#aran'gar

[kaiartx]

the forsaken visiting lews therins grave in the third age, colorized

[ayceofqueens]

My Preferred Rep in Wheel of Time Fanfic

I am disappointed by the lack of WoT fanfics which explore trans characters in the way that I want them to be explored. Most of the ones which do feature trans character go about it in a way that is unsatisfying for me.

I'll preface this by saying that I don't dislike this representation, nor do I think it is bad. Ppl can and should write whatever the fuck they want.

With that out of the way, my personal gripe with the handful of WoT fanfic I've found which explore trans channelers, is that most of them take what I'll call the Cosmic Validation approach, where a trans character is born with a soul that matches their gender, but not their body's sex. I think this is largely done for two reasons:

First, is that there's technically precedent in the story, with at least one character who has explicitly had the experience of a soul whose sex did not match that of their body.

Second is the namesake of the approach. I think that, for many people, writing a trans-male character as having a female-born body, but a male soul which channels Saidin fills a fantasy of cosmic validation. This character is, definitively, a man, because their soul is that of a man.

Setting aside that the sole example of an ambiguously trans character was the result of unnatural influence from the Big Bad Evil Guy, and that the character in question almost explicitly exhibited autogynephilia (fictitious paraphilia which was invented to invalidate trans women) after their forced transition, I still, personally, do not like this form of transness for a couple of reasons.

The first is that, I just personally do not like cosmic validation as a concept. No shade to those who like it and find comfort in it; more power to them. I don't like it because I feel like creating a setting with such cosmic validation, which would ostensibly skip all of the bullshit we're currently dealing with in the real world, is very uninteresting. Seeing how the world deals with a person they initially perceived as a man or woman in every way, even down to which half of the power they channel, deciding that, no, I'm actually going to be not that, feels like a more interesting and compelling prospect to me. That, and it either ignores non-binary people, or relegates all of them to the status of non-channelers.

Second is that I also just feel that it does not reflect my experience as a trans person. In my experience as a trans woman, most of the dysphoria I experienced in my life has been neurological. I often think like a man, and not just in ways that are socially conditioned. I did not know it at the time, but when I was in highschool, I had a strong feeling of envy for many of the depressed girls I knew. Looking back, I am able to recognize that this was because I was depressed, but it did not manifest in me the same way that it did for them, and I felt that it should manifest the way theirs did. So, bringing it back to WoT, I find that exploring the trans experience in a world where sexual dimorphism extends to one's very soul has very interesting potential.

I also feel that exploring channeling dysphoria could be interesting, particularly because channeling is repeatedly likened to sex in the books. The idea of somebody being dysphoric about the half of The One Power that they channel is very interesting to me. I imagine trans men and women deliberately trying to burn themselves out because of how awful they feel, with some of them accidentally dying as a consequence. But I also find the idea interesting because I imagine trans who don't experience channeling dysphoria, reflecting my experience as a trans woman who does not experience bottom dysphoria (and honestly feel that I would rather channel Saidin).

That said, I would ideally like a setting with both. You'll have the rare AMAB person who has soul that is connected to Saidar, many (but not all) of whom transition into women, and then you'll have some people who identify contrary to their sex, body and soul.

So, yeah. I've been unable to find fanfic which explores trans characters in a way that I would prefer, and that upsets me.

With all that said, I have found one fanfic that I'm really enjoying, which explores the cosmic validation approach. Fair warning though, the author updates extremely slowly, and has no intention of picking up the pace:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[anira-naeg]

Drew the Forsaken

[asha-mage]

Which of the unconfirmed Forsaken should get the remaining slot in the show?

"Balthamel's late series plotline can be salvaged I Know It."

"Aginor being karmically clowned on is to funny not to keep."

"Mesaana is important 'women in STEM (who've had grants rejected)' rep."

"Be'lal, just for the meme of him getting one shotted by Moraine."

Voting ended onSep 4, 2023

[lilliankillthisman]

It's a dreadful shame that Aran'gar is a transmysogynistic caricature because I thought she was unbelievably cool when I was reading the books aged 12. Oh well at least there's still Graendal.

[tiredmoonslut]

Now referring to going down on her only as "exchanging affections"

[xillionart]

Collam Daan Revisited

[far-dareis-me]

i humbly request the 'is halima trans?' essay pretty please

Well this took significantly longer than I thought because I have a tendency to go overboard but ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE

Is Halima trans? It's complicated.

That's it, thank you for your time. :)

Okay but really, it is complicated. There's a reason the UAF has been debating this for years, and has yet to reach a sound conclusion. There are plenty of complexities to discuss here, but a a lot of the debate starts with how we even define being "trans", so let's start there.

The way we talk about transness (trans-ness? transhood? transcendentalism?) has evolved a lot in recent years, to the point that one person's definition of it often won't match up exactly with the next's, even within the trans community. There are constant debates - some in good faith, others not so much - as to whether transness requires some sort of transition, if one must have some sort of gender dysphoria (ie- a feeling of discomfort or unhappiness about one's sex or gender), if a better metric is gender euphoria (ie- a feeling of comfort or joy about one's sex or gender), and countless other arguments dissecting what qualifies as "The Trans Experience". Personally though, I like the current Merriam Webster definition- "of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity differs from the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth." That is to say, regardless of the presence or lack of dysphoria and euphoria, regardless of what kind of transition one has undergone (if any), regardless of how one is now seen by others, I see transness as defined by how someone personally identifies. It is self-determined, not reliant on passing any sort of external test or checklist. Do you identify as a gender that differs from the sex you were assigned at birth? Congratulations, you can call yourself trans. That's it. Nothing else required.

