One time I saw a fake headline about the Vatican announcing the virgin Mary's new nemesis, la puta Waría, and ever since that day I've quoted it like anybody else knows what I'm talking about
i wrote this post over on bluesky today and, after receiving a few of the predictable "but what if i Want to write badly" responses you get to any opinion that can be taken as prescriptivist writing advice, i thought i'd talk more about what i'm getting at.
basically, it's an issue of suspension of disbelief. there are a lot of things in fantasy and historical writing that we're willing to look past. dragons, potatoes, the divine right of kings. we are able to suspend our disbelief that a monarch could be anything but a despicable tyrant if the story we're being told is convincing enough, or plays to our comforting worldviews about nobility and Great Man theory. we can also suspend it if we straight up didn't know that europe didn't have potatoes pre-columbian exchange. basically--it means it doesn't bother you that these elements aren't perfectly realistic. fiction is not required to be realistic. clue's in the name.
but there are some things we just can't ignore. some things hit us as out of place for the setting we've been presented, or the world as we understand it. it pulls us out of the story by reminding us, in that moment, that we are reading a constructed narrative made of a series of choices by an author. and for whatever reason, they made a Wrong choice, like plucking the wrong guitar string.
bdsm safety protocols are the classic example, since a majority of people that encounter this sort of thing often enough to identify it online are reading fanfic and romance. things like a red light/green light system appearing in a chinese fantasy world where cars have not been invented, or cowboys intuiting the concept of a safeword while having spit-lubed anal sex in the desert. absurdisms that break suspension of disbelief, because who is teaching these cowboys the principles of consent. nobody.
now, we've beaten the dead horse of 'don't write like you're afraid of a callout post' a million times when it comes to including bdsm best practices in writing. you are allowed to write whatever you want forever, and if what you want to write is perfectly safe, negotiated sex between two adults who would have never received sexual education and probably thought a woman's uterus wandered in the body depending on the temperature, you are free to do that. i'll think your writing is bad, but you don't have to care what i think. you don't have to care about the people who'd get upset at cowboys doing unnegotiated "lasso tricks" either.
anyway, i'm getting off track. the actual point of the post above was that i see this same kind of thing with modern terminology for queer concepts in completely incongruous settings, and it pulls me out just as bad as any cowboy therapyspeak. i simply do not believe the local dirt farmer who binds his chest and changed his name from helen to troy would call himself "trans". i do not believe the wizard who has no time or interest in sex would call himself "asexual". and 1800s english dandies would not be calling themselves "gay" unless they were in a holiday mood.
that doesn't mean they couldn't understand those concepts, but it's not the language they would use to express them, because they would not have it. you see this with discussion of actual literal history--we technically cannot call historical figures "gay" or "transgender" with 100% confidence, even when their behavior lined up very closely with our modern idea of those concepts, because those people did not have our modern idea of those concepts. would they have identified that way, if a time traveler taught it to them? possibly! but we can't know that. they might like "transsexual" better, even if it's no longer in vogue.
and much like nobody is teaching cowboys the concept of aftercare, nobody is teaching our dirt farmer troy the word "trans", which is itself a shortening of several words that have come in and out of fashion as recently as the last century. troy would be calling himself something else, if he even has a word for what he is.
and that's where you, the author, have a Choice. there's plenty of reasons to default to the modern term--you're writing for a modern audience, you want to be clear about your representation, you're afraid of getting yelled at for getting something wrong--but i think it's the wrong move in any serious writing. because what you're losing by doing that is an opportunity to get creative and actually say something with the character, rather than tick a box.
troy might describe himself as a man trapped in a woman's body, because that is how he experiences it, and that experience informs his character. or he might think of himself as a man who just has breasts, because he's always been a man and has been treated as a man, and he's never had to examine it. or he might call himself a "rock", because he lives with dwarves and that's the dwarven word for masculine-presenting.
or he can just say he's "trans", and you don't explore what it means to the character in the world he lives in, while also implying somebody sat this boy down on a stump in the dirt fields and said the word "transgender" to him, and then said it often enough he shortened it to "trans". while living on his dirt farm. where he would never have seen a pineapple.
i am more interested in a troy who doesn't have a perfectly modern understanding of what he is and what he wants, because that's where a story lives. i don't read to see my understanding of things perfectly mirrored back to me, i read to experience something different. i want to read about the guy who calls himself a slur because it's the only language for himself he has, and what that means to him. i want to read about the guy who never calls himself a man, but understands implicitly that he's something different. i want to read about messy, complicated people who don't know shit from fuck. it'll absorb me a hell of a lot more.
anyway.
this is all opinion and i am just one guy so you're allowed to disagree with me. i just won't be interested in your work if you do. and that's only a loss if you make it one.
