We received two similar-ish asks about magical transition, so I’m answering them both at once.
How do you feel about a god of healing who helps trans people transition? I'm trans myself, and at first I thought it was a good thing and something I'd really like irl, but after thinking about it, I wondered if it was more undercutting the real life experiences of trans people. I also thought it might come off as me saying trans people are injured/broken or something like that before transitioning because it's a god of healing (if that's the case, would it be better to have it be something all the gods do?). In the myths I'm basing some of the gods on, there are stories about gods helping people transition, if that has any effect
In this world there is a potion where you can change genders but it only lasts for a few hours. Would it be weird for a character to regularly take the potion in order to have a body that matches the way they wish to present?
I first want to address in the second ask that there’s some problematic wording: “potion where you can change genders” - trans people already are the genders we say we are. Our bodies do not have to change, in order to be bodies that belong to us. We may often need or want to make changes for our own comfort. But a lot of wording surrounding things like the “born in the wrong body” narrative serve to disconnect us from our bodily autonomy, and can sometimes paint transition as a linear, binary, before-and-after thing. I wrote more on this here back in 2018.
These things are very complicated.
I’d say it can be written in a respectful way, but you need to understand the baggage with it and the mechanics of representation, and what you’re hoping to achieve and why. Trans audience members may relate to the yearning for that kind of change, but they might not relate to the character’s experiences as much as they would if it were normal representation.
There’s also the diceyness of what exactly magical transition means in these contexts. Are these characters transforming into what cis people assume that all trans people want to look like? How is it determined what changes happen? What about trans characters that may enjoy their genitalia, but not the bone structure in their face, or vice versa?
What I suggest with this sort of thing is to make sure that transition is not a one-bandaid thing. Most people who do medically transition don’t do it overnight, contrary to what it looks like for a lot of wealthy famous people. I mean, I’m pretty much going to be in some kind of medical transition the rest of my life, since I go on and off hormones a lot. It’s also, honestly, kind of jarring to notice changes immediately. In a good way, but some people do want to have the traditional easing into it that puberty has. Everyone is different. And we all kind of want different things for our bodies, and see ourselves different ways.
I’d advise having a pretty flexible formula for what these potions/gods do exactly. Maybe a given potion will deepen the voice over time, or there are potions that focus on growing or shrinking different specific body parts. Maybe a potion could be a salve on certain areas?
With regards to the god of healing: I think you could make it work, but you’d have to really flesh it out in order for this to be okay. Instead of merely being a god of healing, could they be a god of the body somehow? Physical form and the things that relate to it, like health, determining eye colour, things like that.
It shouldn’t be framed as a healing.
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Brandon Sanderson did that with Ral-na (the Reshi King) in the Stormlight Archive series. (Minor spoiler I guess, but Ral-na is really only mentioned in like, a couple scenes and is not a major character so I feel like it’s ok?) It made me cringe so hard that this is honestly what Brandon Sanderson, and frankly his whole team, earnestly thought was okay to depict. That this is what being trans is.
That we have some kind of physical ailment. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes dysphoria can feel that way for many, and access to medical transition is as necessary as any other lifesaving care. But it’s more complicated than that, and should not be framed as an illness.
They also otherwise changed Ral-na’s body, if I’m not mistaken, which does not make sense to me. Here’s from the Coppermind wiki:
Before transitioning, he appeared as an old woman.[2] After transitioning, he is a short man with strong pectoral muscles. Designated female at birth, his bond with an ashspren allowed him to heal his body to match his true gender.[1][3]
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What really gets me about the above “representation” is that it dismembers our personhood, our mind, spirit, autonomy, from our bodies.
It buys into the idea that the version of ourselves that was forced into a cissexist birth assignment, is some dead thing, that we, our “new selves” killed.*
That we killed some lost potential, some imaginary cis person who Could Have Been.
That’s a sort of narrative that TERFs use in order to claim that our bodies are being “mutilated” - that we are somehow killing some other person in order to make ourselves live. This is also a really common reason a lot of parents of trans children seem to experience an intense grief about us. When I first cut my hair, my mother cried. She told me some other time, “it’s like you’re not even my daughter anymore” - but what she meant was, “it’s like you’re not anyone I knew, it’s like this person I knew was dead.”
And in real life, there are a lot of trans people who are genuinely treated like there is a demon possessing their body and taking control over it. That our true selves are killing some other being. People are literally exorcised over it. People grieve their actual living loved ones over it.
And frankly, a lot of those two groups (transphobic parts of Christianity and TERFs) have a thing in common - Janice Raymond, a former Catholic nun, who wrote the original TERF manifesto (The Transsexual Empire) in the 70s. Here’s a really good article about how she attacked Sandy Stone back in the day, and the history there. There’s a lot more to the history of the TERF movement and the way it kind of harnesses this idea of us having a body that doesn’t belong to us, but I hope the point is received for now.
You can also see this sort of narrative take hold in this bogus “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” crap that TERFs are trying to peddle. Here’s an academic article debunking the original ROGD “study“ (it was a survey on a TERF forum asking if their children ~seemed trans~ before coming out) and otherwise explaining its issues: in PDF and an audio version.
Anyway, suffice to say: trans people deserve bodily autonomy and recognition as owners and inhabitants of our own bodies. Before, after during, with or without transition or closets. There’s baggage that gets added to when we give the message of a simple before and after as only viewed from the perspective of appearance. Transitioning (medically or socially) is a process that’s as awkward as any puberty, tbh.
So when you write a magical transition, just be mindful of these things. There definitely are trans people who say, “I was born in the wrong body,” and there are also people who feel it but do not say it. But for the most part, it’s a phrase invented for the convenience of explaining a complicated concept to cis people, particularly in times before the average English speaker had heard of the concept of transness.
There’s a lot of ways you could take this into account and be respectful. Maybe having people have some kind of puberty reversal potion or tea or something (even given by a god in this instance) that would reverse the effects of a previous puberty, and another that would initiate the effects of another. And another thing for what would ordinarily be surgeries. (Including options for surgeries we haven’t invented yet!)
I would also highly rec having a gander through our magical transition tag for more advice we’ve given on the subject.
- mod nat
Footnote
* Disclaimer: It’s totally normal and fine for trans people to be like, “new me” or whatever. I refer to my coming out anniversary as my “rebirthday” - those things aren’t the same as earnestly believing we are genuinely different people pre-coming-out and post.
