster wrote. “This was the only way I was comfortable exploring my sexuality,” another observed.
Detransitioners finish the sentences that trans-identified girls and women let trail off. Fan fiction offers sex and romance without baggage, without sexual inequality, and without risk. Or, sometimes, simply: it turned me on. It didn’t mean anything.
“When you have been taught that heterosexuality is too dangerous but still have the natural urges the vast majority of females have, well, there you are.”
“I never saw myself in female characters. They were always flat or stupid to me. (Internalized misogyny? Also bad writers) I only saw myself in male characters”
“I probably romanticized homosexual content because they couldn’t have any unwanted or accidental pregnancies… I still identify as childfree and I don’t want to become pregnant.”
“I read lots of gay male fanfic because I had sexual urges but found male/female sex triggering because of my sexual trauma. I fetishised gay male relationships and could only ever see myself enjoying sex if I was a man. I felt safer as a man.”
“I think I love yaoi not just because I find male characters aesthetic, but because I only like to see characters that are not my own biological sex doing it, I feel great discomfort from sexualizing myself, and by extension other women.”
“I began to identify with these representations of boys written by other young females, and the themes within male/male fanfiction were so much more titillating than anything in mainstream, professionally produced media, or even heterosexual fanfiction for that matter. The pairing being same sex seemed to give writers and readers the freedom to explore these characters and their relationships without being constricted by the norms that come with heterosexual dynamics. It became this liminal space where I could explore what interested me about boys and fantasies about relationships, connecting it to whatever my media obsession was at the time, without the pressure of interacting with real boys, as real boys made me painfully bashful.”
“To me, it felt more neutral and lightweight, not as burdened with… um… gendered tropes let’s say? … I believed (or was at least strongly influenced by) sexist tropes, and the gay constellation set me free from that. Like more of an eye-to-eye relationship where you’re both just persons rather than fulfilling a role, and everything remains cozy and romantic no matter which way you play.”
These are not new problems and desires, but old ones that have vexed and inspired generations of female artists and writers, animating works of fiction like Ursula K. Le Guin’s lovers in kemmer, who go to bed genderless, uncertain which partner will rise expecting a child. These are the sources of the harnessed rage that runs under Adrienne Rich’s poems and musings, and that guided the pen in her hand when she wrote that “the body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.”
Relatedly: fascinating conversation…
I know people always say they write m/m because it's more equal or that female characters are less interesting/more poorly written/there aren't any, and these have been the narratives around slash for decades, but I still question them given that
1. a significant amount of m/m is very extremely unequal in dynamic. Lots of slavery, bondage, forced feminization--and you don't even have to read the story itself, you just have to read the summaries and it will be like "Protagonist is young and beautiful and has no power and now rich older powerful CEO King Man has bought him as a slave" or you can talk to people about their fic and RP and....you know what, I'm not giving examples because every real world example of something someone told me they were writing is too disturbing. iykyk
2. slash writers can and will take a male character who appears for two seconds or is only a name who never appears on screen and make him half of a wildly popular ship (I'm looking at you, Rosekiller) so clearly well written and interesting aren't pre-requisites.
3. I was involved in text-based RP for a long, loooooong time and it was a constant complaint among RPers that no matter where you looked for an RP partner, everyone only wanted to write "bottoms" aka everyone wanted to write a character who was being pursued, and they wanted their RP partner to write the pursuer character. "oh, I don't want to write with people who only write female characters, they're all desperate for romance and heteronormative" people would say while refusing to write non-romance plot lines and insisting that their character had to be aggressively (and often, in character, unwillingly) pursued. If I had to write romance I preferred to write the pursuer, but it was still....annoying. (maybe annoying in a different way than if you were part of the majority who wanted to be pursued, since for me it was more "and then you join and have to fend off constant thirsty IMs from other women about your fictional character")
Edit: actually, I say that, but thinking about the romance stories targeted at men and the male fans of romance I've met and I'll revise this statement: a very big romantic fantasy for both sexes seems to be that someone VERY SPECIAL (because she's a vampire queen or he's the CEO billionaire or whatever) chooses you and in fact ONLY wants you even though there's not any obvious reason they should choose you over the more powerful/competent/sexier people surrounding them.
4. the equivalent male spaces are full of nerdy awkward men who write all female casts/prefer media that is primarily female casts. And it's truly hilarious to me. Actually, disclaimer, some of my favorite female characters were written by men who write primarily female cast stories. I like their stories and characters, and one of the reasons I like them is because they don't write ABOUT being women. By which I mean, a lot of the similar stories that I've read by women is ABOUT being a woman. The female MC wants to be a hero and is alienated from the other women because of her interests. Whereas if the story is written by one of these guys who writes all/mostly female casts, his heroine is surrounded by other women and he's not writing about her feelings of alienation from women.
On a related note, a lot of those women will be more likely to brawl or be in the military or be assertive and aggressive in ways that remind me more of men (not because women can't be assertive, but the manner in which they assert...if that makes sense?) the same way a lot of the male characters written by women who only write male characters....they're shy and vulnerable and want to talk about their feelings (even when this isn't remotely how they're written in their source material) and people say oh, it's because men don't understand women/women don't understand men but I personally think the REAL thing going on is that people are working out their own issues in a manner that is distant from themselves. Nerdy, awkward dude writing a bunch of assertive female characters couldn't write a male character who was more assertive because he has hang-ups about his own assertiveness. The fangirl writing an emotionally vulnerable male character can't write a female character in that role because she has hang-ups about her own vulnerability.
I mean, also, yeah, in both cases a lot of these people are heterosexual and writing the sex they're attracted to, but I think that's only PART of it, since plenty of heterosexuals aren't afraid of writing characters and casts of their own sex.
Also, real talk, have you ever read women talk about, like, "what do your blorbos have in common"? because they'll always say trauma and being socially awkward and I'm like man. If this discussion thread is anything to go by, every single male cast member of this series is traumatized, and yet you only latched onto one of those? sooooo maybe trauma is NOT the theme here? What I actually have come away with is that the characters they latch onto are the ones they find sexually attractive and also are best able to project their own personal issues onto. I'm sure that's not confusing for your sense of self at all.
The girls I teach - HS 11th and 12th grade - who identify as boys are all like Peter Pans. They are nothing like the actual boys in class, and don't want to identify or be friends with them at all. They just seem to NOT want to be girls. They have a similar uniform. Khakis, button down shirt, sneakers. They are often uncomfortable in their skin, not the most attractive girls. I can see that trying to be "pretty" in a traditional way would be intimidating, especially in this pornified, hypersexualized world. Far safer to remain Peter Pan - a prepubescent boy. Not a man, but not a woman either. At least 2 girls I know of are also on the spectrum. I wish I could tell them there is no wrong way to be a woman. To be proud of who they are. They don't have to be sexually active yet, with anyone. Grow up, learn, develop who they are. Later, a woman or man will love them for who they are. But don't make decisions now. They are babies in every way.