INCREASE the pressure. Do not let these people sleep. Our voices need to resound in the minds of every corporate executive in every payment processing service.
I made sure to highlight SERVICE because what they do is a service
Call them. Email them. If you are a shareholder, attend their meetings and speak up. Do not accept half measures. Either they accept business from sex workers and porn sites and artists and authors and people of color and poor people around the globe, or they watch their business crumble.
Visa and Mastercard may be getting a lot of calls about their adult content policies, but I just called in to PayPal and not only was there no wait, the customer service rep I got had never had one of these calls before (they were very nice about it.)
Don't overlook the online processors - even more than Visa and Mastercard they are the ones pressuring online retailers. PayPal is the one that's been pressuring Patreon over the last year or so.
I've had no luck reaching Stripe, all of the numbers people have dug up ring through as disconnected.
Then call again later until you reach a real person. If their phones are tied up for days? Try again for days. Large companies hope that backlash dies down over time, so it's important that you ensure they don't see an end in sight.
Collective Shout only succeeded because they were fucking annoying, like most anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups. If you want to get payment processors to back down off this puritanical hate bullshit, you have to be more annoying than the opposition.
sorry if i'm gonna be quiet for a while. my country recently introduced laws that make it so that in order to use social media to the fullest (not being able to view ns/fw content and in a few cases, not even having access to dms), i HAVE to give the sites my id/face scan.
it goes into effect july 25th. it'll probably effect here too, since this place allows mature content (tho not full on ns/fw)
i'm very distressed about it bc i might end up not even being able to talk to my internet friends. i don't really have any irl ones
if i have to disappear on most socials by then, you know why.
if you're in the uk like i am there IS a petition to sign on the official gov petitions website asking to consider repealing this law. it currently has almost 8k signatures and needs 10k in order for the government to even acknowledge it (and 100k for them to debate it)
idk if i can post it here but please... go sign it! and go write to your local mp if possible. they need to realize how dangerous this law is going to be for uk citizens online. it doesn't protect children, it's just privacy invading AND a huge security risk to boot
i should've said this before but the law is called the online safety act 2023. look it up, educate yourself about what it does, and learn about just how damaging it will be to the internet landscape as a whole for uk citizens everywhere, as well as, ironically, incredibly unsafe for everyone
it's like those internet laws that the us keeps trying to push in, but the uk somehow beat them. it got almost no coverage from the media bc the gov was super sneaky about passing it through, and there were very few people speaking out about it. they KNOW that if the public knows about this overall, many would be extremely unhappy. absolutely foul.
AND the gov is thinking about adding even more social media 'safety' rules on top of that, such as like... curfews and limiting amount of time spent on social media for 'kids' (so basically anyone who doesn't id verify, which will be a lot of people bc it's a huge security hazard and invasive to boot). insane.
kids won't be protected by this. they'll be encouraged to do more risky behaviours as a result (such as stealing ids, or going to shadier, less monitored parts of the web). parents shouldn't be letting the internet baby their children - they should be actively making sure they're okay and safe, rather than blaming the internet every time something has happened. sometimes it IS the parents' fault for not being more attentive, yknow? you wanted kids, now raise them properly!
petition is now at 9k! 1k more and then the gov will HAVE to respond (though i imagine their response will be 'tough sh!t, we're not backing down bc waaahhh the CHILDREN')
signatures are slowing down for the time being unfortunately so even if it reaches that goal, don't stop sharing, signing, or letting your mp know how bad this law is!
the petition is VERY close to 10k! which is great!
however, this has only just begun, as the gov will likely double down on their decision bc 'the children!!!', so please, if you want to make sure kids and adults alike don't get harmed by this ill thought out law,
keep signing, keep sharing, contact your mps, and make them aware that this will NOT work. get it to 100k! that way they will have to consider it up for debate
in other news, reddit is the next site after bsky and discord to announce that they are complying with this act, instead of challenging it by shutting down services for the uk. wtf.
ellievsbear
jbbartram-illu
blakekathryn
dededos
