I guess I'm about to get real vulnerable on main here, but I saw some kinda "BookTok" disk horse cross my BlueSky feed, and it's got me thinking in a way I really can only discuss without a character limit. But it feels kind of relative to an over all trans creative experience. Maybe more specifically for us masc people, but. You know. Maybe the threads are different but the weave a similar picture. Anyway, this is kinda what my tumblr blog has become, and so here goes. Please note I also use 'queer' as an all encompassing term, as to me it is the most inclusive word I can use despite its dubious origins and history. Sorry if that upsets anyone.
The funniest thing about this whole conversation popping up was the fact that I had just been lamenting about finding the concept of 'romantasy' fun but what I'd give to find or read something with a transmasc protagonist paired with an opposite partner of any gender. Something my masc bisexual ass would love to see. Mostly because I see and support so many ones that are sapphic in nature, but hardly see any masculine. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places but Anyway. Just so happened that in the next hour I saw what I was looking for cross my Bsky feed, but with the author show casing the really nasty and negative comments he received on his concept. things like but not limited to:
"of course the transmasc character is a twink bottom" "just a girl who got a mastectomy" And other just Internalized Misogyny and Heteronormative things that affect a good portion of us transmasculine guys.
And idk, man it really struck a nerve with me.
If only because first and foremost, the author is writing something he wanted to see. Filling a niche and void he wanted to see realized, and like so many other authors' works, in a way that feels personal to him. And to attack it in such a way was pretty vile.
Queer stories and creations in of themselves are personal stories, because we write from our own experiences, and put them in our original works whether subtly or not so subtly. It's there, and you can't separate the queer experience from a queer work because by its very nature its queer. But also like, that experience isn't the same for everyone. And we shouldn't expect it to be. So, no, not every work is going to be what you want or associate with. But we should be uplifting all of it so that someone with an idea or concept that does speak to you will have the confidence to bring it to the table. And yeah. Unfortunately, that sometimes means that cliches are gonna happen. That twink ass transmasc might end up being a bottom 75% of the time.
But it also like, led me to associate my own struggle of accepting my own body and transness and some of my own preferences in the bedroom.
I'm not saying that all writers, artists, or creators are using their method of making art to explore their own hang ups with their gender and bodies, navigating this absolutely messy and strange world of norms and expectations while simultaneously seeming to want to turn them on their head. Gender is complex. Being trans is complex. And it gets weird, and sometimes we need outlets to work our way through it.
But also, most of us transmasc people have vaginas. It's just a fact of life. We've got a big ol' gaping axe wound of an organ sitting between our legs and for a lot of us, it still feels good to stick something in it, and we shouldn't be ashamed of that at all. And hell, a lot of us are short, considering our genetics are wired that way and no amount of HRT is going to change the fact some of us aren't going to get past 5'5". But sometimes, especially with what is expected to be masculine by gender norms, and the physical form of a cis male body, it can sometimes be really hard to reconcile that.
I know it was for me. To the point where I often struggled with my sexuality and my relationship with intimacy about it for a long time.
I made my character Akihiro while I was, and still am parsing through a lot of my own dysphoric issues, and paving my own way to acceptance. And that's made him a deeply personal character to me. And he has grown and changed as I project a lot of those issues on to him and his development. Akihiro has been an exploration of myself as much as he is an an original character that I role play. But not so much in the ways of personality, but more in the ways of the challenges with which he is presented and has to navigate himself.
Akihiro is a trans man in a world that is accepting of it. Society has progressed past these petty and arbitrary standards. But he becomes a cyborg at a time where the question is instead what it means to be human, and so...The aspect of depersonalization, dysphoria, and depersonalization he experiences at the hands of transhumanism is not so different than what I have and do experience in my own transition.
Akihiro wasn't always trans. That was honestly a pretty recent development and one that I did struggle with making. And I realized I was struggling with it because of those same dysphoric issues. And I just needed to let them go.
It was reflected in another recent development; the way that I had Akihiro handle his genitals when he was presented with the option to upgrade from none to a functioning set. And he chose to go with what he had been born with, the genitals he had when his body was mangled. He went with a vagina. Because he wanted to embrace the body he had taken for granted before he lost it, and not some idealized version of himself he could have obtained at any point prior.
And yeah. He 'bottoms' the majority of the time for his boyfriend because he enjoys it. But it doesn't stop him from topping him either, nor enjoying that. Nor had it stopped him previously from being intimate with other men and women. And that's his preference as a character.
And who are we to say it wasn't the same for this author? Where he is putting his feelings and acceptance of his own body and desires onto paper? And that is being met with such vitriol because it's not someone else's idea of what is masculine, or whatever. I don't know. Maybe they weren't. Maybe they did just wanna write some twink ass boy getting dicked down and like, that's fine too. Why do we have to be so mad about that?
And maybe this was just a lot of words to say that I think we get so wrapped up in words and labels for things that it completely erases the nuances of our own experiences and it turns right back around to being so queerphobic and limiting. And we don't give ourselves, much less other people, the grace to create the things they want to, and from a place of their own experience and desire. It's harmful.
