TransSF

[bcholmes]

In the last bunch of cons I've attended, queer sf panels have talked about a number of trans sf stories: Commitment Hour, Steel Beach, The Left Hand of Darkness, Identity Matrix and others. Usually, this discussion comes off sounding as though trans people get better representation in sf than gay/lesbian/bi people. People point to I Will Fear No Evil and even The Marvelous Land of Oz and say, "Hey, trans people have been represented for a long, long time".

But I don't see these examples as trans sf. Similarly, I don't see Ethan of Athos as gay sf.

That's an oversimplification. I do think that speculative and fantastical treatments of gender are things that trans discourse should be interested in. But there are attributes of the type of trans people that I know that are missing from this so-called trans sf.

I remember a good panel from WisCon called GLBT 201. One of the panelists talked about the problem that sf has in representing queer people. Because sf often presents the future, there's usually an assumption that people have gotten over queer prejudice. But, the panelist said, if you're not writing about the conflict that queer people have with society, in many ways you're not writing about us.

That's a big part of what I feel is missing from so-called trans sf. There's no conflict of gender. There's no agency about addressing that conflict. There're no real coming out scenes.

I'm sure I'm blanking on some examples, but Neil Gaiman's A Game of You is probably the closest thing I've seen to real trans sf.

Comments

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I haven't read it in too long to recommend or disrecommend it, but I'd take a look at John Varley's "Options," a short story about the early days of easily available trans-shifting. And I would argue that LHoD does have conflict of gender, although it shows up in Genly Ai, the human male character, rather than in the Gethenians.

Nonetheless, an interesting point. Write something?

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

And I would argue that LHoD does have conflict of gender, although it shows up in Genly Ai, the human male character, rather than in the Gethenians.

That's an interesting point. One half of my brain is now saying, "Ah! Genly Ai represents the mainstream person in crisis when confronted with the differently-gendered." Not the "insider" view I was looking for, but an important perspective, nonetheless.

The other half of my brain is thinking of Ai as a representative of someone whose idea of gender is in conflict with everyone around him. There's something about that that I'm still struggling to put words around. I remember someone once talking about queer subtext and asking when it became time that we could be text, instead. Remember the panel you were on about when "the alien" can't be used to tell certain stories about difference?

Write something?

I tried one story. I'm not completely happy with the end result, but I was interested in writing about an sf society in which trans people weren't effectively rendered invisible or not worth mentioning. I think I'm way too close to the material to make it really work, though.