Moving forward with that definition (because I think anything further on it is a discussion for another time), we now have to contend with the complexity of Halima herself. Because she is not exactly a case we are likely to see in our world.

SPOILERS AHEAD, just in case anyone has somehow gotten this far without reading the series.

(Note that from here on I'll be using Balthemel with he/him pronouns to refer to the past life, Aran'gar with she/her to refer to the reincarnation, and Halima with she/her to refer to the alias).

When Balthemel dies, he is reincarnated into a female body. This is done partly as a joke by the Dark One, and partly as a punishment, explicitly intended to make him feel uncomfortable and out of place in a body which does not match his gender. But while Aran'gar expresses initial anger at being punished ("Why has this been done to me? Why have I been put into this body? Why?"), she does not give any indication that she now identifies as anything but a woman. From the moment of her reincarnation, all characters (Aran'gar included) refer to her as a woman and use she/her pronouns. Beyond that, in her PoVs as Halima, we see that she seems to revel in her womanhood, actively enjoying her new body, and expressing that she feels quite distant and distinct from her past life ("It was difficult now to really remember what life had been like as a man; had she been such an easily manipulated fool, then?"). This is a somewhat messy element of her character, though, as this split between her former self and current self has been dictated to her- the Dark One requires it, insists that she and Osan'gar both use their new names and identities. It is impossible to know how much of this split is self-motivated, and how much of it is simply obeying orders. But what is clear is that Aran'gar does view her new identity as distinct from that of Balthemel, and that she views her new self as a woman.

Interestingly, this is both the core of the argument that she is not trans, and the reason I think she resonates with trans readers. Finding a sense of euphoria in a new way of expressing yourself (and especially in a new body) is a practically a cornerstone of 'The Trans Experience'. As I said before, it’s in no way a requirement for being trans, but it is a story a lot of trans people will find deeply familiar. And as messily as it is executed, Halima's experience does bear some similarities to that narrative. For myself, and several other trans members of the fandom I've discussed this with, reading Halima's PoV's was a strange experience. It felt off, to be sure, but nonetheless spoke to something inside. It was a similar feeling to the one I had watching DS9 and learning that Dax's previous host had been a man. Or watching Mulan dress as a man to make it into the army. There was just something there that begged exploration. Unfortunately, there are a lot more issues with Aran'gar as representation than either of those examples.

Because Aran'gar is... not exactly a shining example of queer representation. She falls squarely into the "salacious bisexual" stereotype, and if you do read her as trans, she's practically the poster-child for the "trans predator" stereotype. She uses every aspect of her queerness- confirmed or otherwise- to take advantage of those around her. From using her body for seduction to literally infiltrating woman-only spaces, Aran'gar is about as problematic as it gets. I'm not saying that this is unreasonable- she's one of the Forsaken, and I'd expect nothing less from her. But she is also the closest to trans rep the series has, and that is a problem worth at least noting.

So, after all that... Is Aran'gar/Halima trans? Ultimately, I think the only way to answer would be to ask her if she thinks she’s trans. Since of course we can’t actually do that, it's left up to the reader's interpretation. But to give some kind of answer, from my perspective anyway, I don't think she would see herself as trans. Aran'gar seems to view herself, in her new life and body, as distinct from her previous life as Balthemel. As Balthemel, he viewed himself as a (presumably cis) man. Now, as both Aran'gar and her alias Halima, she seems to quite comfortably identify as a (cis) woman. So, even if she may arguably fit the definition of trans (if you define "birth" as Balthemel's birth), this leads me to believe Aran'gar/Halima would not identify as such. My interpretation is hardly the end-all-be-all, of course- and if yours differs, that's completely valid.

Regardless, I do think she is a fascinating lens through which to discuss transness in WoT (as evidenced by the... very long essay I just wrote about it). To me, Aran'gar exists as a somewhat clumsy metaphor for being trans, written by a man who didn't really understand what it means to be trans, but wrote something which approximated the experience nonetheless. Robert Jordan was not (as far as we know) queer or involved in the queer community, and is not likely to have had much interaction with trans people, or many avenues through which to explore what it might be like to be. But I do think that it's likely he had at least encountered the concept, and that whatever bits of information he'd picked up about it influenced his writing of Aran'gar. From the idea of being in the "wrong" body, to the experience of gender euphoria, RJ managed to hit (albeit messily) on a lot of things that are similar enough to transness that Halima resonates, on some level, with trans readers.

I don't think it was his intention to make her so, just like I don't think it was his intention to write her as embodying so many harmful stereotypes. Queerness shows up remarkably often in the WoT, but it is always written through a very cisheteronormative lens (for ref- I'm referring to things like pillowfriends, polyamory in the Aiel, and characters challenging traditional gender roles). So while a full breakdown of that is probably a discussion for another time (sorry, that's becoming a habit), I bring it up to emphasize that I don't think his explorations of queerness in the series were done with any malice whatsoever. I think he just genuinely did not know much about it, and was writing from his own limited perspective. And that's a fascinating takeaway, in my opinion. For someone who did not himself have much experience with queerness to write a series that explores it in so many ways is kind-of incredible, to me. And while I don't think he did a particularly good job of representing queer identities, he did, perhaps inadvertently, provide an introduction to a lot of queer concepts for a lot of people. And well, that's not nothing.

So, TL;DR? No, I don't think Aran'gar/Halima would consider herself trans, nor do I think RJ intended her to be read as such. But I think the fact that so many nonetheless read her as trans reflects the fact that she is, on some level, an exploration of what transness is, albeit a clumsy, unintentional one. And that exploration is worth discussing.